CMO's top 8 martech stories for the week - 18 March 2021
- 18 March, 2021 11:26
Impact joins Shopify Plus
Partnership automation vendor, Impact, has been selected by Shopify Plus to be a Certified App Partner for influencer and affiliate marketing.
Shopify and Shopify Plus merchants can utilise Impact’s Partnership Cloud through Shopify’s App Store. With Impact’s Partnership Cloud, an integrated end-to-end solution for managing partnerships across the entire partner lifecycle to activate rapid growth, Shopify Plus merchants can launch and automate affiliate and influencer programs without developer involvement.
Impact enables merchants to discover and recruit new partners, develop contracts, settle payments in more than 70 currencies, track partners to attribute performance across devices, measure performance and communicate the latest brand messaging and updates to partners. Merchants also have access to fraud protection and to optimise partnerships to maximise efficiency and growth, all within their Shopify marketplace.
Salesforce debuts fresh ABM features
Salesforce has taken the wrappers off a set of new account-based marketing (ABM) features aimed at helping companies better surface their most valuable accounts and those most likely to purchase.
Powered by the vendor’s AI engine, Einstein, the new capabilities include Einstein Key Account Identification, which surfaces accounts with the highest likelihood of purchasing, providing scoring, recommendations and insights for companies to market and sell to these prospects. It does this by analysing data across CRM and marketing engagement across the Web.
The second feature, Accounts as Campaign Members, uses AI-powered insights to create personalised ABM campaigns for buyers within top-tier accounts. This new capability allows organisations to target their most valuable accounts even if they do not have any contacts for that account. They can then add the new account contacts into their marketing campaigns the moment they are identified. This capability is built on the Pardot B2B marketing automation technology sitting on top of the core Salesforce platform.
Integral Ad Science partners with Xandr
Digital ad verification outfit ,Integral Ad Science (IAS), has partnered with Xandr’s buying platform, Xandr Invest, to offer IAS’s contextual targeting and contextual avoidance capabilities across all programmatic buying.
Available globally, advertisers using the Invest DSP can access IAS’s curated list of 300+ contextual segments to target suitable content and optimise their programmatic campaigns on a pre-bid basis.
“We see more marketers leaning into contextual targeting and avoidance today, which makes our expanded work with IAS all the more relevant,” said Xandr head of global partnerships, Dylan McBride. “Our advertisers are looking for the transparency and controls to run their campaigns alongside trusted content, and that’s exactly what IAS provides."
Confirmit and FocusVision complete transaction to merge
Research technology companies, Confirmit and FocusVision, have successfully completed a transaction to merge. The deal closed in quarter one, ahead of the anticipated timeline. Financial terms were not disclosed.
The combined business will focus on the three pillars of qualitative, quantitative and voice of customer/employee research. Together, it will enable smarter decision making, bridging the gap for customers with the accuracy, accessibility and action provided by the platform.
"Our business will focus on the three pillars of qualitative, quantitative and Voice of Customer/Employee research," said CEO of the newly combined business, Kyle Ferguson. "We will enable smarter decision making, bridging the gap for our customers so they benefit from the accuracy, accessibility and action provided by our platform. We will make the complex simple by turning insights into stories that fuel action.”
HypeAuditor launches Competitor Grid
HypeAuditor, an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered analytics tool for transparent and fraud-free influencer marketing, has launched Competitor Grid, which lets marketers analyse the performance of competitors influencer marketing campaigns.
Arming them with important information, such as the full list of influencers they work with, analysis of the creatives used and amount spent per post on a campaign. HypeAuditor’s aim is to help marketers make more strategic decisions for their brand’s influencer marketing activity.
Competitor Grid tool gives full access to analytics on how competitor brand’s influencer marketing campaigns are performing, including a close analysis of engagement rate, audience quality, influencer quality, cost per engagement and reach.
Bristlecone partners with Sitecore
Bristlecone, which specialises in AI-driven application transformation services for the connected supply chain, has partnered with Sitecore.
The new partnership brings together Bristlecone’s product engineering and integration expertise and Sitecore’s customer experience platforms to enable enterprise transformation.
The companies will work together to design, develop and deploy future-led, cloud-driven digital transformation solutions for enterprises across a range of industrial and consumer industry sectors, including manufacturing, high-tech, semiconductor, retail, CPG, life sciences, and software and platforms. New solutions will be industry-focused and aimed at simplifying digital transformation and creating exceptional experiences across the value chain.
Silverbullet 4D integrates with IRIS.TV
Silverbullet’s context outcome engine, 4D, now integrates with IRIS.TV, to help marketers scale brand safe messaging in a cookieless environment.
4D has built an industry-first context outcome engine to offer brand protection from racist or toxic content, to ensure brand safety and suitability are always managed correctly - focused specifically on the burgeoning video landscape, which has different challenges to those of display. Marketers now can leverage 4D’s advanced computer vision context segments to execute cookieless, interest-based targeting on brand-suitable inventory at scale, across thousands of IRIS-enabled CTV and online video publishers, and billions of monthly video impressions worldwide.
Talend to be acquired by Thoma Bravo
Data integration and integrity outfit, Talend, has entered into a memorandum of understanding with Thoma Bravo, a leading private equity investment firm focused on the software and technology-enabled services sector, to be acquired for US$2.4 billion.
Talend will become a private company and continue investing in its cloud transition as well as products and solutions that serve the evolving data needs of its customers.
“I am pleased with how the team has executed through the challenges of 2020 and successfully delivered on the strategic initiatives and targets we laid out a year ago," Talend CEO, Christal Bemont, said. "As we look forward, the transaction with Thoma Bravo – a firm with a successful track record of helping the companies it acquires achieve long-term, sustainable growth – will provide Talend with additional capital, resources and expertise to execute against our mission and leverage a large market opportunity to help all organisations become data-driven."
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