CMO's top 8 martech stories for the week -1 July 2021
- 01 July, 2021 11:15
Tableau augments analytics
Tableau has taken the wrappers off several new and expanded augmented analytics features across its data visualisation and reporting platform.
Among the latest features is ‘ask data’, which allows people across roles to answer business questions using natural language. This tool has also been extended to Salesforce, allowing Salesforce users to ask any question in Tableau CRM using natural language and semantic search and gain answers in the form of insights, generated reports and recommended dashboards tailored to business context.
‘Explain data’ is also available now across Tableau Server and Tableau Online platforms with an optimised user interface aimed at helping users surface understandable explanations behind data points using statistical methods and machine learning. The vendor said this can reduce the risk of errors because it searches entire data sources rather than just what’s show in a visualisation.
Another addition bringing Tableau and Salesforce closer together is Einstein discovery for Salesforce reports, which auto analyses data from the latter’s reports to identify important insights, surfacing them via charts and explanations using machine learning.
Additional new features in Tableau 2021.2 unveiled this week include ‘Collections’ for curating content such as workbooks and data sources from across sites to create custom gallery layouts to share, pre-population of Tableau Online sites with relevant data sources and workbooks to explore Salesforce data and connected desktop for Web authoring to transition seamlessly between Web authoring and desktop work.
Pathmatics debuts in Australia and New Zealand
Digital marketing intelligence player, Pathmatics, has expanded its footprint into Australia and New Zealand to local marketers.
The 10-year-old company focuses on providing visibility into digital, video, display and mobile advertising performance and has built a customer base including Nestle, Target and Reddit. Pathmatics also confirmed this week it’s now providing accessing to Facebook advertising intelligence within its offering to local users thanks to a previous partnership with Nielsen.
The local division will be led by former Nielsen Australia leader, Eugene Du Plessis, as regional director. The decision to expand locally follows Pathmatics’ merger with SaaS mobile analytics company, Sensor Tower, in May.
“Until now, there has been a lack of transparency into Australia and New Zealand’s digital and social ad landscape, so we’re thrilled to be giving marketers and brands with a presence in each market the ability to make more informed decisions about how they invest their advertising dollars,” Pathmatics co-founder and CEO, Gabe Gottlieb, said.
Sprinklr makes its IPO debut
The first of our listings stories this week is Sprinklr, which closed its initial public offering on 22 June 2021. The company has listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol ‘CXM’ in honour of its customer experience management vision.
More than 16 million shares were sold in the offering, at a price of $16 per share, giving Sprinklr gross proceeds of US$266 million. The company was initially expected to achieve a US$5 billion market valuation based on $20 per share. However, Sprinklr reported losses $14.7 million for the quarter ended 30 April from $11.2 million for the same period in 2020.
Sprinklr has more than 2400 employees globally and works with 1000 brands including Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and Samsung. The company’s tech emphasis was initially on social media listening and management, but it’s since worked to build a platform for managing profiles in advertising, marketing, research and social media. To do this, Sprinklr acquired 10 companies over the last seven years to fuel this ambition.
Taboola lists on Nasdaq
The second company to list this past week is Taboola, which provides content recommendations to audiences across the Web. The company is now trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker ‘TBLA’ and debuted with a valuation of US$2.6 billion.
The listing comes off the back of a number of fresh milestones, including Q1 revenue of US$303 million and net income of $18.6 million, outperforming original revenue and profit projections. Taboola has also announced a number of new and expanded deals including with BBC Global News, Dennis Publishing and Are Media.
Product enhancements have also been released in recent months. One of these was the Taboola High Impact advertising solution combining ad formats with transparency controls and access to readership data. The company also struck a new deal with Oracle Moat Measurement to integrate into its media buying platform.
“Today is a significant milestone for Taboola, one that cements our commitment to power recommendations and be the champion for the open Web,” said Taboola CEO and founder, Adam Singolda. The listing generated approximately $526 million of proceeds.
Sprout builds social commerce solution
Social media management vendor, Sprout Social, has integrated its platform with Shopify and Facebook Shops as part of efforts to build social commerce market support.
The latest integrations are aimed at delivering richer customer experience and personalised interactions through the purchase cycle. Sprout users will now have quick access to product catalogues and historic customer information social and can connect an online order to a customer’s social profile. This can then be used to quickly send links to products via content to prospects, or to use insights into order history, shipping status or helpdesk / support to provide content and product options.
“Someone browsing on social had to navigate to a brand’s website, or go to their store, adding another step and more friction in the buyer journey, ultimately increasing the risk of losing that sale,” said Sprout Social president, Ryan Barretto. “Our fully integrated social commerce platform will enable Sprout customers to unite their commerce and social workflows.”
Genesys pitches for digital customer with new offering
Genesys has debuted a new standalone digital customer engagement officer, Genesys DX, built off the vendor’s customer experience and artificial intelligence capabilities and its recent acquisition of Bold360.
The aim of Genesys DX is to take transactional chat interactions and connect them into more contextual and overall digital conversations. Using AI, the platform is designed to get smarter with each customer engagement by tapping insights based on dialogue, responses and preferences. These can then be used by brands as a central knowledge repository and to improve the way they show up to customers across digital and human channels.
For example, these can be used to create smart self-service on messaging channels or assist agents.
New solutions pitches social ads to mobile gamers
A new solution from leading and esports mobile company, AdColony, will allow advertisers across Asia-Pacific to take existing social ads and place them in mobile gaming environments.
The Social Ads solution takes existing campaign creative, such as images, carousel ads and video posts, and place them in mobile gaming scenarios. AdColony said the solution has been devised with two objectives in mind: To offer a greater reach into Asia-Pacific’s wide and diverse mobile audiences, while minimising brand safety risks of advertising on user-generated content in social media.
“As gamers ourselves, we fully understand the gaming experience. AdColony’s latest solution seamlessly integrates social media ads into the gameplay, resulting in an enhanced experience for the player,” AdColony senior director of strategy, Michell Vaz said. “At the same time, we’re also on the side of advertisers. This has led to the creation of this product that amplifies reach and viewability of the ads, offering advertisers a smarter way to scale their brand campaigns while recording high levels of engagement among audiences who are immersed in the game.”
The company said it’s also already gearing up to launch a second phase bringing shopability into these gaming ad units.
PubMatic and HYP Technology join forces
Sell-side programmatic advertising platform, PubMatic, has struck a data partnership with Australian consumer intelligence provider, HYP Technology.
The partnership is about improving the rich audience segments across mobile, connected TV and Web browsers available when trading in PubMatic’s premium inventory. It’s a direct integration via PubMatic’s Audience Encore audience data solution and means buyers can activate HYP’s customer and multi-layered audiences at scale and at the supply level. Those with first-party data can upload segments, generate a deal ID for single, recurring or customised use then transact programmatically across PubMatic’s premium inventory in private or open marketplaces.
HYP platform’s data source encompasses 1500 ready-built audience segments such as location, behaviour, age, gender, income and household type. This is sourced from about 20 million devices per month, with audience segments refreshed daily.
“HYP has created a powerful data set of Australian audience insights. We believe this partnership will help marketers get more from their campaigns by reaching the right target audiences, and reaching the audiences their competitors can’t,” said PubMatic regional director and head of audience A/NZ, Peter Barry.
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