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Socialbakers Adds Vital Ads Transparency and Control Tools to Its Platform

Socialbakers’ Paid Analytics Helps Brands Gain Complete Control of Their Ads Budget Through Accurate Analysis, Stronger Data Security and Transparent Collaboration with Agency Teams

Socialbakers, the unified marketing platform for enterprise brands, announced it is enhancing its marketing solutions to include paid social media oversight and control across multiple ad accounts with the introduction of Socialbakers Paid Analytics.

As brands are shifting more budget to social media advertising, it becomes paramount that the budget owners gain a clear understanding of their advertising investment. Currently, the process is plagued with inefficiencies – from the lack of insight into multiple ad accounts, managed across regions and teams, to the insecure way data is stored and shared between stakeholders.

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“Lack of clarity, transparency, and no oversight of budget allocation across channels or results are currently costing marketers their budgets,” said Yuval Ben-Itzhak, CEO, Socialbakers. “Digital spending will continue to skyrocket, while the marketing teams that are unable to properly manage their spend will see their costs rise and results diminish. It’s a critical time, and we’re committed to helping brands overcome this difficult challenge.”

Socialbakers Paid Analytics empowers marketers to:

Gain a clear, unified view of ad spending – Accurate, reliable analysis of all ad account spend performance provides the ability to track ROI and avoid unnecessary budget waste. Insights can be accessed and shared easily so teams can have a clear focus on ads performance and budget allocation.

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Effortlessly benchmark multiple ad accounts in context – Gaining critical insights into multiple ad account performance is now easy and instant, but even more vital is the ability to benchmark each ad account across regions or industries based on reliable up-to-date data accessible directly on the Socialbakers platform.

Align agencies on spending priorities – Paid Analytics ensures that brands and agencies are always on the same page when it comes to ad spending and budget priorities.

Toughen ads data security – Complicated sharing permissions between all stakeholders have been streamlined and optimized to minimize the risk of data being accessed by the wrong people.

Streamline team collaboration – With Paid Analytics, businesses, their regional teams and agencies can collaborate in a fully transparent, secure ads environment helpings teams focus and align on objectives.

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Confirmit Announces 2019 Air Award Winners

Market Research Businesses Recognised as Leaders for Innovation and Excellence

Confirmit announced the winners of the 2019 AIR (Achievement in Insight and Research) Awards. The AIR Awards were created to recognise Confirmit customers who are driving the Market Research industry forward by demonstrating innovation and excellence to enhance business performance.

Ken Østreng, CEO at Confirmit, says of the programme: “Great research is at the heart of business decision making. We are delighted to recognise the people and businesses whose dedication to innovation and insight are driving the Market Research industry forward. Congratulations to all our winners, we are proud to be part of your stories.”

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Diego Casaravilla, CEO of Fine Research said: “Thank you to Confirmit for this wonderful recognition which is a great motivation for the FINE team to continue working towards excellence. We are particularly proud to be the first Latin American company to have won an AIR award. We are also very excited to be recognised as a Judges’ Choice winner in the Project and Innovation category.”

The AIR Awards programme is broken into three categories:

  • AIR Agency: Rewards agencies who are providing exceptional guidance and value to clients, who are driving the future of the MR market by designing and implementing new approaches, or who are breaking new ground in the merging of Market Research, insight and Voice of the Customer.
  • AIR Project and Innovation: Recognises individual projects undertaken for an end client that demonstrated exceptional application of methodology, true innovation or that yielded results that have had a significant impact on the client.
  • AIR Professionals: Identifies MR professionals at any stage in their career who are having an impact not only on their business but on the industry as a whole, either by driving new thinking, taking new approaches, or harnessing new technologies.

George Zdanowicz, CEO of Enhance Research said: “We’re delighted to receive this AIR Award. It’s a nice recognition of some of the great work the Enhance Research team are delivering for our fantastic clients.”

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The winners are:

  • AIR Agency:

o    Judges’ Choice Winners: Ecorys, Nepa

o    Winners: Enhance Research, Fine Research, Holden, InsightWorks, Nielsen, Owl Solutions, QRS, SNWare

  • AIR Project & Innovation:

o    Judges’ Choice Winners: Fine Research, HESA

o    Winners: B2B International, Delvinia, Holden, Illuminas, InsightWorks, Virtual Incentives, W5

  • AIR Professional:

o    Judges Choice Winner: Lindsay Parry – Nepa

o    Winners: Bill Zuo – InsightWorks, Brian Li – Nielsen China

Confirmit was delighted to have three highly regarded Market Research professionals as judges for the AIR Awards. The judges were Kristin Luck, Founder of ScaleHouse, Dangjaithawin Anantachai, Managing Director, INTAGE Thailand, and Vanessa Oshima, Founder and President of Heart Data inc.

Kristin Luck of ScaleHouse commented: “It’s an honour to collaborate with Confirmit on recognising the research firms utilising technology in truly innovative ways to create new industry solutions. The AIR awards truly elevate and recognise the work of the best and the brightest the market research industry has to offer.”

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FrontRunner Technologies Partners With Derooted to Add Interactive Sound Element to DOOH Experience

FrontRunner Technologies, the digital-out-of-home media delivery platform and retail renaissance leader, is changing the DOOH game by adding interactive near field communication capabilities to its WindowFront Matrix with the FireFly Flare, a new connective “beacon” incorporated into their digital displays.

When a user connects their smart device—whether mobile, tablet or watch—to the display, it plays a sound or song sent to it by the FireFly Flare. Connecting is as simple as holding the device up to the display and accepting the prompts. Now, campaigns can integrate everything from the sound of waves to a beach scene, to the cheering at a sports match, adding a new dimension to how consumers engage with the content they consume while walking down the street.

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“Sound integration revamps the sphere of outdoor advertising, an industry that has been awaiting its own sonic boom,” says Nathan Elliott, CEO of FrontRunner Technologies. “Although we’ve seen slight improvements to this advertising space through the integration of movement and light, the addition of sound to our street-level platforms adds a new dynamic to the way brands will connect with consumers outside of their homes. This is the advent of true sensual content.”

Senior partner at Derooted, Simón Rojas commented, “Marketers always speak about how the public is glued to their device screens. As such, everyone has focused on creating amazing video content that people can consume on their mobile devices. As we observe people and take note of which devices are being used to consume content, one device is often overlooked: headphones. Whether listening to podcasts, music, the videos in their feed or even to communicate with someone, Bluetooth and wired headphones have become the the digital accessory to have. Understanding this allowed us a unique point of interjection for marketing. A way to get consumer attention, without the need of third-party apps or downloads, but by simply using the technology they already have in their hands. By augmenting traditional DOOH campaigns with audio, we allow consumers to further engage with the experience. They can walk away and continue the brand experience.”

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FireFly Flare’s capabilities don’t stop at sound integration. The company’s FrontRunner Factory, a first-of-its-kind tech innovation hub in downtown Toronto, is constantly testing new connective options for the beacon, including device access to instant downloads, touchscreen options and point-of-sale opportunities, taking window shopping to a whole new level.

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Mering Uses Emotion to Build a Competitive Edge in B2B Marketing Utilizes AI Technology to Study Ad Effectiveness and Enhance Impact

It is no surprise that the communications which garner the most attention are often the ones that pull on the heart strings. Just look at Nike/Colin Kaepernick, Always/Like a Girl, Dove/Real Beauty and so many others. In an effort to better understand the emotional resonance of advertising, independent ad agency Mering recently connected with emotion AI company Realeyes.

Realeyes’ AI-powered technology uses the latest in computer vision and machine learning to make machines emotionally intelligent. Using opted-in webcams, its platform enables any laptop, mobile device or TV to recognize straight away how consumers are feeling and whether they are paying attention by measuring their facial expressions, head movements and body language. Realeyes’ emotion AI solutions, which are 75% accurate at predicting sales lifts, helps marketers understand and transform the impact of their content.

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“Our agency has long been of the belief that using emotion in both consumer and B2B advertising is effective. However, the larger B2B universe is just waking up now to the importance of emotion. So, we saw this as a great opportunity to provide further evidence by utilizing revolutionary emotion AI technology,” said Mering President Lori Bartle.

Bartle added: “We are incredibly grateful to our client, The Dentists Supply Company (TDSC), for working with us in conducting this fascinating study. It’s allowing us to supplement our existing data toolkit with the unique quantitative insights and findings from a Realeyes report, providing shareable learnings that might inspire or convince other B2B brands.”

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Mering worked with client TDSC to develop a compelling brand strategy and campaign for its new e-commerce business – striving to differentiate itself in a category that’s focused largely on personal relationships. The TDSC brand stands for, and celebrates, independent dentistry as a community, and promotes the power of a collective.  In the interest of uncovering business-building insights, Mering partnered with Realeyes to look at work for TDSC and a category competitor. Demonstrating its ability to deliver amazing value for the B2B market, the Realeyes team developed a targeted national sample of over 600 men and women who are responsible for purchasing dental equipment. Based on its unique emotion AI technology and benchmarking system, the analysis for TDSC shed light on brand favorability, recall and specifically measured Attraction, Retention, Engagement and Impact. The powerful data visualization provided precise tracking of both positive and negative emotions – offering pin-point detail of what worked well and what could be improved. Through these results, it was confirmed that the TDSC brand strategy drove peak levels of positivity in conjunction with a distinctive and highly innovative creative approach.

The Mering/Realeyes team will be speaking at the B2B Marketing Expo at the Los Angeles Convention Center on Thursday, October 3rd in a session titled: Using Emotion to Build a Competitive Edge. At that time, they will share more details about their work together and how the strategic development of emotionally-based marketing can create a competitive advantage and drive business results.

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OOH Advertising Trade Association, Geopath, Launches New Methodology

Geopath Insights solution provides buyers, sellers and agencies with more granular metrics, advanced audience targeting, and new measured formats

Geopath, the not-for-profit organization that provides the industry-standard currency for out-of-home (OOH) advertising, announced that its Insights platform has been approved and launched as the industry currency for OOH measurement.

The approval was made by a vote of the Geopath Board of Directors at the board meeting in May of 2019.  Geopath is governed by a tripartite board of directors representing the entire OOH ecosystem, including advertisers, media agencies, and out-of-home media.

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Geopath Insights was launched in beta in 2018 and developed in conjunction with the OOH industry around an “audience-first” approach. The methodology provides more than 8,000 unique audience profiles, with additional segments being added on a regular basis.

Geopath aggregates anonymous data from hundreds of millions of mobile devices, connected cars and GPS sources allowing for precise analysis across the millions of OOH assets audited and measured by the organization. These enhanced data allow buyers and sellers to analyze and target OOH audience on the basis of holistic, transparent, independent metrics.

“This is a defining moment for the out-of-home industry at a time when it is one of the fastest growing segments of advertising,” says Kym Frank, President of Geopath. “I applaud the OOH industry for listening to the needs of the advertisers and making an investment in the state-of-the-art, accountable metrics needed to power a smarter marketplace.”

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“At the ANA, we champion innovative, responsible, and transparent use of data to drive deeper consumer engagement,” says ANA CEO and Geopath Board Member, Bob Liodice.  “We congratulate the OOH industry for providing more accountable, precise, third-party audience metrics to their brand partners.”

To assist the industry with implementation of Geopath Insights as the industry’s currency, the organization launched a comprehensive Learning Lab where members can receive training and certification on all of Geopath’s offerings.  Additionally, Geopath worked collaboratively with its Futures Council, comprised of emerging thought leaders from the OOH industry, to develop a set of Best Practices, Standards, and Protocols for planning, buying, and selling OOH with the new currency. The guidelines are available for download at Geopath.org.

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Kustomer Introduces KustomerIQ, Bringing Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to Enterprise Customer Service

Kustomer, the SaaS platform that is reimagining enterprise customer service, introduced KustomerIQ, embedding Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning across the Kustomer platform to enhance the customer service experience of companies competing in today’s on-demand world. KustomerIQ uniquely integrates Machine Learning models and other advanced AI capabilities with the Kustomer platform’s powerful data, workflow, and rules engines to enable companies to provide smarter, automated customer experiences that are more personalized, efficient, and effortless. The Kustomer platform stands out among customer service solutions for the comprehensiveness of available customer data and its business process automation that is driven by branchable, multi-step workflows and custom business logic.

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“In today’s crowded market, excellent customer service is often the differentiator that builds loyalty and trust between one brand to another,” said Brad Birnbaum, Co-Founder and CEO of Kustomer. “With KustomerIQ and the inclusion of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning into our omnichannel platform, Kustomer will now go even further in helping brands automate their business processes, while making it easier for their agents to take action on customer information, ultimately developing a stronger and more profitable customer relationship.”

Kustomer IQ brings together a wide breadth of Artificial Intelligence methods such as Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Predictive Analytics, Deep Learning, and Multi-dimensional Neural Network Mappings. Companies adopting KustomerIQ use their own data to train the predictive Machine Learning models, automatically customizing them to address their own business needs. With each new interaction and piece of data, these models learn and self-tune, increasing their predictive accuracy and improving the decision making of both the models themselves and the customer service organizations using Kustomer.

Through KustomerIQ, companies will be able to automate manual, repetitive tasks and essential processes of their customer service experiences. In addition, KustomerIQ changes the way companies manage knowledge during a service inquiry by surfacing relevant insights and predicting future outcomes to enhance customer self-service, facilitate real time intervention through recommendations, and streamline proactive outreach. By automating everything and providing the right information at the right time, KustomerIQ frees up agents to focus on more complex and emotional customer interactions, resulting in reduced costs and faster resolution of calls.

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Kustomer IQ is bringing new smart customer service features to the Kustomer platform, including:

  • Automated Conversation Classification: Intelligently categorizes and classifies conversations using Machine Learning and attributes of the conversation and customer.

  • Queues and Routing: Routes customers to the most appropriate agent using conversation classification, agent skills and overall team capacity to drive the machine learning model. As a result, KustomerIQ helps companies improve customer satisfaction, increase first call resolution and reduce wait and handle times.

  • Customer Sentiment Analysis: Using Natural Language Processing, the Kustomer platform can read messages between customers and agents and quantify how a customer feels about a brand in real-time. Seeing customers’ sentiment helps agents empathize with customers in a digital medium, and thus determine the best way to communicate with them.

  • Automatic Language Detection: Using Natural Language Processing, the Kustomer platform can automatically identify the language being used in a conversation and then route the customer to an agent that speaks the language. In addition, if a company has pre-written responses (shortcuts) set up in multiple languages, those responses will automatically switch to the language used by the customer to ensure a better experience for both customer and agent.

  • Suggested Agent Shortcuts: Provide recommended pre-written responses to agents based on conversation and customer attributes to help agents immediately access the knowledge they need to resolve customer issues faster.

  • Customer Self-Service: Automatically suggests help articles from a company’s knowledge base providing an immediate answer to a simple customer questions without interacting with an agent, so customers get answers faster and agents can focus time on more complex customer inquiries. By giving a customer more self-service options it also lowers agent volumes and improves resolution and handle times.

  • Workforce Management: Helps to predict future conversation volume and staffing needs based on historical and trend data of items, such as SLA attainment and seasonality. Can also assist in identifying training needs by providing insights into areas where an agent or agents are deficient.

To further increase its rapid pace of innovation, Kustomer will triple the size of its development team in 2020. The team will focus on ensuring the continuous improvement of KustomerIQ’s machine learning models and further expansion and integration of innovative Artificial Intelligence capabilities throughout the platform.

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MindTickle Debuts Adaptive Spaced Reinforcements for Effective Knowledge Retention

Latest innovation to Sales Readiness platform prepares customer-facing reps to be consultative and credible

MindTickle, the leader in Sales Readiness technology, unveiled its Spaced Reinforcements solution. Using advanced gamification, microlearning and smart notifications to engage sales representatives, this latest innovation proactively and automatically helps bridge knowledge gaps to retain and reinforce necessary knowledge skills and behaviors. As part of a comprehensive Readiness system, Spaced Reinforcements transforms customer-facing representatives into consultative professionals that bring value, share insight and help customers address their business challenges.

The most successful sales representatives and other customer-facing employees demonstrate their value through educated, direct conversations with prospects and customers. Their knowledge about products, services and even industry trends, and how they leverage and communicate that knowledge underpins their credibility. Credibility, in turn, translates to better customer experiences and higher levels of revenue and brand value. But retaining the necessary information can be a significant challenge. In fact, the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve hypothesizes that humans forget approximately 50% of new information within an hour and 90% after a week.

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“Our Spaced Reinforcements solution is the industry’s only automated and adaptive approach that works to prevent knowledge and skill decay in an overall readiness program while promoting a culture of continuous improvement and knowledge sharing,” said Albert Fong, director of product marketing at MindTickle. “With knowledge retention and skill-building as key components of a Sales Readiness and sales enablement strategy, customer-facing reps significantly boost their effectiveness and productivity levels to more easily achieve their organizational business goals.”

The Spaced Reinforcements solution is MindTickle’s answer to the challenge of knowledge retention for sales and other customer-facing professionals. The solution builds proficiency and decreases knowledge gaps with automatic microlearning, personalized and gamified challenges, and scenario-based questions, while surfacing coaching opportunities at specific intervals for maximum retention. Through MindTickle’s intelligent and adaptive engine, personalized questions and scenarios are presented based on how individuals respond to questions.  More importantly, sales leaders gain insights into the improvement of the sellers across their competencies.

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“Spaced Reinforcements engages sales reps through a merit solution, in which points are awarded based on correct answers to the challenges and badges are earned as each level is mastered, said Neeraj Sanghvi, senior product manager at MindTickle. “By using this process to reinforce information and identify opportunities for coaching, sales professionals continuously build on their expertise to become consultative professionals with significant credibility in the areas their customers and prospects care most about. Spaced Reinforcements helps sales leaders and managers to not only determine sales proficiency benchmarks and identify areas where targeted coaching is needed, but also view areas of improvement for sellers.” 

You’ll be able to see MindTickle and get a demo at two in-person events later this month:
  • The Sales Enablement Society Annual Conference, October 16-18 at the Westin Riverwalk, San Antonio, TX
  • The Sales Management Association’s Sales Force Productivity Conference, October 23-25 at the Ritz-Carlton Atlanta

MindTickle’s Spaced Reinforcements solution is available as of this announcement.

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Content Recommendation Platforms Taboola and Outbrain Merge to Disrupt “Global AdTech” Ecosystem

Content is nothing if it can’t be discovered. And, Content Recommendation and Discovery platforms like Taboola and Outbrain attract attention from publishers by helping them meet their audience with smart techniques.

In an major announcement reported by The Times of Israel, two online content discovery and recommendation platforms are merging to take on the duopoly of Google and Facebook advertising. Adam Singolda-led company Taboola will merge Outbrain into their operations, allowing Outbrain’s shareholders to get $250 million in cash and a 30% stake in the combined firm. The aim is to not just to multiply the revenue run-rate, but also to jointly serve native content to over 2 billion online content consumers per month.

Shaking Google’s Dominance? Not so Easy

Compared to 2018, ad spending in 2019 is slated to rise by $330 billion and above. There is a significant room to grow for others, but Google remains an unchallenged leader so far.

According to a report, Google’s ad revenue was around $116.3 billion. Currently, it generates advertising revenue through its Google Ads platform. Google Ads enables advertisers to display ads, product listings, recommended news and blogs, and service offerings across Google’s extensive walled garden ad network. Facebook advertising too enable advertisers to publish and promote content across its properties, Facebook pages, Instagram, WhatsApp Messenger, and so on.

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eMarketer says that Google will remain the largest digital ad seller in the world in 2019 (31% ad spending globally). It is followed by Facebook advertising with $67.37 billion in net ad revenues, followed by China-based Alibaba, at $29.20 billion.

courtesy- eMarketer's Digital Ad Spending report 2019
courtesy- eMarketer’s Digital Ad Spending report 2019

The Current State of the Ad Tech and Martech Industries

So, what’s there for the adtech audience exactly — Well, the dominance of Google Advertising remains unchallenged so far, yet the latest merged identity has all the muscle and intelligence to “OUTBRAIN” the Google and Facebook advertising landscape. The new adtech entity is evaluated at $2 billion — a proposition that provides tremendous opportunity to the employees, partners, and their joint customers.

As part of the deal, Taboola will pay Outbrain shareholders $250 million in cash and hold a 70 percent stake of the newly formed company, which will operate under the Taboola brand name. The new combined company will be headed by Taboola founder Adam Singolda. The valuation of the merged units will be around $2 billion, the statement said.

In the Israeli startup market, there was a speculation in 2017 about Taboola and Outbrain merging. However, it remained under wraps for all these months. Today, the deal has finally surfaced officially through Outbrain’s website blog.

At the time of this announcement, Adam Singolda, Founder & CEO of Taboola stated —

“Over the past decade, I’ve admired Outbrain and the innovation that Yaron Galai, Ori Lahav and the rest of the Outbrain team have brought to the marketplace. By joining forces, we’ll be able to create a more robust competitor to Facebook and Google, giving advertisers a more meaningful choice.”

In the Predictions Series 2019, Adam had specifically charged his thoughts against fake news and a deliberate victimization of ad tech platforms, specifically who serve generic content to the gullible audience. He had said, “In the last few years, we’ve recognized the ​danger of the proliferation of fake news on the open web and have committed to fighting for more transparency in advertising to support quality journalism. This year specifically, I think we learned that it truly takes humans to solve human problems like fake news. After creating a dedicated content policy team, which manually reviews over a million campaigns in nine different languages every month, we’ve grown the team by 57 percent.”

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Will This Prove to Be The Renaissance in Ad Tech and Content Personalization

It’s a unique merger that involves two relatively well-known martech startups serving quality technology to advertisers and publishers. As a technology market,  content discovery has less than 20 players. In a hugely fragmented tech space, the new identity will help Outbrain and Taboola to jointly take on the giants in the industry.

Key strategic benefits of the merger include:

  1. Increased Advertiser Choice
  2. Greater Advertising Efficiency
  3. Higher Revenue and User Engagement to Publishers, Mobile Carriers and Mobile OEMs
  4. Accelerated Innovation with Better R&D in Data Science, AI, and Personalization
  5. Better Consumer Experience

Jointly, Taboola’s and Outbrain’s solutions are embraced directly by consumers to help them discover what’s interesting and new, at moments when they’re ready to explore.

For example, Taboola News is now embedded in over 60 million Android devices worldwide. The combined company will be able to accelerate the development of such innovative solutions, improving people’s ability to enjoy quality journalism.

Benefits of Using Content Discovery Platforms

With native content struggling to drive direct traffic from the website audience, publishers leverage Content Discovery platforms and the recommendation engine to advertise content on various third-party sites. The links are personalized to look ‘native’, but have a promotional value that attract visitors to click on them. These help advertisers to retain visitors and help publishers generate more traffic and views from their content — blogs, webpage, and videos.

Compared to Google’s Adwords, working with Outbrain or Taboola is relatively simpler. Similarity starts and ends with advertiser opening an account with them and set up a campaign.

“Almost 70% of total US digital advertising revenue in 2019 is controlled by only three companies—Google, Facebook, and Amazon.” – eMarketer

Adam added, “We’re passionate about driving growth for our customers and supporting the open web, which we consider critical in a world where walled gardens are strong, and perhaps too strong. Working together, we will continue investing to better connect advertising dollars with local and national news organizations, strengthening journalism over the next decade. This is why we’re merging; this is our mission.”

The ambitious merger will drive and support combat against fake news, malvertising, and other challenging trends that have kept adtech behind.

New Identity and the Organization Restructuring

Upon closing, Adam Singolda, the Founder and current CEO of Taboola, will assume the CEO position of the combined company. Taboola will continue to operate in its original logo and name. However, it is still unclear if the new identity will be launched with a new brand name to reflect the merger of the two companies.

The Board of Directors of the combined company will consist of current Taboola and Outbrain Management and Board members. Eldad Maniv, President & COO of Taboola and David Kostman, co-CEO of Outbrain will work closely together on managing all aspects of the post-merger integration.

Yaron Galai will remain committed to the success of the combined company, and actively assist with the transition for the 12 months following the closing.

The combined company will have over 2,000 employees across 23 offices, serving over 20,000 clients in more than 50 countries across the North America, Latin America, Europe, Middle East and Asia-Pacific regions.

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Marquee TV Selects ViewLift to Power New OTT Content Platform

ViewLift, a leader in end-to-end platform services for web, mobile and OTT, announced their alliance with Marquee TV, and the re-launch of Marquee TV’s streaming TV service for arts and culture, available on web, Roku, AppleTV, Amazon Fire, Android TV and mobile devices.

While evaluating next generation partners, Marquee TV sought a solution to provide a state-of-the-art service to their subscribers and grant more control over all facets of the business; including content, user experience, branding, analytics and marketing ops.

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Marquee TV co-founder, Marc Kirschner commented, “Partnering with ViewLift means the quality of our platform now matches the quality of our content. Marquee TV’s vision is simply to deliver the finest culture on demand. On the content side we’ve teamed up with the biggest brands in the arts world and our sophisticated audience expects the very highest quality experience. We’re delighted to work with ViewLift to take the Marquee TV service to the next level for our subscribers across any device.”

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In the rapid deployment of the new Marquee TV service, ViewLift is providing an end-to-end OTT solution, including analytics, state of-the-art content management system, and more. The Marquee TV and ViewLift partnership will continue to innovate and provide seamless technology solutions for the service’s community, while increasing engagement and overall experience.

“Marquee TV offers on-demand access to critically acclaimed dance, opera and theatre performances from across the globe,” Rick Allen, CEO, ViewLift said. “We are pleased to be working with Marquee TV on its OTT service and look forward to continuing to expand its digital footprint.”

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Agora.io Fuels Faster Time-to-Market for Mobile App Developers with Agora Partner Gallery

New Program Connects Developers With Network of Verified Vendors

Agora.io, the leading voice, video and live interactive streaming platform, announced the launch of Agora Partner Gallery, a network of preferred development, technology, and platform vendors, to help Agora’s customers speed the development and launch of mobile, web, and desktop applications with real-time engagement features.

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Agora customers seek technology solutions that enable them to bring their offerings – including mobile apps and software programs – to their end customers more quickly and efficiently within a highly competitive market space. The Agora Partner Gallery offers Agora customers direct access to a network of development and technology partners who provide add-on solutions and services that further accelerate go-to-market time with comprehensive offerings, all with the added benefit of full compatible with the Agora real-time voice and video SDK.

“We understand adding real-time voice and video to an app is complex, and increasingly our customers ask for other complimentary real-time engagement features to complete their solution, which adds another layer of complexity to the project,” said Virginia Liu, SVP of Marketing and Ecosystems at Agora, “The new Agora Partner Gallery connects our customers with technology providers and development agencies that specialize in real-time engagement, so they can get the additional features and support they need to not only create an engaging app experience, but also get the app in the hands of their users faster.”

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All partners in the Agora Partner Gallery are required to go through a verification process to ensure they are compatible with the Agora SDK. Additionally, Agora requires all partners provide a demo app or customer reference as based on the Agora SDK to demonstrate their technical expertise. Current participating partners in Agora Partner Gallery include a variety of technology providers ranging from face filters, avatar, voice changer, voice and video analytics, to white board collocation and PSTN connect.

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