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IBM Releases AI-Powered Anomaly Detection Capabilities to Mitigate Supply Chain Disruptions

Business Transaction Intelligence Helps The Master Lock Company Ensure 100 Percent Supply Network Availability, While Improving B2B Collaboration and Efficiency to Better Serve Customers

Gartner Supply Chain Executive Summit — IBM launched Business Transactional Intelligence (BTI), an AI-powered solution that offers anomaly detection and visualization capabilities for mitigating supply chain disruptions and accelerating data-driven decision making.

BTI, part of IBM’s Supply Chain Business Network, enables companies to garner deeper insights into supply chain data to help them better manage, for example, order-to-cash and purchase-to-pay interactions. The technology does this, in part, using machine learning to identify volume, velocity and value-pattern anomalies in supply chain documents and transactions. Machine learning is a method used to teach artificial intelligence how to learn from data, spot patterns and make decisions on its own. This enables companies to discover potential issues faster and resolve them before they escalate and impact the business.

More than 140 Watson Supply Chain customers are early adopters of BTI, which Greenworks, The Master Lock Company, Whirlpool Corporation and other customers discussed their initial successes in February at IBM’s 2019 THINK Conference.

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For The Master Lock Company, fast-paced global growth mean onboarding and transacting with more partners each year. To empower its lean EDI team and manage the rising requirements they migrated its trading partner integration processes to IBM Supply Chain Business Network Premium. This security-rich, cloud-based solution powered by IBM Business Transaction Intelligence reduces manual work for their EDI team, resulting in 50% faster onboarding for acquired trading partners to help support business growth, while 100% availability ensures mission-critical EDI services are always online.

“If one of our EDI transactions fails for any reason, IBM Supply Chain Business Network sends us an alert, which is valuable on a tactical level because it helps us start to pinpoint the underlying cause straight away,” explains Connie Rekau, EDI Manager, The Master Lock Company. “With IBM Business Transaction Intelligence, we can dig deeper into our EDI data to identify patterns that wouldn’t otherwise be obvious. As well as building a scorecard to track our performance against internal service-level level agreements [SLAs] with the business, we have set up reports that highlight trading partners with higher-than-average error rates.”

In addition to Watson Supply Chain’s product release at Gartner’s Supply Chain Executive Summit, IBM was named a finalist for the 2019 Gartner Supply Chainnovators Award in the High-Tech Manufacturing category. IBM’s Chief Supply Chain Officer, Ron Castro, keynoted on Monday, May 13th for his Chainnovator session titled, IBM’s Digital Transformation Journey to a Learning, AI-Enabled Supply Chain Organization. The session explored IBM’s award nomination details that achieved end-to-end supply chain security to gain a competitive business advantage using AI, blockchain, and IoT, while also speaking on how IBM’s innovations materialize into client product offerings.

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Further evidencing IBM’s leadership and innovation, company executives will speak about the combined power of building a smarter supply chain using AI, blockchain and IoT in the following conference sessions:

  • “5 Imperatives for Building a Smarter Supply Chain”
    Tuesday, May 14th from 3 – 3:45 p.m.
    Inhi Cho Suh, General Manager, IBM Watson Customer Engagement
  • “Busting Myths and Capturing Value: AI and Blockchain in the Supply Chain”
    Wednesday, May 15th 3 – 3:45 p.m.
    Ron Castro, Chief Supply Chain Officer, IBM

“Today’s intelligent supply chains must rise to the challenge of adapting to changes in complex business environments by unlocking the value of existing systems, while providing increased agility and seamless collaboration to improve business outcomes,” said Jeanette Barlow, VP of Offering Management, IBM Watson Supply Chain. “We’re excited to introduce our latest AI innovation with the launch of BTI – further complementing our Blockchain and IoT capabilities – which helps our customers proactively mitigate disruptions and business risks by augmenting their workforce’s capabilities.”

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New Data: Facebook and Google Trounce Amazon for D2C Brand Ad Spend

“The State of D2C Marketing 2019” from Yotpo Offers Extensive Ecommerce and Marketing Benchmarks as Reported by Direct-To-Consumer Brands

As more brands focus on their own eCommerce sites as a direct touchpoint to consumers, “The State of D2C Marketing” is a new report that provides a candid look at related marketing, advertising, and eCommerce investments propelling the success of many of today’s direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands. The report reveals trends across verticals and company size, including that 52% of respondents are increasing investment in Facebook ads, compared to 18% investing more in Amazon Ads. Produced by leading commerce marketing provider Yotpo, in partnership with Magento, an Adobe company, the report debuted at Magento Imagine 2019, currently underway in Las Vegas, Nevada.

“The State of D2C Marketing 2019” from Yotpo offers extensive eCommerce and marketing benchmarks as reported by direct-to-consumer brands.
“The State of D2C Marketing 2019” from Yotpo offers extensive eCommerce and marketing benchmarks as reported by direct-to-consumer brands.

The State of D2C Marketing is based on an online survey conducted March-April 2019 of more than 500 eCommerce and marketing leaders at D2C brands, 41% of whom are brand founders. The respondent base represents online merchants in a variety of verticals from across the globe, with online stores built on eCommerce platforms including Magento, Shopify, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, SAP Hybris, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, and more.

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The State of D2C Marketing 2019 uncovers new industry insights, including:

Key Marketing Priorities

  • The leading priorities for today’s D2C brands are eCommerce sales [60%], customer acquisition [54%], and conversion rates [53%].
  • However, priorities differ depending on company size.
  1. Brands with under $5 million in annual revenue are looking to drive revenue growth (eCommerce sales).
  2. Mid-sized brands between $5$100 million care about both market penetration (customer acquisition) alongside revenue growth (eCommerce sales).
  3. Meanwhile, the largest companies (over $100 million) generally aim to optimize their marketing efforts (conversion rates).

Marketing and Ad Spend 2019 vs 2018

  • To fuel customer acquisition, the majority of respondents [52%] are increasing investment in Facebook ads, compared to only 18% investing more in Amazon Ads.
  • Once again, investments diverge for the different segments:
  1. Small brands, who count social media as their primary customer acquisition channel, are investing in Instagram Ads at higher levels than the industry overall.
  2. Mid-sized brands with higher brand recognition likewise attract customers via social media but also through SEO and direct traffic. Accordingly, this segment– notably more than any other in the industry–is increasing spend with Google, in both Ads (60%, +13 percentage points above average) and Shopping Ads (42%, +10 higher).
  3. The largest, most established brands report social media as a lesser acquisition channel compared to SEO and direct traffic. While these brands with their budget firepower outpace the industry in increasing spend in every channel, Facebook dominates as the largest investment (63%, +11 above average).

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Optimizing eCommerce Sales

  • In today’s digital-first commerce environment, D2C brands consider customer reviews as foundational for their sites, with nearly 3 of 4 brands [73%] having implemented the feature.
  • Segments have a different approach to implementing other forms of user-generated content like customer photos and customer videos:
  1. Small brands are the most advanced in adopting those community-building features, outpacing the industry in the planned implementation of customer photos (36% vs. 32% industry average) and customer videos (43% vs. 39%).
  2. Mid-sized brands outperform the industry in implementing customer photos (40% vs. 36%) with more than a third 35% looking to deploy customer videos.
  3. Large brands, potentially late to considering eCommerce as a top priority, are currently underinvested when it comes to reviews (68% vs 73% industry average) and so is planning to implement the feature accordingly (25% vs 20%).

In the report, Tomer Tagrin, CEO & Cofounder of Yotpo, comments on the central role eCommerce plays in brand growth and survival: “In the D2C approach, the website is both the brand and the store: story, mission, style, products, transaction, and service. Unlike the limitations of physical stores, eCommerce can give businesses access to a wider and global base of potential customers. Additionally, the lower overhead can provide the resources for businesses to persist amidst changing market conditions.”

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TextUs Introduces The “Text Us” Call to Action – The Evolution of the “Contact Us” That Lets Customers Text Message Businesses

Phone and email follow-up aren’t enough — the “Text Us” call to action link lets customers start texting with your business

TextUs, the most popular business-class text messaging software, announced that it will introduce the “Text Us” call to action, allowing customers to start 1:1, real-time conversations with a single click from a website, email, or anywhere on the web.

Traditionally, businesses have relied on conventional “Contact Us” calls to action with phone, email, and forms as a primary means of engagement. In the age of real-time communication, TextUs is bringing business-class text messaging™ forward as a more convenient, instant way for professionals to communicate.

The “Text Us” call to action adds another conversation starter to your website and converts online prospects into real-time text messaging conversations with your employees.

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“‘Visit Us.’ ‘Call Us.’ ‘Email Us.’ These typical calls to action are outdated and don’t meet the needs of an on-demand economy, driven by real-time communication,” said Ted Guggenheim, CEO and co-founder of TextUs.

“We see the ‘Text Us’ call-to-action as the evolution in direct communication. We’ve moved from slow, mass outreach via phone and email to quick, authentic conversations over text and chat. Businesses that don’t evolve with their customers are sure to go extinct.”

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With the popularity of chatbots and social media, the age of real-time communication is in full swing. When you need to directly get ahold of someone, today’s customers expect instant, authentic conversations, which is why text messaging is quickly becoming the preferred way for sales and marketing teams to connect and engage with customers and prospects — on their terms.

TextUs is putting their name into action by helping businesses adopt the “Text Us” call to action based on helping hundreds of customers in recruiting, hospitality, healthcare, and more modernize their communications strategy.

The TextUs platform allows teams to engage contacts by simply text messaging through the 10-digital business phone number they already use for phone calls. Elevating text messaging to a business-class communication service, the platform includes the ability to send conversational SMS campaigns, automate personal text messages, and view in-depth analytics.

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Brand Networks Acquires Clickable; Unveils Azalea Commerce to Accelerate “Shopper Centric” Walled Gardens

Longtime Partner to Social Walled Gardens Announces New Holding Company to Help Retail Advertising Platforms Take Root

Brand Networks, the innovative technology provider and media solutions partner to the world’s biggest walled gardens, announces the acquisition of Clickable, and with it, the formation of a new holding company that leverages the tech, experience, and data of both companies. The new organization, Azalea Commerce, is on a mission to help retail brands establish self-contained advertising platforms powered by permissions-based, first-party data.

Backed by Private Equity firm AEA Investors, Brand Networks shareholders and a $40M investment from a strategic partner, Azalea Commerce is equipped to accelerate the monetization of transactional, behavioral, and purchase data owned by retailers effective immediately.

The organization has formed in response to significant disruption in the media landscape which places transactional data and the retailers that own it in a powerful new position. Shopper data enables advertisers to predict future behavior and measure advertising results like never before.

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“To-date, Brand Networks and Clickable combined have generated over $5 billion in advertising demand for the leading programmatic exchanges, publishers and social walled gardens,” said Jamie Tedford, Brand Networks Founder and Chairman of the Board. “Azalea Commerce applies that knowledge and experience to power data monetization for a new category of customers — the retailers now competing in the walled garden economy.”

“The launch of Azalea Commerce gives Brand Networks a strong platform to nourish organic growth of our current lines of business while adding new capabilities for customers and partners,” said Dave Fall, CEO, Brand Networks. “According to recent research from Gartner, CPG marketers will spend $178 Billion on ‘shopper marketing’ this year. Some $55 Billion of this spend is expected to move from in-store to online advertising before 2020. Azalea Commerce is uniquely suited to capitalize on this dynamic and explosive growth market.”

The Clickable acquisition adds new analytics, search, and data products to Azalea Commerce’s programmatic technology stack, built by Brand Networks and enhanced through previously acquired companies, SHIFT and Optimal. Additional capabilities in programmatic display, video and connected TV were secured through a strategic and exclusive partnership with Tapad’s media business in 2018.

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Azalea Commerce goes to market with five offerings to serve demand-side agencies and brand customers, existing publisher and platform partnerships, as well as shopper-centric walled gardens.

  • Brand Networks, our flagship offering, will continue as the media services center-of-excellence, providing social, video, display and search managed services to agencies and brands.
  • Iris by Brand Networks, the award-winning, AI-powered platform provides streamlined automation, optimization, data integration and media planning tools driven by AI technology.
  • Azalea Consulting, the multidisciplinary team comprised of seasoned engineers, data scientists, and systems integrators that collaboratively architect and build next-generation walled gardens for first-party data owners.
  • GO Local, the local advertising platform that gives retail marketers the tools to create local content and automate hyper-targeted social advertising to drive store traffic, local awareness, larger basket size, and repeat visits.
  • Shoppably (BETA), the shopper marketing and co-op advertising workflow tool that streamlines collaboration between CPG businesses and leading shopper-centric walled gardens, enabling buying of owned inventory and “shoppable” ads from leading social platforms.

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Adobe Collaborates With Amazon to Accelerate Growth for Third-Party Merchants

Magento Commerce Branded Stores for Amazon Sellers Becomes Merchant Solution for Standalone Storefronts

Adobe announced Magento Commerce branded stores for Amazon sellers, a new offering available through Magento, part of Adobe Experience Cloud, that runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The solution is designed to give sellers a seamless way to grow their business and manage their online presence across Amazon.com and their own storefront. Native integration with Amazon.com merchant tools like Amazon Pay and Fulfillment by Amazon provide the added convenience of secure payments and fast shipping services for shoppers.

With Magento Commerce, the new offering is built to deliver faster page load times and better conversions, as well as the ability to scale for peak shopping periods such as Cyber Monday. Serverless operations means new features such as one-click checkout and dynamic media can be quickly deployed. Functionality from Amazon Pay provides the same secure payment experience as Amazon.com, with security and compliance baked in. Fulfillment by Amazon gives customers trusted shipping options that are fast and reliable via Amazon’s proven logistics operation.

“Small and mid-market businesses are taking direct ownership over how they manage customer experiences to differentiate, grow and build loyalty,” said Jason Woosley, vice president of commerce product and platform, Adobe. “Our work with Amazon empowers this large community of sellers to get closer to their customers while saving them time and money on development.”

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“We are excited to support Magento Commerce branded stores for Amazon sellers, which builds on our long running collaboration with Adobe,” said Terry Wise, vice president, channels and alliances, Amazon Web Services, Inc. “Powered by AWS, this launch will provide sellers a seamless way to grow their business and scale for peak shopping periods.”

“We are a top seller on Amazon.com for GPS trackers, helping customers keep an eye on things that matter most,” said Fernando Alegria, CEO of Optimus GPS Tracker. “A standalone storefront will fuel our growth and help build closer relationships with customers. With the new Magento Commerce offering, we were open for business in just a few weeks.”

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Magento Commerce branded stores for Amazon sellers helps deliver a fully operational storefront in record time, as well as access to an ecosystem of over 300,000 Magento developers and over 4,600 commerce extensions on the Magento Marketplace. Native integrations automatically sync product specs and attributes stored in Amazon Marketplace. Amazon.com merchant tools such as payments processing from Amazon Pay, hosting by AWS and more, can eliminate the need for custom development and integration work, saving sellers time and money. With Magento Business Intelligence, merchants can also measure success from the start and take action on data insights.

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RevTrax Announces Addition of State-of the-Art Machine Learning and AI Technology to Its Offer Management Platform to Deliver Groundbreaking Value to CPG & Retail Brands

The RevTrax Offer Management Platform Integrates Across any Marketing Channel to Connect Online Behaviors to any Conversion

RevTrax, a leading offer management platform for CPG and retail brands announced the launch of a machine learning and artificial intelligence capability to its platform to effectively target and deliver the right offers to consumers quicker and more efficiently than ever. The software will allow RevTrax to observe behavior at scale and categorize the behaviors and patterns faster than ever before. Using structures such as Bayesian Networks, probability theory, and other techniques, will allow the platform to replay events, determine causality, and accurately measure results based on a certain set of criteria. With these techniques, RevTrax can rerun actual traffic through modeled scenarios to find optimal outcomes and adjust the flow of traffic for segments of users in real-time to maximize ROI for brands.

“Imagine being able to deliver an offer that is proven to persuade consumers to purchase”

This update will allow the RevTrax offer management platform to perform “what if” scenarios, which are crucial for marketers to drive valuable results, by leveraging over 11-years of anonymized consumer offer-behavior. This analysis will take past activity and results and replay them against a different set of offer-values applied to the same model to predict what the consumer will be offered. This will effectively reveal additional insights such as the use of previously unused offer-values to continue moving product but at a lower cost.

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“RevTrax’s AI technology enables marketers to run smarter offers at a scale never before possible,” said Greg Hansen, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of RevTrax. “Thanks to the hard work of our data science and tech teams, we are now able to help marketers deliver a targeted offer to desired consumers at exactly the right time. With our AI-powered tool, today’s brands can easily cut costs on their offer strategy with minimal effort. Our technology will help our clients to stop bleeding via over-discounting or creating generic offers.”

RevTrax has developed an AI-based methodology that recommends and changes offer-values for CPG and retail brands across consumer segments with various engagement levels. The AI offer recommendations are based on over a decade of experience studying consumer response to offers and state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms.

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“Imagine being able to deliver an offer that is proven to persuade consumers to purchase,” said Jonathan Treiber, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of RevTrax. “Or imagine being able to deliver consistently lower offers to consumers you know don’t need huge discounts. Now imagine all those decisions and segments being analyzed and delivered in real-time. It’s a game changer.”

Recently, RevTrax tested its new AI and machine learning capability on a leading CPG brand that spent $14.5 Million to drive 8.6 Million purchases. Using RevTrax’s AI optimization, they could have reduced the spend to $9.8 Million to achieve the same result, ultimately saving $4.7 Million. In the coming months, RevTrax aims to replicate the result for other top brands as its updated technology is rolled out to its existing CPG portfolio and new clients.

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Vidoomy Launches an Advertising Revolution. An Interactive Video That Even Allows You to Make Purchases

Video advertising has always been crucial when it comes to impact users. Thanks to its dynamism and clearness this type of advertising has been constantly growing. However, it never felt that way before.

In March 2019, Vidoomy has launched its latest format, which allows total interactivity between the video advertising format and the targeted users. This format soon had become a major success. Hence, several brands had started to take advantage of this innovative format. Some of the most popular worldwide uses are:

  • Movie premieres. Apart from viewing the latest trailer, the user can interact with the format buying advance tickets for the movie, adding it to its personal calendar, accessing to unpublished content, or even interacting with some of the characters and so on.
  • Car launches. The user are able to customize inside the ad unit itself with different colors and accessories, compare the different configurations, schedule a test drive with its car dealership, etc.
  • Travelling. The potential client between tons of options can choose the paradisiac destination that fits it the most. Also, the user can make a walkthrough inside the hotel itself and its surroundings.

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Marcos Cuesta, Vidoomy’s CEO, has revealed that one of its keys to grow during this 2019 is the alliance they have with diverse data companies. Thanks to this collaboration, their advertisers can target the users in more than 200 fully-detailed and specific segments. Such as, favorite sport, purchasing power, occupation, gender, musical interests, among many others.

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Vidoomy has also shown in this format a primordial innovation — the merge between a groundbreaking product and the information that an advertiser already has about its own potential customers —, this way, there is no need for the advertisers to use the Vidoomy’s publishers data but they can also choose their own existing database.

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Sreekant Lanka Joins iQuanti as Head of Paid Media

The former Head of Google’s Programmatic Advertising Strategy to lead iQuanti’s efforts to drive superior paid channel performance through advanced data modeling

Digital marketing company iQuanti announced the hiring of Sreekant Lanka as Head of Paid Media.

In this new role, Lanka will now lead iQuanti’s analytics-driven paid media practice. Sreekant brings over 20 years of digital advertising experience to enhance iQuanti’s paid channel solutions and will oversee iQuanti’s channel SMEs, solution specialists, and paid media campaign operations.

“iQuanti is focused on creating exponentially better solutions for enterprise clients through better use of data. We’ve done it with ALPS in the enterprise SEO space and we look forward to Sreekant creating transformative solutions in the paid media space.” said Vish Sastry Rachakonda, CEO, iQuanti. “Companies are looking to get a lot more through their digital marketing dollars and Sreekant will help lead iQuanti’s efforts to transform this space.”

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iQuanti had launched its Analytics Led Platform for Search (ALPS), a transformative enterprise SEO platform that helped make SEO programs a lot more predictable.  Now, the company is working on paid solutions to drive much better targeting and effectiveness.

Sreekant joins iQuanti from Google, where he served as Head of Programmatic Account Strategy at the company’s Hyderabad location. In this role, he led a global team providing programmatic strategy and activation across a wide range of clients and verticals to drive client business results. Sreekant also held senior positions within Google in its sales organization in Mountain View.

Prior to his time at Google, Lanka worked as a Strategy Consultant at Accenture, where he worked with financial services clients to drive operational efficiency of technology and realizing the value of their IT investments.

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“iQuanti’s commitment to data driven insights and leadership in digital marketing were highly appealing to me,” Sreekant said. “I am thrilled to join the iQuanti team and help companies get much more from their digital marketing spends, through a relentless application of insights and custom products.”

Lanka also serves as an advisor and investors to few startups in India on their marketing strategy. Educated in both India and the United States, Sreekant holds a Bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Andhra University and an MBA from INSEAD.

Sreekant is also a widely recognized speaker, having served as a TEDx speaker and a panelist on talks at Google.

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