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RhythmOne Guarantees Advanced TV Audience Delivery to Help Marketers and Media Buyers Maximize Targeted Reach and Campaign Performance

Solution leverages comScore cross-platform campaign measurement to enable marketers to pay only for impressions delivered in-demo

RhythmOne plc (LSE AIM: RTHM), a global advertising technology company, today announced that it will offer United States-based clients guaranteed(1) in-demo delivery of advanced TV campaigns.(2) This unique offering provides clients with campaign-level audience measurement while accessing RhythmOne’s premium network of app publishers within its advanced TV marketplace, including connected TV, TV everywhere, and interactive TV. The RhythmOne Advanced TV Audience Guarantee solution analyzes and optimizes campaign exposure data against comScore cross-platform measurement, which provides insight into campaign reach across TV, over-the-top (OTT), desktop, and mobile platforms for a complete view of campaign delivery.

“The future of TV advertising in today’s digital world is connected,” said Todd Johnson, VP of Emerging Technology, RhythmOne. “Advanced TV is now an integral component of linear TV and digital ad campaigns to maximize reach and boost campaign performance. While person-level measurement has historically been a challenge for the TV industry, we’re proud to introduce a solution that addresses this critical issue. Our Advanced TV Audience Guarantee assures marketers that they are only paying for the impressions that reach their desired targets.”

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According to comScore’s most recent “State of OTT” report,(3) the OTT market is steadily growing, with 8.8 million more OTT viewing households coming online over the past year – an increase of 17% year-over-year (YOY). Time spent streaming is also up 28% YOY, with households averaging 54 hours per month of streaming.

This increase in OTT households and streaming has likely fueled the growth of advanced TV advertising and digital video monetization overall. According to eMarketer’s latest projections, US digital video ad spending will climb to $29.6 billion by 2022 – an increase of 65% compared to 2018’s spending projection ($17.9 billion).

“As a leader in the measurement space, comScore has proudly developed a new model to accommodate the complexities of cross-platform advertising – especially for high-growth media like OTT advertising,” said Felix Hansen, Vice President of Product at comScore. “We are pleased to serve as the source of truth for cross-platform campaigns – and work with companies like RhythmOne – to help marketers more effectively measure their total audience and maximize their campaign efforts.”

Read More: Interview with Sandie Overtveld, Vice President Sales, APAC at Zendesk

The RhythmOne Advanced TV Audience Guarantee offers marketers and media buyers the following benefits:

  • In-target audience delivery at scale. RhythmOne helps brands connect with intended ages and genders. The platform optimizes impression delivery to target digital TV audiences across its controlled and partnered supply.
  • Reach and frequency insights. Metrics include how many unique individuals a brand has reached and how often within a campaign.
  • Person-level viewership in households. Measurement accounts for all viewers in a room with co-viewing calibration from comScore, delivering a complete view of the total audience exposed to a brand’s video.

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Bitcoin for Beta Testers of SRAX’s Blockchain Technology BIG Platform

Sign up now to secure opportunity to win when BIG opens in Beta next month; top three most active BIG Platform testers will be rewarded with Bitcoin

Social Reality, Inc.‘s blockchain identification graph platform, BIG, enters the Beta testing phase next month, and Beta testers will have the unique opportunity to earn Bitcoin for participating.

The most active Beta tester will be rewarded with five Bitcoins. The second most active Beta tester will receive two Bitcoins and the third will be rewarded with one Bitcoin.

Read More: Interview with Anil Kaul, CEO at Absolutdata

“Securing strong Beta testers is critical to developing BIG,” said Kristoffer Nelson, COO of SRAX. “At this time, we believe a unique, relevant and engaging way to demonstrate and validate the BIG Platform is to reward our testers with Bitcoin during the Beta phase. We believe in the growing value of individuals’ data, and our goal is to empower consumers to be rewarded for what they share.”

The number of Beta testers of BIG, the first consumer-powered data marketplace where people will own, verify and sell access to their data, that are eligible to compete for prizes will be capped at 10,000 users. Testers will be accepted in groups during a month-and-a-half period through a public waitlist. Whether let in first or last, each user will have adequate time to interact with BIG and complete actions. The more actions a user completes with BIG, the more points he or she earns. Actions include registering for a free account with BIG, connecting your social accounts, answering surveys, checking into locations, and more.

Read More: Interview with Sandie Overtveld, Vice President Sales, APAC at Zendesk

Beta testing of BIG will also offer a series of team challenges, where all members of a team must complete various actions within a specific time frame. While users are assessed individually, they can earn more points through the team activities. The three users with the most points will be announced and crowned winners at the end of Beta, which is tentatively scheduled for December 31, 2018. The firm end date will be announced by Social Reality at a later date.

“BIG will benefit everyone in the Internet ecosystem, while improving the online experience, and it starts next month with Beta testers,” added Nelson. “Opening BIG in Beta is a huge step toward our goal of building the first data platform that places consumers at the center of the transaction with complete awareness and control. We are on a mission to empower consumers to realize the value of their data and the Beta contest with the Bitcoin reward kicks things off in a big way.”

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SRAX Bolsters Blockchain Initiative, BIG Platform; Hires David James Stewart as VP of Business Development

Social Reality, Inc. (Nasdaq: SRAX) today announced the appointment of David James Stewart as vice president of business development to drive its blockchain identification graph technology platform, BIG. Stewart brings more than 15 years of digital media experience to SRAX and the BIG Platform.

In his new role, Stewart will lead efforts to partner with brands and agencies seeking access to transparent, consumer-verified data to better reach and serve audiences, as well as third-party applications to learn more about their customers and earn revenue through data sales.

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David James is not only a tremendous hire based on his vast experience, but, more importantly, he understands the challenges and opportunities as it relates to consumer data today and beyond,” said Christopher Miglino, CEO and chairman of SRAX. “The BIG Platform will improve the online experience and we are thrilled that he will be leading the charge working with partners on Madison Avenue and developers across the globe.”

Stewart joins SRAX and BIG from Conversant, the digital media arm of Epsilon, an Alliance Data company. He spent more than 12-years at Conversant, formerly known as ValueClick, serving, most recently, as director of strategic accounts. He holds a Bachelor’s of Science degree in Advertising and Communications from the University of Alabama and began his career as a media planner at global agencies Mindshare, mOne and Beyond Interactive.

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David James joins our team to kick partnerships for BIG into high gear, bringing our message of data security and consumer empowerment full circle by allowing consumers to finally own and manage their data,” added Kristoffer Nelson, COO of SRAX and Principal of BIG.

“For more than 15 years I’ve worked for companies that drove revenue by leveraging consumer data. At the same time, those efforts provided little in return to the individual,” said Stewart. “I’m beyond excited to join SRAX and BIG to truly revolutionize the way the industry uses and activates data. I believe that the future of the web is transparency and giving users the ability to monetize and control their own data.”

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SalesHood Launches Expert System for Sales Managers to Accelerate Revenue Attainment

SalesHood launches Expert System for Sales Managers to accelerate revenue attainment with advanced team dashboards, coaching workflows, and a curated library of industry-proven coaching templates and huddles.

SalesHood, the industry leading sales enablement platform is announcing the launch of SalesHood Expert System for Sales Managers. “Our Expert System provides automated coaching tips, content, and guides for managers to develop and motivate their teams to exceed their goals,” says Elay Cohen, CEO, SalesHood and former Senior Vice President, Sales Productivity from Salesforce.

The SalesHood Expert System for Sales Managers accelerates revenue attainment and productivity and focus with insights, workflows, and content recommendations learned through millions of videos, stories, and activities submitted on the SalesHood platform.

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SalesHood Expert System for Sales Managers helps sales managers become great coaches and more effective leaders by enabling them with automated enablement tools and recommendations to develop their teams. Brian McGrath, Director Sales Enablement, SHI International Corp says “You’ve got to be in a position as a manager to observe your people and provide constructive feedback. SalesHood allows sales managers to move from being an armchair quarterback to being a trusted coach”

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Customers using SalesHood Expert System for Sales Managers will benefit from the following features:

Team Dashboard: Provide a concise summary of team progress, collective achievements, as well as simple click throughs to individuals on the team. Benefits to the Manager and the enablement team include:
Intuitive visualization of team progress
Correlate enablement activity completion to revenue attainment more easily
Improved Manager engagement and focus on enablement activities

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Meetings in a Box: Access to a curated selection of sales enablement huddles that keep teams engaged, aligned and on target to the metrics that matter, both in terms of revenue attainment and personal skills development. Specific features include structured and unstructured team exercises such as role-plays and deal reviews and integrated video assets for call/meeting reviews and best practice sharing. Easily create custom recurring team meetings to provide team visibility, accountability and a culture of sharing throughout the organization.

Coaching Workflows: Managers receive automated coaching summaries highlighting areas of development and completion data of their teams. The summaries are pushed to managers 24 hours and 48 hours before team meetings and one-on-ones.

Library of Coaching Templates & Huddles: Managers can easily select from a collection of coaching ‘playbooks’ with prescribed workflows and activities to address common objectives or pain points such as: quota attainment, pipeline coverage, team engagement, QBR best practices etc.

Read More: Interview with Sandie Overtveld, Vice President Sales, APAC at Zendesk

MessageBird Introduces Programmable Conversations

New Omni-Channel Messaging Solution to Unify the World’s Most Popular Communications Channels through a Single API

MessageBird, the Amsterdam-based cloud communications platform company, today announced Programmable Conversations, the API for unifying customer interactions across multiple channels into a single conversation thread. By consolidating a customer’s entire communication history, enterprises can create rich customer profiles and deliver the ultimate personalized customer experience. Starting today, enterprises can take advantage of Programmable Conversations to integrate WhatsApp, WeChat, Facebook Messenger, Line, Telegram, SMS and Voice interactions into their communications workflows. To learn more and to get started in building a more modern customer engagement experience, visit: www.messagebird.com/en/conversations.

Read More: Interview with Sandie Overtveld, Vice President Sales, APAC at Zendesk

In recent years, an explosion of messaging and communications channels has radically increased options and reduced the cost of communicating with family and friends anywhere in the world. But, for businesses trying to communicate with their customers via these channels, the infrastructure for global business-to-customer communications is increasingly complex, expensive and inefficient. Added to this headache, is that implementing omni-channel communications comes with heavy technical lifting. Each channel requires extra developer time and resources to manage not only initial implementation, but also continued maintenance and upkeep.

Programmable Conversations enables enterprises to meet customers on the channels they already use. By adding and maintaining the connections to the world’s most popular channels, MessageBird does the heavy lifting so enterprises can focus on what matters most – delivering an experience that creates happy customers and brand loyalty.

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“Enterprises require a single holistic view of interactions emanating from a diverse array of channels as an integral aspect of an optimized digital CX strategy,” according to Courtney Munroe, GVP of WW Telecom research at IDC. “MessageBird’s Programmable Conversations is an excellent and cost-effective tool that enables enterprises to reduce the complexity of managing the B2C omni-channel customer experience process.”

Programmable Conversations enables enterprises to:

  • Provide customer-facing teams with entire conversation histories regardless of the channel on which the conversation took place.  Agents can pick up where they left off—cutting response times, streamlining workflows and creating higher customer satisfaction and retention.
  • Free up developer resources by taking away the time and pain of adding and maintaining the connection to all the channels your customers use, saving overhead and valuable developer time.
  • Move away from boxing customers in, to creating personalized customer journeys that reach consumers on the channels they prefer. All without dramatic cost increases.

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“Delivering communications experiences that improve customer satisfaction and loyalty has to be a focus of businesses today,” said Robert Vis, MessageBird CEO.  “Consumers today want to connect with businesses in the same way they do with their friends and family – on their own time, via their preferred channel with all the context of previous conversations.  With Programmable Conversations enterprises can now easily build a modern communications experience while reducing the burden of their often over-tasked developers.”

Read More: Interview with Sandie Overtveld, Vice President Sales, APAC at Zendesk

AI + CRM: The Saber for Every Martech Buyer

Zoho’s Chief Evangelist, Raju Vegesna Spoke About Zoho CRM and Their AI-Based Sales Assistant, Zia Are Perfect Tools for Running an Entire Business

You wouldn’t disagree if the “C” in CRM would actually expand to ‘Competition’ and not ‘Customer’ alone. With so much happening in the industry, marketing teams are super-busy with multi-channel communication and pipeline management. Working with CRM requires a significant expertise in dealing with data and mining them for proper orchestration at multiple levels of the sales funnel. That’s where AI and machine-learning make their presence felt. They automate the data processing. Once you get a hang of how AI works, it’s cheese and toast beyond that. Zoho makes ‘sense of complex CRM data’  unlocking the huge business opportunities in the industry. Zoho continues to set the product roadmap for martech buyers on accelerated mode with some really ROI-focused products, including Zia Search, the latest AI-based sales assistant for B2B.

We spoke to Raju Vegesna, Chief Evangelist of Zoho, to understand how he sees the company making it big with AI in martech.

Raju VegesnaHow do you see trends in AI influencing martech companies to deliver better automation and CRM technologies?

I am the Chief Evangelist at Zoho. I work with all product and marketing teams across Zoho. Marketing apps produce lots of data – from website visitor analytics to social media analysis, from lead generation to lead nurturing – data from these tools comes in numerous ways. With each martech tool producing large amounts of data, it is too much data to process by humans.

AI is the way to go. From analyzing a ton of data to correlating data across tools to making sense of it and generating insights, we see AI playing a key role. We ourselves use AI and machine learning to correlate data produced by several of our own martech tools and generate insights, which are turned into actionable suggestions.

A key trend moving forward will be about correlating data across martech channels and making sense of the data alongside CRM to calculate ROI and offer predictions and more.

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How do your latest product enhancements and release help marketing teams improve their tech ROI?

Our AI assistant, Zia, correlates information across various martech channels and makes sense of the data and provides suggestions to users. For example, information on user activity across channels (like website, web chat, customer support, webinar attendance, event attendance) is correlated across various apps and offers suggestions to a salesperson about which leads to prioritize. This will help salespeople to focus on important leads.

Tell us more about Zia Search and how is it different from other search engines?

Search is common within a business app. But it is uncommon to search across business apps. There is a reason. It is complex. This is partly because historically each business application came from a different vendor, and wanting to search for information across apps meant searching across multi-vendor silo-ed products. With Zoho One, we created a suite of 40+ business applications that are tightly integrated. With that as the base, we created a smart search engine that aggregates data across various business apps and shows the results contextually.

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Doing a search engine for business data is different compared to a public search. For one, business search requires us to respect data authorization rules and access controls which could be specific to each application and for each user.

To understand data relationships as well as authorization across apps requires a deep understanding of applications, and this can only be obtained when we own the applications. As we own all the applications we offer, we are able to build a comprehensive search that deeply understands business data and displays contextual results based on activity across the system.

Thank you, Raju, for your insights on Zoho CRM and the role of AI in martech!

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Drift Launches Intel to Eliminate Friction for B2B Buyers

Conversational marketing leader unveils new technology that gives businesses all of the information they need to provide a world-class buying experience to every website visitor — without relying on lead forms.

Drift, the world’s leading conversational marketing and sales platform, brings B2B marketers one step closer to a world without forms today with the launch of Drift Intel. This powerful new feature — included in the latest update to the Drift platform — changes the game for B2B buyers who are looking to provide a frictionless, personalized buying experience for potential customers.

.@Drift Intel gives businesses all of the information they need to provide a world-class buying experience to every website visitor – without relying on lead forms

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B2B buying has undergone a massive transformation: 73% of 20- to 35-year-olds are now involved in product or service purchasing at their companies according to a recent report in Harvard Business Review. This shift has made buyers more reluctant to jump through the hoops of a B2B sales process or respond to traditional lead-generation efforts.

“One clear impact from the change in buying behavior has been on lead forms — which are now being ignored by more than half of companies we surveyed in the 2018 Drift Lead Response Report,” said Drift CEO David Cancel. “But until now, marketers have not had a better way to capture the data they need to fit their sales process — let alone create an amazing buying experience on their website. With Drift Intel, this is now possible, and we are one step closer to a world without lead forms.”

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Powered by an integration with Clearbit, Drift Intel enables marketers to turn anonymous website visitors into qualified leads for their sales teams in real-time — eliminating the friction that comes with filling out forms.

Perfect for businesses doing account-based marketing, Drift Intel gives sales and marketing teams everything they need to deliver a world-class experience to every website visitor, including:

Real-Time Company Profiles. When an anonymous person comes to a website, Drift Intel automatically generates a rich company profile that includes details like company name, employee count, funding, industry, and more—giving sales and marketing teams all the context they need to start meaningful conversations in real-time.

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Intelligent Lead Routing. By using the company profile, Drift Intel can identify businesses with specific demographics for smarter lead routing. For example, based on your team’s segmentation, a company in the Boston area with 500 employees and $30M in annual revenue can be instantly routed to the right account team or salesperson to get them the answers they need in real-time.

Personalized Messaging at Scale. Marketing and sales teams can also personalize real-time messages by using details from a visitor’s company profile. Instead of serving a one-size-fits-all message, Drift Intel allows for highly personalized messages that create a VIP-level buying experience for every single website visitor.

“When we first eliminated forms and called on other companies to do the same, the loudest question we heard was, ‘How will we get the information we need as a business to market and sell to that person?’” said David Cancel, Founder & CEO, Drift. “Our goal with Drift Intel was to answer that question and give our customers the tools they need to create an amazing experience for buyers, remove friction, and continue on our mission to make it easy for businesses to buy from businesses.”

Read More: Interview with Sandie Overtveld, Vice President Sales, APAC at Zendesk

Keith Block Promoted to Co-CEO of Salesforce, Reporting to the Board of Directors

Salesforce (NYSE: CRM), the global leader in CRM, today announced that the company’s Board of Directors has promoted Keith Block to co-CEO. Block now reports to Salesforce’s Board of Directors, and remains a member of the board.

Block served as Salesforce’s Vice Chairman, President and as a Director since joining the company in June 2013, and most recently served as the company’s COO since February 2016.

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“Keith has been my trusted partner in running Salesforce for the past five years, and I’m thrilled to welcome him as co-CEO,” said Marc Benioff, Founder, Chairman of the Board, and co-CEO, Salesforce. “Keith has outstanding operational expertise and corporate leadership experience, and I could not be happier for his promotion and this next level of our partnership.”

“Salesforce’s success is a testament to Marc’s visionary leadership, which has created an unparalleled culture of trust, innovation and equality, as well as a relentless focus on customer success,” said Keith Block, co-CEO, Salesforce. “I’m honored to be co-CEO and to leverage each of our strengths as we lead Salesforce, our employees, customers and partners into the future.”

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In their respective roles as co-CEOs, Benioff, who continues as Chairman of the Board, will lead Salesforce’s vision and innovation in areas including technology, marketing, stakeholder engagement and culture. Block will lead the company’s growth strategy, execution and operations.

Salesforce is the global leader in CRM and the fastest growing top five enterprise software company. The co-CEO model further enables Salesforce to continue its trajectory of unprecedented growth at scale as the company drives toward its next milestone of $23 billion in revenue in FY22 and beyond.

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