Jun 2, 2022

CMO's top 8 martech stories for the week - 2 June 2022 All the latest martech and adtech news from CreativeX, Amplitude, IAS, PubMatic, Idiomatic, Broadsign, Lexer and Airship CreativeX Raises $US25m in series B funding CreativeX has secured US$25 million in Series B funding for its creative data platform designed to help brands measure the creative elements of marketing against global excellence goals. The funding round was led by Guggenheim Investments, on behalf of certain clients, with participation from Beringea, the Brandtech group and Conviction. CreativeX offers a creative data platform that analyses a brand’s in-flight and pre-flight image and video content to determine how that content stacks up relative to industry best practices, as well as the brand’s creative criteria. The platform looks at creative quality, as well as representation of people in advertising, and has a measurement framework for tracking. Started in 2015 and with a focus on social, CreativeX technology is now used by more than 5000 brands including Nestle, Facebook and PepsiCo. The latest funding will be used to increase content coverage out of social to cover display, ecommerce and TV, as well as launch new creative measurement capabilities. There are also plans to expand APIs to merge creative data with existing data lakes as well as more research on creative effectiveness. “Marketers are waking up and recognising their creative for what it is: a major untapped competitive advantage to drive media efficiencies and long-term brand growth,” CreativeX founder and CEO, Anastasia Leng, said. “This funding round, by far the largest in CreativeX history, is a testament to the impact our technology can have on the advertising industry, not only by reducing the $10 billion of wasted spend on creative that’s not set up to succeed, but also by bringing a layer of data to help marketers make creative more accessible, more representative, and better for long-term brand growth.” Amplitude debuts CDP Amplitude has announced its new CDP, fully integrated with its analytics solutions, Amplitude Analytics. The vendor said Amplitude CDP has been created to help product and marketing teams proactively improve data quality, analyse and discover new audiences, and sync data across their marketing and data stack. It claimed a majority of customers connect their first-party customer data by directly using Amplitude SDKs and APIs, while 90 per cent also use its suite of governance tools to manage event data and user profiles. In addition, more than 50 per cent of customers have activated the data they have in Amplitude to another tool in their stack. Creating the new Amplitude CDP means the analytics and data platform execution can be conducted in one place, the company said. Key features include more than 65 turnkey integrations plus SDKs and APIs to ingest data from different sources, identity resolution around customer profiles, embedded tracking plans, collaborative taxonomy validation, observability, data transformations, and a developer toolkit. Amplitude said audience management capabilities are built in for marketers to help create customer segments without SQL and sync them to various marketing and advertising platforms to run targeted campaigns. Customers can build dynamic and predictive user segments and automate activation, and there’s the ability to sync cohorts in real-time to any data destination in Amplitude’s integration catalogue. “Customer data platforms entered the market with the promise of making personalisation a reality, but aggregating data is only step one. As companies look to provide tailored product experiences, they need trusted data that provides insights about their existing audiences and helps them identify new ones, all without unnecessary costs for their business,” said Amplitude CEO and co-founder, Spenser Skates. “At Amplitude, we have spent the last few years helping customers solve the problems that existing CDPs in the market were unable to. With the launch of Amplitude CDP, we are now providing customers with the ability to provide meaningful, personalized experiences all from a single platform.” IAS builds better signals Digital media management vendor, Integral Ad Science (IAS), is bringing its Total Visibility quality path optimisation solution to customers via an improved dashboard and has fostered new partnerships to extend the supply chain offering’s market reach. IAS Signal will now incorporate the Total Visibility solution via a new and improved dashboard so users can view their supply paths in one reporting platform, simplifying how they analyse and manage campaign performance. It’s also confirmed a host of new partner integrations with Xander, Beeswax (now part of FreeWheel), Bidtellect and others. Platform partner integrations with MediaMath, Viant and Adform are planned for later this year. The vendor is also offering personalised support alongside the Total Visibility solution to clients from its newly formed Outcomes team. “Brands and agencies want more visibility into their programmatic buys to understand what optimisations can improve campaign performance and drive high-quality supply paths,” said Integral Ad Science CEO, Lisa Utzschneider. “Leveraging IAS’s QPO solution and metrics like qCPM will allow advertisers to identify the most effective channels for purchasing high-quality inventory at the most efficient cost.” The Total Visibility solution aims to help buyers uncover inefficiencies within media supply paths. Features include the ability to verify media quality against IAS’s brand safety, IVT and viewability metrics, quantify media costs and financial impact of blocked ads and improve performance through optimisation reporting tools. Idiomatic secures US$4m for customer intelligence platform Customer intelligence startup, Idiomatic, has closed a US$4 million seed round led by Freestyle. Idiomatic’s focus is on translating customer feedback into understandable insights for companies using natural language processing (NLP) to then make product and customer services decisions. The platform integrates with a number of customer support offerings such as those from Salesforce, Zendesk and Gladly. Its clients include Facebook, Pinterest, Medium, HubSpot and Upwork. The company said the new capital will help to expand its six-year-old AI-driven customer intelligence platform and accelerate reach in consumer internet, ecommerce, retail and technology markets. Idiomatic’s co-CEOs, Kevin Yang and Chris Martinez, also earned the support of industry powerhouses including Adobe’s Scott Belsky, Amazon’s Gert Lanckriet, Gaingels, Hyphen Capital, Xoogler Ventures, and others, which joined the oversubscribed round. “Consumer feedback data serves as the ultimate guide for successful businesses, and companies can no longer afford to ignore the customer feedback surge,” noted Freestyle partner, Jenny Lefcourt. “The best customer-centric companies tap Idiomatic to ingest all the customer feedback that is out there and then use the resulting data insights to guide their product roadmap, pricing, customer response initiatives and other critical business decisions. As customers give more feedback through more and more channels, I believe all companies will need Idiomatic to stay competitive.” Broadsign expands programmatic DOOH in the US and Australia Adtech player, Broadsign, has taken the wrappers off Broadsign Ads, the rebranded Campsite digital out-of-home ( DOOH) demand-side platform, and launched in both the US and Australian markets. Broadsign acquired Campsite, a Canadian programmatic digital-out-of-home (pDOOH) DSP in 2019. The tool allows agencies and brands to plan and execute DOOH campaigns using a streamlined workflow that’s similar to online and mobile DSPs. Use cases include setting campaign parameters and selecting screen types based on data points such as audience, environment or proximity to points of interest, and the ability to buy and activate inventory based on budget and audience goals using Broadsign Ads’ smart bidding algorithm. The platform also offers real-time and contextual targeting through access to dynamic mobile data as well as triggers like weather and financial movements. Broadsign said it has been working with a number of early adopter agencies and brands throughout the US and Australia to launch campaigns via Broadsign Ads in each market. One of these is media and marketing agency, Frontier Australia. “Broadsign Ads allows us to plan, execute and measure DOOH campaigns quickly, easily and autonomously, while collaborating with the experienced Broadsign team,” commented Frontier Australia head of biddable media, Denver Rego. Airship acquires Gummicube Mobile app experience company, Airship, has acquired Gummicube, a longstanding app store optimisation (ASO) player, for an undisclosed sum. The companies said linking Gummicube's ASO technology and expertise with Airship’s App Experience Platform (AXP) will allow brands to optimise value across the entire mobile app lifecycle, driving greater organic growth, ROAS, retention, loyalty and monetisation. Key functionality includes app store optimisation, customer journey orchestration, no-code native app experiences and app UX experimentation. Gummicube also offers an A/B testing platform. Under the deal, Gummicube’s 80 employees have joined Airship with co-founders, Dave Bell and Anh Nguyen, becoming VPs and co-general managers of the Gummicube division at Airship. Airship said it plans to continue to innovate and invest in Gummicube’s solutions, while empowering customers with richer cross-platform data to better inform each step of the mobile app journey. The deal comes after Gummicube reportedly nearly doubled revenue year-over-year, with nearly three-quarters of total revenue coming from enterprise brands. The vendor has expressed plans to nearly double its staff in 2022 to support continued growth. “Together, Gummicube and Airship enable marketers, product owners and developers to optimise their entire mobile app experience, from the point of discovery to loyalty. This industry-first combination will drive greater app success for brands and unlock huge value for our business,” Airship CEO and president, Brett Caine, said. Lexer expands into Southeast Asia Customer data platform (CDP) vendor, Lexer, has appointed Ben Moreau as its new VP of Southeast Asia as part of efforts to extend into the region. Moreau joins the business after 10 years at Experian, most recently as GM financial marketplaces, where he also established the APAC Innovation Operations and led partnerships. His appointment and the Southeast Asian expansion plans have been bolstered by news that Malaysian cinema chain, TGV Cinemas, and regional ecommerce enabler, aCommerce, have signed deals with Lexer. “Lexer represents everything that excites me in a business. I’m fascinated by how complex data can be transformed into relevant insights and outcomes, and I enjoy working in fast-growth environments centred around a clear purpose, with people who love what they do,” Moreau said. “Lexer has successfully expanded out of Australia into North America, and the opportunity to take our solution into Southeast Asia to accelerate growth for the business is thrilling.” Built for retail, Lexer’s platform features data propensity models, segments, reporting dashboards and workflow tools. Moreau plans to leverage Lexer’s ‘no-code’ implementation, easy set-up, and native connections with existing point solutions used by regional retailers, such as Shopify, DotDigital, and Klaviyo to grow the client roster across the region. PubMatic launches Connect Adtech vendor, PubMatic, has debuted Connect, a new platform aimed at helping media buyers better connect their target audiences across the open Internet. The sell-side addressability offering combines several signal approaches into one platform, including known identity, first- and second-party data, contextual signals, seller-defined audiences and modelled audiences. Brands and media buyers can then use these to activate a portfolio approach to addressability to improve ad relevance while respecting consumer privacy. PubMatic said Connect builds on the momentum of its audience business, which has increased threefold in the past year off the back of supply path optimisation deals and its connected TV (CTV) business. The vendor works with more than 350 publishers via its proprietary identity management solution, Identity Hub, and has partnered with several data players including LiveRamp, Lotame and Semasio. “As media buyers seek to maximise the value and ROI of their media spend, audience addressability is a critical piece of the puzzle,” said PubMatic VP, addressability, Peter Barry. “Connect sets a new standard for efficiency and effectiveness in media targeting, giving advertisers access to specific audiences using the data currency they prefer, in one streamlined platform. There is a robust future for sell-side audience addressability, and this will give publishers and advertisers better control over revenue and performance.”