Former Meriplex Executive Joins the Leading Advertising Success Platform

Simpli.fi, the Advertising Success Platform that provides programmatic advertising and workflow solutions to agencies, brands, and media companies, announced today the appointment of Evan Kolter as Chief Financial Officer (CFO). Kolter is succeeding Andries Marx, who led Simpli.fi's finance and human resources teams through rapid growth over the last 10 years, and is leaving the company to pursue other opportunities. Marx will remain with the company through the end of the year for an orderly transition.

Simpli.fi Chief Executive Officer Frost Prioleau stated, "I would like to thank Andries for his outstanding contributions to Simpli.fi over the past 10 years. Andries has played an instrumental role in the growth of the company. Not only has he built strong financial and HR teams, he also helped form the positive culture at Simpli.fi that we still enjoy. We are thankful for all he has done, and we wish him the best in his future endeavors."

"At the same time, we are very excited for Evan Kolter to join the Simpli.fi team. Evan is an accomplished CFO with broad experience in driving value creation across multiple industries," said Prioleau. "Evan's team-based approach will be a great fit for Simpli.fi as we continue to expand our team, our customer base, and set of solutions."

Most recently, Kolter served as Chief Financial Officer for Meriplex where he had responsibility for finance, accounting, taxes, and compliance. With over 17 years of experience in finance, Kolter was responsible for providing the financial foundation that enabled the organization to reach its strategic objectives. Prior to Meriplex, Kolter led organizations as both a CFO and EVP of finance. His experience spans multiple industries, focusing on banking and technology-enabled service providers, including TD Bank and Cardtronics. Kolter has overseen successful implementations of change management and guided companies through M&A activities. Kolter Holds a bachelor's degree from the University of Tennessee in Accounting and Finance.

"I am excited to join a leading player in adtech and I look forward to helping Simpli.fi achieve its next chapter of growth and transformation," said Kolter. "I'm also very thankful to Andries as he has built an exceptional team of talented professionals that I look forward to partnering with as we plan for Simpli.fi's next chapter."

Medallia, Inc., the global leader in customer and employee experience, today announced the addition of Simonetta Turek as Chief Product Officer. Turek brings decades of leadership with a focus on innovation and customer experience globally. She will lead product management and design at Medallia as a member of the executive leadership team.

“By adding an experienced, talented leader like Simonetta as our new Chief Product Officer we add a proven innovator to an already accomplished product team. Her passion for customer success, AI, machine learning, and driving results at scale will be invaluable as we accelerate and expand what we bring to our customers,” said Joe Tyrrell, CEO at Medallia. “With our existing world-class customer and employee experience solutions at Medallia, this exciting addition to our leadership team gives us a phenomenal opportunity to create even more competitive advantages for our clients.”

Turek is a proven executive product leader with an impressive background in delivering innovative solutions to the market at global technology companies like Genesys, Nokia, and AWS. Most recently she was GM of the Customer Experience Products division at Twilio.

“I am excited to step into the chief product officer role at Medallia and help to continue to deliver high value product development for our clients,” said Turek. “The customer and employee experience landscape is prime for innovation. Medallia’s deep domain expertise, proprietary data, and powerful artificial intelligence give us an incredible opportunity to accelerate that and help the largest companies in the world deliver more personalized experiences to their customers and employees.”

Medallia Experience Cloud, the leading enterprise experience platform used by the largest and most admired brands in the world, captures signals across in-person, digital, and contact center interactions along with social media, transactional, and operational data, and democratizes insights across the enterprise in real time. By enabling everyone from the front line to senior leadership to make the right decisions and take immediate action, organizations are delivering more personalized experiences at scale using Medallia’s AI.

Traackr's 2024 Influencer Marketing Impact Report highlights the potential for influencer marketing to make or break a brand

Traackr, the leading performance-driven influencer marketing platform, today released its annual Influencer Marketing Impact Report, which surveyed 1,000 U.S. consumers to reveal the impact of influencers, social content and platforms on engagement and purchase behavior. The research found that while influencers still motivate their followers and drive sales for brands, consumers are becoming more selective about where and with whom they spend their money.

More than half (61%) of respondents are at least somewhat likely to purchase a product from a brand if an influencer they know and trust posts about it. However, as influencer marketing has become more ubiquitous, the competition to break through the noise and win the loyalty of consumers is hotter than ever. Traackr's Influencer Marketing Impact 2024 report reveals new insights into the most popular channels for social commerce and the biggest considerations consumers make when purchasing from a brand.

Consumers weigh brand and influencer values before opening their wallets

Consumers are more discerning about which influencers they follow and ultimately trust, making authentic influencer partnerships all the more important and valuable. Earning that trust is contingent upon both the influencer's and the brand's values.

The survey found that 60% of consumers at least somewhat agree that they will not buy a product from a brand if it says or does something that conflicts with their values, and 63% at least somewhat agree that they would stop following an influencer if they say or do something that conflicts with their values. Female-identifying consumers were 13% more likely to have this sentiment about influencers than their male-identifying counterparts.

"In just the past year, we've seen stock prices tank and market share lost for high-profile companies when influencer collaborations don't land with fans," said Pierre-Loïc Assayag, CEO and co-founder, Traackr. "When the risks are this high, marketers must do their homework to thoughtfully select influencers who align with their values and set up the partnership to accurately and authentically represent their brand mission."

YouTube ranks most popular for product research, but Meta dominates social commerce

Respondents ranked YouTube as their most used social platform when viewing influencer content or doing product research, followed by TikTok, Instagram and Facebook. However, when asked where they are most likely to purchase products on social, respondents ranked Facebook as the most used platform, followed by Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and Pinterest. When comparing Gen Z and Millennials, Gen Z was more likely to rank TikTok, Instagram and YouTube ahead of Facebook.

"These differences highlight the need for marketers to tailor their influencer marketing strategies to exactly who they are targeting and what they hope to achieve with their campaigns," said Assayag. "Awareness campaigns may perform better on YouTube, where Meta-owned properties might drive more conversions, depending on the target audience. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to winning influencer marketing, and the brands that continuously experiment, analyze and iterate will have a competitive advantage in the market."

"The consumer behavior evolves heavily on Pandora's social media channels," said Kristi Bajrami, global influencer strategy and creator lead of Pandora. "We see that most of our community on TikTok and Instagram are interested in snackable content formats; either focusing on storytelling, product or engaging angles. We offer our consumers a variety of different content formats they love, like trends, viral products, styling and how-tos, which gives us the opportunity to share quick content and engaging messages that resonate with our audience. As a result, tailoring our content to this preference has led to higher unique reach, high engagement rates and an interactive exchange."

Brand partnerships remain a vital component of creator revenue streams

Influencers are on the fringe of a creative industry that's involved in tenuous labor rights debates, still figuring out how to earn a fair wage creating content – especially those with small or mid-sized followings. Some industry insiders have suggested paywalled content or branching off to develop their own product lines as ways to add revenue streams. However, this survey shows that this might be fairly challenging for influencers. Only 41% of consumers at least somewhat agree that they would pay for a favorite or trusted influencer's exclusive content, while 56% are at least somewhat likely to purchase a product from an influencer-owned brand they follow.

"Creators are looking for better financial security and stability and will start focusing on brand partners that can help them get there," said Christen Nino De Guzman, founder of Clara for Creators. "Brands that want successful influencer programs should not only invest in long-term creator relationships, but they should start also dreaming up new ways to work with creators beyond a single paid post."

Brands can look to distinguish themselves by focusing on long-term partnerships over ad hoc posts and out-of-the-box collaborations that go beyond traditional sponsored content and allow influencers to do what they do best – create entertaining, informative and resonant content.

Tofu, a generative AI platform for creating hyper-personalized, omnichannel marketing campaigns at scale, today announced it has raised $5M in venture funding. Index Ventures led the round with participation from SignalFire, Stage 2 Capital and Liquid 2 Ventures.

In today’s fiercely competitive B2B marketing landscape, revenue teams have struggled to find effective ways to reach their target customers. As the Tofu team spoke to over 100 enterprise CMOs, they found the biggest bottleneck to be lack of resources for creating personalized content, especially in this economic environment where teams are leaner than ever and are forced to do more with less.

Tofu solves this problem by allowing marketing teams to easily mass generate on-brand and personalized content for any channel. Tofu starts by creating a proprietary Playbook, or AI knowledge graph, for each customer. Tofu ingests the customer’s website and marketing/sales collateral to ensure that all generated content seamlessly aligns with their brand, messaging, and positioning. Tofu then leverages the Playbook and uses generative AI to create unlimited variations of personalized content in minutes such as emails, landing pages, blog posts, whitepapers, case studies, and an array of other content formats.

It’s a clear answer to the top needs of CMOs today - in the Boston Consulting Group’s recent survey of over 200 CMOs, 89% of organizations are already using or testing generative AI, with personalization (67% of respondents) and content creation (49%) being the top use cases of focus, which are the primary use cases the Tofu platform solves for today.

Today, Tofu is in beta with a handful of enterprise customers. Customers have seen significant ROI from hyper-personalization, where Tofu creates, manages, and analyzes thousands of personalized pieces of content tailored to individual accounts. They’ve further been able to optimize team resources and scale content efforts through repurposing existing content - taking an anchor piece of content and automatically generating derivative assets. For example, Tofu can take content from a case study and create a blog post, email and social media campaign to go with it.

On average, customers are seeing an impressive 230% increase in email open rates, a 300% increase in time spent on page, and a 200% boost in opportunity generation when comparing Tofu-generated content to other personalized campaign tools.

Tofu was founded by a team of B2B Marketing and AI Experts. Elaine Zelby spent 8 years building and leading marketing teams at Slack, Consensys and Capriza. Eunjoon (EJ) Cho and Honglei Liu collectively spent decades as Product and Engineering leaders at companies like Google, Facebook, Affirm, and Twitter.

“Our goal is to have customers focus on their core-messaging and strategy while Tofu puts the creation and execution of campaigns on autopilot. Tofu will bring the technological leap in AI directly into enterprise workflows and super power the next generation of GTM teams,” said CEO EJ Cho.

“AI is a huge unlock for marketers. Reaching an audience with the right message at the right time is a Holy Grail for businesses, and Tofu is making that a reality. Tofu enables marketing teams to run more effective personalized campaigns at scale by bringing AI into the team's workflows. We’ve been excited about EJ, Elaine and Honglei for a long time, and are thrilled to join them on the journey from Day 1. This fits our broader thesis in Applied AI to back great teams in software categories that are being reshaped by this new technological shift. ” - Mark Goldberg, Partner @ Index Ventures

Built to enhance the user experience and promote review generation, the new CRM integrations empower users to connect Synup to every facet of their business. With the new integrations, users can engage with their customers through their CRM - all on one platform.

Synup, a leading provider of local and social media marketing solutions, today launched new integrations for its survey feature. Built to enhance the user experience and promote review generation, the new CRM integrations empower users to connect Synup to every facet of their business. With the new integrations, users can engage with their customers through their CRM - all on one platform.

About the new integration, CTO Vinod Sankar said: "Reputation management is why brands and agencies alike choose Synup. We wanted to give our users an easy way to request reviews as soon as they add a new customer to their CRM. Now, they can - and it's all automated, too."

As a veteran in the space, Synup embraces all aspects of online listing & review management. Most marketing teams underutilize their CRMs and miss out on key touchpoints with customers. With new, smart integrations, users can now connect their invoicing, point of sales systems, and more to Synup to engage with them through survey and review requests. The integration covers CRMs like ZohoCRM, HubSpot, and more.

Review acquisition is essential for maintaining a strong online presence. With the newly added integrations, users can automate review requests. Managing existing customers and building strong customer relationships is facilitated by these small interactions. The automation empowers users to boost their online reputations without adding extra steps to their workflows.

"CRMs are powerful tools. We're not trying to reinvent the wheel, here. We want to connect our clients to the tools they're already using - so they don't have to bounce around between platforms while doing a simple task," said Ashwin Ramesh, Synup's CEO.

As part of the continued surveys rollout, Synup will continue to add CRMs to its list of integrations. Synup users can start using the feature immediately.

With its new integrations, Synup empowers its customers to reimagine the way they manage their local online presence. From review acquisition to listings management, Synup proves to be a true all-in-one local and digital marketing platform for SMBs and agencies alike.

Sinch, a leader in powering meaningful conversations between businesses and their customers through its Customer Communications Cloud, today announced its partnership with Webex by Cisco, a leading provider of collaboration technologies powering hybrid work, to deliver Sinch Calling with Webex. This new product delivers an integrated calling and collaboration experience with advanced messaging and meeting functionalities, all unified within the Webex platform.

"Building on our mutual vision to delight the small to medium business customer, Webex is partnering with Sinch to deliver Sinch Calling with Webex," said Tony Lopresti, senior director product management for Webex. "With fully integrated Webex technology, Sinch users will experience a modern, all-in-one collaboration tool that delivers simple, flexible communications, making their businesses more productive and more secure, with any device from anywhere."

Sinch Calling with Webex offers businesses a unified communication solution, combining Sinch's voice capabilities with Webex's advanced messaging and meeting functionalities.  This allows businesses to have consistent feature functionality across voice, messaging, and meetings — without needing multiple service providers. Moreover, the service is designed for optimal performance, ensuring high-definition voice and video quality, thereby enhancing customer engagement and collaboration.

"Unified communication is essential in today's business landscape, and we're committed to offering robust solutions," says Anders Lenman, vice president of enterprise products at Sinch. "Our collaboration with Webex is an important step that will provide businesses with a comprehensive, high-quality platform for all their communication needs. This integration not only enables companies to streamline their operations but also fosters value, trust, and loyalty with their customer base."

Global enterprises have long relied on Sinch for its exceptional voice and messaging services. Sinch Calling with Webex is best suited for companies needing a platform to deliver a high-quality, unified communications experience. Businesses using disparate apps for voice, messaging, and meetings often face challenges in maintaining consistent quality and feature sets. Sinch Calling with Webex eliminates these issues by providing a seamless, end-to-end communication solution within a single platform.

Integration helps automotive dealers simplify and automate the creation and submission
of vehicle ad feeds

 Ansira Partners, Inc. ("Ansira"), an independent global marketing services and solutions company with proprietary channel, website, and advertising technology, today announced its new integration with Google Merchant Center to help automotive dealers simplify and automate the creation and submission of vehicle ad feeds.

"Ansira is constantly looking for ways we can help our automotive clients reach and engage consumers through intuitive marketing tools," said Ansira Vice President of Products Angie Cordova. "Our new integration with Google Merchant Center helps dealerships run more efficiently by streamlining the vehicle ad process, all while effectively reaching potential in-market buyers."

Ansira deploys a custom-built technology solution to create vehicle ad feeds by crawling dealership websites and relevant automated data collection efforts. Through this solution, Ansira can update vehicle feeds every 24 hours to ensure dealerships are showcasing their most up-to-date inventory to potential customers. Ansira will then host the primary feed, which can be used in Merchant Center.

This new integration alleviates the need for dealerships to manually upload vehicle feeds daily. Preformatted vehicle inventory also helps dealerships easily power their Google Performance Max campaigns.

Dealerships can sign up here for Ansira's Google vehicle ad feed solution. Dealers can also learn more about Google's vehicle ads partnership program here.  

Ansira is backed by Advent International, one of the largest and most experienced global private equity investors, with deep expertise in the business and financial services sector.

Enterprise-grade platform designed to accelerate speed, agility, flexibility in modern web experiences

Today at Compose 2023, Netlify, known for, creating Jamstack and reimagining modern web development, announced the Netlify Composable Web Platform, an industry-first platform for enterprises to build and implement modern, composable web architecture.

In today's economic environment, every business is laser focused on efficiency, agility, and resilience. Many enterprises are realizing legacy, monolithic web architectures aren't able to meet growing business and customer demands. To gain competitive advantage and drive revenue, enterprises are turning to composable architecture to modernize their web presence.

Netlify's Composable Web Platform offers enterprises a simplified, risk-free path towards composable web architecture and a foundation to accelerate speed-to-innovation for architects, developers, and marketers. With the new holistic platform, enterprises can personalize customer experiences and deploy fast, scalable and secure websites, e-commerce stores and web applications on-demand and with zero configuration.

"The Composable Web Platform is a meaningful milestone in Netlify's mission of championing the modern, open, composable web," said Matt Biilmann, co-founder and CEO of Netlify. "We pioneered the Jamstack movement to empower web development teams, and now aim to similarly empower enterprises by equipping them with the tools they need to modernize their web architecture. This platform offers a pathway to composable that doesn't require replatforming, but enables an incremental approach to meet businesses where they are and help them get to where they want to be."

The Composable Web Platform unifies content, data sources, code and infrastructure, and empowers developers to select best-of-breed components that easily integrate into a single workflow. With Netlify's world-class developer experience and these new capabilities, developers can reduce complexity and boost productivity by minimizing time spent on labor-intensive operations.

The new platform is the industry's only one-stop-shop for enterprise composable web development, bringing together content orchestration, frontend development and visual editing capabilities. The platform introduces unparalleled levels of security, reliability and stability, while eliminating the complexity of yet more integrations across a web stack. It offers a single user interface for customers to access Netlify's three key pillars, including:

• Netlify Core provides teams with the platform and workflow to immediately focus on building websites and apps without consuming time and resources on labor-intensive operations. Core primitive advancements added to Netlify Core ensure that updating or rebuilding assets only happens where required, and make sure that customer applications are consistent, up to date, and performant when needed most.
• Netlify Connect brings all content sources and CMS applications together in a single location, giving web teams the power to orchestrate and manage how and where content is served to all frontend digital experiences. A new private SDK allows any company to create a connection between their purchased or custom content source and Netlify Connect, delivering on the product's promise to allow companies to connect everything.
• Netlify Create integrates seamlessly with your chosen content systems, frameworks, and architectures, providing an intuitive visual editing experience.

"As we navigate the complexities and rapid pace of change in the digital world, the path forward becomes increasingly clear: the future is composable. This future, which is swiftly becoming our present, sees the limitations of monolithic architectures giving way to the boundless potential of modular, flexible systems.

Slalom's partnership with Netlify stands out as a strategic move toward a more agile, efficient, and scalable digital future. For our clients, the Netlify Composable Web Platform is not merely a tool; it's a solution that addresses the real-world challenges they face to innovate and meet customer demand. The platform allows their organizations to augment their existing systems with advanced, high-performing, composable components without the need for a total system overhaul. Together with Netlify, Slalom is committed to ensuring our clients can deliver faster, more reliable digital experiences for their customers."

–Bermon Painter, Digital Transformation & Innovation Leader at Slalom Consulting