A 23-year veteran of nearly every aspect of Nielsen's business, Rao will take the global leader in audience measurement, data and analytics into the future

David Kenny to become Executive Chairman

Nielsen, the global leader in audience measurement, data and analytics, announced today that Karthik Rao has been named CEO, effective immediately.  David Kenny, who has served as CEO since 2018, will assume the role of Executive Chairman.  

"Nielsen has been my home for most of my career, and I could not be more excited for this new opportunity," said Rao.  "Providing our client partners, the ad industry, and content creators of all types, the most accurate information possible is our singular goal.  Nielsen invented measurement a century ago.  In that time, the way audiences consume content has fundamentally shifted many times over, and we are committed to continuing to partner with our customers to lead that change.  I am fortunate to work alongside the best in the business, around the world, as we address unprecedented times of transition in our business.  Together with our talented employees, I look forward to positioning Nielsen for the next century and beyond."

David Kenny said: "This is an exciting day for Nielsen and for me.  I have been fortunate to lead this company through some extraordinary times in the past five years, working alongside Karthik for much of it.  As I transition to my new role and my operating responsibilities come to an end, I hand over leadership to someone with extensive experience in knowing what Nielsen does best, backed by the skills and understanding to position the company for a vibrant future.  He has my complete support and I wish him, and everyone at Nielsen, nothing but tremendous success."

Nielsen is backed by Elliott Investment Management L.P. ("Elliott"), and Brookfield Business Partners L.P., together with institutional partners (collectively "Brookfield").    

Since early 2023, Rao has served as CEO of Nielsen's Audience Measurement business, responsible for driving and evolving Nielsen's audience measurement in the midst of unprecedented disruption and transition. His primary focus has been on enabling a currency across all media distribution and consumption models globally. 

Prior to being named CEO of the audience measurement business, Rao served as Nielsen's Chief Operating Officer. Before that he was the CEO of Nielsen Portfolio, leading the fully independent division comprising Nielsen Entertainment, Nielsen Gracenote, Nielsen Brandbank and the Nielsen Telecom businesses across all global markets.  

David Kerko, Head of Private Equity at Elliott, said: "We have spent the past five years engaged with Nielsen, and even more closely since the acquisition nearly a year ago. We have seen great progress already, and we want to thank David for all he has done to contribute to that success. Karthik is now the right leader for Nielsen, which is well positioned to evolve with and support the media ecosystem as it undergoes a period of dramatic change. Karthik's expansive industry experience, deep client relationships, and proven track record make him ideally suited to manage this evolution and make Nielsen's value stronger than ever."

Makes email personalization easy and efficient for marketing teams

Dynamic Content Authoring for Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) and Adobe Marketo Engage can now be performed in Stensul, the collaborative email and landing page creation platform.

"Personalization dramatically improves email performance. However, preparing all the different content pieces and underlying Dynamic Content code has meant doing difficult work that takes a lot of back-and-forth and is prone to error," said Noah Dinkin, Stensul's Founder & CEO. "Stensul applied our years of learnings around email creation and collaboration to Dynamic Content Authoring to make it faster, error-free, and a better experience for everyone involved. We've stripped away all of the complexity under the hood so Digital and Marketing teams can focus on creating higher-impact email programs with Dynamic Content. And they can go after their goals at a much faster pace."

To support the campaigns Marketing teams want to run, until now, authoring an email with Dynamic Content has involved multiple experts, working in the native email builders of the large ESPs/MAPs. The process is extremely cumbersome and fragile, consuming significant time from everyone involved.

"Stensul changes personalizing emails with Dynamic Content from a complex, time-consuming, and often frustrating process to amazingly simple and efficient," said Kyle Garrett, Weave's Senior Marketing Operations Manager. "Changing elements of an email - from the headline, image, body text, the CTA, and even links - is done quickly and easily without the need to make structural changes to the modules in the email's templates."

Before this Stensul innovation, those using Dynamic Content couldn't easily see how their emails would look for different audience segments outside of individual previews in or sent from SFMC or Marketo. The lack of visibility created additional work when changes were required.

Stensul's Dynamic Content Preview, part of the new capability, lets teams build emails and preview Dynamic Content without leaving the Stensul interface. This means teams can see what a whole email will look like, not just the non-dynamic pieces.

"Along with increasing the types of emails that marketers can create in Stensul, this new capability frees up huge amounts of time for the specialists so they can focus on leveraging the more sophisticated capabilities of their ESP or MAP," Dinkin said. "Marketing leaders are really excited about this because they want to bring more sophistication into their programs to drive increased performance, yet historically that required significant additional budget or headcount. With our overall Dynamic Content capabilities, they are now looking at a completely different equation."

Email marketing leader reveals Litmus Email Guardian and new integrated Litmus Personalize solutions to help marketers boost engagement, brand trust and revenue growth

Yesterday, from the stage at the 10th annual Litmus Live in Boston, Litmus introduced Litmus Email Guardian and integrated Litmus Personalize functionality and AI-powered content optimization solutions in its platform. These groundbreaking innovations empower users with unprecedented email testing and personalization solutions aimed at supercharging email engagement, fortifying brand trust, and bolstering revenue outcomes.

Tighter resources and heightened economic pressures have compelled marketers to increase the quantity of their email outreach while maintaining quality. Email volume has tripled over the past several years, compounding the time marketers must spend thoroughly testing emails to find and fix costly issues. While email is an important channel for creating positive brand experiences, consumer expectations remain high. A staggering 86% of customers say they would abandon a brand they love after just two poor experiences. Consequently, broken emails and ineffective personalization can lead to lost subscribers and, subsequently, missed revenue.

To stand out in the inbox, brands must personalize key moments across the customer journey and ensure emails result in the best customer experience with comprehensive and ongoing email testing. With Litmus Email Guardian and intuitive, powerful personalization solutions, users can deliver the right message at the right moment, enhancing every customer experience and avoiding broken emails.

"With increased pressure on marketing teams to deliver more high-quality email experiences with fewer resources, personalization and advanced testing have never been more important," said Erik Nierenberg, CEO of Litmus. "Litmus Email Guardian is the only solution that can give marketers peace of mind their emails are error-free at all times, and our intuitive, integrated personalization makes creating individualized experiences possible for all brands."

This release brings innovative new solutions that empower marketers to:

• Automatically and continuously scan emails across key webmail and desktop email clients to detect unforeseen changes — without any manual work. Users can also activate Email Guardian to watch over all automated sends and frequently used email templates since every email update creates significant risk to the subscriber experience.
• Get notified of changes to emails — and fix any issues — all within one seamless platform with proactive alerts when changes have occurred. It's easy and quick to resolve errors within the Litmus platform, retest emails, and watch for future changes.
• Boost email engagement and revenue with powerful personalization capabilities, such as countdown timers to showcase urgency for a sale or event, progress bars to promote brand loyalty, personalized images to create one-to-one customer experiences and real-time sentiment trackers.
• Gain easy access to AI-powered email copy optimization tools, like subject line suggestions and body content tone alternatives, within an intuitive visual email builder.

Sitecore®, a global leader in end-to-end digital experience management software, was positioned as a Leader in the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Personalization Magic Quadrant.

Gartner defines personalization engines as technology that enable marketing professionals to identify, set up, conduct, and measure the optimum experience for an individual based on knowledge about their intent and context. This evaluation researches which personalization engine technology enables companies to achieve measurable results – evaluating the vendor's ability to execute and completeness of vision.

Sitecore is excited by this acknowledgement as it believes this standing reflects its investment in capabilities that enable and create value around personalization as part of a company-wide growth strategy across marketing, service, and sales use cases.

"We are thrilled to see Gartner recognize Sitecore's dedication to providing our customers with a strong personalization and composable digital experience software," said Dave O'Flanagan, chief product officer at Sitecore. "Our customers have gained tremendous value from Sitecore offerings, and we're committed to continuously innovating and improving our offerings and services to help marketers and organizations develop a best-in-class, customer experience."

PFT to help extend access to IMAX Stream Smart^™ Image Optimization Technology across Europe, Asia, and Australia

Entertainment technology industry leader IMAX Corporation^® (NYSE: IMAX) and PFT, the creator of AI-powered technology solutions for the Media and Entertainment (M&E) industry, today announced plans to expand their strategic relationship beyond theatrical and into the streaming ecosystem.

Under the arrangement, IMAX will expand access to its Stream Smart^™ technology to PFT customers across Europe, Asia, and Australia. The expanded partnership will dramatically increase the global availability of Stream Smart^™, which helps streaming platforms deliver maximum picture quality while significantly reducing distribution and storage costs.

"We are thrilled to deepen our partnership with IMAX, an industry trailblazer with a remarkable legacy of revolutionizing the global entertainment industry," said Ramki Sankaranarayanan, Global CEO of PFT. "For over a decade, CLEAR^®, our flagship product, has spearheaded digital packaging and delivery services for prominent streaming platforms worldwide. CLEAR^® & Stream Smart will help optimize our customers' encoding pipeline, so they deliver better streaming quality while optimizing CDN & storage costs."

"Many of Hollywood's biggest streaming platforms use Stream Smart^™ to ensure quality and reduce costs, and we're excited to work with our partners at PFT to extend the reach of our technologies throughout key markets in Europe, Asia, and Australia," said Vikram Arumilli, General Manager of Streaming and Consumer Technology at IMAX. "Our suite of streaming technology products, including Stream Smart^™, provides a best-in-class service for direct-to-consumer broadcast and streaming companies, and PFT's' ability to leverage this for their customers is a win-win for both organizations."

PFT and its parent company, DNEG, are industry leaders providing a full suite of technology and creative solutions, including IMAX post-production and 3D mastering.

IMAX and DNEG joined forces in 2022 for post-production, which included Indian films like Jawan, Pathaan, and RRR. This extended partnership will build upon the established theatrical relationship between IMAX and DNEG to develop a comprehensive video optimization solution. Stream Smart^™ is an enterprise software product designed to deliver the best image quality and optimize delivery to unlock cost savings. This product was built from cutting-edge scientific advancements, state-of-the-art engineering, trusted studio relationships, and rooted in a real-world at-scale Emmy^®-winning collaboration with Disney Streaming Services and SSIMWAVE.

Stream Smart^™ will be the centerpiece of the IMAX showcase at IBC 2023. Sign up to meet with PFT and IMAX Streaming & Consumer Technology group at IBC:

Lucid Software, the leader in visual collaboration software, today announced it has achieved the "authorized" designation for the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP®), becoming the first visual collaboration platform available on the FedRAMP Marketplace. Lucid is now FedRAMP Authorized at the Moderate security impact level, through sponsorship by the United States Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), an agency of the Department of Justice.

With Lucid's authorized designation, the company launched Lucid GovSuite, an innovative solution which includes Lucidspark (a virtual whiteboard) and Lucidchart (an intelligent diagramming application). This comprehensive offering supports public sector teams from end to end as they ideate, plan and execute mission-critical projects, and introduces an additional layer of security and governance for highly regulated organizations.

"Achieving FedRAMP Authorization is a significant milestone for Lucid, which validates the security and reliability of our platform," said Dave Grow, CEO of Lucid Software. "We're excited to help facilitate digital transformation across the public sector and improve how government teams and contractors collaborate. By using Lucid, public sector teams can drive efficiency, maintain project timelines, and achieve stakeholder alignment with increased security to meet mission objectives in an engaging, intuitive and collaborative way."

Along with Lucid GovSuite, users can also utilize Lucidscale for Gov, a cloud visualization solution that helps organizations see and understand their cloud environments. Lucidscale for Gov is available separately on the AWS GovCloud instance.

The FedRAMP authorization process involves a rigorous evaluation of a cloud service provider's security controls, risk management processes, and compliance with federal requirements. This authorization certifies that Lucid has passed the levels of security and compliance review of FedRAMP Moderate to protect user data in the cloud, enabling government agencies and contractors to take advantage of Lucid GovSuite and Lucidscale for Gov.