Latest Investment by the Leader in Marketing Effectiveness Reinforces the Commitment to Provide Agencies, Brands and Publishers with a Distinctive Platform for Enhancing ROI

Claritas®, a data-driven marketing leader that leverages a proprietary identity graph to help marketers achieve superior ROI, today announced the acquisition of ArtsAI, an AI-powered solution leader that Inc. 5000 recently ranked as the fastest-growing private Ad Technology company for the second consecutive year. The acquisition, which will integrate ArtsAI’s patented, performance-enhancing technology into Claritas’ all-in-one marketing solution will accelerate client success by enhancing users’ ability to predictably drive highly personalized and profitable campaigns. Claritas and ArtsAI collectively serve over 1,300 clients, including brands like Progressive and T-Mobile, agencies like Horizon, MediaCom and Hearts & Science and publishers like iHeartMedia and SXM.

Claritas’ acquisition of ArtsAI is the fourth in a series the company has made during its mission-based, five-year transformation to become the top closed-loop service provider in the industry. Leveraging an industry-leading proprietary identity graph, Claritas addresses the massive multichannel marketing sector’s need for an independent, 3rd party suite of solutions that make it easy for agencies, publishers, and brands to identify ideal audiences, deliver effective multichannel engagements and optimize campaigns through a robust set of measurement solutions.

“We’ve spent the last five years transforming the Claritas business to expand and enhance our value proposition to better meet our customers’ evolving needs”, said Claritas CEO Mike Nazzaro. “We are hyper-focused on providing our clients with unparalleled ways to win, and the acquisition of ArtsAI helps achieve this objective. This acquisition will give us a significant advantage in the field of AI-based marketing measurement and optimization, and we fully expect it will help us continue and even increase the amazing growth we’ve experienced in the last five years.”

“Claritas’ acquisition of ArtsAI creates something very unique. The proprietary capabilities Claritas will now bring to the market provide the advantages of AI across the entire marketing lifecycle, from customer identification and message delivery to campaign measurement and ROI optimization.” Says Jim Brennan, Senior Partner at Boston Consulting Group. “The acquisition of ArtsAI will add new levels of intelligence that will deliver product advancements that do not exist today. It is another example of how Claritas continues to transform its business to meet the changing needs of marketers across all industries.”

“At Horizon Media, we are dedicated to delivering the best data-driven solutions for the brands we represent,” said Lauren Russo, EVP Managing Partner at Horizon Media. “Claritas’ acquisition of ArtsAI adds another layer of expertise & insights that we can leverage on behalf of our clients. Claritas is uniquely positioned through its identity graph to offer a single suite of solutions to help with industry-leading audience insights, campaign activation and attribution measurement.”

With the acquisition of ArtsAI, Claritas will be able to provide marketers with a one-stop marketing optimization solution that allows them to leverage artificial intelligence throughout the entire lifecycle of their multichannel marketing campaigns. For example, marketers can use the lightning-speed testing enabled by AI to measure how specific audiences respond to ads such as email, audio, CTV/OTT, or digital display in near real-time. They can then use that data to dynamically adjust audiences and messages to boost ROI.

“Combining the proprietary capabilities of Claritas and ArtsAI offers significant value for the marketplace,” says David Shiffman, EVP Research and Measurement at iHeart Media,” said David Shiffman, EVP Research and Measurement at iHeartMedia. “This acquisition showcases Claritas’ commitment to evolving audio measurement and helps ensure that publishers and marketers have access to strong, independent, third-party measurement of audio advertising.”

“We are big believers in an open ecosystem and transparent third-party measurement,” said Keri Degroote, SVP of Sales Research & Analytics at SXM Media. “So we’re thrilled to see two of our key collaborators in Claritas and ArtsAI join forces to create an even stronger, more seamless option that will deliver for both our business and our clients.” 

Claritas is owned by Carlyle Group, a global investment firm with deep industry expertise and $381 billion of assets under management as of March 31, 2023. Under the terms of the acquisition, management change/move details. The terms of the transaction are not being disclosed.

Writerly, a leader in AI-enabled software for marketing and e-commerce, proudly announces its groundbreaking partnership with Northwestern University's MBAi (Master of Business Administration, Artificial Intelligence) program. This strategic collaboration underscores Writerly's commitment to fostering forward-thinking innovation and developing future leaders in the generative AI space.

As part of this collaboration, capstone graduate students from Northwestern's joint program between McCormick School of Engineering and Kellogg School of Management will join members of Writerly's leadership for an intensive semester-long engagement. These students, selected from diverse backgrounds in science, engineering, and business, will gain exposure to real-world applications of AI technology, hands-on mentoring, and the opportunity to shape the future of a fast-growing startup pioneering generative AI's frontier.

The MBAi capstone students will benefit from direct access to Writerly's cutting-edge natural language AI platform as they tackle complex challenges at the intersection of business and technology. By actively collaborating with Writerly's experienced data scientists and engineers, students will acquire in-demand skills and have the chance to implement innovative AI solutions with measurable business impact.

"We are excited to embark on this journey with Northwestern's MBAi program," said Jon Ricketts, CEO of Writerly, the parent company of EKOM. "This partnership not only showcases our commitment to pushing the boundaries of AI, but also exemplifies our dedication to providing meaningful experiences that empower our organization as well as students who will be leading AI initiatives of their own in the future."

The selected capstone students will work closely with EKOM's team to research and model novel use cases for generative AI needs at the enterprise level. Writerly's technical expertise, combined with the students' unique perspectives, promises to catalyze innovation that creates unique value for everyone involved. The partnership resonates deeply with Writerly/EKOM's ethos of growth and substantiates its status as a formidable player in the AI landscape.

"The opportunity to work with startups like Writerly at the leading edge of generative AI is exactly the kind of experience we aspire to provide for our students," stated the Program Director of MBAi, Andy Fano.

Cybersecurity leader to expand on CIA relationship with continued Xacta professional services support

Telos Corporation (NASDAQ: TLS), a leading provider of cyber, cloud and enterprise security solutions for the world's most security-conscious organizations, today announced a $6.7 million, two-year contract extension with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

This contract builds on Telos' six-year relationship with the CIA and adds three option periods (27 months) to the existing contract. The CIA will continue using Xacta^® professional services to support their Commercial Cloud Enterprise (C2E) Assessment and Authorization (A&A) efforts. Xacta professional services include supporting the automation of all A&A initiatives within the C2E office, including body of evidence (BoE) generation, vulnerability assessments, business intelligence, and data driven-workflow.

"We are pleased to continue supporting the CIA in its endeavors to maintain the highest level of security and trust for the intelligence community cloud environments," said John B. Wood, CEO and chairman, Telos. "At Telos, we provide streamlined solutions that support organizations like the CIA in their efforts to automate workflows and aid operations."

With this contract extension, Telos' services are being leveraged to support and automate various aspects of the A&A process within C2E via intelligent workflow – a feature that delivers the workflow and structure needed to automate tasks requiring human intervention. The contract also includes integrations of existing cybersecurity toolkits and delivers continuous ad-hoc reporting and business intelligence support.

Xacta professional services will continue to support the intelligence community’s mission to expand cloud capabilities by aiding various aspects of the A&A process.

Rob Finora is a visionary leader with extensive experience in data, advertising and programmatic. Finora was most recently Chief Revenue Officer at data company ShareThis, where he worked for close to eight years pioneering the go-to-market strategy and execution of the commercial data licensing organization across programmatic and data-as-a-service. His expertise in identifying client needs specific to advertising and data-related use cases has established him as a thought leader and valued partner to his clients. Throughout Finora's career, he has successfully built and scaled commercially viable teams to bring complex, data-related solutions to market. Prior to ShareThis, Finora ran programmatic data strategy and the partner ecosystem at AOL Advertising (now part of Yahoo!), which leveraged an end-to-end technology-driven approach for using data to drive better programmatic advertising outcomes, measurement, insights and enrichment. Finora has held commercial roles at start-ups such as TACODA (acquired by AOL) and BuzzMetrics (acquired by Nielsen).

"The data-driven nature of marketing necessitates innovative solutions that allow businesses to understand, engage with, acquire, and retain their highest-value customers – which is becoming increasingly more challenging in a world of deprecated identity. Datonics is a future-proofed data company that pioneered the usage of data in the programmatic advertising industry. I am excited to join this company and this team and execute on the growth strategy they have set in motion," said Rob Finora.

"I have known Rob for many years and am excited about the opportunity to work together. Rob brings a distinguished background and high level of expertise and track record of execution and results to Datonics. His experience in the data and media industries is prized as we take the company beyond its programmatic roots and into new areas of growth as a partner to agencies and brands facing an identity-challenged world," said Michael Benedek, CEO, Datonics. "My entire team is excited to work alongside Rob and continue on our upward momentum."

Datonics has been actively building out its product suite to address the needs of agencies and brands facing an identity-challenged world. Datonics' Audience Insights, Enrichment and new, upcoming solutions enable brands to understand, engage with, acquire, and retain their customers in a world of deprecated identity.

Datonics data is built on 300+ million monthly users, aggregated from a network of online websites and best-in-class specialty data partners, including 1,300 segments of search, intent, life-stage, behavioral, B2B, demographic, point-of-interest and past purchase segments. Datonics also offers an unlimited number of custom segments that can be built from keywords or location visits.

The continuous shift of consumers’ preference towards user-generated content has led to an immediate need for an advanced program that gives brands the tools to turn their everyday customers into loyal brand ambassadors

EnTribe, the first-of-its-kind SaaS platform for community content development, today announced the addition of its new ambassador management program to streamline the process of building an online community of ambassadors and securing organic user-generated content (UGC) to increase overall brand awareness and engagement.

In its 2023 survey, EnTribe found consumer sentiment towards online content is continuing to move away from traditional social media influencers – with 90% of consumers claiming they are more likely to trust and purchase products/services from brands who share content from real customers in marketing initiatives. Knowing this shift away from influencers will only increase brands’ reliance on UGC, EnTribe developed a low-touch management ambassador program utilizing artificial intelligence to expand brands’ ability to gather authentic UGC.

While everyday creators are increasing how much content they contribute for brands to utilize, there is not enough organic UGC being created to meet the increasing demand for authentic content online. However, with EnTribe’s new ambassador program, brands will be able to uncover creators and compare their engagement, follower count, social post tracking, and potential reach, and turn them into official brand ambassadors that produce consistent UGC. From there, brands will be able to measure the impact of each ambassador’s content and reward them accordingly – creating a system that equips brands with an arsenal of authentic content, thus improving their overall online engagement.

“As UGC becomes more popular amongst brands, one of the most cumbersome issues we’ve seen arise is brands’ being unable to track and find which creators are producing the best content,” explains Adam Dornbusch, Founder and CEO of EnTribe. “With this advanced program, we’ve simplified the process of establishing and managing ambassadors so brands can uncover and communicate with those that are producing the most impactful content. We’ve created a solution for brands to build a community of loyal ambassadors that they can tap for content at any time, and easily manage, through automated processes, to ensure no content is ever lost and that the ambassadors they’ve established are continuously publishing content.”

"Since working with EnTribe, we've been able to increase our follower count by 50%, and engagement by 700%, because we have built great relationships with our community of creators," said CEO and founder of InkEdibles. “We’re excited to add EnTribe's new ambassador features to our marketing strategy to continue expanding our online presence and building trust with our customers. Having these types of advanced CRM capabilities will only keep us ahead of the curve when it comes to consumer preferences."

Epsilon’s PubLink is now available to publishers within LiveRamp’s Authenticated Traffic Solution

LiveRamp announced today a partnership with global advertising and marketing technology company Epsilon that enhances user privacy while enabling publishers to boost revenue, and brands to leverage addressable inventory.

LiveRamp’s Authenticated Traffic Solution (ATS) enables publishers to connect first-party user data with LiveRamp’s consistent identity framework, to allow advertising on authenticated inventory in a privacy-forward manner. ATS enables addressable inventory without third-party cookies or mobile identifiers, enabling marketing to real people across Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and other browsers on LiveRamp’s pseudonymous identifier, RampID.

PubLink is powered by Epsilon’s identity solution, CORE ID, and uses a publisher’s hashed authentication data to create a privacy-safe identifier that represents a site visitor and can be utilized downstream by advertisers for messaging specific consumers. Now, ATS publishers can enable PubLink within ATS and transact on Epsilon’s CORE ID interoperably with RampID to make their authenticated inventory available to additional advertisers and demand-side platforms. Brands using LiveRamp can continue activating on Epsilon Digital using RampID to access authenticated inventory programmatically.

Enabling PubLink within ATS lets publishers recognize more authenticated consumers without cookies, unlocking additional revenue-generating inventory and delivering a more personalized ad experience. Most uniquely, leveraging PubLink and RampID within ATS allows publishers to connect to advertiser demand from Epsilon Digital, which services both Epsilon’s global brand clients and those of its parent company, Publicis Groupe.

Additional benefits for publishers adopting both PubLink and ATS include:

• Easy, free implementation: The interoperability of PubLink and ATS ensures publishers that already have ATS enabled can implement PubLink without needing any additional configuration, resources, or fees.
• Preparation for the future: In anticipation of third-party cookies and other signals, publishers can plan and build their advertising strategies sustainably.
• Privacy compliance: Privacy-by-design is at the heart of both LiveRamp’s and Epsilon’s solutions, with attention to both local and regional privacy laws around the world.

Chad Peplinski, Chief Media Officer at Epsilon, said: “We believe in solutions that benefit everyone across the open web, with privacy being of utmost importance. Our collaboration propels the industry forward, and our work with LiveRamp will offer immediate benefits to publishers, advertisers, and site visitors alike. By prioritizing privacy at every step, our partnership allows publishers to access our industry-leading solutions and realize their monetization advantages without requiring any additional technological or financial investment, ensuring that user data is secure and protected.”

Travis Clinger, SVP, Activations and Addressability at LiveRamp, said: “Facing a complex macroeconomic climate and big-picture shifts like signal deprecation, publishers must be dynamic and prioritize sustainable, forward-looking strategies. Publishers can leverage authenticated identity to better monetize their inventory, and LiveRamp’s partnership with Epsilon connects their authenticated inventory with even more advertiser demand. I’m thrilled to continue our commitment to interoperability by now supporting Epsilon’s PubLink with ATS in addition to The Trade Desk’s UID 2.0 / EUID and Google Display & Video 360’s PAIR via an add-on module.”

Marketers can now measure omni-channel advertising performance more accurately and effectively by combining Comcast's aggregate viewership data and Dynata's real-time survey data

Dynata, the world's largest first-party data company for insights, activation and measurement, today announced a partnership to license and incorporate Comcast data into Dynata's advertising solutions product suite.

As a result, marketers for the first time can combine the accuracy and depth of Comcast's aggregate viewership data with Dynata's real-time survey data to assess the performance of their marketing efforts across broadcast, cable, streaming and addressable television. The joint solution provides a single-source, consented, panel-based TV measurement approach that improves marketers' decision-making around advertising performance, when comparing the relative strength of video assets' performance across all screens and devices. 

"We're very excited to support Dynata in their efforts to enable marketers to better measure the impact of their media investment and understand consumer perceptions, favorability and intent," said Larry Allen, VP & GM, Addressable Enablement, Comcast Advertising. "Our ecosystem is stronger when marketers and media owners have a clear understanding of how cross-media campaigns perform and how their brand messages impact consumers."

This partnership underscores both companies' desire to further improve and accelerate innovation in audience-based measurement across media channels, while empowering marketers to derive a much more confident picture of their cross-screen media investment.  

"Partnering with Comcast to enhance our advertising solutions product suite is a strategic investment in our commitment to deliver innovative products that help our customers make practical marketing decisions through the highest quality and scalable passive television viewership data sets," said Eric Sandberg, managing director of Dynata's global advertising solutions business. "This partnership reflects Dynata's commitment to delivering customer-centric solutions that enable more accurate insights, smarter strategies and more effective campaigns." 

Marketers and creative professionals build a narrative designed to be compelling, capture their audience's attention and leave a lasting impact. Dynata's increased coverage across Comcast's representative footprint enhances the stability and reliability of the inputs used to report efficacy quantified through changes in consumers' attitudes toward the advertiser. The broader reach also helps portray a comprehensive story around which channels are most appropriate and how to better personalize the messaging deployment for the highest engagement and long-term impact.

Merkle, a leading data-driven customer experience management company, today announced the launch of its new global accelerator for Salesforce Commerce Cloud, which enables brands to achieve a modern composable, API-first architecture faster. Developed to work with Contentful and Magnolia, the accelerator extends Salesforce Commerce Cloud and streamlines integration of one of the world's leading commerce platforms with other enterprise content management platforms.

With this new accelerator, Merkle continues to scale its global leadership in implementing eCommerce technology. By joining forces with Contentful and Magnolia, Merkle enables businesses to implement enterprise-ready headless content management capabilities with Salesforce Commerce Cloud. The new accelerator drives improved time to market, a future-ready technology architecture, and greater innovation in front-end consumer experience. It allows brands to manage front-end site experience and web content through the content management platform, in addition to user experience functionality.  This reduces the initial front-end development work for brands to implement a headless architecture.    

"Launching our global composable accelerator for Salesforce with Contentful and Magnolia is a significant milestone for Merkle," said Holden Bale, global head of Experience & Commerce at Merkle.  "We've done a great deal of work in the content and commerce space, especially around modern API-led eCommerce and experience architectures. But the challenge of technology modernization for many brands has been the complexity of implementation and the realization of true value for their business and consumers. Our new accelerator provides a comprehensive solution to reduce risk and cost centered around two of the best modular enterprise content management systems in the world. This accelerator reaffirms Merkle's commitment to delivering exceptional customer experiences and driving business growth."

The accelerator brings together Merkle's Salesforce Commerce Cloud expertise and modern content management platforms Contentful and Magnolia, and is supported by Merkle's global design system to expedite design and provide best-in-class brand experience components. This gives businesses the tools to create and deliver exceptional digital commerce experiences while reducing cost and time to implement composable architectures. Merkle's accelerator is also tailored to help brands deliver compelling, real-time commerce experiences on a global level.

"At Salesforce, we take great pride in powering flexible, digital commerce experiences for some of the world's most successful brands," said Michael Affronti, GM of Salesforce Commerce Cloud. "As headless architectures continue to evolve in service of exceptional customer experience, we're evolving with it, and we are thrilled to see Merkle's investment in this space too -- reducing complexity and accelerating time to value for brands."

"As an early pioneer of composability, we've seen the market moving steadily towards the understanding that an enterprise needs more than an off-the-shelf digital platform," said Tim Brown, CEO of Magnolia. "We're excited to support the new global commerce accelerator for Salesforce Commerce Cloud, helping our users get past trade-offs in functionality, flexibility, and cost to focus on fully integrated customer experiences and faster digital delivery." 

"Today, content is the customer experience, and composable content is what enables brands to elevate digital experiences and provide them at scale," said Steve Sloan, CEO, Contentful. "This partnership with Merkle is a reflection of our dedication to helping enterprises transition to modern, composable solutions to compete in this digital-first world and help brands go to market faster."