IPG Mediabrands, Coles 360, dentsu, Lyft Media, MiQ, and Wallapop Leverage PubMatic Technology to Drive Onsite and Offsite Performance

PubMatic, an independent technology company delivering digital advertising’s supply chain of the future, today announced Convert, a unified self-service advertising platform for commerce media. Built on PubMatic's global cloud infrastructure, Convert is tailored for commerce media networks and their advertisers, enabling both onsite and offsite monetization, including sponsored listing ads and CTV. Convert helps commerce media networks leverage their valuable first-party data for audience extension at scale across the open internet.

Leading industry brands, retailers, and advertisers such as IPG Mediabrands, Coles 360, dentsu, Lyft Media, MiQ, and Wallapop have joined PubMatic as partners in the development and announcement of its commerce media platform.

The new offering is built for both traditional retailers as well as a wide variety of transaction-based businesses such as transportation or food delivery providers, travel companies, or any scaled Internet company that processes transactions.

According to GroupM, the global commerce media market is projected to surpass $140 billion by 2025. The emerging commerce media digital supply chain is rife with fragmentation, causing commerce media networks and their advertisers to rely on multiple technology layers that drive inefficiencies.

Convert empowers commerce media networks with a single, self-service platform that streamlines the complex and fragmented commerce media marketplace. It brings together essential monetization and optimization capabilities across sponsored listings, CTV, video, and display ad formats. An unbiased, privacy-centric full-stack solution, Convert ensures transparency in fee and pricing structures along with automation and scalability for commerce media networks and advertisers.

The new platform complements PubMatic’s existing commerce media capabilities offered via Connect, the omnichannel addressability solution launched in 2022 that enables data access and control on the sell-side, closer to the consumer. The number of commerce companies leveraging Connect for audience extension continues to increase as they seek new, high-margin revenue streams to supplement their traditional business lines. In Q2 2023, PubMatic saw a 50% increase in the number of commerce customers year-over-year.

“We are looking forward to working with PubMatic on solutions that align with our goal of unifying retail media,” said Glen Conybeare, Executive Lead, Retail Media, IPG Mediabrands. “There is a great opportunity for us to help our brands navigate this space and retail partners are a key part of our platform ecosystem, especially those that can work on a global scale.”

“The rise of retail media is well-documented and the potential for it to create impactful experiences for consumers and deliver business growth is immense,” said Paul Brooks, General Manager, Coles 360, part of Coles Group, one of Australia’s largest retailers. “We are seeing a lot of companies evolving their capability to move into the retail media sector, PubMatic is moving quickly and their product development and investments in retail and commerce media are testament to this fact.”

“dentsu is committed to driving innovation and integration for commerce media advertisers across the open internet,” said Bruce Williams, EVP, Head of Performance Marketing at dentsu Media US. “By partnering with PubMatic, dentsu can leverage valuable commerce and retail data to enable advanced targeting and reporting and drive performance across the entire media supply chain. With the help of PubMatic, we’re advancing our end-to-end outcome-centered approach for media activation and delivering more holistic strategies across brand and commerce media for our clients.”

“Lyft is committed to providing value for our customers and stakeholders,” said Kenan Saleh, GM, Head of Lyft Media. “This new solution from PubMatic gives us access to the programmatic expertise, scale, and reach to help us innovate and grow our relationships with advertisers and the revenue opportunities we create.”

“As commerce media becomes increasingly important to brands, access points are also becoming increasingly fragmented,” said Erin Madorsky, US Chief Strategy Officer, MiQ. “At MiQ, it is important for us to continue to pursue partnerships with technology leaders like PubMatic to help our customers connect with valued shoppers across retailers and drive successful business outcomes in the commerce media space.”

“Wallapop is a leading marketplace connecting consumers with new opportunities,” said Soma Lepcsenyi, Programmatic Manager at Wallapop, a marketplace for selling pre-owned products. “PubMatic’s expertise in programmatic media and their launch of Convert will support our business goals to create new relationships with consumers and brands, enhance the user experience, and help drive the value we can deliver for advertisers.”

“Commerce media will create another long-term growth driver for PubMatic’s business,” said Peter Barry, VP of Addressability and Commerce Media at PubMatic. “Data access, monetization, and control are critical for commerce media networks and their advertisers, and PubMatic has a strong history of leadership and innovation in these areas. By making substantial investments in developing customized technology with Convert, we are confident in our ability to continue to drive increased value for our customers.”

New global research from industry leaders shows commonalities and differences in programmatic ad creative in podcasts

Veritonic, the industry’s comprehensive audio analytics and research platform, partnered with Acast, the world’s largest independent podcast company, to bring new data to market around the commonalities - and divergence - of audio creative on podcast ads served programmatically. In addition to identifying these global overlaps and points of difference, the goal of the research was also to help media buyers identify strong tactics and best practices in programmatic podcast advertising across three key media markets: the US, Australia and New Zealand, and EMEA.

Together, the companies sourced and analyzed podcast ads transacted programmatically with Acast and spanning various industry verticals including: automotive, tourism, retail, healthcare, entertainment, and more. They then identified the common threads and differences in the creative executions by region by examining themes like ad length, number of voiceovers, gender of voiceover, use of sound effects, call to action placements, and more.

“As an industry there is still a lot of myth-busting to do around programmatic ad buying. At Acast, we firmly believe that programmatic advertising should not be a rigid experience for the media buyer, podcast host, and certainly not the listener,” said Elli Dimitroulakos, Global Head of Ad Innovation at Acast. “Podcast advertising is effective because it’s a seamless part of the listening experience and that shouldn’t change based on how a transaction occurs. Programmatic ads can – and should – have creative elements that enhance the listener experience and brand relationship.”

According to the research, across all markets the majority of ads were a minimum of 30 seconds in length. This was most predominant in the US and EMEA regions which resulted in 80% and 73% of the examined ads, respectively. The Australia and New Zealand market trailed slightly behind with 56% of programmatic ads running at least 30 seconds long. The remaining 44% in the market were 15 seconds in length.

All three markets also reflected similarities in the use of single voices for the voiceover content. The US led the way with 86% of programmatic ads in the study using a single voice for the voiceover. EMEA and Australia and New Zealand were most similar with 66% and 68% of programmatic ads using a single voice for the voiceover, respectively.

However, when it came to gender detection in voiceover content, dissimilarities across the markets presented themselves. In the US, half of ads analyzed featured a female voiceover, 47% of ads featured a male voiceover, and the remaining 3% featuring both male and female voiceovers. Looking at ads that ran in Australia and New Zealand, 53% of the creatives featured a female voice over, but just 27% a male voice, and 20% contained both a female and a male voiceover.

In near equal numbers, the three regions all used sound effects in slightly less than the majority of programmatic ads, indicating that this may be a newly emerging trend in the space. According to the study, sound effects including birds chirping, phones ringing, engines revving, and more were used in 40% of programmatic ads from the US, 38% from Australia and New Zealand, and 33% in EMEA.

“Hope is not a strategy; it’s no longer enough for a brand to create an audio asset and simply hope it’ll move the needle,” said Scott Simonelli, CEO of Veritonic. “Having confidence that your marketing efforts and investments will pay off is crucial, especially in today’s economy. With audio reaching more than 214M adults in the U.S. monthly and having a 36% higher impact on memory than video, marketers need to be leveraging creative testing solutions like the Veritonic platform to ensure they are putting their best audio creative forward, regardless of how the ad itself is purchased or served.”

To download the infographics with results from each region, please visit the following links:

• US
• AUS/NZ
• EMEA

Frigade, a product onboarding and adoption solution for React, announced today $3 million in seed funding. The round was led by Craft Ventures and La Famiglia, with participation from Y Combinator, Defy.vc, and Magic.fund, as well as individual investors such as Vercel founder Guillermo Rauch, Dropbox co-founder Arash Ferdowsi and Plaid CTO Jean-Denis Greze. This funding will enable Frigade to grow its library of onboarding experiences for developers and support additional web SDKs for B2B SaaS companies. Notable startup customers using Frigade include Encord, a machine learning platform, Replo, an ecommerce site builder, and SaaSGrid, a financial data and reporting platform for startups.

Frigade gives developers the power to easily create quality onboarding flows, activation checklists, and product tours without needing backend development support. The platform offers out-of-the-box user targeting and state management features to simplify development, all while following industry best practices. It also provides React components that can be fully customized to match any brand and app, empowering developers to create singular and seamless user experiences. Now businesses can focus on their core roadmap and let Frigade take care of the hardest parts of onboarding infrastructure.

Most existing digital adoption platforms are built for marketers and managers rather than developers, so they sit on top of products instead of feeling native. Since they're not defined in the codebase, these solutions often break without teams noticing, and there are limits to what can be built with them. Frigade translates the growth playbooks of leading software companies into ready-made React components, so any company can build and launch quality user onboarding in hours, rather than weeks and months.

"We see many product-led companies building sophisticated onboarding from scratch – reinventing the wheel – since existing no-code tools are too rigid," said Eric Brownrout, Frigade co-founder and CEO. With Frigade, we're giving developers a third option: build high-quality, flexible onboarding in code, faster."

Eric Brownrout and Christian Mathiesen, CTO, first met at LinkedIn in 2015. They saw the potential of internal developer platforms for onboarding and how companies like LinkedIn, Uber, Pinterest, Figma, and more have built them to accelerate growth. Now, the founding duo are creating the off-the-shelf equivalent that makes it easy for all software companies and builders to get the same platform capabilities.

Frigade's vision is to become the comprehensive customer journey management platform. This includes activating customers with personalized registration flows and getting-started guides, engaging customers with tailored announcements and upsells, and ultimately, retaining customers through regular feedback loops and communications.

"We believe core products should be owned by development and product teams. This produces the delightfully simple user experiences that we all love and expect," Ryan Hrabak, Investor at Craft Ventures. "Existing digital onboarding and adoption solutions are stubborn and inflexible, and are largely designed for marketers, which leads to disruptions at critical points in the user journey. Frigade's SDKs put the power of building in-app product onboarding workflows back into the hands of the developer, enabling them to configure and launch seamless guided experiences in far less time, with far fewer resources."

The partnership will enable Booking.com to automate the way it updates and manages information about accommodations with recognised third-party sustainability certifications on its platform

BeCause, a startup enterprise software company transforming how the hospitality, travel, and tourism industries manage their sustainability data, has announced a new partnership with global online travel platform Booking.com. Through a dedicated API, the partnership will make it possible for Booking.com to receive updated data in real time about accommodations that have earned an array of more than 40 recognized third-party sustainability certifications. This will enable the company to more efficiently present reliable, up-to-date information about those accommodations with a third-party certification, so travelers can make a more informed choice for their next trip.

The ability to transparently communicate credible sustainability information is increasingly crucial for companies like Booking.com, as a growing number of people continue to indicate that they prefer more sustainable travel choices. In fact, according to Booking.com's latest Sustainable Travel Report, 57% of global travelers say they would feel better about staying in a particular accommodation if they knew it had a sustainable certification, and 81% say sustainable travel is important to them.

A bespoke sustainability solution to meet global tourism and traveler needs

Based on its Sustainability Management Hub platform, BeCause developed an API solution specifically for Booking.com's needs. As one of the world's leading digital travel platforms, Booking.com sought an efficient, scalable way to receive data from accommodations certified according to the Global Sustainable Tourism Council (GSTC) recognized standards, among others. They also wanted that data to be automatically updated in their database, so Booking.com customers would always have access to up-to-date sustainability information about the available accommodation options.

BeCause's solution addresses both needs first by replacing manual update processes, which are time-consuming and occur only periodically, with automated sustainability data transfers. The BeCause solution also maps standards from 40+ certifications that align with GSTC criteria to the data provided by tens of thousands of individual properties worldwide, providing a more complete and accurate picture of the sustainability information for those accommodations available on Booking.com.

"Through our partnership with BeCause and the technical solutions they have created specifically for our platform, we've streamlined how we receive sustainability information from our accommodation partners that have invested in achieving a credible third-party certification, allowing us to focus our efforts internally on those areas where we can further innovate and have the most impact," says Thomas Loughlin, Sustainability Manager at Booking.com. "We get the accurate, trustworthy data that we need in real time, which we can then in turn automatically present to our customers, enabling them to make more informed decisions about how they choose to travel."

A partnership between leaders in the sustainability sphere

"Working with Booking.com, which beyond having an extensive global reach, has an equally considerable reputation for being a leader in sustainability issues and efforts, is a significant deal for our startup," says Frederik Rubens Steensgaard, CEO and Co-founder of BeCause. "It's an ideal fit in terms of vision, needs and capability, and we look forward to helping Booking.com expand its sustainability data management capabilities even further as our partnership continues."

BeCause helps organizations collect, coordinate, and communicate their sustainability data, reducing redundancies and creating efficiencies that translate to positive revenue and ecological impacts. BeCause's solution connects certification entities and travel providers and distributors, enabling over 17,000 hotels and online travel platforms to provide travelers with accurate and reliable sustainability data. These processes, traditionally handled via spreadsheets, emails and unconnected niche systems, are ripe for transformation, and the need to manage them efficiently to ensure compliance and competitive advantage is fueling the growth of BeCause.

Gate2Chain unveils a groundbreaking marketplace empowering creators

Gate2Chain, the leading enterprise-grade Web3 solution builder, proudly announces the official launch of Minta 1.0, a revolutionary marketplace and social network designed to empower creators and transform the way goods and services are monetized.

Minta enables creators to unlock new streams of revenue by tokenizing their products, granting them full control over distribution through direct sales, auctions, and royalties. The platform's vision is to become the go-to platform for creators, offering them the best tools to manage and monetize their offerings while ensuring fair trade practices.

"Our mission is to empower creators, allowing them to control the lifetime of their products and services while earning more from their passion," said Bart Olivares, CEO of Gate2Chain.

Operating under a distinct P2P business model, Minta's primary clients, known as "minters," consist of musicians, artists, clubs, designers, and top-quality suppliers, ensuring a diverse and captivating range of offerings. With a minimal fee of just 2% per sale, Minta provides creators with a cost-effective alternative to traditional marketplaces.

Christen Ager-Hanssen, CEO of nChain commented, "Together with Gate2Chain, our vision is clear - to enable the creator economy and revolutionize the way goods and services are monetized. With Minta, creators can tokenize their products on a Web3 platform, ushering in a new era of ownership and royalties."

Minters on Minta can define their own distribution rules, earn royalties on resales, participate in auditable auctions, and even contribute to charitable causes. The platform harnesses the powerful capabilities of the BSV blockchain to facilitate features like minting, product tracking, royalty management, and transparent auctions.

G2C's commitment to user convenience ensures that Minta offers a user-friendly experience, sparing users from the complexities typically associated with blockchain operations. All transactions on Minta are conducted in fiat currencies (USD, EUR, GBP), allowing seamless integration with traditional payment systems while adhering to regulatory compliance.

Close brings more than a decade of industry experience to OpenX to expand demand-side partnerships.

OpenX Technologies, Inc., one of the world's leading omnichannel supply-side platforms, today announced the appointment of Danner Close as Vice President, Strategic Relationships. In this new role, Close will be responsible for OpenX's DSP partner strategy. He will report to Geoff Wolinetz, SVP Publisher and Demand Platforms.

With Wolinetz's newly expanded role, Close will be tasked with developing and implementing strategies to grow OpenX's DSP partnerships, driving both value and revenue by integrating the company's best-in-class supply and data solutions with leading DSP partners, and working internally with product development and deployment to seamlessly introduce demand solutions.

"OpenX continues to be an innovative leader in the market's dynamic supply-side ecosystem, and one whose transparent, efficient, and sustainable products drive increasing value for our publishers, advertisers, and demand partners," said Close. "I'm thrilled to be focusing on driving strategic, long-term partnership opportunities with DSP partners to deliver increased value and efficiency through OpenX's data and identity assets, CTV product suite, and market-leading sustainability initiatives."

Close joins OpenX from Permutive, a first-party data platform for publishers, where he led demand partnerships strategy, implementing a novel model for leveraging and activating publisher first-party data assets across leading programmatic platforms. In his decade-plus of experience, Close has held strategy roles across LiveRamp, Oracle Advertising, and SpotX, focusing on programmatic partnerships across data and identity solutions.

"Danner's unique experience in market-facing roles at an SSP, multiple data technology companies, and in agency-facing roles, gives him a differentiated and well-balanced perspective on how OpenX can continue to grow DSP partnerships responsibly," said Wolinetz. "Given his experience, ardor, and diverse industry contacts, we anticipate Danner will make an immediate and meaningful impact on the business."

Evaluation Based on Completeness of Strategy and Performance

Contentstack, the leading provider of Composable Digital Experience Platform (DXP) solutions, today announced it has been positioned by Aragon Research, Inc. as a Leader in The Aragon Research Globe™ for Content Experience Platforms (CXP), 2023. The report examines 17 providers and analyzes their approach and effectiveness to provide dynamic, personalized, and intelligent buyer journeys.

This year includes Generative AI as a new key component of a CXP, citing Contentstack as a first-mover in integrating ChatGPT with Contentstack Digital Assistant.

"Experiences will become more two-way over the next three years in this fast-changing market," said Jim Lundy, Aragon Research Lead Analyst and author of the report. "Investments in AI, rich media, dynamic delivery, and personalization are key things to understand. With its series C funding round, focus on both product and growth, and Generative AI offering, Contentstack made a statement to the market."

Contentstack strengths including its content publishing neutrality, low-code approach, and more. Our product innovations include: 

• Contentstack Launch, offering the ability to create and launch a Contentstack-hosted site in just a few clicks.
    
• Contentstack Academy, training its growing customer base with on-demand courses and learning modules, ranging from Contentstack platform fundamentals to advanced development techniques. 

"Enterprises need a full set of continually-evolving tools in order to deliver what customers expect from them and stay ahead of the game," said Nishant Patel, co-founder and CTO of Contentstack. "Contentstack's robust product and our product map is full of advancements that will equip them to pursue innovation and excellence, and our support ecosystem ensures they are never alone in their journeys."