• 28% of leaders see executive escalations interrupt half of their weekly digital priorities.

• 47% see less than half their teams as digital experts, inhibiting their ability to prioritize issues.

• Findings show even an incremental improvement could lead up to five hundred thousand in monthly cost savings.

Quantum Metric, the customer-driven digital analytics platform, today released findings from its latest report, The Efficiency Index, shedding light on the challenges and opportunities surrounding digital efficiency and cost optimization. Based on survey responses from digital leaders across the globe, the latest report uncovers how distractions such as executive escalations, false positives and misalignment are costing companies and preventing them from meeting heightened efficiency demands.

Digital teams are under increasing pressure to streamline costs while driving growth. However, identifying the right areas to prioritize remains a challenge, as customer demands continue to evolve. Findings show that unnecessary executive escalations, such as forwarding website complaints from friends or relatives, interrupt half of digital priorities each week for 28% of leaders. The average digital team is spending at least a day a week on executive escalations, but only seeing 25% or less of those digital issues have an actual impact on their business. This amounts to the average digital team wasting two months each year just on escalations. Additionally, in the last six months, 32% of digital teams spend two weeks or more on false positives, and 44% spend the same amount of time manually reproducing issues.

Limited expertise across digital teams and the reliance on certain team members restricts their ability to effectively prioritize and respond quickly. In fact, the report finds 47% see less than half their members as digital experts. Added to this 62% say it takes at least a month or more for a new hire to have enough job expertise to efficiently troubleshoot digital issues on their own, costing already lean teams additional time.

By enhancing digital expertise and understanding the impact of experiences, digital teams can minimize costs and transition from reactive to proactive customer service. Findings show even incremental improvements can yield significant cost savings. A 25% improvement in mean time to resolution could save up to $100K per month, while a 50% improvement could save up to $500K per month.

"The need for efficiency isn't a new benchmark for digital teams, but its impact on customer retention and long-term business stability is more critical than ever," said Mario Ciabarra, CEO of Quantum Metric. "In today's market, digital organizations need to move fast to meet the changing expectations of customers and have an effective understanding of how to prioritize digital needs that have real value for the business and the customer. Success depends on arming every team member with the right digital expertise to understand and empathize with every customer experience, every time."

Other key findings include:

• Primary time wasters: Inefficient digital management not only impacts team costs but also hampers customer loyalty and retention. Identifying the root cause of an issue (30%) and determining priorities (30%) are the most significant time wasters for digital teams. Moreover, "help & support" (27%) and "account management" (20%) emerge as the primary problem areas in the digital experience, requiring considerable time and attention.
• The difference in team efficiency: When asked who is the most efficient and inefficient team, technology/IT and customer experience teams were the most common answers. The biggest difference between an efficient and inefficient team came down to their ability to understand how their work impacts business KPIs (36%) and their ability to prioritize projects based on business KPIs (32%).
• The power of generative AI: When it comes to improving training efficiency and honing digital expertise across teams, leaders believe AI will have a significant impact. In fact, 84% of leaders say new technologies and tech solutions, including generative AI and other guided analytics tools, are already changing the way leaders foster digital expertise.

Findings show consumers want control over brand interactions and will provide information to get app-enabled conveniences and personalized experiences that simplify their lives

Against a backdrop of economic uncertainty, inflation, rising customer acquisition costs and growing data regulations, Airship, the mobile app experience company, today at Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity announced a new global report, “The Mobile Consumer 2023.” The research helps brands better understand evolving consumer preferences, behaviors and expectations in order to accelerate value creation.

Based on a survey of more than 11,000 consumers across ten countries, global consumers are more willing to share all types of information with brands in exchange for personalized interactions and special incentives. Of the 15 different types of information Airship tracked year-over-year, email addresses are the most freely shared at 86% of respondents. This year, “interests relevant to a brand” (78%) displaced “name” as the second most shared information.

Rounding out the top five types of information consumers will share the most are “their communication preferences” and “what they’ve browsed on a brand’s app or website,” highlighting the importance of a customer-centric approach to brand interactions. In fact, the information seeing the biggest year-over-year gains in consumer willingness to share is “what they value socially (environmental, moral, political or religious).”

While email addresses are most commonly shared with brands, it’s worth noting that 79% of consumers ignore or delete marketing emails from brands they love at least half the time or more (up 1% year-over-year). Younger generations, led by Gen Z, are less likely than Gen X and boomers to pursue traditional methods of avoiding commercial email — by unsubscribing or deleting emails by scanning sender or subject lines. Instead, they are much more likely to say they don’t often check their email, use a secondary email account they rarely check and use both anonymous email addresses (e.g., via Sign In with Apple) or fake ones.

Globally, the top three types of personalization consumers find to be most useful are “recommendations and offers based on past behavior or purchases” (41%), “interests and preferences supplied to the brand” (40%), and “content and offers targeted to their current location” (34%). Interestingly, “predictive suggestions based on everything the brand knows about them” ranked lowest among all types of personalization for all countries other than Singapore. These findings indicate that consumers want experiences personalized to them, but basic information doesn’t go far enough and advanced methods walk a fine line between being helpful and creepy.

When asked about how often they like to receive specific types of app-based messaging from brands, more consumers indicated “immediately, and as often as it happens” as their preferred frequency for five of eight different types of messaging. For seven types of messages where there is year-over-year data, findings show a decline in respondents saying they “don’t want these types of messages” and an increase in those that want messages “only as they’re using the specific app.” While consumers may have varied preferences for the frequencies of app-based messaging, these findings illustrate why it’s important for brands to give customers control over the types of messages they receive, as well as where and how often they get them.

“Growing data privacy regulations and advancements from Apple and Android are speeding brands towards a customer-first future, where transparency and control make it easier than ever for customers to shut down brands that aren’t meeting their needs,” said Thomas Butta, Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer, Airship. “This is a seismic shift for many, compounded by both constantly upleveling customer experience expectations and the impending demise of third-party data. To gain the level of customer understanding necessary to succeed, brands must lean into mobile app experiences that offer always-on utility, convenience and individualized control — all of which reach much deeper into the hearts and minds of customers — allowing brands to respect, reward and serve customers better over time.”

Register to receive the full report, “The Mobile Consumer 2023,” with regional and generational insights across topics such as:

• Why consumers continue to turn to mobile apps and how they discover them
• How apps meld digital and physical experiences, and the top ways consumers use smartphones while shopping in-store
• What drives people to opt-in to mobile app push notifications
• Why people delete apps and how quickly do they decide to do so
• How consumers use apps to improve their overall health and well-being
• Adoption of new mobile experiences, such as Apple’s Focus and Live Activities

Methodology

The survey was completed in partnership with Sapio Research among more than 11,000 consumers, age 18 and older in the U.S., Canada, U.K., France, Germany, South Africa, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia and Brazil. Overall results are accurate to ±0.9% at a 95% confidence level.

Customer sentiments around AI, post-COVID-19 support, preferred feedback channels, and personalized experiences don’t live up to CX teams’ optimism

New data from SurveyMonkey, a global leader in online surveys and forms, reveals a drastic disconnect between consumers’ feelings and CX and digital marketing professionals’ perceptions about customer experiences. The analysis of 1,000 consumers and more than 600 CX and digital marketing industry professionals shows that they do not see eye to eye in four important areas: the value of AI, the level of post-COVID-19 support, consumers’ preferred feedback channels, and the amount of personalization they receive. The findings expose insights that can be used to transform how these professionals work and engage with consumers to provide a better experience and enable greater customer satisfaction.

Key differences include:

• CX and digital marketing pros are more optimistic about AI tools than consumers: 63% of CX and digital marketing professionals expect AI to positively impact the customer experience and 82% say it is a priority for their company. However, only 25% of consumers expect AI to positively impact their engagement experiences and 32% expect it to have a negative impact on their interactions.

• There is a significant disconnect about the ongoing impact of COVID on CX: 72% of CX and digital marketing professionals say the level of customer experience their company provides has improved following the pandemic, but only 27% of consumers agree.

• There is a noticeable difference between preferred customer feedback channels: CX and digital marketing professionals want more investment in customer feedback programs (52%) and product feedback programs (47%), and 49% cite the website as the preferred communication channel. However, 53% of consumers select the phone as their preferred means of providing feedback.

• CX teams are far more confident about the personalized experiences they deliver than consumers: 86% of CX and digital marketing professionals said their customers receive a personalized experience all or most of the time throughout the entire customer journey. But only 8% of consumers felt that they received a consistently personalized experience, and 10% expressed that they never received a personalized experience.

Despite CX teams expanding, 40% said customer experience is not a priority for leaders, who occasionally talk about CX but fail to act on it; and only 25% have a single CX leader who oversees and manages the entire customer journey.

The disconnect on these topics and others likely stems from a lack of information, with more than one out of three (35%) CX and digital marketing professionals saying they don’t have the customer data and insights they need, specifically in the consideration stage (57%), purchase stage (53%), and awareness stage (45%).

“Providing experiences that better align with consumer needs and expectations in 2023 and beyond starts with leveraging the right insights,” said Marci Kirkpatrick, Customer Experience Program Director at SurveyMonkey. “The experience gap we’re seeing stems from limited knowledge across the entire customer journey. This presents a significant opportunity for CX teams to further invest in initiatives that bring them closer to a deeper understanding of how customers perceive experiences throughout their entire journey with a brand or company and explore best practices to optimize those experiences.”

Cision, an end-to-end consumer and media intelligence and communications platform, announces the introduction of a new Code of Ethics and a comprehensive Risk Management Framework created specifically to guide the company's development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) driven capabilities. This industry-leading action reflects increasing concerns from clients, governments, the public and regulators about the potential dangers of AI.

"The transformative power of AI has already impacted many aspects of communications, enabling us to better understand our audiences, craft more effective messaging and automate time-consuming tasks," said Antony Cousins, Executive Director of AI Strategy at Cision. "However, we must acknowledge that along with these benefits come potential risks to accuracy, privacy, fairness, transparency and equality."

The recent breakthroughs in generative AI and the accelerated pace of development across the PR, communications and marketing disciplines has created the need for a principled approach to the application of AI to ensure any guidelines aren't quickly outdated. Cision's principles include commitments to:

• Rigorous testing, validation, and ongoing monitoring to minimize potential harm
• Privacy protection and security of client information
• Transparent documentation and explanation of AI objectives, potential risks and mitigations
• Commitment to maintaining human oversight while targeting and eliminating bias where possible

Cision has been at the forefront of AI development for years, leveraging advanced technologies to deliver actionable analysis and powerful insights to its clients, and is the first in the PR & communications sector to take a public stand on the responsible application of AI.  

"We understand that as the largest communications technology company in the world, we must ensure that our AI solutions not only serve the needs of all our clients, but also avoid any unfair discrimination, violation of personal privacy or amplification of misinformation. The implementation of a robust risk management framework will ensure that Cision's AI technologies adhere to ethical standards and best practices, fostering a more equitable and responsible AI ecosystem," said Cousins.    

Cision is also actively shaping the development of government guidelines ensuring representation for the communications industry in future AI regulations by actively engaging with the UK Government on its recently published whitepaper on AI regulation and the U.S. Government's request for contributions to their AI regulation plans. In addition, as a leader in industry associations like CIPR and AMEC, Cousins will be working to build broader industry commitment to responsible development guidelines.   

"If we do not proactively act responsibly, forthcoming regulation will be overly restrictive and limit our ability to maximize the positive impact AI can have for our customers. We want to collaborate with the whole industry to avoid this risk and ensure good outcomes for our clients and their stakeholders," said Cousins. Cision is inviting any relevant stakeholders to reach out directly if they want to collaborate on industry-wide commitments.

Cision has a robust pipeline of AI-driven capabilities leveraging the largest data set in the industry for training AI models, which it will continue to bring to market through its Brandwatch consumer intelligence solution, PR Newswire and CisionOne, the new revolutionary PR & communications platform, that debuts in July in the UK.

Brands will benefit from DV’s industry-leading viewability and fraud verification across Facebook Reels and Instagram Reels inventory

DoubleVerify , a leading software platform for digital media measurement, data and analytics, today announced an expansion of its quality solutions with Meta to enable media measurement and help maximize advertiser performance on Facebook and Instagram Reels. This release will leverage DV’s technology to help advertisers on Meta Reels ensure their video ads are viewable, by a human being and are safe from Fraud/Invalid Traffic (“IVT”).

“As a participant in Meta’s measurement partnership program, we are thrilled to announce that we can measure viewability and fraud on Reels, providing global brands with greater clarity and confidence in their investments on both Facebook and Instagram,” said Mark Zagorski, CEO, DoubleVerify. “The explosion in short-form, user-generated content is offering advertisers a high-engagement environment to connect with passionate online communities. We can now provide media authentication, and help maximize campaign impact and performance for our mutual advertisers.”

With DV’s quality verification technology, advertisers leveraging Reels ads will benefit from:

• Fraud Measurement: For advertising to perform, it must be seen by a real human being. DV identifies and helps to protect advertisers against fraud and IVT – from hijacked devices to bot manipulation.
• Viewability Authentication: DV provides comprehensive viewability measurement, offering clarity into whether an ad has the opportunity to be seen, shedding light on its impact.

Mutual clients will be able to access measurement data and insights through DV Pinnacle^Ⓡ, the company’s unified service and analytics reporting platform, to monitor and optimize the quality of their Reels ads campaigns. Reporting will cover Viewability and Fraud across Reels’ video ad format also known as “Post-loop ads”.

DV became a participant in Meta’s measurement partnership program in 2017 offering fraud and viewability measurement on Facebook and Instagram. In 2019, DV launched brand safety and suitability on Facebook’s in-stream video inventory, Instant Articles and Audience Network. In 2020, DV received the Media Rating Council (MRC) accreditation for third-party viewability measurement and reporting for display and video ads on Facebook and Instagram. In 2021, DV announced an expanded brand safety and suitability integration with Facebook, extending verification to In-Stream Reserve, while providing new tools to boost control and efficiency.

New Omdia research has for the first time benchmarked the leading cloud platforms in the games industry. Newly published on Omdia's Games Tech Intelligence Service, the Market Radar: Cloud Platforms for Games 2023 finds that the market for cloud and related services in the games industry will be worth over $12bn in 2023. The new report analyzes in detail the capabilities of the seven leading players in this rapidly growing market. Omdia has assessed each platform's capacity to address a range of key games industry use cases.

Game development workflows are moving more than ever to the cloud, with game server infrastructure also playing an increasingly critical role. Additionally, cloud platforms are emerging as key providers of a range of game development tools. Understanding the cloud vendors and their capabilities is therefore fundamental for developers, and also for tech vendors whose products have to compete, or integrate, or both, with cloud platforms.

This new Omdia analysis, the first of its kind to focus specifically on the games industry, finds that the leading cloud platforms for games are AWS and Microsoft Azure, thanks to their advanced capabilities across the areas analyzed. "AWS is the longtime market leader and distinguished by its excellent infrastructure, tools, and outstanding partner ecosystem," commented Liam Deane, Principal Analyst covering Games Tech at Omdia, "but Azure also stands out both for its similarly impressive global infrastructure and its exceptionally rich set of bespoke tools and solutions for game developers."

The research also underlines the increasingly competitive market for cloud services in the games vertical. Both Google and Tencent, for instance, leverage their deep expertise in games to provide an excellent range of solutions for game development and operations, and each of the remaining vendors also has distinct strengths able to appeal to particular segments of the market. "More than ever, buyers in the games industry must carefully consider all their options when it comes to selecting a cloud platform, while tech vendors need to be aware of how their products interact with the growing range of cloud platforms targeting the games industry," Deane noted.

Beamr Imaging Ltd, a leading provider of video optimization solutions, today announced the first beta version of its highly anticipated video optimization service. Beamr’s new file-to-file optimization service aims to bring cutting-edge technology.

As part of the beta launch, Beamr is offering a free trial for users to test the service. During this phase, users will have the opportunity to process video content for free until reaching savings of 100GB. This will enable them to experience the remarkable benefits of the Beamr optimization service first hand. To access the beta version, users can register for the cloud-based application programming interface (API) and find the accompanying documentation on the Beamr service. These APIs will make our service easy and safe to use and also enable our customers with automation at large scale.

Figure 1: The new beamr.com homepage

"The timing couldn't be better," said Beamr CEO, Sharon Carmel. "We are thrilled to introduce the first beta version of our upcoming service, just four months after Beamr's IPO on NASDAQ. Our accelerated progress has enabled us to bring forward our original Q3 2023 timeline, demonstrating our commitment to delivering a full-service launch in Q1 2024.”

The next step, in Q3 2023, will be enhancing our previously announced service with Nvidia’s NVENC Hardware accelerated video encoding integrated with Beamr our Content-Adaptive Bitrate (CABR) optimization capabilities. The integration with Nvidia is designed to significantly improve processing speed, reduction in costs and increased speed by up to 10 times.

One of the key advancements that sets Beamr's service apart from others is the integration of the Emmy award-winning CABR technology which guarantees video quality while reducing the video file size significantly (see savings column in the figure below).

Figure 2: Beamr service dashboard

Beamr's Chief Product Officer, Dani Megrelishvili, highlighted the significance of the beta phase and Beamr’ objectives, stating, "Our primary goal with the beta release is to introduce the service to a wide audience, gather valuable feedback on its usability and value proposition, and actively engage with our partners and users to ensure the service is fully operational and fine-tuned before its official launch."

Megrelishvili further emphasized the capabilities of the service, stating, "Today at the launch of our service, we are proud to support an essential use case. We provide video optimization, maintaining the current video standards of AVC to AVC (advanced video coding) and HEVC to HEVC (high efficiency video coding). In the near future we also plan to allow codec modernization, facilitating the transition from AVC to HEVC video. The new modernization approach is expected to allow us to double down on optimization and provide superior video encoding simultaneously. We believe this will serve as an accelerator towards adopting more advanced standards."

The global cloud video storage market is projected to grow to $13.5 billion in 2025, with anticipated average savings to be approximately 30%, or $4.05 billion. This results in each 1% of savings creating $40.5 million of value. For example, for a partner with 2 PetaBytes (2PB) of hot storage, an annual storage cost of $500,000 is expected, with savings of $150,000 a year and $50K in revenue for Beamr, which is based on our current plans to charge customers a third of the value created on average (for more information please see the Beamr company presentation bit.ly/46ute0y). The above projections are subject to a number of assumptions, including, but not limited to: (1) we may choose to change our plans to attract customers; (2) we have no data as to what our market penetration will be, which can be below 1% or a multiple percentage; (3) the potential revenue is calculated using standard pricing from Amazon Web Services, or AWS; (4) our SaaS operation is expected to be based on spreads in which we first pay AWS for computing platforms and then sell storage and bandwidth savings; and (5) our SaaS profit will be dependent on a number of factors, including, but not limited to, the overall service efficiency.

Box, Inc. , the leading Content Cloud, today announced that Serviceplan Group selected Box for secure collaboration, enterprise security and compliance. Operating in 16 locations across the globe, with over 5,000 employees, Serviceplan Group is Europe’s largest independent and partner-managed agency group. Through Box, Serviceplan Group enables collaboration with internal teams, international subsidiaries, external partners and clients to produce campaigns around advertising, brand awareness and communications.

“At Serviceplan Group, our mission is to create fascinating and engaging campaigns that allow our customers, from Heinz to BMW, to shine,” said Fabian Prueschenk, CFO and COO at Serviceplan Group. “Our worldwide teams of strategists, designers, creatives, CRM experts, PR consultants, data scientists, market researchers and more use Box to securely collaborate and deliver lasting, innovative results. We value how easy Box is to use, together with the strength of its enterprise security and compliance functionality, and we’re actively recommending it to our network of global clients.”

“Serviceplan Group is a leader in the agency space, widely recognized for award-winning and technologically relevant campaigns,” said Sébastien Marotte, President of EMEA at Box. “We’re thrilled that Box can play a central role in helping Serviceplan Group’s teams and partners connect and collaborate from anywhere. We look forward to our continued partnership as they expand their use of the Content Cloud.”

Serviceplan Group first became a Box customer in 2021. Since then, the company has expanded its use of Box to the full suite of Content Cloud products and capabilities included in the Enterprise Plus offering, enabling Serviceplan Group to:

• Collaborate by centralizing and organizing content to simplify workflows across internal and external teams;
• Meet compliance requirements for retention policies with Box Governance;
• Manage and classify sensitive data with Box Consulting to fulfill Trusted Information Security Assessment Exchange (TISAX) requirements;
• Integrate with multiple business critical applications, including Microsoft Teams and Adobe Acrobat.