Cloudflare R2 is now a native integration and cost efficient partner for Databricks’ Delta Sharing, the first open data sharing standard

Cloudflare, the security, performance, and reliability company helping to build a better Internet, today announced a partnership with Databricks, the data and AI company, to enable organizations to safely, simply, and affordably share and collaborate on live data. With Cloudflare and Databricks, joint customers can eliminate the complexity and dynamic costs that stand in the way of the full potential of multi-cloud analytics and AI initiatives.

"Without an open standard for secure data exchange across organizations, companies find it highly time-consuming to collaborate, requiring export, replication and maintenance of data across many software platforms,” said Matei Zaharia, Co-Founder and CTO at Databricks. “Delta Sharing provides the first open protocol for sharing data across diverse computing platforms, clouds and regions. Today’s announcement shows just how much demand there is for this in the industry, with Cloudflare joining the ecosystem. We are excited about how this will push open interchange forward and help all of our customers collaborate more easily.”

Databricks is driven by the mission to help data teams solve the world’s toughest problems, and enabling organizations to safely share and collaborate on data is critical to achieving that mission. However many organizations still struggle to share data across clouds, customers, teams, and with partners — they often use restrictive platforms and face maintenance burdens, exorbitant egress costs, and a lack of security. This becomes especially costly for organizations seeking to leverage AI, who are constantly moving massive training data sets across different clouds in search of GPUs, racking up massive egress fees in the process. Databricks’ Delta Sharing, the industry’s first open protocol for secure data sharing, makes it simple to share data across teams, and with other organizations, regardless of which computing platforms they use.

Databricks will now support Delta Sharing from Cloudflare R2, Cloudflare’s zero egress, distributed object storage offering. This seamless integration enables data teams to share live data sets in R2 easily and efficiently, eliminating the need for complex data transfers or duplications of data sets, and with zero egress fees. This will enable joint customers to ensure they’re sharing the most up to date data sets with their partners, suppliers, and lines of businesses, without compromising security and privacy, and without unpredictable, surprise egress fees.

“We are in the midst of an AI revolution rooted in data,” said Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO, Cloudflare. “R2 provides an amazing value proposition for companies that suffer from vendor lock-in, and instead ensures developers retain the power to choose where to move and use their data. The combination of Cloudflare's massive global network and zero egress storage, along with Databricks' powerful sharing and processing capabilities, will give our joint customers the fastest, most secure, and most affordable data sharing capabilities across the globe.”

IBM AI Draw Analysis creates a new statistic for tennis, offering deeper insight into a player's potential path to the final

 IBM and The All England Lawn Tennis Club today announced new features for the Wimbledon digital fan experience that will launch at this year's Championships.

• A new Artificial Intelligence (AI) feature, leveraging generative AI technology from IBM watsonx, will produce tennis commentary for all video highlights packages during Wimbledon
• In a first for tennis, the IBM AI Draw Analysis feature will also provide a new statistic to define how favourable the path to the final might be for each player in the singles draw

The new features expand on the suite of digital tools for fans on the Wimbledon App and wimbledon.com. They are the latest examples of how IBM and Wimbledon are using technology to help fans engage with The Championships on a deeper level.

IBM AI Commentary
The new AI Commentary feature will provide fans watching match highlights videos with audio commentary of key moments, along with captions, which they can toggle on or off. The tool has been designed to give fans a more insightful experience when catching up on key moments from matches with highlights videos on the Wimbledon App and wimbledon.com. Its introduction this year is a step towards making commentary available in an exciting way for matches outside of Wimbledon's Show Courts, which already have live human commentary.

To develop the new feature, experts from IBM iX, the experience design partner within IBM Consulting, worked with The All England Club to leverage foundation models from watsonx, IBM's enterprise AI and data platform, to train the AI in the unique language of tennis. Generative AI built on these foundation models was applied to produce narration with varied sentence structure and vocabulary to make the clips informative and engaging.

IBM AI Draw Analysis
Another new feature IBM will introduce this year is the IBM AI Draw Analysis – the first statistic of its kind in tennis - which uses AI to define how favourable the path to the final might be for each player in the singles draw. A player's draw favourability will be indicated with a rating along a scale, based on factors including the player's match-ups against potential future opponents and how the player's position in the draw compares to competitors. This new insight will help tennis fans to uncover anomalies and potential surprises in the singles draw, which would not be apparent by looking only at the players' ranking, inspiring more debate and engagement in the fan community.

Usama Al-Qassab, Marketing & Commercial Director, The All England Club, said: "We are constantly innovating with our partners at IBM to provide Wimbledon fans, wherever they are in the world, with an insightful and engaging digital experience of The Championships. This year, we're introducing new features for our digital platforms that use the latest AI technology from IBM to help fans gain even more insight into the singles draw and access commentary on a wider variety of matches through our match highlights videos."

Jonathan Adashek, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Communications for IBM, said: "IBM is bringing new layers of insight and engagement to the 2023 Championships through the use of innovative new tools, powered by foundation models and generative AI from watsonx. We've seen first-hand how these technologies have the power to help major sporting events like Wimbledon to grow their audiences through outstanding digital experiences. The AI and data platform that IBM is using to create unique fan experiences for Wimbledon is the same technology that we're using to drive business transformation with clients across all sectors and industries."

The new features being introduced this year will add to the suite of AI-powered digital tools for fans available on the Wimbledon App and wimbledon.com. They include the IBM Power Index Leaderboard, IBM Match Insights and Personalised Highlights Reels and Recommendations. Using over 100,000 data points from every shot played across the tournament, analysed by IBM's Watson AI technology on IBM Cloud, these digital features are designed to make it easier for fans to understand which players to follow, how they compare to their opponents and who's likely to win. Fans are kept updated and engaged throughout the tournament with fresh insights tailored to the players they're following.

Built with MACH technology principles, Composable UI accelerates the learning journey for architects, developers, and designers

Orium, the leading composable commerce specialist in North America, today announced it launched Composable UI, its open source composable commerce accelerator. Built on the foundations of the award-winning accelerators from Orium, this open source project can be found on Composable.com and is designed to help brands learn how to build a modern composable ecommerce storefronts with best-in-class technologies and best practices.

Consumers are on more digital channels than ever before, which means modern brands now have increasingly complex business needs that can best be addressed by more modular vendor ecosystems. By leveraging APIs and bundling microservices into packaged business capabilities, composable commerce systems allow brands to assemble the solution that best works for them.

Composable UI was built to help brands move towards a modular architecture based on MACH technology principles. It provides a full end-to-end ecommerce experience, accelerating the learning journey for architects, developers, and designers through open source code, documentation, and a collaborative community of experts.

"As brands move towards a modular architecture, we recognized the need to help developers get up to speed on best practices for defining and delivering composable commerce architectures," said Jason Cottrell, founder and CEO of Orium. "Composable UI accelerates the adoption of composable commerce by giving developers an opportunity to get their feet wet with this new way of building commerce platforms. Whether an organization is looking for a complete digital transformation or an incremental improvement in customer experience, we can help brands get started with this modular, open, and flexible approach."

Composable UI enables integration with headless commerce, content management systems, and other microservices, and comes pre-integrated with support for Algolia for search and Stripe for payments. Technical users can easily create dynamic storefronts with an open source foundational React, Next.js and Figma design system and UI library for modern composable commerce websites.

Brands looking to update their commerce platform, whether by adding headless technologies or replatforming to composable commerce, can use Composable UI to test the code and see how the experts at Orium approach a build. Orium's technology partners can contribute to the project to support integrations and make additions to the project.

"Composable UI opens an avenue for learning and experimentation while enabling successful composable deployments," said Alex Hawley, Partner Solutions Engineer at Vercel. "We are thrilled to be partnering with Orium to empower developers to get started with composable commerce and helping them to deploy instantaneously and without friction."

The leading consumer insights platform used data from more than 2,300 ads and nearly one million US consumers across four years to answer the question: Is advertising getting better? Findings reveal empathy drove ad effectiveness in the pandemic, but declined as inflation took hold. Now advertising is in bounce back mode.

Zappi, the market research platform for consumer-centric ad and product development, today released its first annual State of Creative Effectiveness* report.

The report was developed from Zappi data on more than 2,300 ads from B2C brands and nearly one million U.S. consumers between 2019 and 2023. It examines advertising’s effectiveness through the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent period of rising inflation, and now offers a mid-year update for 2023. Zappi found that creative effectiveness in 2023 has rebounded from a disappointing 2022, and is set to outperform pre-pandemic advertising, according to its consumer testing.

“As Cannes kicks off – one of the year’s most important gatherings of the creative community – we wanted to put the industry under the microscope to find out if advertising is getting any better,” said Steve Phillips, CEO of Zappi. “The good news is that our data shows creative effectiveness is trending upward in 2023. But this positive momentum is merely offsetting what was a down year in 2022. Our data shows that while advertisers mobilized quickly to reach consumers with empathetic messages during the pandemic, they missed that same connection as inflation peaked. Effective advertising happens when marketers understand their consumers and create work that connects the brand to their needs. Those don’t know their audience may just be wasting precious marketing budgets on ineffective advertising that misses the mark.”

The State of Creative Effectiveness report seeks to understand what drives advertising effectiveness at specific moments in time. In a challenging environment, marketers need to build communications that reach consumers with distinctive messages, cut through the clutter, make a lasting impression by resonating with them, and incite a strong response to drive consideration.

Key findings from the report:

• Empathy drove effectiveness in the ‘pandemic-era’ and marketers saw huge bottom-line gains from emotionally charged ads: Amid the unprecedented changes to consumers’ ways of working and living during the COVID-19 pandemic, brands saw strong ad performance by leaning into messages of empathy. Ads during this period scored 17.5% better in emotional appeal than pre-pandemic ads, which led in part to a massive 32% boost to purchase uplift. Despite strong gains in emotional resonance and response, brand recall declined 5.6% from pre-pandemic levels as it became harder to stand out in the crowd.
• Inflation era advertising was less effective – failing to match changing consumer behavior: While marketers achieved strong advertising performance through the pandemic by quickly adapting, inflation impacted consumers more gradually. In July 2021, creative effectiveness declined 2%, along with important indicators of high-performing advertising, such as purchase uplift (-7%) and emotional intensity (-4.5%). This less emotive advertising didn’t resonate with consumers who had begun burning through their pandemic savings to counter rising costs.
• Creative effectiveness in 2023 is recovering and out-performing pre-pandemic averages: Almost across the board, effectiveness metrics in 2023 are outpacing averages from the previous year. Brand appeal – an assessment of how an ad made the consumer feel – increased 8% from 2022, meaning that brands have identified the topics and trends that move consumer perceptions. Meanwhile, advertising in 2023 is causing consumers to feel again. Emotional intensity improved 7% from 2022, although it is still slightly lower than the pandemic peak of emotionally charged messaging. Finally, we saw a 5% improvement in purchase uplift, as advertising regained some ground on the pandemic era.

126th, 127th patents will enhance collaboration between AI and humans to fuel better customer experiences

Interactions, the world leader in conversational artificial intelligence (AI), today announced it has secured two new patents to advance its industry-leading platform. With 127 patents, the company holds one of the largest portfolios in the conversational AI industry. The new patents will enhance collaboration between AI and humans in customer service, creating better experiences for customers and agents alike.

“AI is one of the fastest-changing technologies in the world, impacting a broad range of industries. Companies have to move just as fast to stay competitive,” said Dr. Srinivas Bangalore, senior vice president of engineering at Interactions. “Our team at Interactions is always working to advance our platform. We’ve accumulated a vast strategic patent portfolio by constantly pushing the art of the possible to ensure we deliver the best possible user experience to the companies we work with.”

Interactions has always believed that AI and humans work better together. The company’s proprietary Adaptive Understanding™ technology harnesses this strength, blending the most advanced conversational AI on the market with real-time human understanding to ensure seamless, productive customer experiences (CX). The two new patents will build on the company’s existing work and allow Interactions to continue advancing its Human Assisted Understanding (HAU) models.

• Automated Workflow Selection for Agent Within an Electronic Conversation System (U.S. Patent No. 11,625,152) leverages data analysis to prompt agents with on-screen workflows to fulfill customer requests. For example, when a customer calls to book a hotel room, the agent will immediately be prompted with the next steps on-screen. This capability takes Interactions’ existing intent understanding technology one step further, from comprehension to execution, to significantly streamline the agent experience and ensure a seamless customer experience.
• Virtual Assistant Architecture for Natural Language Understanding in a Customer Service System (U.S. Patent No. 11,606,463) evaluates confidence in AI’s comprehension or ability to execute a request, and determines if and when to connect a customer with a person for assistance. This is critical because many AI applications do not understand their own limitations, which can lead to dead ends, mishaps, or even misinformation. This patent allows confidence evaluation and any necessary handoffs to happen in real time, facilitating a better end-user experience.

Together, these patents enable better collaboration between AI and agents in customer service. This improves the experience for all parties involved in customer care. Agents can focus exclusively on the tasks that require their attention, and manage these tasks more efficiently with real-time prompts. Customers, in turn, receive faster, more convenient service, and businesses benefit from improved operational efficiency and greater customer satisfaction.

These patents add to Interactions’ impressive portfolio, which includes rights to more than 1,400 additional patents. This expansive library enables the company to continue to uplevel both the agent and customer experience. Learn more about Interactions’ unique blend of AI and human understanding here.

The industry-first offering generates Excel-based data analysis and charts on demand to enhance the way brands manage and analyze commerce data

Pacvue, the industry’s first commerce acceleration platform, today announced the beta release of Pacvue XL Copilot, an industry-first AI solution that enables brands and agencies to easily query data using natural language prompts to generate pre-formatted charts and analysis. This solution not only integrates retail media, sales and operations data from Pacvue directly into Microsoft Excel but also lets brands use and visualize this data in a way that best suits their day-to-day needs.

Built on top of Pacvue’s first-to-market Excel integration, the new AI-powered solution puts the power of Pacvue XL into the hands of brands and agencies to quickly visualize and analyze the state of their business, product or campaign. Individuals of any skill level can input queries using natural language prompts, including speech-to-text, to analyze the data and generate pre-formatted charts populated with key takeaways and insights. The solution can also automatically generate Microsoft PowerPoint slides with these charts and analysis, reducing the time it takes to produce reports from hours to minutes.

“We’re at the very beginning of our AI innovation at Pacvue,” said Melissa Burdick, President at Pacvue. “Our Copilot solution is an important first step to help our clients take action faster with their data. We’re going to continue to lean into the complexity of omnichannel commerce and use AI to boost the ability of brands and agencies of all sizes to make new discoveries and activate growth.”

Pacvue XL Copilot’s generative AI is built on large language model architecture and is the first of its kind to process commerce data directly in Excel. It empowers individuals to work within a familiar application to customize data queries to their specific needs, while AI helps to uncover valuable insights that make swift decisions easier.

Currently in beta and available to all Pacvue XL users, Copilot is the first release in a series of new AI-powered solutions from Pacvue. In addition to expanding Pacvue XL Copilot beyond Excel to the web-based Pacvue application, the company is set to release additional AI tools that power different areas of commerce management.

The unique combination of Habu's interoperable clean room orchestration and automation platform and AWS Clean Rooms' data collaboration controls make data clean room collaborations available for all customers with flexibility and simplicity.

Habu, a global innovator in data clean room software, announced joining the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Network (APN) and today launched a new solution to integrate its Data Clean Room offering with AWS Clean Rooms, and enable customers and their partners to analyze their collective data sets without sharing or copying each other's underlying data. The solution makes it easier for business users to leverage Habu's tools to get started with AWS Clean Rooms. For advertisers and marketers, this solution simplifies use cases for key marketing activities such as audience insights, activation, measurement, and attribution while better protecting their data.

As companies of all types and sizes are looking for greater access to data and insights for a more complete view of their business, they are increasingly looking to complement their first-party data with data from their external business partners. However, these companies want to protect the sensitive, underlying data of their customers and are looking for solutions to help them analyze datasets in a protected environment, where participants can generate insights while safeguarding each participant’s data. Companies increasingly want their business users to be able to leverage data clean rooms more seamlessly to drive data driven decision making.

Habu’s solution helps business users with little technical expertise to easily create and join an AWS Clean Rooms collaboration in minutes. For example, marketers can use Habu's interface to analyze their combined datasets in a few clicks. With a focus on democratizing data clean room access for any company and end-user, Habu is launching a solution to power orchestration for AWS Clean Rooms for AWS customers and their partners to analyze and collaborate on their collective datasets – without sharing or copying each other’s underlying data. Habu is leveraging AWS Clean Rooms to help companies uncover insights through privacy-enhanced data analysis, empowering them to deliver more customized user experiences and improve their business goals. Habu customers can now benefit from AWS Clean Rooms' broad set of configurable data access controls—including query controls, query output restrictions, and query logging—that allow companies to customize restrictions on the queries run by each clean room participant.

Over the past three years, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) has been one of the most widely used data connections in Habu. With this new AWS Clean Rooms solution, Habu’s customers and partners are now able to easily collaborate with hundreds of thousands of companies already using Amazon S3 without them needing to load their data onto another platform or having to maintain a copy of their data outside of an AWS environment. The addition of this frictionless and more secure collaboration workflow is meaningful for privacy-enhanced data analysis for use cases in advertising and marketing, media, and other industries.

“For a brand to be able to fully harness their own first-party data and also tap into high value signals from strategic partners, without either party having to move or expose that data to each other, is an amazing opportunity we are excited to explore with our clients,” said Krystal Oliveri, Global Chief Innovation Officer, GroupM & Choreograph. “We are excited to work with Habu and AWS and help some of the world’s leading brands to not only navigate this inflection point in our industry, but to innovate, differentiate, and deliver long-term value through data collaboration.”

Using Habu, customers can leverage a library of pre-built queries and visualizations, while data scientists have the ability to develop custom, privacy-safe workflows and advanced solutions. This includes capabilities for profile enrichment, journey analysis, advanced targeting and measurement, modeling, and activation. The overarching goal of this partner solution offering is to accelerate value realization through exponential growth of data collaborations.

"Companies across industries are looking to build a holistic view of their business by securely bringing together disparate datasets across multiple parties," said Akram Chetibi, General Manager of AWS Clean Rooms at AWS. "We are excited for the launch of Habu's solution for AWS Clean Rooms, which will bring AWS Clean Rooms’ privacy-enhancing benefits to customers directly in Habu's intuitive and easy-to-use platform."

“In order to enable data-driven brands to achieve more precise targeting and effective measurement, the need for increased data accessibility is paramount,” said Matt Kilmartin, Habu Co-Founder & CEO. “We are excited to share the news of our partner solution leveraging AWS Clean Rooms. This solution aims to deliver secure, seamless, and automated collaboration solutions to accelerate mutually beneficial business growth for brands and their trusted partners.”

Analysis of Representation across Top 50 TV Shows of 2023 Reveals Dramatic Underrepresentation Among Hispanic Viewers Across Both Linear TV and Streaming

Samba TV, the leading provider of omniscreen data and measurement, today released its State of Diversity on TV report, an analysis of representation across top TV shows of 2023 and how that representation impacts viewership. As the U.S. grows in diversity, content creators, marketers, and advertisers have an opportunity to boost engagement with programming decisions like cast composition, storytelling, and more. Samba TV’s insights indicate cast diversity is a key indicator of viewership among diverse households. The report’s findings also illustrate a television and entertainment landscape marked by dramatic underrepresentation of some demographics, mainly Hispanic and Asian audiences, as well as an ad market that is also underserving these viewers.

The analysis encompassed programs released on streaming and traditional linear television, based on the top 25 highest-reaching direct-to-streaming and top 25 highest-reaching linear TV premiere episodes released between January and May. Insights into representation were sourced from cast composition of top-billed actors and actresses throughout each program.

“The data shows that greater on-screen representation will tend to increase viewership overall and among diverse populations,” said Samba TV CEO and co-founder Ashwin Navin. “Audiences are deeply connected to what they watch on TV. Although we live in the golden age of content, diversity on-screen still does not adequately represent the population in all its identities.”

Samba TV’s report sheds further light on diversity trends in television viewership, which include:

Over half of people say that they are more likely to watch TV where they see themselves represented.

• Within the top 50 TV shows, 42% of top-billed actors were Hispanic, Black, Asian, or another ethnicity such as mixed, while 58% were white.
• The report’s findings indicated a positive correlation of 43% among households with Black, Hispanic, Asian, mixed race, or another non-white ethnicity watching programs with higher percentages of non-white stars, indicating that cast diversity is a selling point among diverse households.
• Representation is a deciding factor when audiences choose what to watch on TV. Black households saw the strongest correlation with watching shows with Black leads, with a positive correlation of 67% among Black households watching programs with a higher percentage of Black leads.

Hispanic representation is far below the U.S. Census levels and is lacking across both linear television and streaming.

• Despite making up almost 20% of the U.S., Hispanic actors are underrepresented on TV. Across both linear and streaming, only 10% of lead actors were Hispanic, despite Hispanic people comprising 18% of the U.S. census.
• In fact, none of the top 50 shows featured a majority Hispanic cast, compared to multiple shows featuring majority white, Black, and Asian leads.
• Less than half of the top 50 programs featured Hispanic or Asian leads.
• With 80% of Hispanic people saying diverse content is important when choosing what to watch, content creators and advertisers would benefit from diversifying casts to include Hispanic representation.

Linear programming reaches Black audiences with Black representation.

• More than 1 in 4 of the lead actors among the top linear shows was Black, and that representation paid off for those shows from a viewership standpoint. Multiple shows with a majority Black leading cast over-indexed in the triple digits based on Black household viewership, including BMF, Snowfall, and Power Book II: Ghost.
• The vast majority (90%) of Black audiences say that having diverse representation is important to them when choosing what content to watch.

Studios should look to increase representation, particularly with Asian and Hispanic audiences.

• With more and more of the U.S. identifying as ethnicities other than white, studios will fail to drive interest in new programs if they do not adequately reflect the population.
• Streamers like Netflix are leaning into diverse representation in their content. Notably, the most diverse streaming shows were all Netflix originals.