As AI goes mainstream, Birdeye turns to its trusted partner Google Cloud, global leader in AI driven technologies, to deliver transformative customer experiences to its 100,000 customers.

Birdeye, a leading provider of reputation management and digital customer experience solutions, has expanded its long-standing premier partnership with Google Cloud to offer businesses an innovative way to manage customer feedback. The partnership now includes the use of Google's conversational AI service Bard, which will help businesses understand customer interactions, like reviews and surveys, and respond faster.

The integration of Bard into Birdeye's platform builds on the two companies' history of collaboration which has already helped thousands of local brands and businesses build accurate Google Business Profiles, seamlessly generate and manage Google reviews across multiple locations, improve return on Google ad spends with Google Seller Ratings, and engage customers via Google Business Messages. By adding Bard capabilities, Birdeye customers can now automate the process of monitoring and responding to customer reviews and surveys, saving valuable time and improving efficiency.

"Our strong partnership with Google Cloud has allowed us to support businesses to boost their online reputation, drive more revenue, and improve their digital customer experiences. The advent of AI technologies, however, have unleashed dramatic opportunities to deliver unprecedented customer experiences." said Dave Lehman, President and COO of Birdeye. "We looked at all possible AI solutions, and Bard stood out as the platform to bet on. The ultimate solution will put the consumer at the center. It will leverage new language models, adapt to specific industries, pull in specific company data and then personalize every customer interaction based on real one to one communication. Google Cloud AI + Birdeye data is the answer."

The integration of Bard and Vertex AI into Birdeye's platform offers businesses several key benefits, including:

• Automated response management: Automatically categorize customer feedback, enabling businesses to respond more quickly and efficiently.
• Improved response times: Businesses can respond to reviews and surveys faster through automated Conversational AI bots.
• Enhanced customer experience: Businesses can offer a more personalized experience for customers by detecting real-time sentiment from all engagement touchpoints.

"Our partnership with Birdeye has been a great success, and we're excited to expand it with the addition of Bard," said Uday Ghatikar, Field CTO, Google Cloud. "We believe that Bard's capabilities will enable businesses to better manage customer feedback and improve their online reputation. We're looking forward to seeing the impact of this partnership on the industry as a whole."

The Birdeye and Google Cloud partnership has already helped thousands of businesses build a stellar online reputation and engage with customers. With the addition of Bard, the partnership is poised to transform the industry, offering businesses an unprecedented level of control over their online reputation and customer feedback.

ON24 will announce new personalization, orchestration and automation capabilities at its annual user conference, The ON24 Experience 2023

ON24, a leading digital engagement platform that drives pipeline and revenue growth, will launch a new AI-powered Optimization Suite that enables enterprises to personalize, orchestrate and automate digital experiences and content, improving campaign performance and increasing ROI. Collectively, these capabilities will help go-to-market teams harness generative AI to drive more audience engagement, generate deeper data-driven insights and deliver greater pipeline and revenue growth.

The ON24 Optimization Suite is purpose-built to maximize the impact of ON24 experiences while saving time and resources. Backed by the ON24 AI Engine, ON24 customers will be able to easily personalize experiences to uplift conversion rates, orchestrate content across channels to elevate audience interactions and automate written and video content creation to extend campaign impact.

“Customer success is at the center of our innovation, and we’re relentlessly focused on unlocking the power of AI to help our customers continuously drive cost-effective revenue growth,” says Sharat Sharan, co-founder and CEO, ON24. “Today, at the ON24 Experience, we’re proud to showcase how our platform is digitally transforming go-to-market strategies for industry leaders, and we believe that with the addition of the ON24 Optimization Suite, we can help enterprises further accelerate that evolution and make digital transformation their competitive advantage.”

Through the AI-powered Optimization Suite, ON24 customers will be able to efficiently scale personalized messaging and recommended content to audience segments, create and distribute multimedia content across digital channels and leverage generative AI to automatically produce derivative multimedia content. Highlights include the ability to:

• Build, manage and track audience segments by category, including demographics, content interests, buying intent and historical behavior.
• Compose and deliver unique, tailored messaging, content recommendations and calls-to-actions to different audience segments engaging with the same ON24 experience.
• Develop, edit and publish short-form videos, using generative AI, to promote, enhance and extend engagement across ON24 experiences.
• Augment the creation of promotional content and delivery of live experiences with an embedded generative AI tool and chatbot.
• Surface immediate audience feedback from live experiences with a “Key Moments” report, providing marketers with deep links to promote more targeted experiences.
• Automate the production of written and video content from long-form ON24 experiences, based on real-time, human-driven audience engagement and generative AI.

“Our goal is to use AI to optimize human engagement, not replace it,” said Jayesh Sahasi, EVP of Product and CTO. “With the launch of the ON24 Optimization Suite, powered by the ON24 AI Engine, we believe our customers will be able to gain time and bandwidth so they can focus on what’s most important – creating audience-first, engaging experiences, uncovering data-driven insights and actioning that intelligence to drive pipeline and revenue growth.”

The acquisition extends the value of PhotoShelter's platform capabilities, delivering the industry's fastest AI-driven workflow, from capture to audience

Today, PhotoShelter, the premiere digital asset management (DAM) solution for seamless content distribution experiences, is announcing the acquisition of Socialie, a category leader in user-friendly content distribution, workflow automation and advanced analytics. Made in partnership with PhotoShelter's majority investor, Clearhaven Partners, the acquisition will strengthen PhotoShelter’s real-time distribution powers, provide PhotoShelter customers with more control and insight into the flow of content across their ecosystem, and position the company as the one-stop shop for digital content sharing, from the moment of capture all the way through to influencers and their audiences.

Delivering real-time, approved content is key to brand reputation and engagement today, yet traditional DAMs act more like siloed repositories versus the nimble delivery systems needed to reach and engage external stakeholders effectively. Every brand has major moments they need to share in real-time, and countless stakeholders who can help amplify a message, but today’s digital sharing solutions have not been able to deliver the precision and speed needed to help brands engage their audiences at scale. PhotoShelter’s innovative, custom-built AI tagging models instantly recognize and tag content correctly within seconds, ensuring that the content traveling across platforms is accurate and actionable.

“We are in the middle of a content revolution – with more content being produced by more creators across more channels than ever before – and every brand stands to gain from this opportunity to engage with their audiences or risk falling behind,” says PhotoShelter CEO Andrew Fingerman. “We’re welcoming Socialie to the PhotoShelter team to further provide brands with the right tools to share digital content automatically to content partners, publishers, and influential stakeholders with deep insights into performance and reach. We’re excited for what the future holds and the immediate benefits our customers will be able to activate.”

With embedded AI workflows, PhotoShelter’s platform acts as the central nervous system for how brands communicate visually, enabling customers to streamline the movement of visual content to their ecosystem’s owned channels from the moment an event occurs. Now, with the acquisition of Socialie, these capabilities are extended further with increased automation and analytics baked in throughout the entire content journey. Socialie’s proprietary Magic Tracking capability will make it possible for customers to get insight into content performance across various social channels the moment it leaves the PhotoShelter platform.

“We are very excited to join forces with PhotoShelter,” says Socialie founder Kristin Adams. “PhotoShelter has established deep digital content management expertise across many industries and use cases. Combining this expertise with Socialie’s advanced social channel distribution and analytics provides a unique opportunity that all brands can utilize. We've been integration partners with PhotoShelter since 2018 and look forward to taking the capabilities we've built together a step further, truly disrupting DAM solutions and harnessing our collective strengths in the sports world and beyond.”

“Partnering with PhotoShelter has given our team a reliable one-stop-shop to house critical game-time action, freeing us up to focus on capturing never-before-seen moments on the field instead of manually uploading content after the fact,” said Jennifer White, Senior Manager of Digital Assets at the Philadelphia Eagles. “By leveraging PhotoShelter’s AI functionality, alongside Socialie’s automation and analytics capabilities, we’re able to streamline the process of tagging the right players and get the content into their hands in seconds, taking the knock-on effect of social media and fan engagement to the next level.”

• LTK, the creator-guided shopping platform generating over £3.2 billion globally in annual sales for brands, launches new research showing two-thirds of brand marketers collaborating with influencers see increased sales as a result.

• The research of senior decision makers at brands in the UK shows 38% leverage influencers to inform product decisions, and 31% have seen influencers improve their brand sentiment.

• Leading brands such as Elemis, Karen Millen, and Abercrombie & Fitch have experienced growth of sales and brand salience as a result of continued investments in LTK Creators.

LTK, the creator-guided shopping platform and global influencer marketing leader, today launches new research, commissioned from YouGov, which has found that over half (54%) of UK businesses currently investing in influencer marketing have increased their budgets this year, despite economic uncertainty and cuts to their other marketing budgets, after seeing positive business impact from their influencer marketing programmes.

YouGov surveyed marketing decision-makers across a wide section of the retail industry, revealing the state of influencer marketing in the UK – through their attitudes, experiences and challenges.

Marketing budgets are under scrutiny, with marketers reporting that nearly a quarter (24%) of their budget is being cut. However, investment in influencer marketing is showing resilience, with brands experiencing value in how it improves brand awareness (69%), boosts online traffic and clicks (62%), and increases reach and engagement across social channels (46%).

“The positive results revealed in this study come as no surprise. LTK’s 12 years working with brands and supporting creators’ businesses has shown time and again how data-led creator campaigns can deliver across the funnel an array of metrics and contribute to business growth and development,” said Robin Ward, Head of Sales at LTK Europe. “Our focus is on connecting brands with creators to reach their customers in authentic ways through the power of creator guided shopping.”

Going beyond brand and channel performance, nearly two-thirds of marketers (62%) have seen influencer marketing directly drive sales growth.

Global retailer Abercrombie & Fitch has seen record campaign sales with LTK growing 56% year-on-year thanks to increased, always-on investment in influencer campaigns through LTK as a way for the brand to grow beyond brand awareness. Hanne Fiksdal, Senior Marketing Manager, Abercrombie & Fitch, says: “Partnering with LTK allows us to work closely with creators that drive additional engagement and awareness for our brand. This relationship helps us to reach our campaign objectives while also increasing the opportunities our customers have to shop with us through LTK Creators.”

Investment priorities for the next 12 months

For those brands investing in influencer marketing, their areas of focus for expanding activity over the next 12 months includes increasing video content by creators (54%), more diverse casting (46%) and further investment in micro-influencers (31%).

According to a recent LTK study, two-thirds of consumers prefer video content over still images on social media, and 73% of Gen Z watch creator videos. And with video seeing the strongest sales lift year over year - driving 3X the sales growth over still images on the LTK platform - brand investment in short-form video campaigns with LTK Creators are up by five times year-on-year.

Marketers are also committing to a shift towards always-on partnerships (38%) with influencers, moving away from one-off campaigns. LTK has seen its brand partners such as Elemis, move to an always-on, full-funnel strategy, which boosted revenue by nearly a third, in just a few months.

The importance of performance data and evidencing results

The research also reveals some of the barriers that marketers not currently investing in influencers say are holding them back.

Nearly half of those not currently investing say they need more awareness of its value, and a fifth of senior marketing decision-makers are unsure of how to measure influencer marketing activity, highlighting the importance of accessing performance data and sharing measurability to optimise creator campaigns and demonstrate influencer marketing success.

High street clothing brand Karen Millen has made use of LTK’s real-time tracking and sales reporting, as part of one of their recent campaigns, helping to increase sales by +114% MoM. April Roberts, Senior Performance Marketing Manager at Boohoo Group, says: “Partnering with LTK highlights the significance of creator commerce as we work together, alongside their high performing creators, to increase brand awareness and sales. Measurement is a cornerstone of all our campaign success, allowing us to see multiple sides of value when it comes to influencer marketing and reporting on its wider impact on our business aims.”

Impact of influencer marketing on other marketing channels and business development

Influencer marketing success is having broader contributions on the performance of other marketing channels. LTK’s research found that the top uses for influencers beyond social media are through inviting them to amplify events (46%), video advertising (38%), and in-store marketing and activations (31%).

Beyond sales and marketing channel performance, investment in influencer marketing is also driving brand growth and business development, with marketers saying it is informing product decisions (38%) and improving brand sentiment (31%).

Notes to editors

Research methodology

All figures, unless otherwise stated, are from YouGov Plc. The total sample size is 102 senior decision-makers in marketing, working in the retail sector. Fieldwork was undertaken between 12^th - 30^th April 2023. The survey was carried out online. Respondents were initially asked questions on their industry, role and seniority to ensure the required audience of key decision makers was targeted.

These additions to the company's leadership team are instrumental in helping DrivenIQ become the world’s leading first-party consumer data and audience technology company.

DrivenIQ ,experts in first-party consumer data and audience technologies, today announced the addition of four accomplished industry leaders to its team. Samantha Lee joins as Chief Operating Officer, TJ Ceballos as Chief Commercial Officer, and James Dunay as Chief Technology Officer. In addition, Jamie Solis assumes the role of Head of Content. Their extensive expertise and track record of success will play a pivotal role in driving DrivenIQ's growth and establishing the company as a global leader in the consumer data industry.

Samantha Lee brings a proven track record of driving revenue growth with strategic direction and operational excellence. Her background includes leadership roles at companies ranging from seed-funded startups to large public organizations such as Microsoft and Akamai. Samantha's entrepreneurial spirit is exemplified by her own sustainable seafood business. Most recently, she served as the General Manager of PromoteIQ, Microsoft's retail media platform business, where she led operations and strategy for an $800 million ARR business.

TJ Ceballos brings over two decades of experience in media, advertising, publishing, and data to DrivenIQ. His expertise spans analytics, business development, sales and operations, and emerging technologies. His career includes notable roles at New York Daily News, where he oversaw the implementation of advertising systems, and Affinity, where he achieved substantial revenue growth through product development. He also played key roles in driving programmatic advertising and optimizing data-driven campaigns for The Trade Desk and MediaMath.

James Dunay, DrivenIQ’s newly appointed CTO, brings a strong track record of success in driving technological innovation and strategy. With his extensive experience as a technology leader, James has successfully led and guided the development of high-profile organizations. His previous roles include serving as the CTO of Kaya Now, where he focused on building a creative community connecting cannabis enthusiasts. He also made significant contributions during his tenure as Interim CTO at The H Hub, Contract Product Engineer at KiraKira 3D, and iOS Engineer at Stitch Fix and We Heart It.

Jamie Solis, DrivenIQ’s new Head of Content, is a seasoned writer and content publisher with a decade of experience in writing and editorial roles. Her background includes managing and editing content for popular magazines and blogs, including her role as Editor-in-Chief of CULTURE Magazine and High Times Magazine. Jamie's strong creative execution and content expertise will be crucial in working with publishing partners to leverage DrivenIQ's first-party signal data and engage ideal audiences effectively.

“Together, Samantha, TJ, James, and Jamie make a formidable leadership team committed to growing DrivenIQ into the world’s leading first-party consumer data and audience technology company,” said Albert Thompson, Founder and CEO of DrivenIQ. “Their collective expertise, strategic vision, and proven track records of success are instrumental to our mission of providing innovative solutions that empower businesses to reach and engage with their target audiences effectively. We’re thrilled they’re part of our team and we look forward to amazing growth and scale with their guidance and direction.”

DrivenIQ is a data-driven intelligence technology firm. In 2021, Capstone Technologies Group, Inc (OTC: CATG), a company that acquires, operates and organically develops disruptive technologies, acquired an initial minority interest in DrivenIQ and has since invested additional capital to further accelerate the company’s growth.

Optimized Security and Archiving for M365 and Google Workspace Now Available to Safeguard Federal, State and Local Government Agencies Against Sophisticated Cyberattacks

Mimecast, an advanced email and collaboration security company, and Carahsoft Technology Corp., The Trusted Government IT Solutions Provider^®, today announced a strategic partnership. Under the agreement, Carahsoft will serve as Mimecast’s Master Government Aggregator^®, making the company’s world-class solutions available to the Public Sector through Carahsoft’s reseller partners and National Association of State Procurement Officials (NASPO) ValuePoint, National Cooperative Purchasing Alliance (NCPA), E&I Cooperative Services Contract and OMNIA Partners contracts.

“When reviewing our go-to-market strategy in the Public Sector markets, we knew that we wanted to leverage a Government aggregator to help guide and support us,” said Mike Bird, Director of Public Sector Sales at Mimecast. “As we evaluated the options, Carahsoft’s deep portfolio of solutions, contract vehicles, partnerships with Public Sector-focused resellers and alignment to our technology alliance partners made them the clear choice.”

Public Sector agencies have access to AI-powered, best-in-class protection with Mimecast Email Security solutions that are designed to safeguard organizations against all forms of email compromise, including zero-day attacks. Mimecast’s advanced solutions provide proactive threat detection, brand protection, awareness training, and data retention capabilities to help organizations work protected.

“Government agencies are often a target for cybercriminals due to the high level of sensitive information they store,” said Sean Kelley, Director of Sales who leads the Mimecast Team at Carahsoft. “With the addition of Mimecast to our portfolio, agencies can leverage multi-layered targeted threat and information protection solutions to carry out daily communications without worry. We look forward to working with Mimecast and our reseller partners to further support the Public Sector′s cybersecurity advancement.”

Onyx leverages the company’s AI prediction technology across dedicated environments for high-impact display and video advertising

Outbrain Inc. today announced Onyx by Outbrain™, a new branding platform designed to maximize business impact of awareness and consideration campaigns. Onyx runs exclusively within dedicated, in-article environments across Outbrain’s premium publisher partners.

Onyx is designed to meet brand objectives and deliver value beyond traditional ‘ad views’ by leveraging Outbrain’s +15 years of technology built to predict user engagement through AI. Onyx features custom large ad formats designed to drive high attention from contextual Pre-Roll Video and High-Impact Display experiences. Initial launch partners include Ford via Xaxis among other brands across the automotive, tech, retail, health, and CPG categories.

Launched in partnership with Adelaide, a leader in the rapidly growing field of attention-based media quality measurement, Onyx aims to increase campaign effectiveness and ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) for enterprise brands and agencies.

“Onyx is part of our long-term strategy to become a full-funnel marketing partner, significantly growing our business with enterprise brands and agencies,” said David Kostman, Co-CEO, Outbrain. “Onyx delivers a unique opportunity for advertisers to win real attention and drive business impact while benefiting our publisher partners with incremental revenue vital to sustain free and independent journalism.”

According to Adelaide, initial findings showed that Onyx units outperformed their benchmarks for display and rich media formats across all device types by 26%. Onyx units also scored 53% higher than standard mobile banners and exceeded mobile rich media formats by 20.1%. Assessment of Adelaide’s attention metric (AU) at the domain level revealed that top-performing Onyx placements surpassed format averages by more than 15%, highlighting a significant opportunity for AU-based optimization across sites and placements.

“We are pleased to partner with Outbrain and empower marketers to run advertising more effectively by focusing on attention metrics,” said Marc Guldimann, Founder & CEO, Adelaide. “Onyx’s combination of high attention placements and engaging ad formats is a promising recipe for marketers seeking to maximize brand impact of display and video campaigns with AU on premium publishers across the open web.”

Onyx is now available for enterprise brands and agencies in the US, UK, Germany, France, and Italy and will be launched in other markets later this year.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws, which statements involve substantial risks and uncertainties. Forward-looking statements generally relate to possible or assumed future results of our business, financial condition, results of operations, liquidity, plans and objectives. You can generally identify forward-looking statements because they contain words such as “may,” “will,” “should,” “expects,” “plans,” “anticipates,” “could,” “intends,” “designed to,” “guidance,” “outlook,” “target,” “projects,” “contemplates,” “believes,” “estimates,” “predicts,” "foresee,” “potential” or “continue” or the negative of these terms or other similar expressions that concern our expectations, strategy, plans or intentions. We have based these forward-looking statements largely on our current expectations and projections regarding future events and trends that we believe may affect our business, financial condition and results of operations. The outcome of the events described in these forward-looking statements is subject to risks, uncertainties and other factors, including but not limited to overall advertising demand and traffic generated by our media partners; factors that affect advertising demand and spending, such as the continuation or worsening of unfavorable economic or business conditions or downturns, instability or volatility in financial markets, and other events or factors outside of our control, such as U.S. and global recession concerns, geopolitical concerns, including the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine, supply chain issues, inflationary pressures, labor market volatility, and the pace of recovery or any resurgences of the COVID-19 pandemic and the risks described in the section entitled “Risk Factors” and elsewhere in the Annual Report on Form 10-K filed for the year ended December 31, 2022 and in subsequent reports filed with the SEC. Accordingly, you should not rely upon forward-looking statements as predictions of future events. We cannot assure you that the results, events and circumstances reflected in the forward-looking statements will be achieved or occur, and actual results, events or circumstances could differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements. We undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statement to reflect events or circumstances after the date on which the statement is made or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events. We do not assume any obligation to update any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by law.

Leading multicloud solutions provider announces Generative AI offerings aimed at accelerating the responsible adoption of AI in organizations of all sizes

Rackspace Technology^® a leading end-to-end, multicloud technology solutions company, today announced Foundry for Generative AI by Rackspace (FAIR™), a groundbreaking global practice dedicated to accelerating the secure, responsible and sustainable adoption of generative AI solutions across industries.

FAIR aims to be a force multiplier to accelerate the pragmatic and secure use-case-based adoption of generative AI in businesses across all industries. It builds on unique Rackspace Technology IP and multicloud capabilities along with their global footprint to facilitate:

• Cutting-edge AI/ML, analytics, data services, and assets gained through the strategic acquisition of Just Analytics.
• Industry-leading partnerships, with leading hyperscalers, including the extended ecosystem of open-source AI solutions featuring Hugging Face and stability.ai, to drive rapid Open Innovation.
• The development of AI Private Cloud capabilities, including GPU-based high-performance computing, low latency storage solutions such as Rackspace Data Freedom, and secure networking across 30 plus global data centers, to enable the data kinetics needed to build advanced AI models in a private, secure, and on-demand environment.

Generative AI Offerings to Drive Customer Success

• FAIR Generative AI Ideation Workshop: An interactive and collaborative ideation workshop that helps organizations uncover actionable use cases for generative AI with defined business impacts. AI readiness diagnostics provide critical considerations for successful AI adoption.
• FAIR Generative AI Incubate: An agile and iterative program that co-creates an enterprise's first generative AI solution. It establishes the technology stack and assesses the viability of AI, ensuring seamless integration into organizational processes.
• FAIR Generative AI Industrialize: A systematic effort to transform the AI solution into a product, implementing governance, defining metrics, and optimizing the AI model and Distributed Cloud Infrastructure for continuous improvement.

Under the FAIR platform, over 100 use cases have been identified across multiple industries, and several first-of-a-kind implementations across the globe are under development. We have leveraged generative AI to implement Intelligent Co-pilot for the Enterprise (ICE™). Developed within FAIR, ICE is a co-pilot, boosting the productivity and effectiveness of go-to-market teams. It harnesses the power of AI to automate routine tasks, identify warm leads, surface relevant data and content, and provide real-time contextualized analytics for hyper-personalized customer interactions.

"As we extend our AI/ML capabilities, we are committed to pushing the boundaries of what is possible with generative AI," stated Amar Maletira, CEO of Rackspace Technology. "Foundry for Generative AI by Rackspace (FAIR) showcases our technology-leaning dedication to innovation, commitment to open source, and ambition to be at the forefront of data-driven solutions that benefit our customers and partners. We aim to develop solutions that leverage the full potential of generative AI across various industries."