New value-based pricing enables greater composability and an improved platform experience. 

mParticle, an AI-powered Customer Data Platform (CDP), today unveiled its new value-based pricing. This revolutionary model empowers brands with unparalleled control and flexibility to compose a customized data stack that fits their unique needs, while optimizing costs and maximizing system performance.

In today's economic environment, data and marketing teams across all industries are optimizing for efficient growth and scrutinizing costs. Recognizing this shift, mParticle's new value-based pricing model allows teams to improve cost efficiency while maintaining value and performance, evolving from a legacy model based on usage caps and overages, to one that better supports flexibility and configurability.

Legacy pricing models for customer data platforms often suffer from cost-to-value misalignment. Traditional user profile-based pricing models charge the same price per user, irrespective of the user's level of engagement and ultimately, the value to the brand. Similarly, traditional Event-based pricing models assign a uniform price to each Event, regardless of its intended use, and the subsequent value realized.

mParticle's value-based pricing offers an innovative solution to solve these challenges by moving beyond a one size fits all approach. Teams can designate Event tiers within the mParticle UI, aligning each data point with an intended use case. For example:

• For data streaming use cases, Events can be designated as ephemeral in nature within the platform without incurring storage and compute costs. This creates a zero data copy solution and eliminates excess costs.
• For customer 360° and data replay use cases, teams can designate Events to be stored but maintained separately from high-compute activities and
• For audience targeting and personalization use cases, Events designated as such will help brands optimize costs by reducing inefficiencies in which data is stored and accessed for real-time calculations such as audience segmentation, customer journey orchestration, and profile enrichment.

"With mParticle's new pricing model, we have improved the efficiency of our platform costs without sacrificing usage and value," describes Ramya Chekuri, Senior Director of Data at Equinox. "The ability to tier our events and optimize our costs as our data volumes continue to grow is critical for delivering impactful customer experiences at scale."

The new pricing model not only creates greater efficiency and value-to-price alignment, but also unlocks a set of best in class product offerings. Rather than a legacy model constrained by caps, overages, and penalties — teams can purchase credits that can be applied toward the usage of any component within the mParticle platform. Moreover, the offering provides a boost to system performance and allows for greater lookback windows on real-time audience calculations.

"Value-based Pricing helps our customers eliminate waste and get the most value out of their CDP investment," said Chee Chew, Chief Product Officer at mParticle. "In this macroeconomic climate where all companies are being more cautious about their spending, we want to provide customers with the best value-to-price ratio possible."

Teads leverages the largest dataset of attention and context, to offer clients unparalleled audience insights and support campaign optimization.

Teads, the global media platform, has announced the release of attention metrics in Teads Ad Manager (TAM), its dynamic programmatic buying platform. This integration makes Teads the first platform to embed Lumen's attention measurement natively and gives clients the ability to measure attention similarly to how they measure viewability. This integration marks one year since the launch of Teads Attention Program, an incubator for innovation, which fueled hundreds of tests with Lumen and other partners in the program. The addition of attention metrics to Teads Ad Manager gives advertisers a one-touch system for measuring and optimizing attention, simplifying an otherwise complex process.

Mike Follett, Managing Director, Lumen Research said: "With the release of attention metrics, Teads has consolidated its position as the easiest, and most widely used system of its kind globally. Now self-serve clients using Teads Ad Manager can measure attention in their campaigns with one click, gaining unprecedented insights into performance by leveraging Lumen's cutting-edge attention models."

By clicking on the 'attention' button within TAM, campaigns are automatically tagged with the Lumen tag, giving advertisers valuable insights on the amount of attention received by their ads, and empowering them to identify the drivers of attention, optimize their campaigns and drive impactful results. These metrics also offer simplicity and sustainability, as they are inherently cookieless and provide a scalable solution for measuring ad effectiveness. Since the launch of our offering, there has been a significant adoption among TAM clients, with Lumen attention measurement being utilized by 20% of their activities on TAM.

Damien Prybis, Head of Digital Trading, OMD France said: "Attention metrics are a key turning point in a more performance driven media planning, and the next step forward for brands seeking an even more clear view on where they should focus their media investment. The introduction of Teads attention metrics brings unparalleled ease in gaining deeper insights into our audiences, enabling us to drive more audience engagement and leverage those invaluable learnings to craft compelling content that captivates and connects."

With 1,236 active agencies and 3,349 active advertisers in 74 markets, Teads has established itself as the leading global end-to-end platform with the largest database of attention insights in the world. Currently, billions of impressions are reported and tagged, all supported by the unmatched scale and user-friendly features offered by Teads Ad Manager. This has translated directly into business results, such as a recent campaign in which a brand achieved remarkable success by strategically leveraging high-attention media across all channels, resulting in a remarkable 42% stronger lift compared to Teads' in-store visitation benchmarks, highlighting the impact of Teads' vast collection of attention insights. Teads is continuing to raise the bar on executional excellence for clients and partners, by continuing to explore new ways to make campaigns more actionable driving business results.

Caroline Hugonenc, Senior Vice President, Research & Insights, Teads said: "By utilizing the largest database of cases combining attention and outcomes on live campaigns, Teads has built an experience that allows clients to easily link attention to outcomes. The integration with Lumen is unparalleled - the deepest and easiest to use - and has produced the largest dataset of its kind in the world. We are proud of the monumental milestones we have achieved, with 103 advertisers onboarded and over 200 campaigns run since the launch of TAM, but this is only the beginning."

Pathlight Conversational Intelligence" combines the depth and nuance of human analysis with the scale and speed of today's most powerful large language models

 Pathlight today unveiled Pathlight Conversation Intelligence (CI), introducing a new paradigm in AI-based customer interaction analysis. Leveraging the most sophisticated language models available, organizations can, for the first time, perform human-level analysis at scale—maximizing quality and depth of customer insight. Pathlight CI represents a major technology leap in the application of AI to the field of conversational analysis, surpassing the superficial limitations of legacy solutions.

"The most critical business insights and customer issues originate from daily interactions, yet most organizations have visibility into less than five percent of conversations," said Alex Kvamme, CEO, Pathlight. "The bottom line is that you can't fix what you can't see. Not only that, but you can't truly understand a customer's needs and future pain points unless you're able to deeply understand what they are saying. Pathlight CI closes this information gap by enabling customer-facing teams to uncover and address issues quickly, and giving them unparalleled insights into emerging trends."

Kvamme added, "Most non-AI-native conversational analysis tools in the market pick up bits and pieces of customer interactions, but words and tags fail to answer a fundamental question: why are my customers calling in the first place, and what do they need from us to make their experience better? We designed Pathlight CI to go above and beyond these superficial insights and extract the full picture of what the customer needs. Until Pathlight CI, we had barely scratched the surface of what's possible."

Pathlight CI: Generative AI Provides Human-Level Conversation Analysis

Traditional conversation analysis remains incredibly limited. Today, the process is either managed manually by Quality Assurance (QA) analysts that can't cover the full spectrum of conversations, or by a lightweight AI model that can analyze at scale but lacks deep insight. The common thread between both options is they are expensive and lack depth and scale.

Pathlight CI harnesses the latest in large language model technology, combining the depth and nuance of human analysis with the scale and speed of machine learning. Leveraging transfer learning and transformer architecture, as well as multiple LLMs, the new solution deciphers nuances in language and context far beyond the reach of traditional ML solutions, delivering a level of analysis previously unattainable.

The foundation of Pathlight CI is powered by a multi-LLM backend that uniquely leverages both public and privately hosted models. This architecture ensures each analysis job is matched with the ideal model, optimizing precision and efficiency, while also circumventing issues around context window limitations and rate limits. As a result, Pathlight is able to deliver human-level analysis with the speed and scalability of AI, revolutionizing the field of conversational analysis.

Pathlight CI: Customer Benefits 

With Pathlight CI, organizations can:

• Capture every conversation across every channel with AI, no training required: Capture, transcribe, tag, and categorize every customer conversation across every channel using Pathlight's data pipelines and language models. Summarize, classify contact drivers/intent, detect resolutions, ask custom questions, and score agent performance across millions of conversations.
• Uncover insights and track trends in real-time: Gain full insight into customer interactions across all channels, allowing you to identify trends, seize opportunities, and mitigate risks for a comprehensive understanding of your business. Capitalize on opportunities in a timely manner and make informed decisions based on data, rather than relying on instincts.
• Deliver personalized guidance when needed: Deliver targeted, detailed feedback. Focus on the parts of each conversation that need attention. Build custom scorecards, view interactions side-by-side, and annotate specific phrases to deliver targeted feedback.
• Answer complex, high-stakes customer questions: Pathlight CI delivers a nuanced view into the deeper layers of customer interactions. Uncover critical questions around customer issues and concerns beyond the surface-level inquiries. This deep-level analysis, unattainable through traditional methods, allows businesses to comprehensively understand their customers' needs and priorities, thereby enhancing their capacity to deliver exceptional service.

The entertainment industry's first AI assistant that tells users whether they should watch a show or movie

Reelgood, the all-in-one streaming platform, announces the debut of Cue, the entertainment industry's first AI assistant to help users figure out what to watch.

Cue is an AI assistant that has an in-depth understanding of people's nuanced tastes and will tell users whether or not they should watch a movie or show.

This revolutionary personalization is possible thanks to Reelgood's sophisticated data platform and machine learning algorithms, which enable Cue to analyze what a user has watched, loved, liked, and disliked, then match that against billions of data points on the entertainment preferences of over 100 million users.

Cue is a powerful discovery tool for Reelgood users who rely on the platform as their default daily interface for streaming entertainment. Given that the average American spends 3.1 hours per day streaming video and 78% of all US households subscribe to more than one streaming service, Cue is a revolutionary way for users to maximize their entertainment time.

"You'll be surprised to see that Cue often understands your tastes even better than you do," says Reelgood founder and CEO David Sanderson.

Quad ensures your marketing machine runs as frictionless as possible.

Quad/Graphics, Inc. a global marketing experience (MX) company, is rolling out “Built on Quad.” This new campaign showcases Quad’s latest brand identity and marks the company’s first large-scale marketing and advertising effort in its 52-year history. Quad’s new brand campaign will run through digital, OOH, print, events, experiential, direct mail, sponsorship and sales assets. It will also be showcased at the 2023 Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, including the Nice Côte d'Azur Airport.

Quad provides end-to-end marketing solutions that removes friction wherever it occurs in the marketing journey for more than 2,900 clients, including Sirius XM, Amazon, the Albertsons Companies, and other major brands. The "Built on Quad” campaign focuses on the company’s strength as a one-stop partner for the modern marketer, and it also pays homage to its roots as one of the largest and most successful commercial printers in North America. The company prints and mails more than 8 billion pieces per year.

“In 2006, when I succeeded my father, I wanted to build on what he started and grow it into something unparalleled for the marketplace,” said Joel Quadracci, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer, Quad. “Today, we are meeting that moment. We’re renowned for our work in printing and direct mail, but those only represent a fraction of our capabilities. Our new story and brand expression encompasses everything that we are and marks an exciting juncture for the company’s evolution. We’re thrilled to introduce the new, reinvigorated Quad.”

Quad’s mission is to deliver a better marketing experience so its clients can focus on delivering the best customer experience. As an MX company, Quad combines unparalleled integration capabilities with quantifiable business impact. Quad’s mission is validated by insights from recent Forrester research, which affirms that while marketers have a functional mandate to operate in today’s increasingly complex marketing environment, they have an emotional need to eliminate the complication caused by poorly integrated marketing ecosystems. Quad’s uniquely integrated marketing platform helps solve this dilemma. The new campaign focuses on Quad’s roll-up-its-sleeves ‘maker culture’ and covers the full breadth of Quad’s products and services, including creative, intelligence, content, direct, media, packaging, production and in-store.

“This is a huge moment for the Quad brand as most marketers have an historical impression of what Quad can do for them. Now with this very strong signal, we are telling the most complete story of our offerings as a modern marketing company that provides excellence at scale," said Josh Golden, Quad’s Chief Marketing Officer. “Our ‘Built on Quad’ campaign speaks both to our foundational history as well as how we are widening the aperture of our integrated offerings all under one roof in service to the marketer. This work also creates more visibility around our culture of makers, which deserves to be celebrated. It’s exciting to bring Quad’s story to the marketplace in this way.”

Groundbreaking partnership and insightful findings offer advancements in cost reduction and forecasting success for future entertainment content

StoryFit, a rapid-growth AI technology company providing machine learning and predictive audience insights for the entertainment industry, and Kouo, an emotional analytics platform connecting key feelings to consumer viewing behavior, today announced its strategic partnership and successful results from a joint research study testing the predictability of viewer reactions to scripted and produced content in notable TV shows.

"As a storyteller myself, being able to understand audience reactions by using the power of AI technology is revolutionary," said Monica Landers, CEO and founder of StoryFit. "This work with Kouo proves that the audience truly experiences what StoryFit identifies at script stage, before the film or show is ever produced."

Despite using different modalities at different stages of a content's life cycle (pre-production vs post-production), StoryFit and Kouo successfully predicted the rating of the pilot episodes of two Crime-Drama-Mystery shows – Clarice and Killing Eve –  highlighting moments of peak audience interest, while signaling potential areas of improvement. The significant overlap in StoryFit's data and Kouo's measured audience engagement levels proves to be a groundbreaking feat in the field of predictive analytics.

StoryFit's AI engine ran on publicly available pilot scripts to measure story elements from the script. Kouo ran the physiological data from participants who remotely shared their Apple Watch data from watching the finished TV episodes during a Zoom session. Both StoryFit and Kouo identified that audience responses were 50% less emotive for Clarice than Killing Eve, which is reflected in the higher outcome in both ratings and viewership performance. On comparable scenes, StoryFit and Kouo correlated on peak emotional engagement levels, underscoring StoryFit's success in identifying an audience's emotional reactions from scripts.

"Our unique partnership with StoryFit finally gives entertainment executives and creatives the opportunity to reduce costs attached to expensive changes in post-production by gaining valuable insights early in the pre-production phase," shared Elias Benussi, Co-Founder and COO at Kouo. "The results from our study with StoryFit reveal such meaningful findings; we are thrilled to continue to demonstrate these important correlations across our partnerships data set."

StoryFit's AI engine applies hundreds of proprietary models to measure character and story elements. When matched against billions of audience data points, the story intelligence platform simulates audience responses, producing powerful predictive insights for any kind of scripted content in the pre-production stage. Kouo's models run on physiological data, registering human biometric feedback during the viewing process to characterize a viewer's emotional response. All of these capabilities are vital for studios, streaming platforms, and production companies efforts in executing entertaining and successful content.

Flytxt, a leading provider of AI-powered SaaS for Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV) maximisation, launched a Generative AI that assists digital product designers. This first-of-its-kind application of Generative AI solves a critical pain point faced by digital businesses worldwide — design of well-performing products faster and at scale.

Achieving product-market fit in volatile markets is a challenge, as the ease of adoption of digital products also lowers switching costs for customers. Generative AI is well suited to solve this challenge. It can programmatically evaluate several potential product designs to find the best match," said Dr. Vinod Vasudevan, CEO of Flytxt.

Flytxt's Generative AI can optimise price points, product attributes, bundling options, and associated benefits to meet business objectives like increasing revenue, retention, or margin.

Generative AI has been mostly used for creating original multimedia content and enabling intelligent conversations as in tools like ChatGPT. Flytxt's innovative application of Generative AI will open up new possibilities for product managers to bring in innovations in product design and ensure higher success rate. 

"Flytxt foresees widespread applicability of Generative AI in many Customer Experience workflows like product and campaign design," continued Dr. Vinod Vasudevan, CEO of Flytxt. "We will continue to integrate powerful AI capabilities like Generative AI into our solutions to help users make accurate decisions that impact long term value creation."

Furthermore, Flytxt Generative AI adds the ability to explain the decisions made by the AI. This transparency allows product managers to critically review the reasons behind the AI-recommended design, before they decide to approve and launch the product in the market.

Sports, media, and technology veteran joins Yahoo to oversee the #2 digital sports platform in the U.S.

Yahoo today announced the appointment of Ryan Spoon as the new President of Yahoo Sports. Spoon will be responsible for leading the growth and innovation of the Internet’s #2 ranked sports property, while positioning it for a new generation of sports fans.¹ He will report directly to Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone.

“Yahoo Sports has been a trusted voice and guide for hundreds of millions of fans through the years, who come to us daily for context, content and community,” said Lanzone. “We’re thrilled to welcome Ryan, a true product leader across all aspects of the digital sports experience, and whose expertise in building social sports communities and scaling engagement is perfect for leading Yahoo Sports into the future. That future truly just got more exciting with Ryan’s arrival and I cannot wait to see what we can do together.”

“I look forward to joining Yahoo at such an exciting time of growth and expansion,” said Spoon. “Yahoo Sports has been a consistent and important mainstay in the lives of millions of sports fans for over 20 years. With its first-class fantasy and product experiences, Yahoo Sports has shaped the way millions of fans engage with each other and their favorite teams. I look forward to creating new growth opportunities that take our product and content offerings to the next level.”

Spoon has held a range of prominent positions across the sports and digital media industry. Most recently, he was the COO at Sorare, a trailblazer in NFT-based fantasy sports. Spoon played a critical role in Sorare's expansion into the U.S. market, fostering the growth of the global football game, and launching Sorare: NBA and Sorare: MLB.

Prior to Sorare, Spoon served as the COO of BetMGM, one of the leading sportsbook and iGaming operators. During his tenure, BetMGM was the second largest sportsbook and iGaming operator across the markets it operated in. He also spent more than eight years at ESPN as Senior Vice President of Digital & Social, overseeing digital editorial, performance and strategy. Spoon also helped shape ESPN’s digital experiences, mobile applications and fantasy games.

Spoon is the founder of beRecruited, a recruiting platform that was acquired by The Raine Group in 2012. He is also a venture capitalist at Polaris Venture Partners, focusing on early-stage technology and consumer investments. Spoon’s individual accolades include being a two-time winner of the Sports Business Journal Forty Under 40 award in 2018 and 2020.