As agencies face rising pressure to specialize, scale, and prove business impact, Elysium Marketing Group is adding something many founder-led firms wait years to formalize: outside perspective at the top.

The full-service marketing agency has announced the formation of its inaugural Board of Advisors, a strategic move designed to support its next stage of growth as it deepens its focus on franchise, restaurant, and multi-location brands. Founded in 2015 by Elyse Lupin, Elysium has steadily expanded its footprint across digital marketing, public relations, and creative services—and now appears to be professionalizing its governance to match its ambitions.

Why an advisory board—and why now

For growing agencies, advisory boards often signal a shift from founder-led momentum to more deliberate, scalable growth. In Elysium’s case, the timing reflects both market dynamics and internal maturity.

The agency has carved out distinct niches in the franchise and restaurant sectors, industries facing their own digital transformation challenges—from local SEO and reputation management to brand consistency across locations. As client needs become more complex, agencies increasingly rely on multidisciplinary insight to guide strategy, operations, and risk management.

Elysium’s newly formed board pulls expertise from finance, legal, HR, franchising, and hospitality—areas that directly intersect with the agency’s core client base.

Meet the 2026 Board of Advisors

The Elysium Marketing Group 2026 Board of Advisors includes senior leaders with operational and executive experience across multiple industries:

• Veronica A. Cram, MBA, MAcc, Founder and Chief Consultant, InSight Strategic Solutions

• Maureen DiStefano, CFE, Director, Potbelly Sandwich Works

• Steve Lupin, Esq., Partner, Hamburg, Rubin, Mullin, Maxwell & Lupin

• Marcia O’Connor, CEO and Founder, The O’Connor Group

• Shawn Utke, CEO, The Friendly Toast

Collectively, the group brings hands-on experience in financial strategy, franchising operations, legal governance, human capital, and hospitality leadership—disciplines that often sit just outside a traditional agency’s core competencies but heavily influence client outcomes.

Strategic guidance over surface-level advice

According to Lupin, the board isn’t about optics—it’s about accountability and insight.

“While Elysium has evolved significantly from our early days, I recognize the value of collaborating with professionals esteemed in their industries who can provide smart guidance and critical insights,” Lupin said. “These individuals are lending their time and counsel as we prepare for pivotal growth and long-term success.”

That framing matters. Advisory boards can fail when they exist in name only. Elysium’s emphasis on “critical insights” suggests the board will play an active role in shaping decisions related to expansion, positioning, and client strategy.

A broader agency trend takes shape

Elysium’s move mirrors a broader trend across the agency landscape. As marketing firms compete not just on creativity but on strategic depth, many are borrowing from private equity and enterprise playbooks—introducing advisory boards to de-risk growth and sharpen focus.

This is particularly relevant in sectors like franchising and hospitality, where marketing outcomes are tightly linked to operational realities. An agency that understands unit economics, labor challenges, compliance, and multi-location governance is better positioned to deliver results that extend beyond impressions and clicks.

By formalizing access to that expertise, Elysium is signaling to clients—and competitors—that it intends to operate with greater strategic rigor.

What it means for clients and partners

For Elysium’s clients, the advisory board could translate into more informed strategy, better alignment with business realities, and a stronger long-term partner. For the agency itself, it’s a foundation for sustainable growth that doesn’t rely solely on founder intuition.

As marketing agencies continue to mature alongside their clients, governance and guidance are becoming competitive advantages in their own right. Elysium Marketing Group’s first advisory board marks a clear step in that direction.

Get in touch with our MarTech Experts.

AI agents are getting smarter—but more importantly, they’re getting better data.

Similarweb and Manus have announced a new integration that gives the Manus AI agent direct access to Similarweb’s web traffic and engagement data, a move aimed squarely at one of enterprise AI’s biggest pain points: unreliable or hallucinated insights.

Available now, the collaboration allows Manus customers to deploy autonomous agents for tasks such as building marketing plans, assessing competitive positioning, and analyzing growth opportunities—using market intelligence anchored in Similarweb’s digital data rather than guesswork.

Why data quality matters for AI agents

As AI shifts from chat-based assistants to agents that execute real business decisions, the risk profile changes. A hallucinated answer in a brainstorming session is one thing; a flawed market analysis driving budget or strategy is another entirely.

That’s the gap Similarweb and Manus are targeting.

“The kind of work Manus agents do—market analysis, growth planning—depends on trusted data,” said Omri Shtayer, VP of Data as a Service and AI at Similarweb. “Data is the fuel, AI is the engine, and agents are the aircraft. Manus has built a very high-performance jet. We help make it reliable.”

The integration is designed to ensure that when Manus agents analyze markets or competitors, they’re working from validated digital intelligence rather than scraped or inferred signals.

What Manus agents can now access

Through the integration, Manus AI customers can tap into Similarweb’s global digital intelligence platform, including:

• Monthly visits and unique visitors

• Traffic sources and digital marketing channels

• Competitive web performance benchmarks

Joint customers also gain deeper access tied to their Similarweb accounts, including advanced segmentation, geographic breakdowns, and data spanning SEO, ecommerce marketplaces, mobile apps, search, and GenAI brand visibility.

The integration runs through the Similarweb MCP Server, using the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to structure data in a way that’s optimized for AI applications—making it easier for agents to reason over complex datasets without distortion.

A fast-moving AI platform meets enterprise-grade data

The partnership arrives as Manus continues an aggressive growth trajectory. Less than nine months after launch, the company says it has surpassed $100 million in annual recurring revenue, claiming the title of the fastest startup to scale from zero to $100M.

Manus positions itself as an autonomous AI agent platform, designed to move beyond prompts and chats toward outcome-driven collaboration, where users delegate complex digital work end-to-end.

For that model to work in enterprise contexts, credibility matters.

“As AI agents take on decision-critical work, the authority of the underlying data becomes essential,” said Henry Yang, co-founder and CMO of Manus. “Similarweb provides a trusted view of digital markets that helps ground our agents’ outputs in reality, not speculation.”

Similarweb’s broader AI strategy comes into focus

The deal also highlights Similarweb’s own push into AI-native workflows. The company has been building purpose-driven agents internally, focused on sales, prospecting, and content marketing use cases where speed and accuracy directly affect revenue.

By integrating with Manus, Similarweb extends its data into a broader agent ecosystem—reaching users who may not yet be customers, while reinforcing its role as foundational infrastructure for AI-driven marketing decisions.

Notably, Similarweb is among the first technology partners Manus has integrated at this depth, joining Stripe for payments and Microsoft for Microsoft 365 access.

Setting expectations for agent-powered marketing

The collaboration reflects a larger shift in martech: AI agents are no longer novelty tools. They’re being asked to plan, analyze, and recommend—functions traditionally reserved for senior marketers and strategists.

That raises the bar for accuracy.

By pairing Manus’ general-purpose agent architecture with Similarweb’s market intelligence, the two companies are betting that the future of AI-powered marketing isn’t just faster insights, but defensible insights.

As Or Offer, CEO of Similarweb, put it: “Manus has been a pioneer in general AI agents. We’re proud to support that vision with data marketers can trust.”

For brands experimenting with autonomous AI in marketing, the message is clear: smart agents still need solid ground to stand on.

Get in touch with our MarTech Experts.

In a digital marketing world crowded with strategy decks and disconnected execution, Robinson Consulting is growing by doing something deceptively simple: owning both.

The Germany-focused digital marketing advisory has reached full client capacity just 90 days after refocusing its service model in mid-2025—a pace of growth driven not by aggressive advertising, but by fast, visible client results and referrals.

For founder Benjamin Robinson, the momentum validates a clear hypothesis about what small businesses actually need from marketing partners—and what they’re tired of paying for.

Fixing a broken marketing split

Robinson Consulting’s revamped Results-Driven Digital Marketing Advisory is built around a two-part premise that challenges the traditional consulting-agency divide.

On one side are consultants, who diagnose problems and deliver strategy but rarely implement. On the other are agencies, which execute campaigns without fully owning the underlying strategy. Robinson Consulting aims to collapse that gap by providing both strategic direction and hands-on execution through a single partnership.

“Business owners have no need for one more strategy deck that ends up collecting dust,” Robinson said. “Results come quickly when strategy and execution come from one source.”

That integrated approach appears to be resonating with founders and small teams who lack internal marketing departments—and the patience for long feedback loops.

Who the firm serves—and why it’s working

The advisory focuses on three core client segments:

• Solo entrepreneurs building visibility and personal brands

• Self-employed professionals, such as consultants and coaches, looking to attract better-fit clients

• Small and mid-sized companies that need senior-level marketing guidance without hiring full-time staff

Services span strategic digital marketing advisory, personal brand positioning, lead generation campaigns, and direct marketing implementation—designed to move from plan to execution without handoffs.

What differentiates the model isn’t breadth, but speed.

Speed as a competitive advantage

Robinson Consulting emphasizes rapid iteration based on real market feedback, streamlining processes so clients see traction quickly rather than months into an engagement. That velocity has become a growth engine of its own: early wins lead to referrals, which in turn fill capacity.

The firm has also benefited from state-backed subsidies that lower the barrier to professional marketing guidance for eligible businesses. Combined with quick results, the funding support accelerates both adoption and word-of-mouth growth.

In a market where trust is often slow to build, early proof appears to be doing the selling.

A high-touch model—by design

Despite hitting capacity quickly, Robinson Consulting isn’t racing to scale indiscriminately. Robinson says the firm plans to grow selectively, prioritizing confidentiality, accessibility, and close collaboration with each client—particularly across German-speaking small and mid-sized businesses.

“Trust is fundamental for successful working relationships,” Robinson said. “That’s why we ensure confidentiality and maintain accessibility with every individual client.”

That restraint may be strategic. As more founders seek alternatives to bloated agencies and abstract consulting, boutique advisory models that combine senior insight with execution are gaining appeal—but only if they preserve quality.

A signal of shifting demand

Robinson Consulting’s rapid growth reflects a broader trend in marketing services: businesses want outcomes, not artifacts. Strategy without execution feels incomplete; execution without strategy feels wasteful.

By collapsing the two into a single engagement—and proving results quickly—the firm has found a model that aligns with how small businesses actually operate.

Hitting full capacity in 90 days doesn’t just mark a milestone for Robinson Consulting. It underscores a growing reality in modern marketing: speed, clarity, and accountability now matter more than scale.

Get in touch with our MarTech Experts.

For years, marketers have chased content inspiration through keyword tools, trend reports, and competitive audits. According to a new analysis from Digital Silk, many of the most valuable ideas are already hiding in plain sight—inside everyday customer interactions.

The digital agency, known for its work in branding, custom web design, and digital marketing, has published a new article titled How to Get Content Ideas From Customers, outlining how organizations systematically extract content insights from customer feedback rather than relying solely on intuition or trends.

The takeaway is straightforward but timely: customer-led content ideation works best when treated as a structured research discipline, not a reactive exercise.

From anecdotes to actionable insight

Digital Silk’s analysis draws on widely documented marketing practices and research around audience engagement, feedback loops, and behavioral analysis. Instead of positioning customer input as ad hoc inspiration, the article frames it as a repeatable process that complements traditional content planning frameworks.

“Customer interactions often surface recurring questions and themes that inform content development,” said Gabriel Shaoolian, CEO of Digital Silk. “The article outlines commonly referenced ways organizations review customer input when shaping content plans.”

That distinction matters. As content saturation increases, relevance—not volume—is becoming the differentiator. Listening closely to customers, Digital Silk argues, helps brands answer real questions instead of guessing what audiences might want to read.

Seven customer-led sources shaping content ideas

At the core of the article is a breakdown of seven commonly referenced customer-led inputs that organizations use to guide content strategy. None are new individually, but Digital Silk’s analysis shows how they become more powerful when treated collectively.

1. Customer questions and inquiries
Questions submitted through sales calls, customer support tickets, live chats, and contact forms often reveal consistent information gaps. When patterns emerge, they point directly to content opportunities that can preempt future friction.

2. Customer reviews and testimonials
Reviews don’t just signal satisfaction or dissatisfaction—they capture the language customers use to describe value, concerns, and expectations. Analyzing phrasing and recurring themes can help brands mirror customer vocabulary in blogs, guides, and landing pages.

3. Surveys and feedback forms
Structured feedback tools allow organizations to gather direct insight into customer needs, preferences, and challenges at scale. When aggregated, survey responses often expose unmet expectations or misunderstood features worth addressing through content.

4. Sales and support team insights
Frontline teams are often overlooked content strategists. Sales and support professionals interact with customers daily and observe objections, misconceptions, and decision triggers that rarely appear in analytics dashboards.

5. Social media interactions
Comments, direct messages, and discussion threads on social platforms frequently surface confusion, curiosity, or debate around specific topics. High-engagement posts can signal where deeper explanatory content is needed.

6. Community forums and user groups
Online communities, user groups, and third-party forums provide unfiltered insight into how customers describe problems and solutions in their own words—often revealing pain points brands wouldn’t identify internally.

7. Behavioral and usage data
Website analytics, content engagement metrics, and user behavior patterns help validate which topics sustain attention over time. This data can confirm whether customer-inspired content ideas resonate once published.

A research-driven approach to content ideation

Rather than presenting these sources as isolated tactics, Digital Silk’s analysis emphasizes organization and evaluation. Customer input is most effective, the article suggests, when it’s systematically reviewed alongside keyword research, performance data, and business objectives.

This approach helps teams avoid chasing every comment or complaint and instead focus on themes that consistently align with audience needs and brand positioning.

In practice, that means treating customer-led insights as a qualitative layer within a broader content research process—one that balances what customers say with how they behave and what the business needs to communicate.

Why customer-led content matters now

The timing of Digital Silk’s analysis is notable. As generative AI accelerates content production, differentiation is shifting away from output volume toward relevance and authenticity. Content rooted in real customer language and real customer questions is harder to fake—and more likely to build trust.

For B2B and B2C brands alike, customer-led ideation also offers a secondary benefit: alignment. When content reflects what sales and support teams hear daily, it reinforces messaging consistency across the organization.

Turning listening into strategy

Digital Silk isn’t arguing that customer feedback should replace traditional content strategy tools. Instead, the article positions customer-led inputs as a grounding mechanism—one that keeps content efforts anchored to reality rather than assumptions.

The result is content that answers actual questions, addresses real objections, and speaks in language customers already understand.

In an era where attention is scarce and skepticism is high, that grounding may be one of the most sustainable advantages a brand can build.

Get in touch with our MarTech Experts.

">

IFS is making a strong statement in the crowded field service management (FSM) software market. The industrial AI specialist has been named the only Customers’ Choice in the 2025 Gartner Peer Insights Voice of the Customer: Field Service Management report—a distinction that puts real user sentiment front and center, not analyst theory.

Unlike Magic Quadrant placements, which balance execution and vision, the Voice of the Customer report reflects verified feedback from end users who live with the software every day. In that context, being the sole Customers’ Choice is more than a marketing badge—it signals consistent satisfaction across product capabilities, support, and overall experience.

Why This Matters in a Competitive FSM Market

Field service management has quietly become one of the most strategic battlegrounds in enterprise software. As manufacturers, utilities, energy providers, and asset-heavy industries push toward servitization, FSM platforms are no longer just about scheduling technicians. They’re about uptime, predictive maintenance, workforce optimization, and recurring service revenue.

IFS has leaned heavily into this shift with what it calls Industrial AI—purpose-built AI designed for complex, asset-centric environments rather than generic enterprise workflows. Gartner peer reviewers appear to agree that this focus is paying off.

According to Gartner’s methodology, vendors placed in the upper-right “Customers’ Choice” quadrant score highly on both user interest and overall experience relative to the market. In 2025, IFS is the only FSM vendor to meet that bar.

Industrial AI Moves From Buzzword to Business Value

IFS has spent the past several years positioning AI as a practical tool for industrial operations, not an abstract innovation layer. In field service management, that means applying AI to real-world problems: predicting failures before they happen, optimizing technician utilization, and helping service organizations grow margins without sacrificing customer experience.

Cathie Hall, Chief Product and Customer Officer at IFS, framed the recognition as validation of that strategy.

“As IFS continues to drive forward the Industrial AI revolution, we feel this recognition represents an important independent validation of our leadership position in this market, and our focus on innovation.”

That focus aligns with a broader industry trend. Enterprises are increasingly skeptical of AI promises that don’t map cleanly to measurable outcomes. Vendors that can show tangible improvements in efficiency, service quality, and revenue growth are gaining an edge—and customer reviews suggest IFS is landing on the right side of that divide.

What Customers Are Actually Saying

The Gartner Peer Insights report includes direct feedback from practitioners across services, manufacturing, energy, utilities, and IT services—industries where field operations are mission-critical.

Several themes stand out in customer reviews:

• End-to-end functionality: Users highlight IFS’s ability to support the entire service lifecycle, from planning and scheduling to execution and analytics.

• Operational gains: Customers cite measurable improvements in utilization, efficiency, and user experience over multi-year deployments.

• Collaborative product development: Reviewers repeatedly mention IFS’s willingness to listen and reflect customer needs in its product roadmap.

• Strong support model: Fast response times and proactive engagement appear to be a differentiator compared to some larger, less agile competitors.

In a market where FSM tools often feel bolted onto broader ERP or asset management platforms, this feedback suggests IFS has managed to balance breadth with depth.

How IFS Compares to Rivals

The FSM market includes heavyweights such as Salesforce, ServiceNow, Oracle, SAP, and specialized players focused on scheduling or mobile workforce management. Many of these vendors offer strong point solutions or benefit from ecosystem scale.

IFS’s advantage appears to lie in its industry-first design philosophy. Rather than adapting generic CRM or IT service workflows for field use, IFS builds FSM capabilities specifically for asset-intensive environments. That approach resonates with manufacturers and utilities that need more than basic work order management.

The Customers’ Choice distinction also highlights a potential gap between vendor messaging and customer reality elsewhere in the market. Not all well-known brands translate market presence into high satisfaction—something buyers increasingly factor into procurement decisions.

A Pattern of Gartner Recognition

This isn’t an isolated win for IFS. The company was also named a Leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Cloud ERP for Product-Centric Enterprises and earned a Customers’ Choice for Cloud ERP in manufacturing in a previous Gartner Peer Insights report.

Taken together, these recognitions point to a consistent theme: IFS is gaining traction not just with analysts, but with the customers deploying its software at scale. For enterprises evaluating long-term digital transformation partners, that combination carries weight.

Implications for Service-Centric Enterprises

For organizations where service is a growth engine rather than a cost center, the message is clear. FSM platforms are evolving into strategic systems that sit at the intersection of AI, asset management, and customer experience.

IFS’s recognition suggests that buyers are rewarding vendors who:

• Deliver AI that works in industrial contexts

• Support complex, global service operations

• Actively incorporate customer feedback into product evolution

As economic pressure forces enterprises to do more with existing assets, demand for intelligent field service solutions is likely to accelerate. Vendors that can prove customer value—rather than just market vision—will be best positioned to win.

The Bottom Line

IFS’s position as the only Customers’ Choice in Gartner’s 2025 Voice of the Customer: Field Service Management report underscores a growing reality in enterprise tech: credibility increasingly comes from users, not slogans.

For industrial and service-centric organizations weighing FSM investments, this recognition signals that IFS isn’t just talking about Industrial AI—it’s delivering outcomes customers are willing to stand behind.

Get in touch with our MarTech Experts.

DaVinci Commerce, formerly known as Jivox, is betting that the next phase of commerce marketing won’t be managed by dashboards and manual workflows—but by AI agents operating at enterprise scale. The company announced a new strategic round of financing to accelerate growth of its AI-native DaVinci Commerce platform, as global brands and commerce media networks increasingly adopt agentic AI to manage the complexity of modern retail advertising.

The funding arrives at a moment when commerce media is booming but operationally strained. Brands are pouring budgets into retail media networks, yet many struggle to execute campaigns fast enough, across enough retailers, with the compliance and measurement rigor large enterprises require. DaVinci Commerce positions itself squarely at that pressure point.

From Jivox to DaVinci: A Strategic Reset Around Agentic AI

The rebrand from Jivox to DaVinci Commerce is more than cosmetic. It reflects a strategic shift toward what the company calls agentic commerce marketing—AI systems capable of autonomously executing multi-step marketing workflows that once demanded extensive human coordination.

Originally launched in August 2023, the platform was built from the ground up to be AI-native. Rather than layering AI onto legacy ad tech, DaVinci Commerce integrates content generation, optimization, media activation, and measurement into a single system designed for scale, speed, and enterprise control.

That positioning appears to be resonating. DaVinci Commerce was recently named a Top 50 Innovation at the 2026 National Retail Federation (NRF) Innovators Showcase, signaling early industry validation for its approach to agentic AI in commerce marketing.

Why Commerce Media Needs Agents, Not More Tools

Commerce media is now one of the fastest-growing segments in digital advertising. According to eMarketer’s May 2025 forecast, U.S. commerce media ad spend is expected to grow at a 15.3% CAGR from 2025 to 2029. But growth alone isn’t the problem brands are trying to solve.

The real friction lies in execution.

Retail media campaigns must be launched quickly, localized across retailers, customized by audience and product availability, and governed by brand, legal, and retailer-specific rules. Add in closed-loop measurement expectations and the convergence with programmatic buying, and the operational burden becomes enormous.

DaVinci Commerce was designed to operate at this intersection—where commerce media, programmatic advertising, and AI-driven automation collide.

“Commerce media growth is no longer limited by media spend but constrained by the ability to handle speedy launches, multi-retailer complexity, and compliance,” said Diaz Nesamoney, Founder and CEO of DaVinci Commerce. “We built the platform from the ground up to be AI-native.”

What DaVinci Commerce Actually Does

At its core, DaVinci Commerce enables brands to operationalize agentic AI across commerce marketing through two primary capabilities.

Commerce Content Optimization uses AI to generate, adapt, and deliver commerce ads and content across programmatic environments. The goal is to enable deep personalization—creative tailored to shopper context and intent—without sacrificing scale or brand consistency.

Commerce Media Activation automates campaign launches across commerce media networks in under five minutes. That speed is critical in a retail environment where promotions, inventory, and consumer demand shift rapidly. Importantly, the platform enforces enterprise-grade guardrails, ensuring brand safety, legal compliance, and retailer rules are respected even as automation increases.

Together, these capabilities aim to reduce the cost and complexity of running commerce campaigns while improving performance through personalization and faster time-to-market.

Beyond Ads: Agentic Shopping Experiences

DaVinci Commerce is also pushing beyond traditional ad execution into AI-driven shopping experiences. Instead of directing users to crowded product landing pages, the platform supports agentic shopping flows where consumers engage with AI-powered shopping agents.

These agents guide discovery, surface relevant product options, and help shoppers evaluate choices in real time. The result is a more conversational, intent-driven path to purchase—one that links ad exposure directly to verified transactions and incremental sales measurement.

This approach aligns closely with broader shifts toward LLM-driven conversational commerce, where discovery increasingly happens through AI interfaces rather than static search results or category pages.

A Notable Investor and Board Lineup

The strategic funding round is backed by a group of investors and executives with deep roots in AI, enterprise software, and commerce.

Saama Capital, a Silicon Valley firm focused on AI and commerce technologies, led the round. Its founder and managing partner, Ash Lilani, has joined DaVinci Commerce’s board.

The investor roster also includes Amit Singhal, former Senior Vice President and Google Fellow who led Google’s core search team for over 15 years; Sohaib Abbasi, former CEO and Chairman of Informatica and an early Oracle executive; and Cosmos Nicolau, a senior engineering leader with experience at Google, Akamai, GRAIL Bio, and Neeva.

The board has also expanded to include Jerry Porter, recently Chief Research and Innovation Officer at Procter & Gamble Fabric & Homecare, alongside existing members Greg Archibald of PayPal and Robert Chatwani, President of DocuSign and former CMO at Atlassian and eBay North America.

For a company operating at the intersection of AI, commerce, and enterprise marketing, the lineup adds both credibility and strategic depth.

Why CPG and Retail Brands Are Paying Attention

Consumer packaged goods brands, in particular, are under pressure to make better use of first-party data as signal loss reshapes digital advertising. Commerce media offers a rare combination of scale and deterministic purchase data—but only if brands can activate it effectively.

“Prior to commerce media and LLM-powered agentic commerce, brands were often flying blind,” said Jerry Porter. “DaVinci Commerce makes it easy for brands to connect exposure, discovery, and purchase.”

That promise—closed-loop visibility paired with personalized engagement—is what many CPG and retail marketers have been chasing for years.

The Bigger Picture: Agentic AI Comes to MarTech

DaVinci Commerce’s timing is notable. Enterprises across marketing and commerce are moving beyond generative AI experiments toward agentic systems that can execute, optimize, and learn with limited human intervention.

In that sense, DaVinci Commerce isn’t just competing with retail media tools—it’s positioning itself as infrastructure for the next phase of commerce marketing, where AI agents work alongside human teams to accelerate execution without sacrificing trust or control.

As agentic AI moves from concept to deployment, platforms that can balance automation with enterprise governance are likely to define the category. This funding round suggests DaVinci Commerce intends to be one of them.

Get in touch with our MarTech Experts.

TikTok may be where trends are born, but increasingly it’s also where customers are found—especially for local businesses trying to stay relevant in a video-first internet. Scorpion, a major digital marketing and technology provider for local and SMB-focused brands, is making a direct play into that shift. The company announced it has joined the TikTok Marketing Partners Program as an officially badged Marketing Technology Partner, deepening its integration with the platform and expanding what its customers can do on TikTok.

The move positions Scorpion as a conduit between TikTok’s fast-moving ad ecosystem and the small and mid-sized businesses that often lack the time, expertise, or internal teams to manage it effectively. For TikTok, it’s another step toward making its ad platform more accessible beyond large brands and agencies.

Why TikTok Matters for Local Businesses Now

With more than 1 billion monthly active users globally, TikTok has evolved from an entertainment app into a full-fledged discovery and commerce engine. For local businesses—law firms, home services, healthcare providers, franchises, and regional brands—TikTok offers something other platforms increasingly struggle to deliver: attention.

But attention alone isn’t enough. TikTok advertising requires constant iteration, creative testing, and performance monitoring, all of which can be daunting for SMBs already stretched thin.

“It’s no secret that TikTok is a very unique space. It’s where culture often happens and is being created. And local businesses should be a part of that,” said Ashlie Kim, Senior Vice President of Advertising at Scorpion. “This partnership gives our customers the ability to easily show up, reach more of their audience, and improve their performance.”

The subtext is clear: TikTok is no longer optional, but it needs to be simplified if local businesses are going to use it consistently and effectively.

What the TikTok Marketing Partners Badge Signals

TikTok’s Marketing Partners Program is designed to connect advertisers with vetted technology providers that meet the platform’s standards for integration quality, scale, and innovation. For Scorpion, earning the Marketing Technology Partner badge signals TikTok’s confidence in the company’s ability to help businesses activate, manage, and optimize campaigns without unnecessary friction.

Rather than forcing SMBs to learn TikTok Ads Manager from scratch, Scorpion enables them to advertise through tools and workflows they already use. This “meet businesses where they are” approach mirrors a broader trend in martech: platforms win adoption not by adding features, but by reducing complexity.

For TikTok, partners like Scorpion extend the reach of its ad solutions into local and regional markets that are difficult to serve directly at scale.

What Scorpion Brings to TikTok Advertising

As a TikTok Marketing Technology Partner, Scorpion now offers a tighter, more automated connection between its marketing platform and TikTok’s ad infrastructure. The focus is on operational efficiency and performance, rather than flashy features.

Key capabilities include:

• Streamlined campaign creation and management, reducing setup time and technical barriers

• Optimization tools tailored for SMB performance, not enterprise-only use cases

• Integrated reporting and insights, enabling faster, data-driven decisions

• Automated workflows that minimize manual effort and operational overhead

• Scaled support for local and multi-location businesses, a core Scorpion audience

For SMBs that typically juggle marketing alongside daily operations, automation and simplification can be the difference between running TikTok ads sporadically—or not at all—and making them a repeatable growth channel.

TikTok’s Push to Broaden Its Advertiser Base

TikTok has been steadily investing in partnerships to lower the barrier to entry for advertisers. While major brands have already embraced the platform, the next phase of growth depends on attracting and retaining SMBs at scale.

“Businesses of every size are looking for trusted, efficient ways to activate on TikTok,” said Lorry Destainville, Head of Product Partnerships at TikTok. “Our Channel Sales Partners bring the technology, automation, and expertise needed to meet that demand.”

This reflects a familiar strategy seen at Google, Meta, and Amazon: partner ecosystems do the heavy lifting of onboarding and servicing smaller advertisers, while the platform focuses on reach, formats, and measurement.

How This Fits Into the Broader MarTech Landscape

Scorpion’s TikTok partnership highlights a larger shift in marketing technology. SMB-focused platforms are no longer just managing search, display, or social ads in isolation—they’re becoming centralized operating systems for customer acquisition.

At the same time, TikTok is evolving from a standalone channel into a must-have line item in local marketing mixes. The challenge is execution. Unlike search ads, TikTok requires creative experimentation, cultural awareness, and frequent optimization.

By embedding TikTok more deeply into its platform, Scorpion is effectively abstracting that complexity away from its customers. That approach aligns with where martech is heading: fewer dashboards, more automation, and tighter integrations between platforms and execution tools.

The Bottom Line

Scorpion joining TikTok’s Marketing Partners Program isn’t just a badge—it’s a signal that TikTok advertising is entering a more mature, SMB-friendly phase. For local businesses, it means easier access to one of the most influential platforms in digital culture today. For TikTok, it means broader adoption through trusted intermediaries that understand the realities of small and mid-sized teams.

As short-form video continues to shape how consumers discover brands, partnerships like this may determine which businesses show up—and which ones get left scrolling past.

Get in touch with our MarTech Experts.

">

Bloomreach is making a decisive move to help brands stay visible—and in control—as shopping behavior shifts into conversational AI. The company announced Loomi Connect, a new capability that makes Bloomreach’s product discovery technology available through the Model Context Protocol (MCP), allowing retailers to bring their ecommerce search intelligence directly into ChatGPT and other conversational AI platforms.

In practical terms, Loomi Connect lets the same algorithms, ranking logic, and performance signals that drive conversions on a retailer’s website also determine how products surface inside AI-powered conversations. As more consumers turn to ChatGPT as a shopping assistant, Bloomreach is positioning conversational AI not as a threat to ecommerce, but as its next major channel.

Conversational Commerce Is No Longer Theoretical

Bloomreach’s launch is grounded in a sharp shift in consumer behavior. According to a company survey of more than 1,000 U.S. consumers, nearly half now shop with ChatGPT several times a week or more. More striking: when asked to choose between ChatGPT and a traditional ecommerce site, 41% said they would pick ChatGPT.

That data underscores a growing reality for retailers. Product discovery is no longer confined to search bars and category pages. It’s happening inside conversations—often before a shopper ever lands on a brand-owned site.

For years, brands invested heavily in on-site search optimization, merchandising rules, and personalization engines to control how products are discovered. Conversational AI threatens to bypass much of that work unless brands can inject their own intelligence into those experiences. Loomi Connect is Bloomreach’s answer to that problem.

What Loomi Connect Actually Does

Loomi Connect integrates Bloomreach’s product discovery stack directly into ChatGPT apps built on the OpenAI marketplace. Instead of relying on generic recommendations or static product feeds, ChatGPT can surface products using the same AI models and behavioral data that power a retailer’s ecommerce search.

That includes signals such as:

• Historical conversion performance

• Product availability and relevance

• Customer behavior patterns

• Merchandising logic refined over years of optimization

The result is product recommendations that are not only relevant to consumers, but also aligned with business goals such as profitability, inventory management, and conversion efficiency.

Equally important, Loomi Connect captures interaction data from conversational channels and feeds it back into Bloomreach’s customer profiles. This allows personalization to flow both ways—between a brand’s ecommerce site and AI-driven conversations—rather than fragmenting customer data across disconnected touchpoints.

Why MCP Matters for Commerce

The launch also highlights the growing role of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) as a bridge between enterprise systems and AI platforms. MCP enables structured, governed access to proprietary data and logic, making it possible for brands to expose intelligence to AI systems without relinquishing control.

For commerce teams, this is critical. Letting conversational AI “freestyle” product discovery can lead to inconsistent recommendations, margin erosion, or compliance risks. By plugging into MCP, Bloomreach allows brands to define how their data is used, which rules apply, and how recommendations are generated—even inside third-party AI environments.

This mirrors how brands approached earlier channels like email, SMS, and social media: initial experimentation followed by a push for control, consistency, and measurement.

ChatGPT As A Channel, Not A Competitor

Bloomreach is explicit about how it views the role of conversational AI in ecommerce.

“ChatGPT isn’t the competitor to the brand experience—it’s the next channel within it,” said Raj De Datta, co-founder and CEO of Bloomreach. “Brands need to take control of their presence on conversational channels, just as they did with email, SMS, and social media.”

That framing is significant. Rather than resisting AI-driven discovery, Bloomreach is encouraging brands to treat ChatGPT as an extension of their owned experience—one that should reflect the same intelligence, personalization, and strategic intent.

This stance aligns with a broader MarTech trend: brands increasingly accept that discovery happens off-site, but they still want to influence how it happens. Loomi Connect offers a way to project brand-specific intelligence into environments that retailers don’t directly own.

The Stakes For Retailers And Brands

The implications go beyond better recommendations. As conversational AI becomes a primary interface for shopping research and decision-making, brands that fail to integrate risk losing visibility—or worse, losing control over how their products are positioned.

Generic AI recommendations can prioritize popularity over profitability, relevance over compliance, or convenience over brand strategy. Bloomreach’s approach aims to ensure that when products appear in AI conversations, they do so on the brand’s terms.

For retailers already using Bloomreach for onsite search and personalization, Loomi Connect offers continuity. Years of tuning algorithms, refining relevance models, and analyzing shopper behavior don’t disappear in the age of conversational commerce—they extend into it.

How This Fits Into The Broader MarTech Landscape

Loomi Connect lands at the intersection of three major trends reshaping marketing and commerce technology:

1. Conversational interfaces replacing traditional search

2. AI platforms becoming new discovery gateways

3. Brands demanding governance and measurement in AI-driven channels

While many vendors are racing to “add AI,” Bloomreach is addressing a more nuanced challenge: how to operationalize AI across channels without fragmenting data, logic, or control.

In that sense, Loomi Connect isn’t just a feature—it’s infrastructure for a world where product discovery is increasingly conversational, decentralized, and mediated by large language models.

The Bottom Line

Bloomreach’s Loomi Connect signals a shift in how ecommerce leaders should think about AI-driven shopping. Conversational platforms like ChatGPT are no longer experimental—they’re becoming default entry points for discovery.

By enabling brands to bring their proven search intelligence into those conversations, Bloomreach is helping retailers protect relevance, consistency, and performance as commerce moves beyond the website. For brands navigating the next phase of digital commerce, that control may prove as important as reach itself.

Get in touch with our MarTech Experts.