Expanded Sage AI by Braze™ Offering, Including 'AI Item Recommendations,’ Increases Personalization and Decreases Time to Purchase

Braze, the leading customer engagement platform that empowers brands to Be Absolutely Engaging™, today announced several new AI features across its platform designed to inspire marketers' creativity and increase efficiency in delivering more personalized, tailored experiences, all powered through Sage AI by Braze™. 

With a wealth of knowledge at our fingertips and the advent of AI-powered tools, marketers can inspire creativity with speed and precision. The latest AI features from Braze reflect this paradigm shift, with recent research indicating that 79% of marketers recognize AI's potential to ignite innovation. As we leverage AI to simplify tasks and bridge the gap between aspiration and reality, customer engagement is being reshaped in profound ways. From streamlining processes to inspiring innovation, Sage AI by Braze™ empowers marketers to optimize customer journeys and craft unforgettable cross-channel experiences that resonate deeply with audiences and accelerate the customer’s next best action. In addition to driving conversions and boosting brand equity, Braze helps brands forge authentic connections, build trust and drive reciprocal value with each interaction. In this landscape, Sage AI by Braze™ is a trusted partner for marketers, offering tailored recommendations, sophisticated personalization, effective content generation, and the ability to drive high-value actions at scale.

“The AI Item Recommendations feature has been instrumental in driving a remarkable 3X increase in our purchase rates,” said Pam Shih, Team Lead CRM at KoRo Handels GmbH. “By intelligently suggesting tailored products from the Braze catalog during onboarding sessions, it not only reveals invaluable insights into new user behaviors, but also empowers us to deliver highly personalized recommendations from our extensive catalog of over 1,000 products.”

New features added to Sage AI by Braze™ include:

• Enhance Relevant Experiences and Increase Purchase Rates with Personalized Recommendations: Expanded AI Item Recommendations capabilities allows brands to create additional recommendation models, with more frequent item updates. This helps deliver personalized item suggestions such as products, services, experiences, and offers, tailored to each individual's preferences. By leveraging AI to match customers with the items most likely to resonate with them, brands can create more meaningful experiences, build stronger connections, boost brand equity, and drive greater conversions and revenue growth. AI Item Recommendations seamlessly integrate into campaigns on any Braze channel and eliminate the need for complex setups, technical resources, or additional integrations.
• Personalize Every Touchpoint and Maximize Revenue with Personalized Paths: Personalized Paths, a new feature that marketers can use in Braze Canvas, to scale sophisticated personalization by seamlessly matching each customer with the most relevant message, copy, creative, channel, and offer. Personalized Paths feature experiments, automates, and shares the message variant each individual is more likely to prefer at any step in the journey, driving deeper engagement and creating more personalized and creative experiences for each customer.
• Strengthen Brand Equity and Improve Time to Value with Tone Control: Tone Control generative functionality, powered by OpenAI GPT-4 Turbo, allows marketers to dictate AI-generated copy tones directly within the AI Copywriting Assistant. This feature inspires content creation, fosters creativity, and ensures authentic customer experiences that can be generated quickly and inserted on any channel. Combined with testing and optimization, brands can compare tones, and swiftly share resonant messages.
• Addressing Email Metric Reliability with Estimated Real Open Rate: Estimated Real Open Rate addresses Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) challenges, offering marketers reliable insights. Braze introduces a new metric in its Email Campaign Performance analytics, utilizing advanced analytical modeling for accurate email open rates, guiding effective insights and fostering creative experiences.

“The magic of Braze lies in our ability to fuel marketers’ efficiency and creativity in order to power relevant and memorable experiences that drive business outcomes. AI simply supercharges this ability. Already we are seeing marketers generate uniquely personalized moments with a speed and ease that wouldn’t be possible without modern AI capabilities,” said Kevin Wang, Chief Product Officer of Braze. “These latest Sage AI by Braze™ features focus not just on users saving time in their day-to-day, but on capabilities such as Item Recommendations and Personalized Paths that allow brands to harness the real-time data flow in Braze to drive even more meaningful outcomes. These are big steps towards helping marketers realize the full potential of AI.”

Merkle, dentsu's leading technology-enabled, data-driven customer experience management (CXM) company, will be presenting several sessions during the upcoming global Adobe Summit 2024, to be held March 26-28 in Las Vegas, NV. Merkle is a global platinum Adobe partner that helps global brands unlock the power of the full Adobe tech stacks to explore and enhance the customer experience.

As an Adobe Summit diamond sponsor, Merkle will host two sessions that showcase key components of customer experience innovation:

• How Kellanova's Brands Transformed Loyalty with Content Supply Chain: Philip Wilkinson, senior director consumer & shopper experience Europe at Kellanova, and Billy Hanna, experience platforms practice lead at Merkle, will explain how Kellanova is working toward transforming consumer loyalty across different brands and regions. Kellanova, previously known as the Kellogg Company, is working to create experiences that encourage loyalty through innovation.
  • Date/time: Tuesday, March 26, at 2:30 p.m. PDT
• Take Charge: Driving Maturity using the Adobe Martech Ecosystem: The landscape is changing dramatically. Today's marketer is challenged to increase operational efficiencies and drive greater revenue growth across more channels than ever before. In this session, Sayantika Sikdar, VP, analytics at Merkle, and Barry Latimer, SVP, audience at Merkle, will discuss how to leverage Adobe's Experience Platform (AEP) as your hub while integrating with the wider Adobe ecosystem to drive more value for CX, Marketing and Sales.
  • Date/time: Thursday, March 28, at 10:30 a.m. PDT

With the deprecation of third-party cookies, identity is more important than ever. Merkle's identity resolution tool, Merkury, enables the Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) to excel. Merkury is the first identity partner integrated with AEP. With Merkury, Adobe customers have the ability to standardize and unify customer profile data to the Merkury person ID to create a single view of the customer across all data sources. Enhanced customer profiles with Merkury's extensive US consumer data offers improved insights, relevance, and expanded reach to customers and prospects. This further expands Merkle's strong partnership with Adobe, which includes recognition as an industry leader in Adobe Services.

"As a sponsor at this year's Adobe Summit, we look forward to showcasing the work we're doing with Kellanova to customize and implement Adobe's innovative technology solutions," said Roxanne Paulus, global Adobe practice lead at Merkle. "We have been working closely with Adobe for many years and recently received specialization as an Adobe Experience Manager Run and Operate partner and a Real-Time Customer Data Platform (RT-CDP) partner. The integration of Merkury with AEP and the addition of new specializations bring new depth to what Merkle and Adobe can achieve together for brands."

Dhillon will help accelerate Contentstack's next-level growth and take composable digital experiences to the world's leading brands

Contentstack, the leading Composable Digital Experience Platform (DXP) provider, today announced Gurdeep Dhillon as its new Chief Marketing Officer. Based in Sunnyvale, California, Dhillon brings almost 20 years of enterprise software experience and Global Marketing leadership responsibility at industry giants SAP, Marketo, and Adobe. Most recently, he helped lead Zuora into the next phase of the "Subscription Economy."

Dhillon is a proven driver of growth and market presence and a builder and nurturer of high-performing teams. His three-year tenure in Adobe's Digital Experience business as a leader of both the Marketo and Magento marketing organizations helped him build expertise and empathy for Marketing and Commerce leaders who are responsible for driving efficient growth. 

"Even some of the best known brands in the world are facing a relevancy crisis as they seek to gain a sustainable competitive advantage. Contentstack has the vision, product, and commitment to no-fail customer care that these brands can count on to deliver exceptional digital experiences," said Dhillon. "The team has built something special – from the platform all the way to the culture. That made this an obvious choice for me."

Dhillon will report to Contentstack Founder and CEO Neha Sampat. "Gurdeep is a great fit for our Contentstack tribe, both in expertise and values alignment," said Sampat. "He understands the industry, and what it takes to capitalize on opportunity, and lead category creation. He knows digital experiences are the new competitive frontline for brands. Best yet, he is well regarded for his leadership style and ability to bring teams together to do the best work of their lives."

"Contentstack already is unlocking growth for brands around the world and has the ability to scale that impact tremendously. Gurdeep is the right executive to help them get there," said Teddie Wardi, managing director at Insight Partners, a Contentstack investor. "We are confident in this smart pairing and look forward to supporting the company on its ongoing journey from inventors of headless CMS to a multi-product organization pioneering a new era of composable digital experiences."

Contentstack has raised a total of $169 million in its quest to help brands gain an experience edge. In 2023, Forrester Research named Contentstack a "Strong Performer" in its report, "The Forrester Wave™: Digital Experience Platforms, Q4 2023", and the company ranked 268 on the 2023 Deloitte Technology Fast 500™ Fastest-Growing Companies in North America list. Most recently, Contentstack was recognized as number 23 on Forbes' 2024 America's Best Startup Employers List.

The GenAI-powered solution provides scene-level contextual targeting to help advertisers align the emotional sentiment of their campaign creatives with content closest to the ad break, improving viewer memorability and engagement

Wurl, a leader in data-driven solutions for CTV, today announced BrandDiscovery – a GenAI-based CTV advertising solution that enables advertisers to align their ads with content in real time. Campaigns targeted with BrandDiscovery allow advertisers to present ads within programming that contextually aligns with their creatives based on emotions, genres, and brand safety – leading to improved brand awareness and purchase intent. 

BrandDiscovery’s launch comes at an exciting inflection point for the CTV advertising industry. Television continues to be viewed as a highly effective channel for brand marketers and AI-driven technologies are poised to revolutionize how advertisers connect with their audiences. As the largest video screen and non-skippable environment, CTV is ideal for improving brand awareness – research shows that brand recall and purchase intent is higher for TV and CTV than for digital mobile environments. At the same time, however, media buyers face a fragmented CTV ecosystem, often resulting in a lack of control and transparency, and limiting advertisers’ ability to scale and spend effectively.

“The CTV advertising ecosystem is ripe for disruption,” said Peter Crofut, Vice President of Business Development for Agencies and Brands at Wurl – the company’s newest executive hire brought on to oversee BrandDiscovery’s launch and integration. “When I joined the team here, I was motivated by BrandDiscovery’s potential to lead that disruption and fundamentally change how marketers approach CTV media. We know emotional resonance drives positive attention for brand campaigns, leading to higher brand awareness, recall, and reduced cost per engagement for advertisers. Now, with BrandDiscovery, advertisers will have greater control over the context of their CTV ads, more easily earning the attention of viewers and, as a result, improving measured campaign outcomes.”

BrandDiscovery leverages GenAI to produce emotional resonance between CTV content and campaign creatives. By matching an ad’s emotion with the emotion of the content directly preceding it, brands can generate positive attention.

With BrandDiscovery, advertisers gain:

• Scene-level analysis: BrandDiscovery offers contextual targeting at the scene level, an improvement over the industry’s standard program or channel-level solutions. Advertisers can present ads within programming that contextually aligns with their creatives based on emotion, brand safety, and genre.
• Contextual targeting at scale: BrandDiscovery ads will be shown across 300+ premium CTV publishers, including FAST channels and leading streamers. With more than 60 billion monthly available ad impressions, Wurl enables advertisers to achieve contextual targeting at scale through a single source of access, providing significant cost and time savings.
• Free access: BrandDiscovery data segments are free of charge, and available to advertisers through their SSPs and DSPs.

“At Media.Monks, we’re focused on driving stellar results for our clients,” said Matthew Kramer, Head of Brand Investment at Media.Monks. “We’re excited to partner with Wurl to continue doing just that by introducing their technology to our advertisers, who are already reaping the benefits of BrandDiscovery. During a recent campaign for a financial services client, BrandDiscovery’s emotion targeting led to a 33% lift in aided brand awareness and a 15% lift in purchase intent – exceeding the performance of our CTV campaign strategies. What’s even more promising, the campaign saw a 200% improvement in cost per engagement – as measured by EDO – when the ad creative’s emotions matched the content right before the ad break.”

When compared to KPIs benchmarked for Lending studies over the past five years by Kantar, the results of when Media.Monks applied BrandDiscovery emotions-optimized targeting stood out – performing more than 7X better for aided brand awareness, 4X better for brand favorability, and 2X better for purchase intent.

The Media.Monks campaign – activated through FreeWheel, a global technology platform for the television advertising industry – delivered millions of impressions within a matter of weeks. FreeWheel’s Head of Publisher Sales, Kathy Argyriou, said a critical component to the campaign’s success was being “better able to help advertisers reach their intended audience in premium television environments, fueled by the data sources that matter in today’s ecosystem.”

“In this complex and fast-moving media landscape, this collaboration is another step in tackling some of the most pressing industry challenges, and connecting buyers to premium, brand-safe ad inventory, with transparency and efficiency,” she said. “At FreeWheel, we take very seriously our mission to help fuel greater industry interoperability and our partnership with Wurl is the latest proof point of how we’re putting this philosophy into action.”

Appointments establish gender parity at C-suite and vice president levels

SurveyMonkey, a global leader in online surveys and forms, has announced the promotions of three executives: Jing Huang is vice president, artificial intelligence and machine learning; Katie Miserany is senior vice president and chief communications officer; and Craik Pyke is vice president, infrastructure and security engineering. With these appointments, SurveyMonkey celebrates gender equality at both the C-suite and vice president levels—a rarified achievement in the technology industry that reflects the company’s longstanding commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Miserany joins a bench of women leaders in the c-suite at SurveyMonkey that includes Becky Cantieri, CPO; Robin Ducot, CTO; and Michelle Leung, senior vice president, general counsel and secretary. 

“Jing, Katie, and Craik are brilliant leaders committed to helping our customers leverage authentic insights to make faster, smarter decisions with confidence,” said Eric Johnson, CEO of SurveyMonkey. “With their proven record of high-performance leadership and innovation through a year of immense change, they are uniquely positioned to help amplify diverse voices and empower our customers to delight their own.”

These promotions recognize the individuals’ outstanding leadership following a transformational year for SurveyMonkey focused on customer innovation. In 2023, SurveyMonkey returned to its iconic SurveyMonkey brand name under the direction of CEO Eric Johnson following the company’s acquisition by STG. It also announced industry-leading AI-generated surveys and a powerful forms solution that empowers users to create and design professional forms and surveys using a single, intuitive platform. The company also received a score of 100 on the Human Rights Campaign Foundation’s 2023-2024 Corporate Equality Index, the nation’s foremost benchmarking survey and report measuring corporate policies and practices related to LGBTQ+ workplace equality, affirming its commitment to being a steward for change.

About Jing Huang

As vice president, artificial intelligence and machine learning, Huang will lead the continued investment and leadership for AI-powered survey creation and insights generation at SurveyMonkey. Huang joined SurveyMonkey in 2017 and presently leads the machine learning and personalization engineering teams with the vision to empower SurveyMonkey users to obtain answers to their questions with greater ease and speed. Previously, she was an entrepreneur who built mobile-first solutions and data products for non-tech industries. She also worked at Cisco Systems for six years, focusing on security, cloud management, and big data infrastructure. She has a B.S. in Electric Science and Technology and an M.S. in Computer Science.

About Katie Miserany

As senior vice president and chief communications officer, Miserany will spearhead the team's ongoing commitment to delivering an outstanding employee experience and driving meaningful customer communications. Miserany joined SurveyMonkey in 2019 and presently leads all communications functions, including public relations, internal communications, and analyst relations. Previously, she held marketing and communications roles at Worthwhile Digital, the Sheryl Sandberg & Dave Goldberg Family Foundation, RelateIQ (acquired by Salesforce), Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, and Tiny Prints (acquired by Shutterfly). She has a B.A. in English.

About Craik Pyke

As vice president, infrastructure and security engineering, Pyke will lead the technology tools strategy for the engineering organization. Pyke joined SurveyMonkey in 2018 and is presently responsible for the financial drivers of AI innovation and guiding employees through the completion of the cloud-native infrastructure program, as well as data storage, search, security, messaging, and observability capabilities. Previously he held security and software engineering roles at several startups. He also worked at Entrust Inc. and Nortel Networks Inc. He has a B.Sc. in Computer Science.

New strategic suggestions empower more actionable writing, enabling professionals and teams to get aligned faster—no prompting required

Grammarly, the company helping over 30 million people and 70,000 teams work smarter and faster wherever they write, today announced the launch of strategic suggestions, accelerating an evolution toward situational and goal-oriented communication from the leader in AI writing assistance. This is the first feature of many that will use audience awareness to help customers accomplish goals through their communication. 

Since its founding, Grammarly has been helping people write clear, polished communications. Now, leveraging nearly 15 years of linguistic experience and the latest AI technologies, Grammarly can coach customers to write with impact. Grammarly’s AI is audience-aware and uses that knowledge to help professionals predict and address communication mistakes before they even hit send. Over time, Grammarly’s suggestions will become increasingly more personalized, situation-specific, and contextually aware to support customers in completing tasks.

“As professionals, we write to get things done: to quickly close a deal or pitch our vision to the department head,” said Nick Stanford, Group Product Manager at Grammarly. “But clarifying sentences, adjusting tone, and improving the wording of a message only does so much to enhance impact. Starting today, Grammarly will provide the type of advice you’d receive from a coach or mentor like reminding leaders to acknowledge how hard their team has been working, or making the essential point of a long message stand out.”

Strategic suggestions proactively appear in the flow of work, guiding professionals to anticipate questions, focus on key takeaways, and tailor messages to their audience without the need to prompt a tool for improvements. These suggestions help people and teams reduce lengthy review cycles and unnecessary back-and-forth to get quicker alignment from stakeholders. This new capability will begin rolling out to Grammarly customers on our Premium, Business, and Education plans today through May 2024.

Unlike competitor features, the models powering these suggestions have been fine-tuned on Grammarly’s extensive, high-quality, anonymized business writing data to ensure that suggestions amplify impact. Professionals and teams can use Grammarly’s suggestions with confidence, knowing they’re receiving the highest-quality writing suggestions on the market while their data is being protected by the most comprehensive enterprise-grade certifications and compliance of any AI writing assistance company.

Grammarly is committed to using the latest AI technologies to deliver the knowledge of what good writing looks like to customers, enabling them to communicate at their best.

Company Partners with OpenX to Conduct First Server-to-Server Integration 

Mediavine, the largest exclusive full-service ad management firm in the U.S., announced the first successful server-to-server integration in the Privacy Sandbox's Protected Audience API (PAAPI) since its launch earlier this year. Working with OpenX, one of the world's leading omnichannel supply-side platforms, Mediavine configured the first server-to-server (S2S) solution conducted within PAAPI. This was achieved via component auctions through server-to-server communications, resulting in efficient, cookieless advertising.

With Google Chrome's upcoming third-party cookie deprecation, the advertising industry is currently experiencing the biggest shift in the history of programmatic. Ad buyers are seeking a streamlined method to assess cookieless offerings within their current workflows. This preliminary S2S integration is the first successful RTB workflow that will be viable for buyers and the ecosystem at large.

S2S integrations transmit data directly to secure servers without dependence on a user's browser ensuring a privacy-centric environment and a better user experience. The PAAPI auction configuration delivered through S2S allows publishers and SSPs to take advantage of faster ad auctions, more demand sources and increased control available through these connections.

"As the advertising ecosystem attempts to navigate the Privacy Sandbox changes, we're starting to see success in new workflows, and that's thanks to programmatic partners, like OpenX, that are committed to being at the forefront of testing with us," said John Rosendahl, Mediavine's Director of Product, Activation & Identity. "Mediavine is dedicated to crafting innovative solutions within the Privacy Sandbox that prioritize both publisher well-being and buyer achievements as we enter a new era of programmatic advertising."

"As a pioneer of server-side real-time bidding and experts regarding the Protected Audience API, OpenX was well positioned to partner with a leader like Mediavine in delivering this first-to-market offering. Our goal has always been to limit the burden on the end user and minimize the latency in auctions," said Joel Meyer, SVP, Engineering at OpenX. "Today, we provide publishers with much more than just a server-side auction – our proximity to the content and the bidstream at scale across publishers helps us facilitate solutions that deliver strategic advantages to our publisher and advertiser partners."

86% of Advertisers Confirm Games Advertising is Brand Safe; 40% Set to Boost Spending in the Coming Year

IAB Unveils Guidelines, Sets New Standard for Responsible and Engaging In-Game Advertising

Amidst the booming growth of the gaming market, a pioneering study released today during IAB PlayFronts, Changing the Game: How Games Advertising Powers Performance, explores the impact of games advertising. This first-of-its-kind analysis of brands and media agencies quantifies the success, reach, and effectiveness of games advertising, shedding light on why it is a crucial component in the marketing mix.

"This is the first large-scale quantitative analysis of brands and agencies with experience purchasing games advertising," said Jack Koch, Senior Vice President, Research & Insights, IAB. "The study found that advertisers view games advertising as a measurable, brand safe medium that is effective across the entire consumer journey. Marketers can no longer afford to ignore this medium if they want to reach the more than 200 million U.S. consumers that play video games."

Current State of Gaming and Games Advertising

For those using games advertising, it has become an integral and continuously growing part of the marketing mix. Notably, 86% of advertisers surveyed agree that it is of growing importance to their companies, and 40% plan to increase spend on games advertising in the coming year.

Increases in ad spend come on the heels of gaming's growing importance and prevalence in the US. According to Entertainment Software America (ESA), there are 213 million gamers in the US, while eMarketer projects ad spend in games will surge from $8.53 billion in 2024 to $11.49 billion by 2027.

Why Marketers Are Using Games Advertising

As games advertising continues to mature, it has become a reliable platform for delivering premium, high-quality inventory. Of note, 86% of advertisers surveyed agree that it is brand safe, solidifying its position as the second-highest rated channel in terms of brand safety. In addition, 85% of those surveyed are confident in their ability to measure games advertising.

While 79% of advertisers find buying advertising in games relatively easy, it still falls behind other digital media channels concerning ease of buying and planning. Experienced planners and buyers emphasize the need for additional effort to exploit the advantages of games advertising fully. This includes conducting research on gaming audiences to understand their preferences and tailoring ad formats and creatives, which can be more complex compared to other media channels due to the diverse gaming landscape and the need for custom work.

In light of these insights, it's evident that games advertising serves as a powerful tool for engaging with the right consumers in their preferred environment. An impressive 90% of advertisers attest to its effectiveness in reaching valuable, hard-to-reach audiences with relevant messaging. Further, 85% of advertisers recognize games advertising as a premium, high-quality platform for promoting their brands. With its ability to integrate immersive ad placements into user experiences, it offers a fresh and innovative approach to marketing.

Games Advertising is Effective Across the Entire Consumer Journey

Games advertising meets both brand and performance marketing goals, with 78% of advertisers stating that games advertising is "excellent" or "good" at awareness, 76% at driving research and consideration, and 65% at driving purchase.

Koch added, "Impressively, games advertising consistently performs well across all stages of the consumer journey, showcasing its potency compared to other media channels. We're excited to reveal where and how to harness its power in the marketing mix."