Partnerships with Leading Ad Tech Intermediaries Will Prevent Ad Dollars from Going to Pirate Websites Via Pre-Bid Exclusion 

TAG, the global certification program to strengthen safety and transparency in digital advertising, today launched "Project Brand Integrity 2.0" (PBI 2.0), a significant expansion of TAG's proven anti-piracy initiative to defund the criminals who profit from stolen content while protecting advertisers from unintentional exposure to unsafe websites. 

Through PBI 2.0, TAG will leverage new partnerships with the industry's major ad tech intermediaries to cut off funding from pirate websites through a comprehensive pre-bid exclusion list, thus preventing pirate sites from monetizing stolen intellectual property (IP). By incorporating real-time intelligence on new pirate domains from TAG's Ad Sec Threat Exchange and TAG member companies, PBI 2.0 will protect brands while preventing ad dollars from reaching those illegitimate sites.

"Project Brand Integrity 1.0 was incredibly effective but hard to scale, as it involved a time-consuming manual process of notifying advertisers when their ads were found on pirate sites," said Mike Zaneis, CEO of TAG. "Although most advertisers took action when alerted to such misplacements, the money often had already changed hands, and the criminals quickly moved their efforts to new domains. PBI 2.0 helps automate, expand, and accelerate that process by blocking the money to pirate sites in advance through pre-bid intermediaries, so it never reaches the criminals in the first place." 

The new pirate domain exclusion list is being built and maintained through the TAG AdSec Threat Exchange, the industry's leading forum for sharing threat intelligence, through collaboration with participating companies and other TAG members, while also utilizing open-source resources and intelligence on pirate domains.

"Fast-changing threats like the pirate domains created by content thieves require real-time collaboration and intelligence sharing to develop a rapid, cross-industry response," said Michael Lyden, TAG's VP of Threat Intelligence. "PBI 2.0 will leverage TAG's proven collective defense model to create, manage, and disseminate an exclusion list of offending piracy-related domains for use across the global advertising industry."

TAG launched Project Brand Integrity in February 2019 to help advertisers safeguard their brands by alerting advertisers when their ads were found to have run on high-risk and IP-infringing websites. A 2023 report on the program's work in Europe found that 86% of brands contacted by PBI had reduced their ad impressions on pirate sites after getting such notice. As a result, the average monthly ad spending by major brands on high-risk and other sites that infringe on intellectual property (IP) fell by 89%. 

Part of TAG's Brand Safety Certified (BSC) Program, PBI 2.0 will couple the new pirate domain exclusion list with TAG's existing Pirate Mobile App List, a long-standing threat intelligence tool that provides brands with an evidence-based list of mobile apps infringing on protected intellectual property rights.

TAG will work with leading ad tech companies already participating in the AdSec Threat Exchange to ensure that they do not facilitate the monetization of piracy sites included on the exclusion list. TAG also plans to update BSC standards to require the implementation of a piracy-related block list such as the one crowdsourced through the AdSec Threat Exchange for a company to be awarded the BSC Seal.

Admitad improves its partner marketing platform to grant access to its ecosystem connecting 100,000 partners and 3000 brands to all sizes of business. Small and medium-sized enterprises frequently face constraints in allocating marketing budgets to campaigns, particularly when the potential for positive returns is uncertain. The partner network has rolled out enhanced platform features, establishing a new digital marketing environment that tackles the challenges faced by brands and online publishers globally.

Admitad Solutions enable companies of all sizes to increase sales

Admitad introduces new services based on SaaS model and packaged in subscription plans allowing brands to access the precise tools needed to optimize their partner marketing efforts.

Benefits of this upgraded affiliate software include an opportunity to increase the number of online orders by 20-30%, foreseeable marketing spendings, sales via new channels (influencers, coupons, etc.), increased audience’s brand awareness, traffic control and detailed analytics.

Admitad recreated the approach to affiliate marketing in a comfortable and effective way: Manage - Grow - Protect.

1. Manage full partnership life cycle with Admitad SaaS platform on your own or dedicate it completely to our expert team.
2. Growth is based on access to publisher database through tools and features allowing to recruit, chat and promote your program.
3. Protection includes actions aimed at elimination of traffic fraud using cutting-edge Admitad’s antifraud technologies and safeguarding ad budgets.

3 different approaches to affiliate programs

Admitad Base - the most comfortable option for small and medium-sized businesses - provides brands with the essential toolkit for attracting partners, launching a simple and cost-efficient, self-managed programme for 1 type of action with different rates, without the hassle of a long-term contract.

Admitad Rise gives advertisers additional features to run a sophisticated affiliate programme, with premium support 24/7, enhanced protection against brand bidding, and added automation.

With Admitad Peak brands get everything they need to run a data-driven programme, starting from 200 invitations per week and tools like promo codes, banners, landing pages, to chats with partners from an unlimited number of GEOs.

Former executive from Salesforce, New Relic joins leading MDR provider to drive next phase of growth

Expel, the leading managed detection and response (MDR) provider, today announced the addition of Seema Kumar to the company’s leadership team as Chief Marketing Officer (CMO). With over 20 years of strategic marketing and product management experience, Kumar joins the Expel team to help propel the company into its next stage of growth. 

“Becoming a breakout company requires not only a best-in-class product, but customers who believe you’re the best and put their trust in you,” said Kumar. “I’m thrilled to join this team to accelerate Expel’s growth and enable even more organizations to become more secure.”

Kumar leads Expel’s global marketing team strategy and execution to expand the company’s brand presence and positioning, and drive demand for Expel’s award-winning solutions. Her expertise spans the technology and cybersecurity industries, with a proven track record of building high-performing marketing and sales teams that increase revenue and market share.

Most recently, Kumar was the Chief Operating Officer at Secureframe, where she oversaw marketing, sales, customer success, and people operations—increasing both headcount and company revenue. Before that, Kumar served as CMO at New Relic, after holding the same position at ServiceChannel. Kumar also served as vice president of marketing at Salesforce for the Salesforce Platform, launching multiple new products and revenue streams for the company.

“We’re confident Seema’s deep empathy for customers and understanding of marketing strategy will elevate Expel’s brand profile to the next level,” said Dave Merkel, CEO and co-founder, Expel. “Her experience in high-growth environments and hunger for results will play a key role in growing our market share and solidifying Expel’s position as the leading MDR provider.”

New leadership builds on significant company momentum to take personalized video creation to more businesses than ever

SundaySky, the leading software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform for efficient enterprise video creation and personalization, announced today that it has appointed Marc Zionts as chief executive officer. With significant experience leading software and technology businesses to superior outcomes, Zionts will lead SundaySky through its next phase of growth and innovation. 

“I’m delighted to welcome Marc to SundaySky as CEO. Since Clearhaven’s investment in the company, we’ve been continually impressed with the innovation and ingenuity coming from the SundaySky team. Marc’s leadership will ensure those traits are maximized to the success of the company’s employees, customers, and shareholders,” said Michelle Noon, founder and managing partner of Clearhaven Partners. “Marc’s proven track record of efficient growth and market expansion, coupled with his strong cultural fit with Clearhaven and SundaySky, support our confidence in his leadership for the next stage.”

Throughout his technology career, Zionts has helped companies expand product offerings and develop new market opportunities while accelerating SaaS product adoption and increasing company revenue. “I’m thrilled to join SundaySky. I’m drawn to the mission to transform scaled, efficient, and personalized business communication through video. My experience leading companies from a startup founder to a multinational public company provides me perspective to apply to SundaySky as it scales,” Zionts said. “My journey has equipped me with insights from artificial intelligence (AI) to video optimization and from navigating founder-led, VC-backed startups to private equity-owned businesses. I am excited to lead SundaySky through its continued transformation, creating value for our customers and all shareholders.”

In addition to Zionts, several new leaders have joined SundaySky for its next growth phase, including:

• Larry Murff, CFO: As SundaySky’s chief financial officer, Larry Murff brings more than 30 years of financial and operational experience in financial services, technology, advertising, and logistics in both public and private equity sectors, including successful tenures in executive finance and operations roles at companies such as Bazaarvoice, Quantcast, and Impel. Larry maintains a proven track record of delivering optimal results in high-growth environments and successful exits, including an IPO.
• Barbara Dischner, SVP of Marketing: As senior vice president of marketing at SundaySky, Barbara Dischner plays an integral role in accelerating growth at software companies. With extensive experience helping B2B SaaS companies develop go-to-market plans that accelerate revenue while building, nurturing, and scaling high-powered marketing teams – serving in executive positions at SAP, Dell, BlueJeans, and Coveo – Dischner is an expert at building sales pipeline, accelerating sales velocity, and ensuring branded touch points across the customer journey.
• Phil Leininger, Strategic Advisory Board: As the newest member of SundaySky’s strategic advisory board, Phil Leininger brings extensive experience in driving customer growth, satisfaction, and loyalty by creating seamless and engaging digital experiences across multiple channels and platforms – most recently at Verizon and Fidelity Investments. In his role at Fidelity Investments, Leininger gained experience driving the digital business and experience for retail clients. At Verizon, he owned the E2E customer journey across all Verizon consumer customers as the head of omnichannel customer experience and digital channels. Leininger’s impressive track record will help SundaySky bring personalized video creation to more customers across more channels.

With an expanded leadership team, SundaySky is entering a new year with significant growth momentum from 2023. Highlights include:

• Strong financial momentum in 2023
  • Despite macroeconomic headwinds during the year, SundaySky had its strongest-ever new bookings quarter in company history in Q4 2023.
  • The company realized significant wins, including:
    • A 43% deal win rate.
    • Increased pipeline velocity by a 52% reduction in the sales cycle duration.
    • Increased multi-year contracts, signaling long-term commitment and greater investment in video strategy by SundaySky customers.
    • New SundaySky customers across all categories, including IntouchCX, People First Federal Credit Union, Nexamp, WebMD Health Services, and many more.
    • New customer wins across new and evergreen markets, including credit unions (in partnership with Allied Solutions) and financial services, technology, e-commerce, energy and utilities, healthcare insurers, business services, and higher education institutions.
• Increased product usage and adoption
  • SundaySky launched its generative AI Copilot assistant in beta in 2023; with significant adoption, speed to video production and ease of use, AI Copilot will be generally available in Q2 2024.
    • Based on the beta launch:
      • Nearly half of customer accounts utilized AI Copilot.
      • On average, AI Copilot helped users create a video in just 22 minutes – a fraction of the time (18%) it would take to create a video in SundaySky’s platform without AI Copilot.
      • AI Copilot is now the leading method of video generation for SundaySky platform users, signaling a high level of acceptance of businesses to use AI-generated videos in market.
  • Today, more than 50% of SundaySky’s customers’ videos are personalized, underscoring our customer’s desire for data-driven content engagement.
  • SundaySky continues to prioritize product development focused on making data-driven personalization in video easier than ever with the launch of its Data Connectors Marketplace, which provides out-of-the-box data integrations for Salesforce, Hubspot, and Google Sheets – with an Adobe Marketo data connector targeted to launch in April of 2024.

In the recent report “Reduce Technical Debt By Understanding Enterprise Video Platform Capabilities Before RFP,” Forrester outlined a unique market opportunity for enterprise video platforms like SundaySky to “unlock new tiers of enterprise value.” As SundaySky combines significant company momentum with exciting new leadership capabilities, the company is poised to deliver easier, more cost-effective personalized video capabilities to more customers than ever before.

Major fashion retailer leverages SAP process automation to transform finance function, streamline data-intensive processes, and fuel more confident business decisions

Precisely, the global leader in data integrity, today announced that Etam Group, a major international retailer and leading lingerie brand in France, has implemented its Automate Studio solution across all subsidiaries to support company-wide accounts payable processes. By providing seamless SAP data access to decision-makers in real-time, Automate Studio (formerly Winshuttle Studio) enables Etam’s accounting teams to work autonomously without support from IT personnel, reduce operational costs, and drive greater innovation across the organization. 

Business agility is critical in the retail industry, with companies seeking to balance tight margins with the need to innovate and stay competitive. With more pressure than ever to optimize margins through existing operating structures and processes, it comes as no surprise that automation has emerged as a top consideration for retailers in 2024. Retail companies are increasingly seeing the need to simplify and accelerate processes across their major functions to drive business efficiencies, improve customer experience, and stay compliant with an ever-changing regulatory landscape.

“In the retail sector, businesses must stay agile and be able to implement ideas quickly, something which is also incredibly important in accounting,” said Stéphane Delattre, Vice President – Accounting for Europe at Etam Group. “Automate Studio increases our productivity and efficiency, enabling mass data simplification and empowering decision-makers to access trustworthy data in real-time. We call it the ‘miracle product’!”

The Etam Group has an impressive history of driving innovation to optimize infrastructure and provide great customer experience – having invented the concept of just-in-time automatic restocking in 1965. But with presence now in over 1,500 stores located across 57 countries, the retailer needed a solution that would work with its SAP ERP (enterprise resource planning) software and support all the company’s subsidiaries in streamlining their data management.

Automate Studio is the premier Excel-to-SAP solutions platform that enables business users to automate complex SAP business processes and make mass data changes quickly and easily. The platform allows customers to eliminate manual data entries and upload and download SAP data in record time, while simultaneously improving data quality. Automate Studio empowers business teams by reducing their reliance on IT support for automating Excel to SAP processes. Now citizen developers within business teams can create and manage their own solutions faster, while ensuring compliance and security standards are maintained.

“Before we deployed Automate Studio, we manually handled hundreds of invoices a month which could be very time-consuming,” said Delattre. “This practical solution from Precisely has not only increased our internal productivity but has helped us save time. Previously, one invoice took three minutes to create and now Automate Studio facilitates the creation of nearly 600 invoices within 15 minutes. Another example is how drastically it reduced the time needed to add purchasing conditions to orders in SAP – this used to take two days but can now be completed in just two hours.”

“Precisely is committed to helping customers automate their SAP processes to maintain agility, accelerate speed of business, and build the integrity of their data,” said Pat McCarthy, Chief Revenue Officer at Precisely. “As more organizations embark on digital transformation across their core functions, they are realizing the power of process automation, fueled by accurate, consistent, and contextual data to help ensure success.”

dotCMS, a leading hybrid-headless content management system, announced today that Preston So has joined the company as Vice President of Product.

New enhancements enable customers to collaborate with any partner, activate data to any destination, and access more solutions—all from one place

With a future-ready platform optimized for speed and ease-of-use, customers can deliver better business outcomes and more personalized customer experiences

LiveRamp today unveiled the next generation of the /LiveRamp Data Collaboration Platform, which brings together solutions for the end-to-end marketing lifecycle onto a single platform. The unified offering introduces new capabilities such as a simplified user interface, composable technology for cross-cloud interoperability, and a partner marketplace where innovative third-party developers can build applications showcasing their trusted expertise. Built on a foundation of durable, authenticated technology designed to withstand signal loss, the /LiveRamp Data Collaboration Platform offers functionality to proactively address evolving privacy considerations while accelerating forward-looking data collaboration use cases. 

Gartner® findings show “Marketing has an outsized role in data and analytic activities across the enterprise, with 71% of marketing data and analytics teams responsible for owning at least one element of data strategy for their organization.” By bringing all of its capabilities into a single user interface with simplified orchestration, LiveRamp enables customers to more easily connect audiences across partners. Supporting modern data architectures with a focus on decentralized data reduces cloud complexity, improving cloud usability for all business users while resolving IT infrastructure constraints. Customer advantages include greater ease-of-use and streamlined functionality that unlock greater value across all of their data collaboration needs.

• Increase simplicity using a single user interface built on a foundation of best-in-class identity, global authenticated connectivity, and proprietary privacy-enhancing technologies
• Enhance the user experience and accelerate speed-to-value with new ingestion pipelines that reduce turnaround time from days to hours. Self-service tools allow the permissioning of datasets and segments, and a new notification system—capable of integrating with workplace tools including Slack—enables users to control how they receive information
• Reach audiences ecosystem-wide using an enhanced activation and segmentation experience centered on users, campaigns and cross-audience segmentation. Further improve marketing performance by integrating with technologies such as Google PAIR designed to combat the loss of third-party cookies and other deprecating signals.
• Unlock new partnerships across second and third-party data with the flexibility to collaborate wherever your first-party data lives, across the widest range of use cases, from one location
• Leverage a new, partner application marketplace starting with integrated discovery, access, and deployment of measurement solutions from LiveRamp’s global network of partners

“A core tenet of the Albertsons Media Collective is to foster a more interconnected, collaborative ecosystem that increases access to data while minimizing data movement,” said Evan Hovorka, VP of Product and Innovation, Albertsons Media Collective. “LiveRamp has helped us advance this pledge with future-ready solutions that grow signal fidelity, enhance privacy, and scale data collaboration across the channels that matter most to our network. LiveRamp bringing these capabilities together more seamlessly will not only accelerate our own partnership, but the downstream value we deliver to our customers, advertisers, and ecosystem at large.”

“Circana’s Lift solution, a gold standard in retail and CPG measurement, incorporates household level data to unlock critical insights for advertisers, enabling them to measure and optimize media investments to improve sales performance,” said Harvey Goldhersz, EVP of Product at Circana. “Through LiveRamp, advertisers can now pinpoint which creative messages, ad formats, audience segments, and media placements drive retail sales most effectively and efficiently. Advertisers who use Circana’s Lift solution improve return on advertising spend (ROAS) up to 80%. We’re thrilled to switch on this capability for LiveRamp, bringing Circana’s speed, superior coverage, and accuracy to an even wider audience.”

The launch of the unified /LiveRamp Data Collaboration Platform follows the company’s acquisition of Habu to accelerate data collaboration through enhanced clean room technology. Customers using the LiveRamp Clean Room, powered by Habu on its platform can measure campaigns across all walled gardens, media platforms and programmatic channels while connecting data seamlessly across clouds, warehouses and clean rooms.

“LiveRamp’s customers have been asking for solutions with greater simplicity and scale to unlock the value of data and drive a competitive advantage,” added Kimberly Bloomston, Chief Product Officer at LiveRamp. “The launch of our fully unified platform delivers on this need by setting a new standard for powerful data collaboration built on privacy-enhancing technologies that withstand evolving signal loss and privacy requirements. LiveRamp’s recent acquisition of Habu further strengthens our ability to help customers collaborate with anyone, activate data anywhere, and measure everywhere it matters.”

For the past 20 years, Lytho has been serving creative teams with best-in-class creative workflow, review and approval, automation, and digital asset management capabilities. This acquisition allows Lytho to quickly expand its reach within marketing organizations and deliver an integrated toolset that manages all aspects of the content creation lifecycle.