AdTheorent utilizes precise location data for visitation modeling, location-based targeting,
 and deterministic measurement

AdTheorent Holding Company, Inc. , a machine learning pioneer and industry leader using privacy-forward solutions to deliver measurable value for programmatic advertisers today announced the launch of Point™, a suite of proprietary machine learning-powered geo-intelligence solutions designed to drive real world visitation performance for advertisers.  Point is fully integrated into the AdTheorent platform, offering advertisers a seamless way to activate, optimize, and measure the efficacy of their advertising campaigns.

Point delivers differentiated geo capabilities enabled by the industry's most advanced machine learning foundation:                                 

• AdTheorent's Point of Interest (POI) Capability: The AdTheorent platform enables advanced location targeting by points of interest locations.  AdTheorent has access to more than 29 million consumer-focused points of interest that span across more than 17,000 business categories.  POI categories include: shops, dining, recreation, sports, accommodation, education, retail banking, government entities, health and transportation.  AdTheorent's POI capability is fully integrated and embedded into the platform, giving users the ability to select and target a highly customized set of POIs (e.g., all Starbucks locations in New York City) within minutes.
• Point's Targeting Suite, Powered by Machine Learning: AdTheorent's machine learning-powered geo-intelligence solutions allow advertisers to leverage precise location data in highly differentiated ways. Point's targeting capabilities include:
  • Omnichannel Geo-Targeting: AdTheorent can target by country, state, city, DMA, or zip code and only serves ads to those within the specified geo that have the highest likelihood of converting, as measured by AdTheorent predictive models.
  • POI Location Targeting and Retargeting: can be leveraged to reach customers near a brand's location, or customers who have visited a brand or competitive brand's location within a customizable period of time.
  • AdTheorent Predictive Audiences: in addition to the multitude of custom inputs that can be incorporated into AdTheorent ID-independent audiences, proprietary visitation patterns can be used to inform advanced audience quality algorithms. 
  • Custom Machine Learning KPI Models: all AdTheorent campaigns utilizing Point have performance models built upon visitation and location data, ensuring the attainment of important client KPIs, such as visits, cost per visit, and incremental lift.
• Point's Visitation Reporting: AdTheorent offers deterministic visitation reporting to quantify the impact of AdTheorent campaigns. Reporting metrics include: total visits, visitation rate, cost per visit, standard visitation lift and incremental lift.  Unlike most solutions, AdTheorent can measure and report on visitation by individual POI location or nationally.

"AdTheorent's Point is a differentiated and powerful suite of geo-intelligence solutions that provides advertisers with endless applications of location-based data whether to drive incremental visits to a specific set of locations, or to use location data to build ID-independent customized Predictive Audiences," said Jim Lawson, CEO of AdTheorent. "Most importantly, all of these applications are enabled by AdTheorent's proprietary machine learning technology, which drives superior performance for advertisers."

Codified, a Generative AI-powered Data Governance startup, announced today $4M in seed funding. Codified was incubated at Madrona Venture Labs and founded by Yatharth Gupta. This seed round was co-led by Madrona Ventures and Vine Ventures with participation from Soma Capital and angel investors Bob Muglia, JG Chirapurath, and Shireesh Thota. Additionally, Ali Ghodsi, founder and CEO of Databricks, and Arnab Bose, Chief Product Officer, Workforce Identity Cloud at Okta, joined the Codified Advisory Board.

As the Generative AI era unfolds, companies will increasingly turn to their critical business data for insights and new products. At the same time, data security and privacy continue to be a primary concern as recent costly examples of critical data leakage or unintended uses have shown. Unfortunately, a lot of data governance work relies on manually intensive processes which is costly and often not in a policy compliance framework. Usually companies exist in two unhappy extremes: critical data is too widely accessible in their organization, and users are frustrated that they can’t easily access data needed for their tasks. Founder Yatharth Gupta lived this experience over his career, working with customers on their data platform strategies while he was running product management at data leader SingleStore and building data services at Microsoft for Azure.

Codified is developing a first-of-its-kind AI-powered Data Governance platform to address the challenges inherent in protecting data while enabling access for the right people and applications at the right time. Codified enables companies to use natural language to author and implement data governance policies ensuring that access to data is aligned with business intent. Codified is built with complete automation in mind such that once a policy is in place, access is provided seamlessly and quickly without manual intervention. Codified also provides full visibility into data access rights for users, roles and groups.

“We are thrilled to launch Codified and pioneer the first-of-its-kind policy-driven Data Governance solution. Customers are spending months implementing Data Governance solutions and this needs to change. With Codified, customers will be able to save time and money while significantly improving their security posture,” said Gupta. “Security does not have to be complex to implement and hard to use. By re-imagining the approach from the ground up, we are simplifying the pain associated with protecting the access to data.”

“Data is widely acknowledged to be an important asset for nearly every company, but managing access to this exponentially growing and critical asset relies on manual processes that are cumbersome, error-prone, and extremely time-consuming to audit. Codified is built for any company wrestling with data governance solutions, offering just-in-time access and protection in alignment with company policies,” commented S. Somasegar, managing director, Madrona. “Generative AI has opened the door for people to deal with policies using natural language which is at the core of Codified’s approach to solve this problem.”

This funding will enable Codified to expand its team, accelerate product development, and bring its innovative solution to the market. The company is working with design partners and will launch a product preview to select customers in 2024.

Monetate for Merchandisers is the industry’s only solution with integrated product recommendations, social proof marketing, dynamic bundling, product finders, and personalized search.

Monetate, the leading personalization platform that helps build personal and meaningful digital connections between eCommerce brands and their global customers, is proud to announce the launch of Monetate for Merchandisers, a groundbreaking product offering designed to help eCommerce and digital merchandising teams deliver category-defining customer experiences.

Monetate for Merchandisers represents a significant advancement in the realm of eCommerce, marrying the power of artificial intelligence with a comprehensive suite of merchandising tools, buoyed by a robust AB and MVT testing framework. By leveraging Monetate, businesses can better address key online merchandising responsibilities such as enhancing product findability, increasing catalog exposure, and reflecting distinct brand value across the shopper journey, while being able to continually draw customer insights and optimize for KPIs like Conversion Rate (CVR) and Average Order Value (AOV).

"Monetate for Merchandisers represents a paradigm shift in how companies approach merchandising in a digital age," said Brian Wilson, CEO of Monetate. "By combining the best of AI-driven product recommendations with personalized search and an array of other powerful tools, we're empowering businesses to exceed their merchandising goals while providing an unparalleled shopping experience for their customers."

The announcement of Monetate for Merchandisers has been made official at eTail Palm Springs 2024 and comes on the heels of the launch of Monetate Dynamic Bundles, enabling the automation of ‘Complete the Look’ product sets. The full suite includes:

• Monetate Product Recommendations
• Monetate Personalized Search
• Monetate Dynamic Bundles
• Monetate Social Proof
• Monetate Product Finder
• Monetate Product Badging
• Monetate Testing & Experimentation

“Merchandisers have always brought retailers a unique ability to use shopper insights to differentiate from their competition,” said Andrew Koperwas, Chief Marketing Officer at Monetate. “Monetate enables merchandisers to combine their curation and shopper expertise with powerful machine learning, all built on top of a powerful testing and experimentation engine to prove success.”

Sessions and booth will highlight the power of customer data and content to create productive customer journeys and buying experiences

Acquia, the digital experience leader, is set to make a prominent appearance this week at eTail, the gathering place for retail leaders. Acquia will participate through insightful panel discussions and a dynamic booth emphasizing the transformative role of customer data in the evolving retail digital market landscape. To support retail tech innovation, Acquia is proud to sponsor the Emerging Tech track during the event.

On Wednesday afternoon, Tom Bianchi, SVP of Product and Solution Marketing at Acquia, will kick off the Emerging Tech sessions and set the stage for discussions about generative AI, digital commerce, and personalization strategies that respect customers’ privacy. He will also moderate a panel, "The Benefits of Shifting to Composable Commerce," with speakers from Pampered Chef, Autozone, and Algolia.

Bryant Shea, Director of Product Management at Acquia, will lead a panel discussion on "Everything You Need to Know to Succeed With Live Shopping." The conversation with speakers from Masami, Fun.com, and Shopware will dive into emerging trends in digital content and social commerce experiences.

In conjunction with these panels, Acquia welcomes eTail attendees to visit our interactive booth (#317). The Acquia team will showcase the variety of ways we enable marketers to leverage customer data to create highly personalized experiences that lead to productive customer journeys. Visitors can also explore the latest enhancements to Acquia’s customer data platform (Acquia CDP), including updated machine learning modules, new self-services features and improved performance bolstered by our partnership with Snowflake.

“Acquia brings nearly two decades of expertise enabling the world’s leading retail brands to gain actionable insights from first-party data,” said Mark Picone, SVP and General Manager, Marketing Cloud at Acquia. “At eTail, we’ll highlight how organizations can leverage the full power of AI and ML to create productive customer journeys across multiple digital channels.”

New features, announced at the Blueshift Engage conference, enable brands to ingest data from data warehouses, develop insights about audiences, and personalize using LLMs

Blueshift, the leading platform for intelligent customer engagement, announced three new powerful capabilities that help brands leverage customer data & LLMs in their cross-channel marketing. Announced at Blueshift's Engage Conference, the new innovations include a new Audience Insights module, the addition of Databricks to Blueshift's Data Warehouse Sync module, as well as new LLM-Powered product & content recommendations added to Blueshift's Customer AI.

The new product offerings reflect the theme of Blueshift Engage this year, which is Marketing in the Age of Data & AI. "Today's announcement is a major milestone in making customer data & AI more accessible to marketers," said Vijay Chittoor, Co-Founder and CEO of Blueshift. "We are committed to continuous innovation that advances our mission of making data & intelligence effortlessly actionable on every channel."

Data Warehouse Sync

Blueshift is making it easier to unify and activate all customer data with the introduction of Data Warehouse Sync. Brands can effortlessly integrate data from warehouses and real-time customer behavior within Blueshift for intelligent cross-channel engagement. Today Blueshift announced the addition of Databricks into their Data Warehouse Sync portfolio, soon to be followed by Google BigQuery. Previously, Blueshift announced integrations with Snowflake and Amazon Redshift.

"We're looking forward to this new integration, leveraging the combined power of Blueshift and Databricks," says Andy Sleigh, Chief Operating Officer at Clearscore. "By merging data from Databricks with real-time customer behavior from Blueshift, we will have the right ingredients to deliver personalized messages to each customer precisely when it matters most."

These integrations will help brands:

• Gain control of their marketing data with self-serve configuration, eliminating the need for data science teams and SQL expertise.
• Unlock data from data warehouses and combine with real-time customer behavior in Blueshift – giving customers a wider catalog of data warehouses to sync bi-directional data with ease.
• Easily access, leverage, and activate rich data using Blueshift's native features, such as segmentation, predictive modeling, 1:1 personalization, and campaign execution.
• Sync audiences to a variety of paid media destinations for targeting look-alike audiences or for retargeting.

Emplifi analyzed both organic and paid activity across Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and X (formerly Twitter) for thousands of global brands during Q4 2023 for its latest Social Media Benchmarks report 

Emplifi, a leading customer engagement platform, today announced the release of its 2024 Social Media Benchmarks report. After analyzing both organic and paid ad activity for the thousands of global brands that have implemented its Social Marketing Cloud platform, Emplifi is sharing deep insights from their findings to help social media marketers and advertisers align their social media strategies with current performance trends for Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and X (formerly Twitter).

Emplifi revealed that Instagram Reels and Carousels are the top-performing format on Instagram for organic content, with 65 median post interactions. Brands have experienced a 39% drop in engagement on TikTok organic content in Q4 2023 compared to Q1 2022, but only 9% compared to Q3 2022 meaning that the bulk of TikTok’s decline in engagement happened during the first three quarters of 2022. Still, Instagram continues to beat TikTok for organic video views a trend Instagram has maintained since the beginning of 2022. For both Instagram and TikTok, long- and medium-video lengths have outperformed shorter videos, a finding Emplifi first revealed last quarter.

In terms of paid advertising results, ads are becoming increasingly more affordable on X, with cost-per-click (CPC) and cost-per-thousand (CPM) steadily decreasing between 2022 and 2023. Meanwhile, Facebook CPM and CPC have remained consistent throughout the same time period. When analyzing click-through rates (CTRs), Emplifi discovered Facebook delivered the highest CTRs, followed by X and Instagram, respectively.

“It is such an interesting time for social media marketers and advertisers. The number of tools available to create social content has increased accessibility for a wider variety of brands. While the cost to produce high-performing posts has never been as affordable generative AI being one of the forces driving productivity enhancements with a reduction to cost,” said Ohad Hecht, CEO, Emplifi. “As engagement trends are shifting, it makes it difficult to know where to allocate social media marketing budgets”.

“Marketers need all the insights they can get to create strategic campaigns that deliver measurable outcomes. Because brands rely on social media marketing to bridge the gap between their biggest marketing, commerce, and customer care goals, the insights we’ve uncovered will help social media marketers fine-tune their strategies as they adjust to rapid changes in engagement across multiple social platforms,” added Hecht.

Here’s a quick breakdown of the most significant insights from Emplifi’s 2024 Social Media Benchmarks report:

• Instagram and Facebook saw the highest engagement rates for organic content in two years, while TikTok’s organic engagement continued to drop. The holiday surge helped increase organic engagement on Instagram for brands, driving a 9% jump over the previous quarter. TikTok’s engagement numbers remain strong when compared to Facebook and X. However, post interactions per 1K impressions have been declining down 26% from the start of 2022.
• Instagram Reels and Carousels were the top-performing organic content on Instagram in Q4 2023. Brands on Instagram are experiencing tremendous success with Reels and Carousels with 65 median post interactions, while images received 45 median post interactions.
• The best time of day to post organic content? It’s still the afternoon. Emplifi looked into Instagram and TikTok brand profiles in Europe and found the highest engagement rates were for social posts published in the afternoon, and particularly those on Friday afternoons.
• Facebook Live drove massive results for brands, generating 300% more engagement than Facebook Reels or Carousels. Meanwhile, brands posting organic videos on Instagram saw higher median interactions and median reach rates than image-centric posts.
• Ad spend on Facebook and Instagram reached its all-time high for the year in Q4 2023. It’s no surprise that ad spend reached record-breaking levels during the last quarter of the year. What’s most interesting are the results: CPCs for Facebook and Instagram ads remained largely steady throughout 2023, but CPCs for ads on X experienced a 22% drop midway through the year—by Q4 2023, CPCs on X were less than half than in Q2 2022.
• Instagram main feed ads represented the highest CPCs, but also led to a sizable increase in CTRs. In Q4 2023, ads on Instagram’s main feed saw a 24% increase in CTRs from the previous quarter, and respectively, ads on Stories had a 22% increase.

“The biggest takeaway from our research is that social media marketers must be flexible and take an agile approach to their social media strategies for both organic and paid campaigns. Social channels and user engagement on each continues to evolve. It’s imperative that your social media strategy evolves right along with the platforms and that your content choices align with the content formats that are winning the most engagement. It’s the fast path to social media marketing success,” said Hecht.

In today's digital landscape, reaching and engaging high-value customers can be daunting. However, Path2Response, a leading provider of data-driven marketing solutions, is revolutionizing how retailers approach retargeting with its innovative direct mail solution.

"We have to mail smarter," states Maria Youth, Chief Revenue Officier at Path2Response. Maria emphasizes the need for smarter direct mail strategies. Path2Response unveils Path2Ignite, their innovative direct mail solution for retailers, at this week's eTail event. Path2Ignite is the only solution combining consumer buying behavior with custom modeling to address the challenges brands face in today's direct mail marketing landscape. By embracing Path2Ignite, retailers can:

• Unlock the power of hyper-targeting: Leverage deep household-level insights, predictive intelligence, and rich analytics to identify individuals most likely to convert and reach highly specific customer segments with laser focus.
• Hyper-target ideal customers: Maximize ROI: Eliminate scattershot approaches and ensure mail quickly lands in the right hands, maximizing campaign effectiveness and minimizing cost.
• Empower sales teams: Equip them with data-driven insights to achieve outstanding results.
• Nurture customer loyalty: Activate high-value segments, automate engagement, and foster lasting relationships with personalized lifecycle marketing campaigns.
• Drive Measurable, incremental results and measure the performance of direct mail campaigns, including comparative indexes vs. holdout panels, and insights for optimization.

Unlocking the Power of Data-Driven Direct Mail

Path2Response's solution goes beyond traditional, generic mailers. Leveraging deep household-level insights, predictive intelligence, and rich analytics, Path2Ignite fuels performance-driven direct mail campaigns that resonate deeply with retailer's target audiences.

"The future of marketing is demonstrably data-driven," says Bruce Biegel, Senior Managing Partner at Winterberry Group. "With investments in data-driven channels projected to reach a staggering $36 billion in 2024, retailers need innovative solutions to stay ahead of the curve."

Kent to propel growth as enterprises look to build AI faster with Clarifai

Clarifai, a global leader in AI development and a pioneer of the full-stack AI platform, announced today that Chris Kent will join as SVP of Marketing as Clarifai expands into more enterprises, enabling them to build and operationalize AI faster.

Kent brings decades of marketing and category creation experience to Clarifai, which has spent 10 years perfecting its capabilities to enable teams to build AI in minutes, not months, and unlock value instantly. Kent was formerly VP of Product, Solutions, Partner and Customer Marketing for Cohesity and VP of Product Marketing for HashiCorp, where he helped grow the company to over $300 million ARR and a successful IPO.

"Given the rapid rise of Generative AI, people might think AI just appeared a year or so ago, but Clarifai has been helping companies build and find value with AI for more than a decade. As companies shift from AI exploration and experimentation to a focus on ROI and value, they're faced with similar challenges companies went through with the migration to cloud" said Matt Zeiler, Ph.D., Founder and CEO of Clarifai. "Chris has a long history of not only creating a company's story and of helping to build new categories, but also of engaging with developers in an authentic way that helps them find the solutions they need to make their companies winners. We're excited to welcome him to the Clarifai executive team."

Some of the world's best teams already build with Clarifai, including those at Humana, Lowe's, and NVIDIA. Additionally, the U.S. government is one of many Clarifai customers, proving that the product has been battle tested under extreme conditions with required precision.

"Clarifai is perfectly timed to establish itself as a leader in this category given the need of companies to quickly operationalize AI and stay ahead of competitors," said Kent. "Companies are struggling with skills gaps and hiring around AI, and Clarifai aims to empower companies to operationalize AI at scale, while reducing costs and risk, and reducing complexity around building and running AI, so anyone can do it. I'm thrilled to be part of Clarifai to build the next era of enterprise AI around the world."