Brands & Agencies Empowered to Understand the Combination of End Publishers & Sellers that Drove Performance

Insights Inform Optimizations to Cut Waste & Find the Most Effective Supply Paths

Innovid, an independent platform for the creation, delivery, measurement, and optimization of advertising across connected TV (CTV), linear TV, and digital, today announced the availability of publisher-level outcomes analysis for all DSP and SSP campaigns. The first-of-its-kind offering helps brands and agencies break down silos inherent in DSP and SSP reporting to understand, assess, and compare performance across all of their media buys through a granular and unbiased measurement lens. 

The addition of this breakout analysis within InnovidXP augments the previously provided DSP and SSP reach, frequency, and unique reach, and offers a new level of transparency and granularity for campaigns and performance-driven optimization. Advertisers ultimately benefit through increased visibility into inventory performance, publisher-level impression details, device transparency, and how their campaigns performed across all of their investment strategies. These additional insights allow advertisers to find the most effective supply paths to optimize campaigns and drive ROI.

“As TV becomes 100% digital, a new world of transparent measurement is opening up across the advertising ecosystem, allowing buyers and sellers to identify optimizations and improve efficiency to decrease waste and strengthen performance,” said Blair Robertson, Head of Product Strategy, Innovid. “With InnovidXP, advertisers can optimize every part of their investment.”

Fueled by the scale and automation of Innovid’s ad server – which processes more than one billion video impressions and collects over six billion data points a day – InnovidXP delivers an unrivaled view of the converged TV universe and powerful, granular, always-on insights on all aspects of TV campaigns in one platform.

Robertson continued: “With so many ways to buy inventory, advertisers are challenged to understand where their ads landed, the outcomes they drove, and the performance of DSP and SSP partners. While most DSPs and SSPs provide measurement insights, there has never been a way to consistently compare them within a campaign. Now, with InnovidXP, brands and agencies get a chance to ‘see past their buys’ and start optimizing toward KPIs based on real-time, unbiased analysis.”

Pruitt to lead business development and brand communications for the growing Stagwell network connecting creative, media and commerce.

Stagwell's Brand Performance Network (BxP), today announced the appointment of Shannon Pruitt as Global Chief Marketing Officer. Shannon will be responsible for business development, marketing and communications globally for BxP, where she previously served as Global Chief Content & Partnership Innovation Officer. 

"After spending more than 20 years working in both agency and brand-side roles, I've come to understand the headache marketers face when brand and performance marketing operate in silos. The Brand Performance Network flips the script by treating brand and performance as a single, unified action," said Shannon Pruitt.

After joining Stagwell in 2020, Shannon was elevated to Global Chief Content & Partnership Innovation Officer of BxP in 2021. In this role, Shannon spearheaded partnerships with emerging platforms like Roblox and Audio, while collaborating with BxP agencies and Stagwell on key business initiatives. In 2023, Shannon launched Partners for Progress, Assembly's Global Diversity & Inclusion initiative, and consolidated Assembly Global's ESG efforts into Assembly Impact.

Prior to joining Stagwell, Shannon was the Chief Marketing Officer of The Honest Company and the co-founder and CEO of Dentsu's The Story Lab, amassing experience across Fortune 100 brands including GM, XBox, P&G, Fox, Microsoft, Mondelez, MasterCard and Macy's. Shannon has also led creative, marketing and business development teams at entertainment powerhouses 19 Entertainment, Mark Burnett Productions, Warner Bros and Octagon. Throughout this time, she was responsible for the strategy and activation of MasterCard's FIFA World Cup, Major League Baseball, and National Football League sponsorships.

"Given Shannon's deep background in brand storytelling, partnerships, content creation, and omnichannel campaigns, she is the ideal person to drive forward the Brand Performance Network's mission. Shannon understands the necessity for connected solutions across creative, media and commerce and can help us tell the story for brands seeking a modern alternative to the legacy players," said James Townsend, CEO of the Brand Performance Network.

"Shannon is also deeply passionate about sustainable growth and impact for brands. We know that DEI and environmental sustainability are important not only to consumers but to clients who have also made shareholder and business commitments in these areas. Shannon will continue to serve as a trusted advisor to clients defining their path forward," Townsend added.

A new study reveals trends in CTV, targeting, and sustainability for the European digital media industry.

As the programmatic ecosystem prepares for the deprecation of the third-party cookie, the proportion of campaigns run via CTV across Europe is set to increase substantially while brands and agencies alike lean more into curated media buys.

The market is also recognising the importance of sustainability, investing heavily in practical efforts to reduce carbon emissions. This is according to a new research report, CTV, Targeting, and Sustainability - Europe 2023-2024, published by ExchangeWire, in association with OpenX.

As brands and agencies recognise the increased attention and premium inventory CTV offers, they are flocking to the channel en-masse, with a majority of marketers reporting that in the next two years, at least 40 percent of their campaigns will be running via CTV. Meanwhile, the reliance on third-party cookies is steadily decreasing, with probabilistic identity graphs coming to the fore, especially in European markets.

“As the programmatic ecosystem collectively prepares for a huge shift, it’s really encouraging to see how significantly brands and agencies have embraced curation and programmatic CTV to continue to reach their desired audiences effectively,” says Joseph Worswick, VP, EMEA, and head of sustainability at OpenX. “OpenX is committed to building innovative solutions that help ensure both publisher health and buyer success as we enter a new era of programmatic.”

Highlights from the report include:

• A majority of respondents stated that at least 40% of campaigns will be run on CTV in the next 24 months.
• Two-thirds of brands and agencies are engaging in programmatic CTV buys, via both managed service providers and self-service platforms.
• Six-in-ten respondents stated that 40% or less of their inventory is reliant upon third-party cookies, as probabilistic identity graphs and CTV rise in their wake.
• Just 3% of media buyers report only advertising against traditional linear TV.
• 75% of marketers deem sustainability metrics to be a top priority for their businesses, representing a sizable increase from the 43% recorded last year.

PubMatic, an independent technology company delivering digital advertising’s supply chain of the future, has today announced its partnership with Vevo, the world’s leading music video network. The collaboration will allow for an accelerated phase of programmatic CTV growth for Vevo, allowing advertisers to drive scaled reach across its premium library.

Vevo’s global network spans more than 800,000 videos, boasting a total monthly average of 25 billion views. Partnering with PubMatic will offer unprecedented access to Vevo’s expansive high-quality CTV inventory for media buyers globally. Harnessing PubMatic’s huge demand, advanced programmatic trading capabilities, and strategic supply path optimisation (SPO) relationships, Vevo will unlock rich opportunities to deliver targeted ads for a wide range of audiences in engaged, immersive, and brand safe environments, while benefiting from significant ad yield gains.

The integration closely aligns with Vevo’s goal of achieving ubiquity through ever-broader video distribution and persistent development of its monetisation approach. With its content accessible on the Vevo TV app, over 20 unique Free Ad-Supported TV (FAST) channels, and social platforms such as YouTube, Vevo is increasing its participation in different types of sales environments, building on previous direct dealing success, by making inventory programmatically accessible to varied demand partners via PubMatic’s platform.

The new partnership gives media buyers access to Vevo’s premium inventory, coupled with access to PubMatic’s cutting-edge addressability and transparency solutions, known for enhancing return-on-investment (ROI).

PubMatic's Nicole Scaglione, Global VP for CTV/OTT and Video says: “This collaboration marks a major milestone on multiple fronts. The partnership will enable greater growth and innovation by fulfilling the requirement for an efficient, transparent, and premium-grade supply of inventory. As well as allowing us to connect programmatic buyers with high-value music video inventory, it reinforces PubMatic’s standing as a leading force in the CTV space — cementing our position as a go-to platform for existing and new CTV players. We look forward to playing a key role in powering trading that optimises ad revenue for both buyers and sellers.”

Vevo's EVP of Revenue, Distribution & Data Operations, Natalie Gabathuler-Scully, says: “This partnership will allow Vevo to considerably elevate the advertising opportunities we can provide at a global level and drive our programmatic business forward. Leveraging PubMatic’s extensive preferred demand relationships will considerably augment our monetisation approach, especially across our TV app and FAST channels on over 35 CTV platforms worldwide.”

Mitto, a dominant global omnichannel communications provider announced today that it entered a strategic partnership with MoEngage, an industry-leading insight-led customer engagement platform, to optimize WhatsApp Business and SMS communication quality and cost-efficiency while elevating the customer experience. Mitto will now be part of the MoEngage Catalyst partner program that focuses on helping brands scale at speed. 

This collaboration empowers MoEngage users to:

• Leverage Mitto's advanced SMS API and WhatsApp Business communication solutions to engage and support customers worldwide with two-way, individualized conversations
• Cost-effectively amplify their reach with Mitto's proprietary AI-routing platform, which proactively monitors carrier networks, runs simulations, and analyzes and prioritizes traffic to mitigate problems, identify the best message path, and provide the fastest delivery speeds at the lowest price points
• Drive sales, boost retention, and deepen customer connections with personalized campaigns, prompt 24/7 support, and loyalty programs
• Effortlessly segment customers, customize messaging, monitor key performance indicators in real-time, and increase efficiency with event-triggered automation
• Tap into Mitto's global network of over 800 direct carrier connections

By uniting abilities, Mitto and MoEngage allow brands to optimize ROI and deliver extraordinary conversational experiences to consumers worldwide.

"We believe that our collaborative efforts with Mitto will help businesses delight customers with unforgettable, hyper-personalized experiences across high-impact channels that make them feel seen, heard, and understood, " stated Raviteja Dodda, MoEngage® Inc. Founder and CEO.

"Our partnership with MoEngage reinforces our commitment to not just empowering brands with innovative communication tools but to reshaping the future of how businesses interact and care for customers," Andrea Giacomini, Mitto CEO, said.

Sinch AB (publ), which powers meaningful conversations between businesses and their customers through its Customer Communications Cloud, today announced that it has appointed Wendy Johnstone as Executive Vice President APAC and member of the Sinch Global Leadership Team.

Wendy brings a broad experience and a proven track record of success from over 25 years in the technology and SaaS sectors across EMEA and APAC. She joins Sinch from Zendesk where she had the position as Senior Vice President Asia Pacific and Japan.

"I am delighted to welcome Wendy Johnstone as our new Executive Vice President for the APAC region. Wendy will be instrumental in advancing our strategic initiatives across APAC, capitalizing on emerging opportunities, and fostering strong relationships with partners, clients, and employees. With her strategic vision paired with empathetic and courageous leadership, we are confident in Wendy's ability to drive innovation, align teams cross functionally, enhance operational efficiency, and achieve accelerated growth in this dynamic and diverse market," comments Laurinda Pang, Sinch CEO.

Wendy Johnstone will succeed Damien Tabor who has had this position on an interim basis and will continue as Sinch APAC's Chief Financial Officer. Wendy is based in Singapore and her first day at Sinch will be February 23.

Following this appointment, Sinch's leadership team will consist of:

• Laurinda Pang, CEO
• Brett Scorza, Chief Technology Officer
• Christina Raaschou, Chief Human Resources Officer
• Cristina David, Chief Information Officer
• Jonathan Bean, Chief Marketing Officer
• Julia Fraser, EVP Americas
• Nicklas Molin, EVP EMEA
• Roshan Saldanha, Chief Financial Officer
• Sean O'Neal, Chief Product Officer
• Sibito Morley, Chief Data and Transformation Officer
• Thomas Heath, Chief Strategy Officer
• Wendy Johnstone, EVP APAC

KDDI Web Communications Inc. has announced its partnership with Vonage, a global leader in cloud communications helping businesses accelerate their digital transformation and a part of Ericsson, to bring Vonage Communications APIs to customers in Japan, starting today.

With Vonage's Communications APIs, businesses in Japan can bring new communications capabilities to customers such as online calling and two-way messaging, to build better connections and deeper engagement. In addition, security can be enhanced with simple, seamless two-factor authentication powered by the Verify API, while Vonage's conversational commerce application, powered by Jumper.ai, enables businesses to create AI-powered omnichannel experiences that boost sales and increase customer satisfaction.

Masato Yamazaki, President, KDDI Web Communications, said, "KDDI Web Communications has been providing Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) API solutions since 2013. In offering Vonage's Communications APIs and Vonage Conversational Commerce, we have leveraged Vonage's extensive experience and expertise as a pioneer in the Japanese CPaaS market to create an environment that makes it easier for Japanese businesses to adopt CPaaS. We provide "value-added" services that are close to our customers, such as opening a sales website that is highly visible to Japanese people, developing an implementation support system, and setting up customer support in Japanese."

"We are excited to partner with KDDI Web Communications to enable more businesses in Japan to take advantage of Vonage's CPaaS platform," said Tetsuro Nishimura, Country Manager, Japan, at Vonage. "The Vonage platform makes it easy to embed verification, fraud detection, automated alerts - not to mention voice, video, and customer insights - directly into every interaction. Furthermore, Vonage Conversational Commerce enables brands to create omnichannel, messaging-first customer buying experiences across popular messaging, social and web platforms.

"This partnership not only offers us a great opportunity to innovate together in Japan, but also to enable more businesses to differentiate themselves and create meaningful connections and engagements with customers."

As of 2023, the demand for CPaaS in Japan was poised to reach a valuation of $668.7 million. The industry in Japan is likely to expand with a 28.50% CAGR from 2023 to 2033, reaching $8,902.50 million by 2033. KDDI Web Communications plans to develop services that leverage its existing expertise and cultivate CPaaS and communications-related partners to help solve customers' communications problems.

Founded in 2001 in the United States, Vonage serves more than 120,000 business customers, has a global community of more than one million registered developers and a highly scaled platform. Vonage's solutions have facilitated transformative projects for multiple startups and established companies across Asia including Carousell, PT. Telekomunikasi, Kakao, Doctor Anywhere, Manulife, PUBG Corporation, Insung Information, Spacely and more.

New research explores how enterprises use a data foundation layer for both intelligence and activation, and how this layer is undergoing transformation

A new white paper released today from Winterberry Group, a strategic advisory consultancy, explores the business and economic considerations of building an enterprise “data layer” to support the integration, management and activation of data and identity. “Demystifying the Data Layer: Transformation of Marketing Data Infrastructure (February 2024)” documents the components of this layer inside many organizations, and how they are changing – both in Europe and North America.

According to Winterberry Group, in the United States alone, $27 billion will be spent in 2024 on data, data services and data infrastructure to support an estimated $270 billion in U.S. media buying across data-driven channels. Data spend to support not just these channels – but the enterprise decision-making behind media and marketing selection – is projected to rise to more than $33 billion by 2027, the Company reports. The paper explores core solutions in the data layer, including: master data management; identity graphs; data clean rooms; data lakes; customer data platforms; analytic data environments, data warehouses; customer relationship management platforms; and LLM [large language models] data warehouses.

U.S. Marketing Data, Data Services and Data Infrastructure Spending Projections, 2024-27. Source: Winterberry Group, Demystifying the Data Layer: Transformation of Marketing Data Infrastructure, February 2024.

The paper is the culmination of insights derived from more than 60 expert interviewees in the advertising, marketing, publishing, regulatory, legal and agency sectors, conducted between October 2023 and February 2024. The interviews were supplemented by 200 respondents across the United States, United Kingdom, France and Germany, who answered a comprehensive survey.

“Several market forces are transforming how enterprises responsibly collect and use data for marketing activation,” said Michael Harrison, managing partner, Winterberry Group, and a co-author of the research. “Increased privacy regulation, a rapid shift toward digital-centric performance media, and the evolution of tech driven by machine and learning and generative AI [artificial intelligence] are helping to build a centralized data infrastructure that can support many business use cases – involving insights, activation, optimization and measurement. We’re seeing brands and companies embracing this layer as foundational.”

Harrison noted that the data layer directly supports two other layers that comprise marketing and advertising technology ecosystems today: the intelligence layer, which supports deriving insights to inform decision-making in strategy; and the activation layer, where inbound and outbound communications channels reach customers and prospects – and are increasingly driven by both data and analytics. “Getting it right, understanding how to source, unify, parse and stage the data, is vital to successful business outcomes,” he said.

The paper also details some of the transformation underway in the current “omnichannel era” of marketing within and about the data layer:

• A shift toward cloud-based environments, to help manage scalability, flexibility, and aspects of cost-efficiency. Hybrid hosting approaches, which combine on-premises and cloud environments, are gaining traction, enabling optimized performance while ensuring robust data security and privacy measures;
• The design and establishment of persistent first-party identity graphs to link proprietary PII [personally identifiable information] data with third-party assets, enriching customer insights and personalization capabilities;

Marketing Organizations’ Intent to Invest in Data Services, 2024. Source: Winterberry Group, Demystifying the Data Layer: Transformation of Marketing Data Infrastructure, February 2024.

• The evolution of Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) from “systems of record” to unified intelligence and data management platforms capable of integrating persistent and non-persistent identifiers to support more relevant marketing efforts;
• Growing demand for Data Clean Rooms (DCRs) to enable collaboration within and across brands and media providers for targeted planning, analysis and measurement in a more secure, privacy-safe environment.
• Addressing challenges in content and audience data adoption and integration, particularly structured and unstructured data residing in digital asset and content management platforms. These efforts support the development of Large Language Models (LLMs) within the intelligence layer, enhancing data-driven insights and decision-making processes.

The Winterberry Group research is commissioned by numerous data and adtech/martech companies: LiveRamp, Habu, Treasure Data, mParticle, Acxiom and Aqfer.

“Data is critical to not only know customers, but deeply understand them across the many enterprise touchpoints and devices, screens, and browsers they engage with,” said Daniella Harkins, SVP of product GTM, LiveRamp. “As signal loss drives investment in first-party data, enterprises must extend the value of that data and enhance their identity strategies through strategic partnerships that unlock new insights driven by new second and third-party data relationships.”

“As the Winterberry research highlights, privacy-enhancing technologies such as clean rooms are now essential for ethical data-driven collaboration,” said Matt Kilmartin, co-founder & CEO, Habu. “It's imperative for companies to possess flexible tools designed so both technical and business users can achieve any use case, driving business growth efficiently. And, these tools should be interoperable, empowering organizations to collaborate and scale with any partner, regardless of the cloud platform from which their data resides.”

“In the age of hyper-personalization and artificial intelligence, it’s never been more important to get your data layer right as Winterberry Group highlights in its research. We believe a CDP that brings together data and decisioning is the future-proof customer data foundation that global enterprises need to orchestrate enriched customer experiences and drive profitable growth,” said Karl Wirth, chief product & technology officer, Treasure Data.

“We’re experiencing a major platform shift right now as (predictive) AI is multiplying the value that can be extracted from customer data,” said Michael Katz, CEO, mParticle. “As such, the benefit of the CDP is evolving from creating operational efficiency via simplifying martech integrations to impacting business outcomes through better decisioning at scale. While every vendor will have some sort of AI offering, it’s important to look for a diverse set of ML pipelines to create the most surface area for generating business outcomes.”

“Winterberry’s report underscores the rapid evolution of marketing data, driven primarily by expanding digital channels, regulatory shifts, and technological advancements,” said Dana Goff, SVP and head of industry and solution strategy at Acxiom. “The findings reaffirm what we’ve long recognized at Acxiom – these changes, while challenging, offer opportunities for growth and innovation. To capitalize on this potential and thrive in a data-driven future, brands must adopt cloud-native, privacy-compliant data management and analytics solutions. Establishing a robust data strategy, supported by a strong foundation, is the path forward for businesses aiming for sustained market success in the digital era.”