Veritonic, the industry’s comprehensive audio analytics and research platform, announced today the Veritonic Audio Attention Report, a new gold-standard tool enabling advertisers to create more effective audio advertising. The report was created in partnership with Realeyes, the leading computer vision and attention AI company.

The audio attention report provides data-backed insight into the importance of creative efficacy programs for audio and podcast advertising. As noted in the report, audio is one of the most immersive, affective, and effective media channels available to brands and advertisers today, yet it’s still not getting the focus and investment it deserves. Consequently, those advertisers who seize the opportunity to invest in impactful audio advertising stand to gain remarkably outsized returns. This potential is further magnified when advertisers embrace innovative creative measurement tools, ensuring that their audio ads are finely tuned and optimized for their discerning listening audiences.

Hundreds of loyal podcast listeners opted-in to listening to a handful of podcast ads for a vitamin subscription service with their webcams enabled. Realeyes provided its award-winning PreView technology to capture and overlay their self-reported reactions to the ads with the passive attention and reaction metrics captured via webcam.

"We are dedicated to collaborating with forward-thinking leaders to deliver unparalleled data and insights to advertisers, brands, agencies, and platforms around the world,” stated Scott Simonelli, Founder and CEO of Veritonic. “Realeyes' expertise in measuring and categorizing human responses to sound, leveraging the largest culturally sensitive AI training set, perfectly complements our decade-long refinement of AI-powered audio measurement and optimization solutions. This unique combination allows us to provide advertisers and brands with unprecedented insights into audience reactions to audio and podcast ads—cognitive, emotional, and physical. We take pride in offering a level of insight for audio advertising optimization that has never been available before, contributing to the success of podcast and audio advertising globally."

“We are excited to partner with Veritonic, a pioneer in audio measurement to the world’s largest advertisers, agencies, and platforms,” said Alex Browne, Head of Partner Strategy at Realeyes. “Our work with the Audio Attention Report will provide advertisers with granular and unparalleled performance data that allows them to optimize their audio and podcast ads, and increase their ROI.”

Key findings from the report include:

• The proportion of the ad where people had sustained attention (did not look away or get distracted) was the weakest for audio ads with voiceovers that were low in volume, at 10% below the benchmark
• The proportion of the ad where people had sustained attention was similarly weak for audio ads that contained many competing sonic elements (lengthier messaging, 3+ sound effects + music), at 7% below the benchmark
• Attention quality was highest for the audio ad that had the highest voiceover volume (36%) as opposed to the ad that had the lowest voiceover volume (27%) and the ad that had too many competing elements within the creative (25%)
• 75% of participants reported a good quality audio ad positively influences their consideration to purchase a product

Accenture has agreed to acquire GemSeekhttps://gemseek.com/, a leading customer experience analytics provider helping global businesses understand customers through insights, analytics and AI-powered predictive models. The acquisition underscores ongoing investment by Accenture Song—the world’s largest tech-powered creative group—in data and AI capabilities to help clients grow their business and sustain relevance with customers.

Founded in 2011, GemSeek offers expertise in advanced analytics and customer experience program management, along with proprietary technologies. GemSeek helps clients across several industries—including telecommunications, healthcare, consumer goods, and financial services—realize the full potential of their customer experience programs, cultivate enduring customer relationships, and improve revenues and operational efficiencies.

Globally, 78% of business leaders say people are changing faster than they can change their business¹ and with more than half of global consumers wishing companies would respond faster to their changing needs, greater understanding of these expectations is required to close the relevance gap. The global customer experience analytics market is expected to grow from $9.5 billion in 2022 up to $37 billion in 2032. Accenture Song and GemSeek are both committed to helping clients realize these opportunities through understanding the customer’s perspective of brand and making customer-centric, data-driven decisions.

“The rapid pace of change the world is facing is felt by customers and businesses alike,” said Max Morielli, president for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, for Accenture Song. “Within GemSeek we found a team of like-minded thinkers, aligned with our purpose to provide clients with means to understand their customers’ needs better, and define new ways of engagement that will drive growth during these times of change.”

“We are thrilled at the opportunity to join Accenture and offer innovative and award-winning solutions to clients seeking to prioritise the customer agenda,” said Petko Tinchev, CEO, GemSeek. “Our extensive background in customer experience analytics complements Accenture’s deep expertise in data and AI. We are confident that our combined passion will empower us to deliver a truly integrated customer perspective and cutting-edge solutions, driving greater value for enterprises globally."

Headquartered in Sofia, Bulgaria, GemSeek’s more than 170 employees working across Bulgaria and the UK will join Accenture Song, growing its footprint and expanding offerings for clients across Europe, the Middle East and Africa. GemSeek employees will be the founding team for Accenture Song in Bulgaria, alongside the existing cohort of over 1,100 people from Accenture’s Advanced Technology and Intelligent Operations Centers.

GemSeek is the latest in a series of acquisitions that Accenture Song has made to enhance customer offerings for clients, including Work & Co, Rabbit’s Tale, ConcentricLife, Fiftyfive5 and The Stable and supports Accenture’s global strategy to invest $3 billion in AI to help organizations across all industries reinvent their operations at every level.

Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Completion of the acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions.

In hospitality and retail, consumers say the least personalized parts of their experiences are during their stay and while in store, providing key opportunity for brands

Medallia, Inc., the global leader in customer and employee experience, today announced the findings of its new research report, Understanding Personalization Efforts in the Hotel and Retail Industries. 

In a research study of 1,749 hotel guests and 1,905 retail consumers, Medallia found a strong link between personalization and overall satisfaction, validating earlier research that showed 61% of consumers are willing to spend more with companies if they offer a customized experience. But the new study revealed hotel and retail brands have significant opportunities to improve and capture more revenue: Just 23% of consumers report experiencing high levels of personalization after recent hotel stays and only 26% say the same after recent retail interactions.

The study also found customers who rate the level of personalization they received as a 9 or 10 on a scale of 0 to 10, with 10 being the most personalized, are far more likely to also rate their overall satisfaction as very high. Those who do not perceive their experience as being personalized report lower satisfaction ratings.

“It’s no surprise to see the clear link between personalization and satisfaction, but also not surprising to see brands struggling to keep up with consumer expectations for more customization,” said Andrew Custage, Head of Insights for Medallia Market Research. “The challenge for companies — especially in hospitality and retail, where consumers frequently engage across multiple digital, contact center, and in-person touchpoints — has always been capturing and understanding customer data fast enough to act on it. But generative AI technology is now making it possible for brands to automate insights and actions at scale to deliver more personalized experiences.”

Other key findings from the new report include:

The greatest opportunity to maximize personalization for hotel guests is during the stay itself

• Guests are less likely to find personalized experiences at this stage of the customer journey — features of personalization possible during the hotel stay averaged only a 46% recall rate, but other parts of the journey like interacting with customer service, during the booking, post stay, and during the check-in and check-out processes all averaged higher.
• Additionally, hotels can offer greater personalization when rewarding guests based on their status by allowing guests to make customized selections during the booking process, giving them more opportunities to provide feedback and allowing them to choose the support channels they prefer when they need customer service.

Retailers deliver more personalized experiences at certain touchpoints than others

• Retailers provide more tailored interactions for mobile app users, web visitors, loyalty program members and customers who interact with a brand’s customer service team. These individuals are much more likely to report higher levels of personalization compared to non-loyalty program members and customers who interact with retailers in person.
• These personalization gaps highlight an opportunity for retailers to step up and win a greater share of business and loyalty. After all, the majority of retail customers agree that customized, personalized and quality service leads to them choosing a brand more often and spending more when doing so.

Andrew Custage presented this new research at Medallia’s Experience ‘24 conference in early February, where the company also announced four new generative AI capabilities and a new Agile Research solution.

Survey Methodology

Medallia Market Research gathered responses from 1,749 hotel guests and 1,905 retail consumers about a recent visit or transaction in November 2023 using Medallia Agile Research and Medallia’s Sense360 research panel. Weighting has been applied based on U.S. census distribution of age and gender.

Data rightsizing solution supports company's Data First mission advocating starting data work earlier to drive better business outcomes from SAP transformation projects

Optimizing data volumes through early assessment of SAP data to enable cost savings, faster system migrations and improved overall system performance

Syniti, a global leader in enterprise data management, today announced it has acquired Proceed Group's Rightsizer software, a tool for identifying archiving opportunities and to determine infrastructure sizing as organizations embark on their SAP S/4HANA transformations. Rightsizer enables businesses to gain agility, relieve strain on internal resources, increase efficiencies in deployment, and maintain actionable data while keeping business operations running smoothly. The acquisition will expand and complement Syniti's current portfolio of solutions and build on the company's Data First approach to digital strategy of prioritizing data work at the start of any business transformation project.

With the acquisition of Proceed Rightsizer, Syniti customers will be able to begin working on their data earlier than ever before as they prepare for their journey to implementing SAP S/4HANA. When conducting an SAP migration, businesses need support to securely extract and import the data and documents stored within SAP environments and decommission the SAP and non-SAP legacy data that's no longer required. That's in addition to retaining the data required for regulatory and business reasons, ensuring continuity. Assessing and optimizing data earlier, understanding what to archive and what to delete, helps customers realize value faster from their existing data and infrastructure, setting the right Data First foundation for SAP transformations.  With rightsized data, businesses can focus on the data that is most important to their operations and can realize increased efficiency from their existing investments.

Syniti will begin incorporating the Rightsizer software into its Data Assessment Express offering, which offers customers rapid visibility into their SAP data to identify data challenges and opportunities. It provides customers with earlier access to relevant data information with suggested actions to accelerate data quality, data governance, analytics or data migration projects. These solutions facilitate the company's Data First approach by driving the importance and real benefits of data-driven transformation efforts and further enhances Syniti's capabilities and offerings in the SAP ecosystem.

Kevin Campbell, CEO, Syniti, said: "I've never had a customer tell us they started their data work too early or that their data is too clean. This is particularly true for any business transformation project, as we have seen in the thousands of SAP migration projects that we've delivered on for our customers including our recent successful go-live at Bridgestone. We continue to see the Data First strategy proving to drive better business benefits than antiquated lift and shift approaches."

Nick Parkin, founder, Proceed Group, said: "Syniti and Proceed are long-time partners, having worked together on many successful data projects. Both companies believe that maximizing the value of your SAP S/4HANA transformation means getting your data in shape prior to the move. Rightsizer is a natural fit for Syniti's innovative solutions and its Data First mission, which is critical towards ensuring every client is thinking about their data as a first step to delivering faster business benefits from their system implementations."

Experienced technology executive will drive global marketing strategy to accelerate growth

Mitel®, a global leader in business communications, today announced it has appointed Eric Hanson to its executive team as Chief Marketing Officer (CMO). 

Hanson will lead Mitel’s global marketing strategy, including solutions marketing for Mitel’s extensive communications portfolio, demand generation, brand, partner engagement marketing, customer marketing, and global communications.

“Over the past year, we have strengthened the Mitel solutions portfolio, expanded our channel community, and doubled the number of customers we serve,” said Tarun Loomba, President and Chief Executive Officer for Mitel. “Eric’s deep knowledge of the communications market and proven ability to drive demand in this space will accelerate our growth objectives and help solidify Mitel as the clear leader in unified communications.”

Hanson brings nearly 30 years of executive and marketing expertise to the Mitel team. Most recently, he was CMO at OneSpan, a provider of electronic signature and cybersecurity software, where he drove new programs that increased enterprise demand generation and improved the company’s brand and reputation in targeted market segments. Previously, Hanson served as CMO at Fuze where he was instrumental in contributing to the business and product innovation momentum that led to the company’s acquisition by 8x8 in 2022.

Prior to his time in the technology sector, Hanson was CEO and cofounder of SPY, a creative studio. Under his leadership, the company experienced tremendous growth, working on advertising campaigns with brands such as Nike, Toyota, and Apple and films including Iron Man, Hunger Games, and Avatar.

“When you pair its heritage of innovation with the recent acquisition of Unify, Mitel has an incredibly exciting story to tell,” said Hanson. “I am thrilled to join a world-class team at such a pivotal time, and I look forward to helping elevate the Mitel brand, empower partners, and provide clear paths for customers to use communications technology to drive engagement and better business outcomes.”

New third-party app integrations and actions in Grammarly enable businesses and professionals to simplify workflows and reclaim time lost to constant context-switching

Grammarly, the company helping over 30 million people and 70,000 teams work smarter and faster wherever they write, today announced the general availability of its app actions feature for all business, individual, and education customers. App actions enable customers to complete actions in popular third-party applications wherever writing with Grammarly is happening, making it easier to get work done without wasting time switching between tools, so teams stay focused and efficient. 

The increasing weight of application and information overload is causing a massive productivity drain, distracting teams from strategic work and costing businesses significant time and money. Knowledge workers lose up to five working weeks per year navigating between different apps, and 64% say they’re exhausted by incessant context-switching. App actions help people reclaim their workday by letting them carry out tasks—like creating a project ticket, linking to a file, or scheduling a meeting—from one place within Grammarly.

“Application overload is crushing productivity. We all know the pain of navigating an endless stream of apps, files, and channels,” said Matt Rosenberg, Grammarly Chief Revenue Officer and Head of Grammarly Business. “Opening up access to app actions is a major step toward our vision to power the AI-connected workplace by helping people work better and faster without distractions. Unlike many generative AI offerings that make the problem worse by locking people into one platform, Grammarly connects to the tools they already use so they can stay focused on getting their job done.”

Expanding support with new connections and capabilities

Grammarly is uniquely able to provide a connective layer across apps and workflows because it works where people do, on over 500,000 apps and websites. Since first announcing app actions in beta, Grammarly has listened to customer feedback to expand the feature with new integrations and functionality in a dozen of the most-used workplace apps, with more to be added over time. With app actions, customers can:

• Find, link to, or create new tasks to manage work in Asana, Atlassian Jira, monday.com, Smartsheet, and Wrike
• Find and link to a file or page in Atlassian Confluence, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, and Microsoft SharePoint
• Reference, link to, or create a new contact in HubSpot
• Access, format, and share links to schedule meetings via Calendly
• Find and insert animations and images from GIPHY and Unsplash

“At Smartsheet, we bring people, content, and work together in our enterprise work management platform. Adding a workplace AI tool like Grammarly to our integration suite simplifies collaboration for customers by eliminating the need to switch between their go-to apps,” said Bani Bedi, Senior Vice President, Corporate Development and Strategy at Smartsheet. “With the Smartsheet app action in Grammarly, more teams everywhere can work where they want to work, quickly find and kick off tasks, manage projects, and get the job done.”

“HubSpot is all about helping businesses grow, and partnering with an enterprise AI tool like Grammarly makes it even easier for our shared customers across marketing, sales, and support to access the HubSpot experience and get more value out of our product,” said Scott Brinker, VP of Platform Ecosystem at HubSpot. “Grammarly’s app action for HubSpot lets teams effortlessly tap into our platform to create and pull customer contacts into wherever they’re writing. That means faster work and more focus on what matters: building great customer relationships.”

Delivering impact across use cases

Customers already see significant results from using Grammarly. People at 96% of the Fortune 500 rely on Grammarly, and businesses report it saves them an average of 19 working days—the equivalent of an estimated $5,000+ in productivity—per employee per year. Making app actions generally available with more connections and capabilities will help customers further simplify workflows to save more time and costs.

Teams and professionals are seeing impact from app actions, using the feature to better collaborate on projects, find and link to relevant documents, make text more engaging with visuals, and more.

“With app actions, Grammarly seamlessly bridges the gap between our frequently utilized tools, helping us work faster and equipping our team to take action and access up-to-the-minute institutional insights from Confluence, Jira, and monday.com, no matter where they work,” said Jeff Ugai, Chief Operating Officer at Bitfocus.

“Grammarly’s app actions help me stay in the zone and churn out good work by putting everything I need at my fingertips, so I can stay in the flow and not get lost in other tabs,” said Stacey Roshan, Ed-tech Consultant.

The announcement follows Grammarly making its generative AI features generally available as it sees strong demand from enterprises and professionals for an AI writing partner that works across their tools, understands their context, and upholds security and privacy. The app actions feature maintains all of Grammarly’s enterprise-grade security and privacy practices and commitment to responsible AI, so customers can trust that their data remains secure.

All app actions are available today for all Grammarly Business, Premium, and Education customers, and Grammarly Free users benefit from connections to GIPHY and Unsplash.

MGID Ads deploys AI across campaign optimization, data analysis, and creative generation

MGID, the global advertising platform, has launched a new dashboard for MGID Ads, its self-service advertising campaign planning and execution suite. The new platform presents users with a new, more powerful intuitive interface that surfaces numerous AI-powered features, doubling the speed of campaign setup. 

Users will be guided through MGID Ads with informative tooltips through the entire campaign creation process, from creative development to ad placement, leveraging extensive data analytics for maximum performance alongside a CPC calculation feature, a step-by-step tracking setup, and AI-generated creatives.

The new dashboard has increased campaign metrics from 9 to 27 whilst 100 creatives can now be launched simultaneously in the time it previously took to launch one. Asynchronous validation also instantly alerts users of potential errors, with detailed descriptions of how to resolve them.

“Advertisers always have more to do than there are people to do it, so we’ve overhauled MGID Ads to make it as easy as possible to work efficiently with native ads,” said Matthew Villa, Head of Sales US at MGID. “By weaving AI into the very fabric of our new dashboard, advertisers can leave the heavy lifting to technology while focusing on driving audience attention, maximizing performance, and delivering measurable results.”

Alembic uniquely predicts marketing ROI using contact-tracing mathematics developed during the pandemic; WndrCo leads the round

Alembic, the leading holistic marketing attribution platform for enterprises, today announced it received $14 million in series A funding. The round was led by WndrCo, the venture capital firm started by DreamWorks founder Jeffrey Katzenberg. Existing investors MXV Capital, the venture capital firm started by Braze founder Mark Ghermezian, and Liquid 2 Ventures, the venture capital firm started by Joe Montana, also participated in the round. 

Alembic will use the funds to enhance its engineering capabilities, broaden its product range and accelerate client acquisition.

Alembic’s software predicts revenue and ROI from marketing, applying AI and mathematics developed during the pandemic for identifying causes, treatments and mortality in disparate data and populations. Alembic analyzes and evaluates unstructured and complex data to predict marketing ROI and future revenue based on the results. Alembic is proud to have Fortune 200 and top brands as customers, including NVIDIA, Texas A&M and North Sails.

Justin Wexler, who led the investment for WndrCo and joins Alembic’s board of directors, said, “At WndrCo, we continually ask Fortune 500 CMOs about their top challenges. The most common response is around proving the effectiveness of marketing spend. Our investment in Alembic is the culmination of our search for a company that solves this problem. We are looking forward to partnering with Alembic’s brilliant team to bring the power of AI and cutting-edge statistics to the marketing organizations behind the world’s leading brands.”

Using only anonymous and privacy-respecting aggregate data, Alembic accurately models marketing results and proves quantitatively how value is generated by marketing and sales activity. Alembic provides a real-time view to optimize all marketing activity and sales funnel movement. The Alembic platform leverages unstructured data from TV, radio, social media, out-of-home, sponsorship and digital marketing to predict revenue and profit for its customers. The visibility and transparency of marketing spend and outcomes facilitates reporting, informs strategy and breaks down silos between marketing, finance and business operations.

“Our customers say, before Alembic, what they used to evaluate marketing was like an ultrasound that only looked at one part of the body. Alembic is like a full body MRI scan that shows you a holistic view with much greater detail and precision,” said Tomás Puig, Alembic co-founder and CEO.

“Deploying AI allows companies to increase productivity in ways not possible before,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “Alembic is using AI developed for scientific research applications to predict ROI from marketing. NVIDIA marketing is using Alembic with great success.”

“Alembic has a breakthrough solution for a problem I’ve seen throughout my career: Measuring results from marketing initiatives. WndrCo is thrilled to lead the series A round for Alembic and enable the company to introduce its innovative solution to a wider audience. All enterprise marketing organizations should consider Alembic to solve this problem in marketing,” said Jeffrey Katzenberg, founding partner, WndrCo.

“In sports and in business, it’s difficult to predict outcomes, but Alembic enables enterprises to accurately predict revenue and ROI from all the components of their marketing mix. For this reason, Liquid 2 Ventures is proud to invest in Alembic. We believe that Alembic will be a winner along with its customers in applying the most advanced mathematics and AI available for predicting marketing ROI,” said Joe Montana, managing director, Liquid 2 Ventures.

“MXV Capital invests in Alembic because its novel, unique, quantitative approach helps enterprises understand which actions and plans from marketing drive the most value. Using AI and mathematics developed during the pandemic for identifying causes, treatments and mortality in populations, Alembic analyzes unstructured and complex structured data to predict revenue and ROI from marketing and improve planning strategy. It’s a great example of how AI initially developed for epidemiology can be applied to predict and help improve business outcomes,” said Mark Ghermezian, founder and general partner, MXV Capital.

“Alembic enables me, for the first time, to show what impact to the organization our marketing dollars today will have on future revenue. Our most recent success has been around time to event analysis — an AI modeling solution initially applied in healthcare. We are leveraging Alembic to guide finance on which marketing spend will provide the most ROI with accuracy,” said Aristomenis Capogeannis, senior director, enterprise revenue marketing, NVIDIA.

“With a plethora of content and proliferation of channels, marketers are constantly faced with choices. Alembic’s AI-driven correlation engine not only provides confidence in decision-making, but delivers return on intelligence and investment for enterprises like NVIDIA, Texas A&M and North Sails,” said Laura Maness, Alembic independent board director and global CEO, Grey.