BeyondID, a leading managed identity solutions provider, today announced its successful completion of its System and Organization Controls 2 Type II (SOC 2 Type II) examination. This certification highlights BeyondID's commitment to ensuring the security and privacy of its users' data.

The company also announced that its platform is Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliant and can provide a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) to customers that ensures the proper handling of protected health information.

The independent examination, conducted by leading cybersecurity assessment firm A-LIGN https://www.a-lign.com/validates that BeyondID's security practices and controls meet the Trust Services Principles and Criteria for security, availability, and privacy over an extended period of time. 

"Every day, our certified identity professionals and Security Operations Center help customers identify threats to their environment and data, and protecting them is our top priority," said  Sasi Kelam, co-founder and CTO at BeyondID. "We are also proud to achieve HIPAA compliance, ensuring that BeyondID can handle sensitive healthcare data securely. This combination of SOC 2 and HIPAA compliance assures our customers that we take security as seriously as they do." 

In addition to performing a SOC 2/HIPAA audit on an annual basis, BeyondID will make the report available to current or potential customers upon execution of a non-disclosure agreement (NDA). 

Integration Enables Advertisers, Agencies, and Publishers to Navigate the Post-Cookie Era While Prioritizing User Privacy and Audience Effectiveness 

Optable, a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) data management & collaboration platform designed for the advertising ecosystem, announced today the commencement of its Early Access Program for its Privacy Sandbox activation capabilities. This marks an unprecedented step for a company synonymous with data collaboration, as it boldly integrates with the new Google API, becoming the go-to "easy button" for privacy-safe advertising.

"At Optable, our mission to enable growth through privacy-safe advertising products has led us to extend our data management and collaboration capabilities by deeply integrating with the Google Privacy Sandbox," said Bosko Milekic, Chief Product Officer and Co-founder, Optable. "Our customers require solutions that empower them to leverage both authenticated and anonymous user data in innovative, privacy-centric ways for audience-based planning, activation, and measurement. This integration fundamentally strengthens our platform and will redefine what people expect to get out of data management and collaboration platforms in the era of privacy."

The Optable Early Access Program empowers advertisers and agencies to construct and target audiences while preserving user privacy. This suite also facilitates the measurement of advertising effectiveness within a privacy-centric framework. Further, it offers publisher networks the ability to develop and launch privacy-safe advertising products, engaging user cohorts across owned, operated, and third-party media.

Seamlessly integrated with Optable's robust data management solution, Optable DMP, and its collaborative data clean room suite, Optable Collaborate, this development benefits key industry stakeholders:

• Publishers: Empowers publishers by enabling them to regain control over audience data, enable emerging revenue streams, expand their reach across various media, prioritize user privacy, and optimize audience activation and measurement within a privacy-centric environment.
• Marketers: Ensures continued audience reach, offering privacy-centric solutions, innovative measurement tools, opportunities for early adaptation, and access to new, privacy-safe approaches in audience engagement and campaign optimization.

"We're encouraged by the industry's continued efforts to test innovative solutions using the building blocks provided by the Privacy Sandbox," said Victor Wong, Senior Director of Product Management, Privacy Sandbox, Google. "As we enter 2024, we look forward to working with all parts of the industry as more companies shift towards privacy-centric advertising solutions."

PRWeek and Cision examine opportunities and challenges for PR pros, including generative AI adoption, influence in the C-suite, and budget constraints

Cision, the global leader in consumer and media intelligence, engagement, and communication solutions, today released its 2024 Global Comms Report: Elevating & Evolving in partnership with PRWeek, highlighting the evolving role of strategic communicators as business drivers. Now in its seventh year, the annual report examines the perspectives of more than 400 PR and corporate communications professionals across 10 countries on what it means to be a strategic communications professional today. The report sheds light on the challenges and opportunities they currently face amid factors like increased pressure to prove impact, more sophisticated data and analytics, emerging technologies like AI, shifting consumer behaviors, and a complex media landscape.

Among the report's most intriguing findings is the growing role of – and dependencies on – PR and corporate communications teams within the C-suite. Nearly half (41%) of senior-most communications leaders report to the CEO directly, and a remarkable 92% say their C-suite sought their counsel more often last year than in years prior, up from 87% who said the same in 2021. With this level of influence comes greater expectations of how communicators can impact the bottom line. PR and comms teams indicated feeling increased pressure to play a key role in moving the needle on business factors such as revenue, share of voice, and overall brand equity. When asked to name the factors they consider CEOs' biggest priorities for comms, nearly two-thirds (60%) of respondents cited "building sustainable growth and value," an increase of 6 percentage points from just a year ago. Other priorities include the ability to respond in a timely manner to changing marketplace dynamics and opportunities (55%), customer acquisition/engagement (43%), and driving sales/revenue (42%).

"Strategic communicators have more than proven their value to the C-suite and have earned a seat at the table when it comes to influencing strategy and driving business outcomes," said Carrie Parker, Chief Marketing Officer at Cision. "High-performing PR and Comms teams are aligning their arsenal of tools and expertise with organizational goals to drive transformative change."

Additional Report Takeaways:

• Generative AI: The majority of PR and comms professionals (65%) have started experimenting with generative AI for things like content creation, press release writing and audience research; however, the degree of adoption varies, with 32% of comms teams describing their usage as "frequent," and 33% saying it is "infrequent." The rest are only in the consideration stages of experimentation (27%), unlikely to use them at all (7%) or unsure about their plans (1%).
• Identifying Influence: Everyday consumers are considered the most effective influencers, as brands look beyond celebrities to boost awareness and enhance sales.
• Need for Reliable Data: Comms professionals are increasingly focused on measurement, with 42% saying they very much rely on data and analytics - up from 30% who said the same last year.
• Social Media Dominance: Reliance on both earned (53%) and paid (46%) segments has increased year on year.

"PRWeek has been collaborating with Cision on the Global Comms Report since 2017, and I have always been proud of the enlightening and detailed global PR snapshot we've been able to provide, along with valuable counsel from various industry leaders," said Gideon Fidelzeid, Editorial Director at PRWeek.

LiveRamp is the first company in the industry to become Addressable Media Identifier (AMI)-certified by the Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA), the ad industry’s self-regulatory body for relevant digital advertising. Publishers, marketers, and the broader ecosystem can leverage and build upon LiveRamp’s solutions with confidence they will endure beyond third-party signal loss. With this certification, companies can recognize LiveRamp as a partner that is suited to help both the buy- and sell-side to better connect data and improve customer experiences, as they work to ensure they stay compliant with varying legal and regulatory requirements.

LiveRamp’s Authenticated Traffic Solution, as well as its durable, privacy-centric identifier, RampID, have been successfully reviewed and found compliant with the Digital Advertising Alliance’s (DAA) Policy Framework for Addressable Media Identifiers. In a rigorous process, TRUSTe, a subsidiary of TrustArc, reviewed LiveRamp’s solutions in five critical areas, validating the steps LiveRamp has taken to establish, maintain, and continually improve privacy practices aligned with the DAA’s self-regulatory AMI frameworks. The areas of evaluation included:

• Policies and Standards, including ensuring that controls are in place to limit the use of AMIs to only those purposes allowed under DAA policy
• Processes, including processes to maintain records and reports to demonstrate compliance with the DAA Policy Framework for AMIs
• Use, Retention, and Disposal, including purpose limitation, special requirements outlining prohibited uses of AMIs, and the use of sensitive information with AMIs that require the individual’s opt-in consent
• Transparency, including providing enhanced notice and website notice regarding the use of AMIs and adherence to the DAA Policy Framework for AMIs
• Reporting and Certification, including accessibility to AMIs under equal, reasonable, and non-discriminatory terms and conditions

“LiveRamp has been an industry leader in adopting rigorous industry-backed, independently-enforceable standards to strengthen privacy practices while improving partner outcomes, and we are delighted that they’ve become the first company to complete the DAA’s AMI certification,” said Lou Mastria, CIPP/US, executive director of the DAA. “This achievement serves as a clarion call for the industry to move quickly to ensure their cookie-based and next-generation advertising solutions are compliant with the DAA’s past and current standards. LiveRamp is setting a model for the industry at making meaningful and timely progress towards this goal.”

The DAA and its standards are supported by the leading ad industry trade groups, including the 4As, American Advertising Federation, Association of National Advertisers/ANA, Interactive Advertising Bureau, and Network Advertising Initiative. The DAA’s AMI Certification advances the industry’s commitment to consumer privacy self-regulation by, among other things, introducing the concepts of permitted and prohibited uses of data. Through responsible data collection and use, coupled with transparency and control, AMI Certification shows a renewed commitment to high standards by responsible actors in the digital advertising ecosystem.

“We’re grateful for the DAA’s focus on maintaining critical functionality across the digital ecosystem, something we’ve championed ourselves with LiveRamp’s connectivity and interoperability,” said Travis Clinger, Chief Connectivity & Ecosystem Officer. “With the 100% deprecation of the third-party cookie just months away, for anyone that’s just getting started or shifting their focus to their cookieless transition, this can give them the confidence of picking a solution that enables the scale and performance they need.”

PureWeb, a leading innovator in cloud-based streaming solutions, is proud to announce an important addition to its platform - the release of high performance On Demand infrastructure providers. These providers, powered by top-tier rendering GPUs available in CoreWeave, are set to redefine the streaming landscape and empower creators to achieve unparalleled performance.

Available immediately in both the Western and Eastern United States, PureWeb's high-performance providers are equipped with NVIDIA’s formidable RTX A6000 GPUs, 32 GB of RAM, and 10 vCPUs. These specifications make them the ideal choice for handling the most demanding Unreal Engine and Unity streaming projects.

“What sets these new providers apart is their exceptional performance,” says Chris Jarabek, VP of Product Development at PureWeb. “We conducted extensive testing with GPU-intensive workloads, and the results were impressive. In Unreal applications, we saw frame rate improvements ranging from a substantial 28% to a very healthy 67%. Similarly, in Unity environments, enhancements ranged from 35% to an impressive 48%, when compared to our standard CoreWeave providers.”

Depending on rendering demands, clients can find success utilizing these new On Demand providers in conjunction with AWS current-generation G5 instances for enhanced global accessibility, enabling them to customize their infrastructure to meet their project's unique performance requirements.

“We’re really excited about this new On Demand provider and, when PureWeb introduces support for AWS’s next-generation G6 instances, we think the two will make the perfect dedicated pairing for our new On Demand offering,” says Chris.

• Ballesteros To Lead Wizeline's Brand Marketing and Go-To-Market Strategy Globally.

• She brings 20+ years of experience in marketing and communication strategies from leading technology and multinational corporations, including Cognizant, Softvision, Globant, Shell, Unilever, and American Express

Wizeline, a global technology company providing AI-focused digital services, recently named Fausta Ballesteros as Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), with the goal of advancing the global brand and ‘go-to-market’ strategy, and elevating the company's positioning in the technology sector.

"We are thrilled to welcome Fausta to the Wizeline team”, said Bismarck Lepe, CEO and founder of Wizeline. “Fausta’s experience, energy and creativity with multinational companies, particularly in the technology and software industries, will be instrumental in enhancing our market position as well as our overall world-class culture.”

Fausta has more than 20 years of experience working in global markets, including the United States and North America, Mexico and Latin America, Europe and Asia. Originally from Argentina, she has been in New York since 2007. She holds a master's degree in Marketing from the University of San Andrés in Argentina, a Women Leadership Program from the Yale School of Management, and an Entrepreneurship Program from the Austral University in Buenos Aires.

Fausta has worked for technology companies and multinational corporations, including Cognizant, Softvision, Globant, Shell, Unilever, American Express, and Urban PR, where she has been involved in strategy, branding, and communication. Her expertise includes creating culture-defining initiatives, global communications programs, thought leadership and content, and go-to-market products and strategies that help drive growth, engage internal and external audiences, and build community. Under her leadership, campaigns have resulted in bottom-line growth as well as attracting professionals with engineering and digital skill sets such as product strategy and delivery, experience design (UX, UI), cloud, AI, software development, application modernization, gaming, data, mobile, DevOps, Java, .Net, Full Stack and QA.

In addition to her professional work, Fausta is passionate about STEAM education, women entrepreneurs, corporate culture, parenting, and Hispanics in the US.

"I am proud and grateful to join this stellar and proven Wizeline team,” said Ballesteros. “Under Bismarck’s leadership, Wizeline is reinventing business processes globally with AI-based technological solutions. I look forward to working with everyone at Wizeline and helping accelerate growth and creating a world-class marketing organization.”

As part of Wizeline's growth strategy, the company promotes female talent in the technology industry, recognizing women as a fundamental accelerator for this purpose, aiming to maintain its leadership in the technology sector and the development of AI and Big Data-based products.

In initial integration testing, advertisers leveraging the new integration saw up to a 5x increase in attributed conversions and a 82% improvement in CPA

MNTN, the Hardest Working Software in Television and a trailblazer in Performance TV advertising, today announced a full integration with leading marketing analytics platform Rockerbox. With this integration, Rockerbox’s clients gain enhanced cross-device measurement and the ability to attribute MNTN’s proprietary Verified Visits™ and business outcomes generated by their Connected TV (CTV) campaigns accurately in the Rockerbox platform. 

"CTV is one of the most promising channels for marketers right now, and that's why it's so pivotal for companies to have access to quality data and the right measurement strategies to measure its impact," said Ron Jacobson, Rockerbox CEO. "Rockerbox's MNTN integration meets this need, and since it's cookie-less, marketers have the peace of mind that they're relying on a future-proof solution."

MNTN’s integration with Rockerbox comes at a time when marketers are demanding more accurate and transparent measurement of the site traffic, conversions and revenue influenced by their CTV campaigns. In initial integration testing, advertisers saw up to a 5x increase in attributed conversions and an 82% improvement in CPA with Verified Visits data, compared to the performance with default impression-to-IP matching.

“We first launched Verified Visits to give marketers a way to accurately measure the real site traffic and conversions they were generating with their CTV campaigns,” said MNTN Chief Product Officer Marwan Soghaier. “Marketers need to be able to measure the performance delivered by all of their marketing channels in the same source of truth. With Rockerbox and other third party integrations, marketers can keep a consistent approach to measurement—empowering better decisioning and ultimately stronger performance.”

Through the integration, Rockerbox’s clients, including National University, gain the confidence that site visits will only be attributed to connected TV ads when those ads actually prompted users to take action.

“Integrating MNTN’s Verified Visits with Rockerbox’s precise measurement platform has been extremely effective in analyzing performance,” said Michael Rossini, Associate Director of Paid Media and Performance Marketing at National University. “We are now able to measure the performance of National University’s CTV campaigns alongside our other marketing channels, and use that unbiased measurement to better inform strategic decisions. The knowledge gained has enhanced confidence as we scale our CTV campaigns.”

Revel Digital^®, a leader in SaaS based digital signage and media distribution, is excited to announce a strategic partnership with Intelligent Ad Media, a company known for its innovative approach to audience engagement through digital screen technologies. This partnership will leverage Revel Digital's expertise in enterprise digital signage with Intelligent Ad Media's diverse and extensive network of digital displays.

Intelligent Ad Media aims to enhance their existing and future digital signage deployments with a number of technologies provided by the Revel Digital platform including AdHawk, which is a suite of tools specific to audience analytics and sensor driven content. These technologies will bolster audience engagement with the ability to fine-tune and present content at the optimum time. This, in turn, will result in a better return on investment for DooH advertisers. In addition to AdHawk, Revel Digital also provides the ability to specifically target mobile devices which opens up an entirely separate modality for content distribution. This content is accessible via QR code, NFC, or Bluetooth and can coincide with content on an associated display, or can be an entirely separate campaign.

Peter Mayhew, CEO of Intelligent Ad Media, comments on the partnership with Revel Digital: "We have been working with Revel from our inception in 2019 and have scaled our business from NY to Hawaii and everywhere in between. We researched many CMS platforms and could not find one that gave us the flexibility to create custom experiences nor have a team willing to provide additional engineering services when our clients needed something unique. Their template tool allows us to free-form each venue to give it its own unique look and feel. At our request, Revel integrated with Vistar, PlaceExchange, and soon to start Hivestack programmatic platforms. Very happy to have such a great team behind the scenes keeping us front and center with our clients."

Mike Tinnes, CTO of Revel Digital, comments on the partnership: "Intelligent Ad Media is a perfect partner for Revel Digital as they have a large footprint in the physical spaces most applicable to our offerings in digital signage, digital out-of-home advertising, and audience measurement. We look forward to working with IAM on not only optimizing their existing network but also introducing some innovative new capabilities into their existing tech stack."