artificial intelligence 17 Nov 2023
Google Cloud today announced new Vertex AI Search capabilities that are purpose-built to help media and entertainment companies give audiences more personalized experiences. Recommendations are our first generally available capabilities, providing media companies with generative AI-powered recommendations that will keep audiences engaged by delivering personalized content recommendations that speak directly to consumers' individual interests.
More than 71% of consumers expect to receive personalized interactions, and 76% get frustrated when that doesn't happen (source: McKinsey). With recommendations, companies can address this frustration, while also benefiting from more meaningful engagement on their platforms. According to a recent Harris Poll study commissioned by Google Cloud, 79% of respondents report having kept a subscription after discovering new content. By providing more personalized content recommendations, media and entertainment companies can increase time spent on their platforms, which can lead to higher revenue and retention.
"Vertex AI Search is becoming an essential tool for media and entertainment companies, helping them improve and deepen audience engagement," said Anil Jain, managing director, Strategic Consumer Industries, Google Cloud. "The new capabilities launched today will provide personalized recommendations for content using gen AI, which can help media companies better engage, grow, and retain their audiences."
Google Cloud is committed to investing in the development of new technologies that are specifically designed to help media and entertainment companies better distribute and monetize their digital content. The new Vertex AI Search capabilities build upon Google's proven track record for developing successful video streaming platforms like YouTube and news aggregator services like Google News, as well as personalized product recommendations for e-commerce.
"Ensuring audience engagement is critical to our business, and gen AI holds the key to delivering personalized experiences that elevate our connection with viewers," says Robin Chacko, EVP Direct to Consumer, STARZ. "With Google Cloud's Vertex AI Search for media and recommendations capabilities, we can deliver tailored content that truly speaks to our viewers' unique interests."
The new recommendations capabilities within Vertex AI Search combine a variety of advanced AI techniques to generate personalized recommendations for content, including:
Vertex AI Search is fully managed and continually improved by Google Cloud. It can be integrated into consumer touchpoints, including web, TV, mobile, newsletters, and more, using an easy-to-use API. This can allow media and entertainment companies of all kinds to focus their engineering teams on new, differentiated opportunities while still providing cutting-edge personalized recommendations.
technology 17 Nov 2023
Tagger by Sprout Social, the global technology leader in making influencer marketing more intelligent, today releases its 2023 QSR Influencer Marketing Index. The report identifies best practices and trends for restaurant brands to refine and optimize their influencer marketing campaigns, including top-performing platforms, content types, and more.
Influencers are an important marketing avenue for quick-service restaurants (QSR) to drive brand awareness and loyalty within their target audience. Social media users are turning to influencers for restaurant recommendations, and brands can tap into these engaged followers through partnerships. As with other industries, there are trending best practices and insights that brands should know to be successful.
Leveraging Tagger’s social intelligence engine, Signals, the QSR Index identifies the following key takeaways for influencer marketing strategies:
“Successful social media strategies that include influencer marketing efforts can be a huge advantage for QSR brands as they look to compete in a busy space,” says Dave Dickman, Head of Global Sales and Services, Influencer Marketing at Tagger. “In the 2023 QSR Index, brands can see some of the specific considerations and strategies they need to consider for their current and upcoming influencer partnerships. The data will be useful as we look ahead to 2024 and QSRs set new goals and explore how they can grow.”
artificial intelligence 17 Nov 2023
Arkose Labs, the global leader in bot management and account security, released its threat intelligence report analyzing the contemporary attack landscape. The report, “Breaking (Bad) Bots: Bot Abuse Analysis and other Fraud Benchmarks” found that bots and human fraud farms were responsible for billions of attacks in the first half of 2023 and into Q3. These attacks comprised 73 percent of all website and app traffic measured. In other words, almost three-quarters of traffic to digital properties is malicious.
The report studied billions of sessions worldwide across industries to reveal the top attacks by industry, type, and region. Researchers assessed the attacks across three primary attack vectors: basic bots, intelligent bots, and human fraud farms. Fraudsters use these vectors to launch attack types such as SMS toll fraud, web scraping, card testing, credential stuffing, and more.
The analysis found bot attacks overall increased 167 percent in the first half of the year, weighted heavily by a 291 percent increase in intelligent bots. These smart bots are capable of complex, context-aware interactions. The attacks, though, weren’t limited to bots. Research found that when fraudsters’ bots are blocked, they pivot attacks to human fraud farms, which increased 49 percent from Q1 to Q2 2023.
“Bot attacks aided by human fraud farms are about more than concert tickets and high-priced sneakers. They can point to far darker activities,” said Kevin Gosschalk, founder and CEO of Arkose Labs. “We’re seeing more attacks, using more intelligent bots, conducting more sophisticated types of attacks. Fake account registration, credential stuffing, scraping, SMS toll fraud--these are the types of attacks that fraudsters use as the first steps to more harmful crimes. They lead to romance scams that groom for human trafficking, money laundering from drug deals, or theft to fund illegal weapons.”
Two trends are highlighted in the report as driving the increase in attack level: Generative AI (GenAI), and Cybercrime-as-a-Service (CaaS).
During the past six months, Arkose Labs’ threat researchers have observed a significant uptick of GenAI being used for content generation by bad actors who are now able to write pristine phishing emails for Man-in-the-Middle attacks or perfectly-worded responses on dating apps in their romance scams. In addition, the researchers found attackers are using bots to scrape data from websites and then using that data to tune their GenAI models.
An equally prodigious trend, Cybercrime-as-a-Service (CaaS) lowers the barrier to entry for adversaries looking to commit cybercrime. CaaS vendors advertise their questionably-legal services openly. Anyone can reach out to these vendors to buy bots to circumvent security measures or carry out an attack. Fraudsters with limited to zero technical skills can then use fully automated bots at scale that cause widespread damage to businesses and consumers. Fraudsters no longer have to know how to code to deploy a sophisticated volumetric bot attack. They can simply buy the bots off the web along with the training they need and even tap into the sellers’ “customer” support.
Gosschalk added, “The massive rise of CaaS has completely changed the economics for adversaries. It’s much cheaper to attack companies and the attacks are just better because it’s a dev shop that is doing the attacks instead of just individual cybercriminals.”
Industries Under Attack
With so much traffic to digital properties made up of malicious attacks, Arkose Labs researchers delved more deeply into the specific industries under attack. Nearly every industry experienced an increase in the number of attacks. The report lists the following as the industries that had more than 50 percent of traffic coming from bad bots and details common attacks carried out by malicious bots.
“Breaking (Bad) Bots: Bot Abuse Analysis and Other Fraud Benchmarks” shares additional insights on how attacks happen and what can be done to detect and block them.
customer relationship management 17 Nov 2023
Crossbeam, the Ecosystem-Led Growth platform, today released a new report showing that a majority of sales leaders expect to miss their revenue targets for the year and are rethinking the traditional sales-led growth model. According to The Future of Revenue report, business leaders are struggling to attract new leads, close deals in their current pipeline, and overcome constrained budgets on the buyer side.
To understand the sentiment across different stakeholders in Go-to-Market (GTM) teams, Crossbeam partnered with Pavilion, a private membership organization for GTM leaders, CEOs and their teams, to survey more than 425 business leaders across sales, partnerships, marketing and customer success from August to September 2023. The majority (77%) of respondents work at B2B SaaS companies and 70% are director-level and above.
Of the leaders surveyed, 56% say they don't expect to reach their revenue targets this year, while only 17% report that they expect to exceed annual revenue targets. Compounding the pressure on sales quotas, 54% say the sales cycle has gotten longer over the past two years and only 12% report that it has accelerated.
When asked about the reasons for the revenue shortfall, 46% of sales leaders said it was a lack of high-quality leads, and 43% pointed to a lack of alignment with the marketing team. As a result of these challenges, 89% of all respondents say their companies are looking to change their sales strategy and looking for alternatives to the traditional top-down sales approach.
Embracing Change, Bringing Trust Back to Sales
More than two-thirds (68%) of GTM leaders said that buyers have more control over the sales process, acknowledging that buyers are focusing more on insights and opinions from sources within their own trusted ecosystem.
As GTM leaders embrace change to increase revenue, they are leaning more on relationships and social selling within a broader ecosystem. This ecosystem consists primarily of customer referrals (42%), strategic partners (32%), internal stakeholders at their companies (28%), personal networks (22%) in addition to other connections.
There have been many SaaS growth strategies that have gained momentum over the past few years, including Product-Led Growth and Sales-Led Growth. When asked about the sales strategy they have been focusing more on over the past year, the top choice among 48% of sales leaders was an emerging growth strategy: Ecosystem-Led Growth (ELG) and co-selling with partners. Ecosystem-Led Growth is a go-to-market motion that focuses on partner ecosystems as the primary way to attract, convert, and grow customer relationships.
The shift extends beyond sales teams; marketing leaders are leaning into channels they have more control over. The two largest ways marketing strategies have changed over the past year are through collaboration with partners to generate and nurture leads through co-marketing, and email marketing, which continues to be a mainstream communication channel.
"Today's challenging selling environment has created a market shift away from traditional go-to-market playbooks to alternative strategies," said Bob Moore, chief executive officer and co-founder of Crossbeam. "But change doesn't always require an overhaul of the current system — an existing resource can rewrite old playbooks. That's the beauty of Ecosystem-Led Growth. There are substantial and relevant business opportunities for leaders in their own ecosystem that impact every stage of their revenue funnels."
"Visibility into new connections and overlaps in a partner ecosystem surfaces the people and companies in their network that will accelerate and close higher-quality deals," continued Moore. "The over 17,000 companies on the Crossbeam network are seeing high engagement and strong results, out-executing their competition at a blistering pace. The customer relationships generated via ELG have higher contract values, close faster, see higher win rates, and expand more meaningfully over time."
In the report, sales leaders said after implementing ELG, 81% saw deals close faster than before and 89% said ELG deals are more likely to close.
"More than 10,000 members on Pavilion are reevaluating deteriorating and expensive outbound motions that are no longer working," said Pavilion chief executive officer Sam Jacobs. "We're seeing that they are increasingly interested in new sales strategies, and are investing into partnerships and ELG as a more efficient — and more human — way to go-to-market."
artificial intelligence 17 Nov 2023
Ally Financial Inc. announced today the early results of an experimental generative AI use case with its marketing team designed to help understand the real-world impact the technology could have on campaign development and employee productivity. Using the Ally.ai platform's large language model (LLM) chat and prompt functionality, a select group of marketers were able to reduce the time needed to produce creative campaigns and content by up to 2-3 weeks and reported an average time savings of 34%, compared to typical processes without AI.
Additional results reported from the month-long experimental program include:
"The best marketing teams know the art of evolution, which includes evaluating and testing of transformative technologies," said Andrea Brimmer, Chief Marketing and Public Relations Officer at Ally. "The early results demonstrate how AI could enable our talent to focus on creative tasks that needed the most human involvement, while speeding up the routine efforts of our day-to-day work. We look forward to the continued exploration of generative AI and learning more about how the technology can assist our team."
Ally.ai, the company's proprietary, cloud-based AI platform that serves as a secure, private bridge between enterprise-grade LLMs and Ally's data and AI applications, launched in June 2023. The test with marketing comes on the heels of Ally's pilot with its Customer Care and Experience group where Ally.ai was used to quickly and accurately summarize customer service calls, helping associates focus their energy on more meaningful customer interactions and reduce the time needed to service and close a customer inquiry.
Both use cases reflect a commitment to Ally's core principles for the enterprise use of AI: initially focusing on use cases that support employee productivity and optimizing internal business processes; providing human intervention and controls for oversight and training; protecting against the disclosure of personal identifying information and prohibiting third party model providers from using Ally data to train their foundational models.
"The purpose of building Ally.ai in-house, and with foundational data, cloud and network infrastructure already in place, is to scale its use throughout the organization while also keeping a close eye on potential risks and opportunities for new use cases," said Sathish Muthukrishnan, Chief Information, Data and Digital Officer at Ally. "The value that our marketing colleagues could get from Ally.ai demonstrates how important cross-functional collaboration is to the development of enterprise AI capabilities."
Generative AI in Marketing: Supporting Productivity
In addition to the preset system prompts and security features already embedded in Ally.ai, the platform needed a place where teammates could engage with the LLM directly. Understanding that most LLMs and generative AI applications are good for summarization, content creation, ideation/brainstorming, and information analysis, Ally's developers built an open prompt user interface (UI) for Ally.ai that would allow teammates to do two types of work: chat directly with the secured LLM and also develop specialized prompts that could be saved, used again, and shared with colleagues based on their accuracy and usefulness rates.
Teammates could change features of the platform depending on the work they did, including toggling between chat and prompt mode, adjusting prompt length as well as the model's creative parameters and vocabulary. The participant team frequently used Ally.ai as a starting point for creative development, specifically for first drafts of advertising copy, video scripts or social media posts, or enhancing human-driven ideas that originated from brainstorms or naming exercises.
An example: the content team performed a test of Ally.ai by providing the platform with a transcript of a podcast that featured an Ally executive. The team asked the platform to create the first draft of a 750-word article for Ally's Conversationally blog with the information provided, plus direction to incorporate the most insightful, informative and entertaining parts that would be relevant to consumers. While the Ally.ai output required editing and the finesse of Ally's content writers and it still went through Ally's well-established regulatory review processes, having a quick first draft done in 15 minutes helped reduce the total time needed to create and edit the blog article from four hours to just one.
"We look at Ally.ai as an assistant that will be able to help our teammates with faster and smarter project delivery, which leads to a better experience for our customers," Brimmer said. "In several different instances, our content writers were able to use thoughtfully crafted prompts to either start up the creative process or help extend the distribution of content to new channels. Anytime we can reduce the time to publish while also letting our creatives do what they do best, that means a lot in our fast-moving, competitive environment."
With the Ally.ai UI in place, Ally teammates can be trained to use it for the exploration and development of approved business use cases. The opportunity to learn more about AI and train using the platform has created a positive energy inside the company. Earlier this month, Ally hosted its second AI Day – a half-day dedicated to education and knowledge sharing around AI – with almost 1,000 teammates from multiple business units in attendance.
"You can't escape the conversation around AI, so we are taking hold of that momentum and using it as a springboard to continue to explore new use cases that will drive AI adoption internally while supporting business goals," Muthukrishnan said. "Right now, there are more than 100 use cases being carefully evaluated throughout the enterprise. While not all of them will pass our rigorous testing, we remain optimistic about what AI can bring to our teammates at Ally and to the financial services industry."
advertising 17 Nov 2023
OpenX Technologies, Inc., one of the world’s leading omnichannel supply-side platforms, today announced the launch of TV+, an ongoing initiative to unlock the full potential of CTV by combining the most powerful aspects of linear and programmatic buying models.
In the current CTV landscape, buyers aren’t able to efficiently buy in biddable media environments due to an over-indexing of intermediaries. Additionally, brands and agencies often pay CTV CPMs without having full transparency into what they’re buying. When non-TV content is categorized as CTV, publishers’ premium content is devalued and buyers cannot lean into their KPIs with confidence.
In this first phase of TV+, effective today, OpenX will eliminate all resellers from its CTV inventory pool, ensuring that buyers have more working media and reduced invalid traffic. This move also ensures that publishers get their fair cut of transactions to power the development of high-quality content for consumers.
Additionally, OpenX will today remove all non-TV content, including fireplace apps, gaming, UGC, OTT, and mobile, from its CTV inventory. While OpenX will continue to monetize these types of inventory as online video rather than CTV, this phase of TV+ properly classifies content, providing more premium advertising experiences, a clear value for inventory, and more accurate measurement.
This first step in the TV+ mission to transform programmatic CTV into a high-quality marketing opportunity allows publishers to confidently place their premium inventory into biddable environments while giving brands and agencies full transparency into what they’re buying. With these innovations, TV+ delivers a fair and transparent value exchange between publishers, agencies, and DSPs.
“CTV is a powerful channel for marketers to reach and engage with their audiences,” said Adam Roodman, SVP of product strategy and management at Yahoo. “As this happens, solutions that prioritize control and transparency will enable buyers to lean into their KPIs in biddable CTV environments, helping them further realize the full promise of programmatic CTV.”
“As more marketers choose CTV for incremental reach over linear, there's tremendous value for the ecosystem in scaling reach beyond direct buys," said Ashwin Navin, co-founder and CEO at Samba TV. “Solutions that provide trust and transparency empower data providers to scale audiences in CTV and digital while increasing confidence in biddable environments and optimizing working media.”
Through TV+, buyers unlock direct premium publisher integrations across more than 110 million measurable “glass-on-wall” devices. This access to direct-sourced inventory improves transparency and control, while log-level data delivers visibility into impressions.
Further, this initial phase of TV+ protects consumers’ interests by ensuring they're getting the premium content they signed up for because premium publishers are able to secure an appropriate price for their inventory and invest resources back into creating premium content.
"The long-term growth of biddable TV advertising requires buyers and sellers to have confidence in marketplace integrity," said Chris Kane, founder of Jounce Media. "OpenX’s TV+ creates these conditions, ensuring media buyers get the quality they expect from their TV investments and ensuring media owners, not supply chain intermediaries, are the beneficiary of those investments."
“I've spent the majority of my career in TV, and ensuring that CTV doesn't repeat the same cycles as digital is imperative to the success of programmatic TV,” said Geoff Wolinetz, SVP of publisher and demand platforms at OpenX. ”As we embark on creating the future of CTV, we have the opportunity to make programmatic TV more efficient and effective by ensuring content is fit for purpose, accessed directly, and demand and supply partners have transparency across the value chain. This will positively impact buyer confidence, enabling them to implement key strategies such as incremental reach.”
technology 17 Nov 2023
Artlist, the creative technology company used by millions of digital creators and major brands worldwide, today released the Artlist Trend Report 2024, featuring industry insights from business leaders from Google, Amazon, Meta, and actionable data from more than 7,000 global content creators. It provides the most comprehensive look into how international brands should approach video content in 2024. The report explores how brands can push their boundaries, embrace new technology, and create a local connection in an increasingly global landscape.
The Artlist Trend Report 2024 is a first-of-its-kind, not-yet-trending report with upcoming predictions designed to inspire and empower brands to look toward the future and create without limits. The full report has several surprising predictions and data for any brand looking to stay ahead of the curb with impactful content.
The top predictions of the Artlist Trend Report 2024 include:
Today, brands are operating in a rapidly advancing technological landscape. Shrinking attention spans and an explosion of digital content have led to a greater need for compelling, sharable visuals. There are significant business opportunities for brands that project a distinct voice with unique creative approaches. Ira Belsky, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Artlist explains, "Today, a brand's vision, and the business strategy that it influences, all need to be conveyed to consumers through a single voice that spans diverse forms of media, and remains authentic, no matter what."
There are so many changes happening before our eyes that it's more important than ever for brands to be clear on who they are and the essence of what they want to convey about themselves.
Itzik Elbaz, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Artlist, says, "2024 is set to be a truly unique year. The technological advances we've seen in 2023 have triggered an entirely new generation of enthusiastic creators exploring new directions. Technical expertise is no longer a barrier to entry. Creativity can be unleashed by anyone from anywhere. It's going to be a wild ride of a year."
marketing 17 Nov 2023
ChannelMix, the industry-leading marketing revenue generation platform, proudly announces the release of its groundbreaking Marketing Impact Modeling™ product, setting new standards in media mix modeling with its AI-driven, real-time optimization capabilities, designed for navigating a landscape without third-party cookies.
With Marketing Impact Modeling™, marketers can now automate data collection and processing, offering marketers unprecedented accuracy and efficiency. It delivers real-time, in-campaign optimization, allowing for agile adjustments that enhance campaign performance as it unfolds. This AI-powered platform delivers spend-level mix recommendations for online and offline channels within 24 hours of data connection, delivering actionable scenarios that reduce media waste and drive increased sales and leads.
Deprecation of Third-Party Cookies
For marketers, the demise of third-party cookies is crippling. Retargeting, multi-touch attribution, and other historical methods of planning and buying media will become unavailable or, at best, even less accurate than they are today. Marketers will require new, cookie-less strategies to replace these strategies.
As Google prepares for the phased elimination of third-party cookies starting in early 2024, advertisers are proactively experimenting with alternative audience targeting and tracking approaches, such as first-party data and contextual advertising alternatives. This shift is primarily motivated by growing privacy concerns and evolving regulations. While these alternatives offer privacy-compliance insights, they are limited by their narrower scope, likely data silos, and lack of comprehensive customer behavior tracking. The transition away from third-party cookies highlights the critical role of user consent and data privacy, encouraging the adoption of transparent and ethical data practices and guiding the industry towards user-centric, privacy-conscious strategies.
A Closer Look at Marketing Impact Modeling™
Marketing Impact Modeling™ is the next-gen media mix modeling, built for a cookie-less, privacy-focused future, setting it apart in strategy and execution. Attribution modeling continues to lose its relevancy as Marketing Impact Modeling™ equips marketers for the future of media planning:
ChannelMix has predictive prowess, distinguishing itself from others by delivering exact media mix recommendations down to the dollar. This extraordinary capability has already saved clients over $100 million in unproductive media spending while bolstering sales. In an age of evolving privacy norms and the shift toward a cookie-less future, ChannelMix's Marketing Impact Modeling™ is an innovation that empowers marketers with data-driven decision-making that respects privacy standards.
What Sets ChannelMix's Marketing Impact Modeling™ Apart
"Marketing Impact Modeling™ represents a revolution in how marketers tackle data analytics. We're confident that this product will deliver exceptional value to marketers, enabling them to efficiently optimize budgets, discover new opportunities, and achieve exponential growth," said Matt Hertig, CEO of ChannelMix. "What sets Marketing Impact Modeling™ apart is its performance AI capabilities, providing an invaluable tool for reducing marketing waste and increasing marketing ROI. We are hell-bent on demonstrating the value of marketing, and Marketing Impact Modeling™ does that with unparalleled accuracy."
“ChannelMix's Marketing Impact Modeling™ is a game-changer. We've seen incredible results using Marketing Impact Modeling™ to drive client renewals. It has redefined our approach to media mix modeling, allowing us to make data-driven decisions that not only eliminate waste but also deliver outstanding results, bringing us closer to our marketing goals with unprecedented efficiency," said Bryan Karas, CEO of Playbook Media.
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