New advanced webhooks technology expands integration portfolio to open up new marketing channels, customer engagement, and communication efficiency for marketers.

Act-On Software, a provider of enterprise marketing automation solutions, is again easing the job of marketers by expanding integration options with new advanced webhooks technology. These open up new engagement channels and use cases, within a growing martech and salestech ecosystem. In addition to Act-On’s existing integrations and open data strategy, Act-On’s advanced webhooks integration empowers organizations to interact with a massive partner ecosystem and reach an unlimited range of business needs.
As marketing technology stacks become increasingly complex and powerful, Act-On is focussed on delivering the easiest to use and most intelligent marketing automation solution, supported by an open data and extensibility philosophy. Data and integrations are paramount to B2B marketers in today's digital landscape, ensuring system interoperability while leveraging the single source of truth on customer behavior data that resides in Act-On’s marketing automation platform. 
To enable this open data strategy, Act-On provides a comprehensive integration approach including:

• Native integrations with leading CRMs, including Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Oracle Netsuite, SugarCRM, and Zendesk Sell, to provide a robust, bidirectional system for marketing and sales teams to sync data for segmentation, reporting, sales insights, and forms.
• Built-in integrations with many solutions in the martech stack such as webinar, social media, SMS messaging, and data enhancement/augmentation solutions.
• Act-On also provides non-native ways to integrate CRM and other martech solutions via rest API, external services such as Zapier and Cazoomi, simple FTP sync, and HTTP requests. 
• Act-On supports data sharing with Act-On’s Customer Data Lake on Snowflake and AWS and Act-On Data Studio, providing access to reporting in an external BI system like Tableau or PowerBI.

“Data and system extensibility is key to intelligent marketing ,” CEO Kate Johnson said. “Through comprehensive integration strategy, advanced analytics, and AI everywhere, Act-On is charting the course for Marketing Automation 3.0.”
With this latest release of advanced webhooks technology, Act-On enables B2B marketers at mid-market and enterprise organizations to engage their target audiences in more ways, streamline operations, and accelerate revenue growth. Here’s a summary of possible use cases this technology now enables:

• Direct mail for that personal marketing touch:
  Data sharing between platforms and programmed events can trigger direct mail campaigns and gifts for welcome packages, client loyalty programs, and renewal incentives.
• Contact information passing for CRMs, event management, or other systems:
  For customers not using one of the leading CRMs that natively integrate bidirectionally with Act-On, users can send prospect contact information into their CRM such as Zoho, Redtail for financial services or Deltek Vantagepoint CRM for project-based businesses, event system, or any other webhook enabled solution to create or update a contact record, initiate a workflow, or update a lead score. 
• More robust alignment between Sales and Marketing:
  Webhook capabilities can send “hot prospect” notifications into Slack or contact information into a CRM to trigger sales outreach calls. Lead scores are updated automatically, delivering helpful and updated information to the correct sales owner.
• Added calendar meeting info into Act-On to enable event follow up:
  Customers can extend the visibility of Calend.ly scheduled meetings to Act-On for segmentation and lead scoring considerations/use.
• Automatic internal updates about campaign statuses:
  Integrations enhance real-time communication, cross-functional alignment, lead management, and overall efficiency by sharing campaign status and other data specific to Act-On in MSFT Teams or Slack.   
• Maintain positive reputation and prospect trust through effective subscription adjustment:
  For non-native CRM users within Act-On, integrations more readily share data to update subscription state to respect email preferences and privacy compliance by sharing real-time opt-in/out status across applications.
• Boosted operational efficiency and segmentation via event registration:
  External event registration insights can now easily be shared to marketing team owners for future marketing campaigns in Act-On and updated lead scores.

Act-On’s expansive native, open, and flexible integration capabilities provide marketers with a versatile platform, seamlessly connecting with various data sources, tools, and applications. 

Demonstrating a 10X Increase In Addressable Scale, 33Across' Lexicon Empowers Publishers to Monetize Unaddressable Inventory Prior to Google's 2024 Phase-Out of Third-Party Cookies

33Across, an addressable infrastructure designed for the open web, today announced that its identity resolution technology, Lexicon, enriches over 54 billion bid requests daily and is currently growing at a 42% rate every quarter. This exponential growth translates to a 10X increase in addressable scale integrated across 5 of the top 7 supply-side platforms (SSPs) and 20 demand-side platforms (DSPs).

This announcement comes at a pivotal time in advertising. With the upcoming demise of third-party cookies, part of Google's strategic plan set to begin in Q1 2024, the industry is grappling with the challenge of finding robust identity solutions. While several identity solutions exist today, many lack scale or meaningful adoption, resulting in a fragmented programmatic ecosystem. 

Lexicon's integration throughout the ecosystem and data expertise serves as a robust identity solution, resolving to the buyer's chosen ID for improved scalability, greater precision in targeting, and measurement. Publishers receive more demand on their cookie alternative supply through Lexicon's flexible integration points, including Google Secure Signals, Amazon Publisher Services Connections Marketplace, and Prebid.org, as well as server-to-server connections, simplifying the process for publishers to activate incremental monetization and increase the value of their inventory.

Using Lexicon, 33Across has strategically avoided third-party cookie traffic and focused on cookie alternative supply outside of third-party cookies to ensure that their partners can truly scale in cookieless environments. Lexicon is revolutionary to publishers, giving them the ability to create addressability within a publisher's unaddressable inventory and bringing direct demand from over 20 integrated DSPs.

"We set out to build trusted addressable infrastructure for the industry that actively scales and enriches bids to make programmatic transactions operate seamlessly without third-party cookies," said Eric Wheeler, CEO of 33Across. "Shifting programmatic advertising's focus towards alternative identifiers allows marketers to reach large untouched audiences across the open web and publishers to drive incremental revenue on their unaddressable inventory. As we usher in a new era of digital advertising, testing in cookieless environments before third-party cookies exit is crucial for measurement and scale."

"PubMatic is building the supply chain of the future with privacy-compliant and sustainable addressability strategies at the core," said Peter Barry, VP of Addressability and Commerce Media at PubMatic. "Lexicon is an important part of our sell-side targeting offering that helps publishers find new monetization opportunities while enhancing value for advertisers and consumers across the open internet."

The AI-powered tool generates optimized title tags and meta descriptions for SEO within seconds

Wix.com Ltd., a leading global SaaS platform to create, manage and grow an online presence, today announced a groundbreaking addition to its built-in SEO tools, the AI Meta Tag Creator. The new tool enables Wix users to instantly generate tailored title tags and meta descriptions based on their page data, ensuring each page's content is accurately represented and optimized for search.

Wix's latest enhancement is the first AI-powered feature within its collection of SEO tools. Designed to streamline SEO content creation, it allows users of all levels, from self-creators looking to generate SEO-friendly tags for each of their pages, to professionals seeking to enhance their efficiency and make adjustments in real time, all directly from the SEO panel and settings.

Natively developed and powered by OpenAI, the AI Meta Tag Creator offers suggestions for title tags and meta descriptions that adhere to SEO best practices, work seamlessly with different Wix page types, and address various search intents. By analyzing content data from users' websites, it can generate accurate and relevant meta tags, without any manual input.

Key benefits include:

• Efficiency: Users can now create search-optimized title tags and meta descriptions in a fraction of the time it would traditionally take, increasing productivity and improving workflow. By simply clicking 'create with AI, in the SEO Panel,' users receive three tailored suggestions they can choose from, based on their page data, such as page type, page name, keyword, and page content.
• Search Visibility: By utilizing AI-powered suggestions tailored to the page's content, users can increase their search engine results pages (SERP's), click-through rates (CTR), and impressions driving more organic traffic. The suggestions include important information such as keywords, the business and location.
• Customization: Users have the flexibility to choose the tone of voice that aligns with their brand and audience (general, informative, conversational, formal, or transactional), ensuring more accurate and personalized results. Additionally, users can further customize the tags by inputting specific details they would like included.

"Wix's new AI-powered tool marks a significant milestone in the evolution of its SEO capabilities, offering users an efficient solution that simplifies the on-page optimization process," said Nati Elimelech, Head of SEO at Wix. "The challenge of creating search-optimized content, including title tags and meta descriptions, has long been a hurdle for website owners and marketers. With the introduction of the AI-powered SEO tags creation tool, users can complete complex tasks more effortlessly with optimal results. We are proud to continue delivering SEO tools at the forefront of innovation and empowering our users to succeed online."

The tool's creation process involved testing tens of thousands of results based on numerous prompts and qualitative checks. The factors considered include page content, page type, target keyword, and more to provide tailored title tags and meta description suggestions. Extensive testing and error filtering were done to ensure that only high-quality and SEO-compliant suggestions are provided to users, resulting in a user-friendly and effective tool.

Wix has a long-standing relationship with AI dating back to 2016 when the company introduced Artificial Design Intelligence (ADI), its first AI website generator. Since that time, Wix has consistently improved and expanded its offerings, empowering users to expand their businesses and achieve success by harnessing the benefits of AI. This tool joins Wix's available AI-powered features for web creation, contributing to Wix's dedication to maximizing the potential of AI in web development.

Fund will fuel innovation, strategic partnerships and generate returns by investing in enterprise AI-focused startups

Fund demonstrates IBM's continued commitment to the effective and responsible deployment of AI

IBM today announced that it is launching a $500 million venture fund to invest in a range of AI companies - from early-stage to hyper-growth startups - focused on accelerating generative AI technology and research for the enterprise.

With a differentiated model and strategy consisting of domain expertise from across IBM and a dedicated portfolio development team, the IBM Enterprise AI Venture Fund will invest in current and future AI leaders that are helping businesses around the world realize the potential of AI for business. Led by a dedicated team at IBM with decades of combined experience as highly successful investors and enterprise AI experts, the fund will provide each startup with opportunities to develop meaningful partnerships with IBM, while gaining operational expertise on product and engineering and go-to-market strategies.

IBM has a long history of bringing proven enterprise AI technology and capabilities to organizations around the world and is capitalizing on the latest wave of AI innovation in generative AI with watsonx, the company's AI and data platform. With the IBM Enterprise AI Venture Fund, the company will grow its ecosystem of AI partnerships - including working with companies leveraging and building on watsonx - and create long-term value for AI leaders as well as new and existing clients.

"AI is slated to unlock nearly $16 trillion in productivity by 2030. With the launch of the IBM Enterprise AI Venture Fund, we're opening another channel to harness the enormous potential of the AI revolution into tangible, positive outcomes for IBM and the companies we invest in," said Rob Thomas, Senior Vice President, Software and Chief Commercial Officer, IBM. "This fund is yet another way we're doubling down on our commitment to responsible AI innovation through watsonx and helping organizations put this transformational technology to work."

A Differentiated Approach to AI Investing

IBM has demonstrated its commitment to promoting AI for business through its recent investments in AI technology and companies. For example, IBM announced in August that it is participating in the $235M Series D funding round of Hugging Face, the leading open-source collaboration platform for the machine learning community building the future of AI. IBM has contributed hundreds of open models and datasets on Hugging Face, including the recent release of the Geospatial Foundation Model in partnership with NASA. It is the largest geospatial foundation model on Hugging Face and the first-ever open-source AI foundation model built in collaboration with NASA.

Hugging Face co-founder and CEO, Clem Delangue said: "We've been thrilled to collaborate with IBM in democratizing AI. With hundreds of open models on the Hugging Face hub, they are significantly boosting the open-source ecosystem. This is the reason why we wanted to have them join our series D round. I am convinced that they'll be able to accelerate their impact on AI with the IBM Enterprise AI Venture Fund."

IBM also recently participated in HiddenLayer's Series A funding to expand its talent base, increase go-to-market efforts, and further invest in its award-winning Machine Learning Security (MLSec) Platform. HiddenLayer is the leading security provider for AI models and assets, and this funding round marks the largest Series A funding raised by a cybersecurity company focused on protecting AI this year.

Chris Sestito, CEO and Co-founder of HiddenLayer said: "IBM's commitment to progressing secure and responsible AI, access to global clients, and the scale of one of the most innovative companies in the world has made them the perfect partner to support us in driving the next stage of our business growth. Our partnership will help us bring our AI threat detection capabilities to the most cutting-edge companies in the world."

Today's news builds on the momentum and market adoption of IBM's watsonx and furthers the company's strategy of leveraging both third-party and its own AI models to accelerate open innovation in AI. In September, IBM announced the general availability of the first models in the watsonx Granite model series — a collection of generative AI models to advance the infusion of generative AI into business applications and workflows. IBM also confirmed that the standard contractual intellectual property protections for IBM products will apply to IBM-developed watsonx AI models. Earlier this year, IBM also announced plans to host Meta's Llama 2-chat 70 billion parameter model within watsonx, furthering the company's strategy of leveraging both third-party and its own AI models to maintain open innovation.

Partnership Enables Powerful FAST Distribution Across Wurl’s Global Platform

Edgio, the platform of choice for speed, security, and simplicity at the edge, today announced a partnership with Wurl, the leader in data-driven solutions for Connected TV (CTV), to offer global FAST syndication via Edgio's Uplynk service. With FAST Syndication powered by Wurl, Edgio customers can generate linear channels using Uplynk's scheduler UI or APIs and effortlessly distribute them through Wurl. By offering this service via Uplynk, users will also benefit from Edgio’s scalable workflows, top-tier broadcast features, and industry-leading expert services.

The FAST market has witnessed exponential growth in recent years, as TV operators continue to secure rapid consumer uptake. In fact, research firm, Omdia, predicts that the market will nearly triple by 2027. In this era where channel lineup real estate on FAST platforms is at a premium, the pursuit of quality content is also on the rise. Yet, delivering premium streaming experiences is a formidable challenge, especially when integrating with third-party platforms. With Uplynk’s best-in-class components, companies can now deliver exceptional viewing quality and reliability to a global network of FAST channels.

“Media companies need to find the right mix of distribution strategies to retain and grow subscribers while maximizing ad revenues. However, delivering high-quality content to viewers across different subscription types, viewing formats, and digital platforms causes huge complexity,” said Eric Black, CTO and GM for Media at Edgio. “This partnership underscores our commitment to enabling the delivery of high-quality content while simplifying the streaming workflow, and we’re thrilled to be working together with Wurl to make that a reality.”

“Together, Edgio and Wurl offer FAST channels and platforms the ability to bring their content to more viewers globally,” said Craig Heiting, Head of Corporate Strategy for Wurl. “As the largest FAST channel network, Wurl in partnership with Edgio’s Uplynk service brings a powerful solution to the FAST industry.”

Through this partnership, Edgio customers will also have access to Wurl’s AdPool product, providing advanced CTV ad monetization and management. Uplynk’s FAST Syndication will be available in Q1 of 2024.

Endemol Shine, Yahoo! veteran Wim Ponnet named President, EMEA

Quickplay today announced the latest stage in the expansion of its worldwide footprint with the establishment of a new office in Europe and the naming of highly-regarded media, sports and technology veteran Wim Ponnet as President, EMEA.

The new office will address heightened industry demand for cloud-native, open architecture OTT solutions. These solutions have been proven to accelerate time to market capabilities, drive cost effectiveness and optimize audience engagement and monetization. Quickplay will leverage market-specific expertise and its global talent and innovation capabilities to tailor fast, flexible, and scalable solutions that can power digital transformation success for pay-TV, telco and MVPD customers throughout the EMEA region.

"Our success with sports, media and entertainment providers across North America and APAC has spurred enormous interest in our ability to drive results for the streaming industry," said Paul Pastor, Chief Business Office and co-founder of Quickplay. "Wim Ponnet's skillset and track record in EMEA will spearhead a dedicated presence that will help us immediately to address a growing pipeline of inquiries from providers – all of whom are seeking the superior performance and rapid integration of AI technologies that only cloud-native, open architecture solutions can provide."

As chief strategy and commercial officer of Endemol Shine Group, Ponnet was responsible for P&L management of the company's sales organization, achieving multiple consecutive years of annual growth in excess of 20%. Previously, with Yahoo!, he had been senior director, strategy and operations, EMEA and chief of staff. He most recently served as founding partner and CEO of FanTechCapital, an investment firm at the intersection of sports, media and technology. He also serves on multiple investor and advisory boards for sports, academic and business organizations.

"Every distributor and sports league I've worked with has articulated the need for platforms that go beyond delivery of content and instead can truly drive viewer engagement," said Ponnet. "Quickplay's cloud native, open architected platform is opening the door to rich fan and consumer experiences that can meet the OTT and sports industries' strategic objectives today and can harness the business and market potential of Generative AI tomorrow."

Quickplay's OTT platform is designed to build and run scalable applications in the cloud using cloud-native technologies, including containers, microservices, a service mesh, APIs, and immutable infrastructure. The OTT technology stack provides significantly better performance, a modular approach for feature expansion, continuous delivery for rapid iteration, and built-in scalability, observability and security. Forward-looking OTT providers such as Allen Media Group, Canada's Sportsnet SN NOW, India's aha 2.0, PLDT's Smart in the Philippines and others are using the Quickplay platform to deliver services with the flexibility and the agility of the cloud, while equaling or exceeding the reliability and high performance of broadcast.

OptiGenie empowers Optimove’s clients to deliver personalized, relevant customer messages at the speed of a consumer's interaction with a brand. Three new AI-powered features mark the latest in years of integrated AI capabilities

Optimove unveiled OptiGenie, a comprehensive AI-powered suite embedded in Optimove, the first Customer-Led Marketing Platform. Optimove’s clients are now empowered to optimize marketing workflows from insight to creation and through orchestration. The result is that marketers can now deliver personalized, relevant customer messages at the speed of a consumer's interaction with a brand. 

The OptiGenie suite empowers marketers across every step of their marketing personalization workflow. AI Insights allows marketers to explore, analyze, and discover answers about their customers and campaigns in intuitive and user-friendly ways. AI Creation simplifies and accelerates the creation of personalized content at scale, that is always on-brand. AI Orchestration powers campaign and journey testing with dynamic next-best-action optimization across channels and customer touchpoints. 

Optimove is also announcing three new AI-powered capabilities reflecting Optimove’s continuous 11-year innovation journey of integrated AI, with more advancements on the horizon.  Optimove was the first Customer-Led Marketing Platform to natively embed AI with the ability to predict customer migrations between lifecycle stages in 2012 and with Optibot, starting in 2016.  

“OptiGenie is the comprehensive AI suite in the Optimove platform that we always envisioned,” says Optimove founder and CEO, Pini Yakuel. “Every marketer should have a marketing platform and solutions that enable them to analyze, create, execute, and orchestrate campaigns in an instant. This is just the most recent step in our ongoing journey, with more developments ahead."

Below are the latest innovations of each new AI capability: 

1. Generative AI Insights (new to AI Insights) 

With OptiGenie’s Generative AI Insights, marketers can now instantly discover insights about their business, audiences, and campaigns in a familiar chat interface. Optimove users can now ask anything, using their own language, about campaign performance, KPIs and Target Groups through in-product conversation
For example, marketers can simply ask OptiGenie to plot the revenue generated from last quarter’s campaigns or run a comprehensive analysis for deeper insights into customers that engaged with respective marketing programs.

1. AI Target Group Discovery (new to AI Creation)

Using Optimove's AI Target Group Discovery, marketers can now find your best audience. Whether it be to accelerate revenue growth, streamline segment creation, or maximize marketing ROI, AI Target Group Discovery empowers marketers to dive into their data in a whole new way.

Brands can now deliver campaigns that will have an immediate impact on their bottom line without compromising on personalization.

1. AI Self-Optimizing Streams (new to AI Orchestration)

Optimove’s Self-Optimizing Streams, coming soon, helps brands scale personalization by using AI-powered journey maps to track customer response patterns and select the best path for each of them, based on their unique “Customer DNA.” Self-Optimizing Streams compliments Optimove’s existing Self-Optimizing Journeys and Self-Optimizing Campaigns.

This innovation empowers marketers to experiment with different campaign strategies including multichannel journeys, varied messaging, and unique promotions, and then leave it to OptiGenie to determine which series of campaigns a customer is most likely to respond to.

Optimove’s Current AI Capabilities in each workflow are now as follows: 

1. AI Insights: Predictive Models, Generative AI Insights, Optibo  
2. AI Creation: Generative AI Copy, AI Target Group Discovery, and AI Product Recommendations 
3. AI Orchestration: Self-Optimizing Campaigns, Self-Optimizing Journeys, Self-Optimizing Streams, and Control Group Optimization 

Shai Frank, Senior Vice President of Product at Optimove, stated, "Since our inception, AI solutions have been a crucial part of our roadmap, built on our uniquely rich data foundation, empowering marketers with enhanced capabilities. Optimove has always enabled the synergy between data and engagement, and now with OptiGenie, marketers now have the ability to independently generate marketing insights, create campaigns, and orchestrate strategies seamlessly through the Optimove platform, receiving nearly instant answers to optimize their campaigns." 

This announcement comes on the heels of Gartner ranking Optimove #1 in Journey Orchestration in its 2023 Critical Capabilities for Multichannel Marketing Hubs. Optimove is positioned highest in Execution and Vision among Challengers in the Magic Quadrant for Multichannel Marketing Hubs and is recognized as a noted leader in Customer Intelligence and Measurement, and Optimization.

Sarkar brings extensive cloud experience to CloudBees as the company launches a new cloud native DevSecOps platform

CloudBees, the leading software delivery platform for enterprises, today named Raj Sarkar as its chief marketing officer. Earning a spot in the Forbes "Top 50 Entrepreneurial CMO" list in 2022, Sarkar comes with a rich, 20-year background focused on cloud-based software and technology. He will lead the company’s global marketing strategy and execution, expanding growth and extending market awareness.

“Raj is an invaluable addition to the executive team as we embark on our cloud journey,” said Anuj Kapur, president and CEO, CloudBees. “His extensive background in marketing, product management and leadership within industry-leading software companies is perfect for CloudBees at this pivotal moment. As we launch our new DevSecOps platform, Raj’s talents and leadership will be key factors in our success.”

Before stepping into this role, Sarkar was an advisor to various startups, shaping their marketing strategies and go-to-market plans. Previously, he was CMO at 1Password, a 2023 Forbes Cloud 100 company, and CMO at Prisma Cloud, Palo Alto Networks' cloud security platform. Sarkar's experience also includes six years at Atlassian as the head of marketing, overseeing cloud products like Trello, Confluence, Bitbucket, and Jira Work Management. Earlier in his career, he played foundational roles in product marketing at both Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services.

Embracing his new role with enthusiasm, Sarkar shared, “Being part of the CloudBees team is both an honor and an exciting challenge. The industry already recognizes CloudBees for its enterprise on-premise continuous integration and continuous delivery products. My goal as CMO is to broaden this recognition to cloud-based DevSecOps, making CloudBees the de-facto choice for developers and platform engineering teams.”

Sarkar joins Kapur and Marc Gemassmer, who were appointed CEO and CRO, respectively, last year to lead the transformation of CloudBees into the next era of software delivery.