Partnership to enable syndicated and custom audience targeting across linear TV and CTV

Cadent, the largest independent solutions provider for advanced TV advertising, and Proximic by Comscore, a division of Comscore, Inc. and leading provider of audience and content targeting solutions for programmatic activation, today announced a two-part partnership, beginning with the now live integration of Proximic by Comscore's ID-based audience suite into Cadent Aperture Platform. The second phase will integrate Proximic by Comscore's Predictive Audiences and content targeting tools into the Aperture Converged TV DSP.

This partnership combines the capabilities of Aperture Platform and Proximic by Comscore to provide enhanced ID-based and ID-free audience targeting across linear and advanced TV, including addressable TV and CTV viewership audiences. Through the joint solution, marketers will be able to plan, target, activate, and measure their campaigns through Aperture Platform, while following strict privacy guidelines, ensuring maximum scalability and cost efficiency.

"Cadent Aperture Platform is built to unify the fragmented data ecosystem of converged television, a challenge that any advertiser that needs to target across households and devices faces," said Tony Yi, EVP, Business Development and GM, Platform Sales at Cadent. "By integrating Proximic by Comscore, we are enabling holistic targeting and measurement with their syndicated and custom audience segments."

Aperture Platform offers an unparalleled depth of campaign coverage and performance, allowing advertisers to activate across the converged TV landscape. Aperture Platform is powered by Cadent's patented Aperture Viewer Graph, which connects audience intelligence to screens with access to more than 100M+ Home Addresses, 400M+ Connected Device IDs, and 300M+ Home Device IPs, in addition to the Data and Measurement Marketplaces.

Proximic by Comscore provides ID-based and ID-free audience targeting across a rich set of granular TV and CTV viewership audiences derived from the industry's largest TV panel. It provides accurate, scalable demographics to help advertisers and publishers reach the highest in-target rates, with extensive user personas to reach audiences based on broad interests or shopping habits. Proximic offers a robust list of brand safety and suitability filters along with content topics specific to TV and CTV and a unique set of custom capabilities to reach audiences based on criteria such as website and search behaviors, TV show, ad exposure and more. All segments are available with or without IDs. ID-free audience targeting follows strict privacy guidelines and ensures maximum scalability and cost efficiency, providing the perfect complement to ID-based tactics.

"With more than 5,000 advertising clients already relying on Proximic by Comscore's privacy-compliant, ID-free audience targeting to complement their traditional behavioral targeting solutions, we're excited to partner with Cadent to continue building on this strong adoption," said Lee Blickstein, Vice President of Targeting Solutions, Proximic by Comscore. "This integration allows us to open the door for more advertisers and marketers to achieve added reach while remaining focused on performance."

Partnership Protects Customers against Vendor Payment Fraud

JAGGAER, the global leader in Autonomous Commerce, has announced its collaboration with Trustpair, a leading vendor fraud prevention platform. Trustpair technology monitors millions of data points from internal and external data sources to verify bank account information internationally. Its platform also provides dashboards, secure workflows, and real-time warnings to streamline risk identification and management.

“The integration with Trustpair enables JAGGAER customers to add an additional layer of protection against a risk that has been on the rise around the world. Organizations are vulnerable when new supplier bank accounts are added or modifications are made to existing accounts, and the fraudsters are getting more sophisticated in exploiting such changes,” said Dawn Andre, Chief Product Officer, JAGGAER. “By automating fraud detection with Trustpair, CFOs at JAGGAER customer organizations can sleep easier in the knowledge that they can pay their suppliers on time without the risk of being the victims of payment fraud,” she added.

“We’re delighted to work with JAGGAER, a global leader in procurement and supplier management technology, and to give customers peace of mind that they are paying the right vendor every time. This native integration of Trustpair with JAGGAER enables procurement and finance teams to confidently mitigate vendor payment fraud within their current procure-to-pay process,” said Baptiste Collot, CEO and co-founder, Trustpair.

“Fraud has become incredibly sophisticated and complex and is a big concern for organizations everywhere. Our solution gives a clear view of organizations’ fraud risk and eliminates fallible manual account validations and controls that are no match for the savvy fraudsters organizations are up against,” Collot added.

“By automating account validations from supplier onboarding through to payment, Trustpair extends JAGGAER’s Autonomous Commerce offering, which already deploys various AI-based solutions to protect against threats in many areas of supplier and supply chain risk,” Andre said.

A survey conducted by Treasury & Risk co-sponsored by Trustpair and GIACT revealed that 56% of companies in the US were victims of vendor fraud in 2022. Furthermore, most companies that were a victim of fraud attempts were targeted more than once. 12% of all US companies were targeted more than 10 times and 5% more than 15 times. According to the report, these record-breaking numbers can be linked to changes in the way fraudsters operate. “They have become more sophisticated, organized, and specialized – the threats aren’t the same as they were 10 years ago.”

Leading marketing platform expands product suite and strengthens executive team to accelerate growth

With an innovative AI roadmap, a growing roster of blue-chip companies and a significant demonstration of its competitive advantage, Cordial raised the bar in 2023, charting a course to transform the future of marketing.

The only true marketing platform that empowers brands to fully automate their marketing strategies, Cordial delivered 369% ROI to customers, reducing costs, improving efficiency and boosting revenue, according to a Forrester Total Economic Impact Study.

"Our unparalleled accomplishments in 2023 make one thing clear: We're meeting the moment for marketers," said Jeremy Swift, CEO and co-founder of Cordial. "While legacy marketing clouds have failed to innovate — requiring expensive add-ons for essentials like personalization, email triggers, SMS, testing and identity resolution — our comprehensive, AI-enabled platform consolidates these critical capabilities, reducing complexity and costs and lifting revenue. And we're not slowing down. For Cordial and the ambitious clients we serve, the best is yet to come."

With a focus on customized global services and a platform designed to help brands communicate in personal, intelligent ways, Cordial signed several key enterprise customers in 2023. Kahala Brands (Coldstone Creamery, Baja Fresh, sweetFrog, Planet Smoothie, Blimpie Sub Shop, and more), Church's Texas Chicken, Coldwater Creek, Getaway House and PacSun, among others, now deploy Cordial as their trusted cross-channel marketing platform.

And to help manage this significant customer growth, Amy Jerusalmi joins Cordial as chief customer officer. With more than 20 years of experience working for world-class brands such as Quattro Wireless, Apple, SessionM (a Mastercard company) and Reachdesk, Amy has grown and scaled teams across customer success and support, professional services, managed services and implementations. Jerusalmi brings big-name credentials and a unique vision of how product and customer teams can collaborate to achieve a winning balance of company goals and client needs.

Additionally, with more than 30 years of go-to-market (GTM) strategy and execution experience with leading organizations like Contentsquare, Percolate and Tibco, Matt Elders joined Cordial earlier this year as executive vice president of revenue. With expertise in building and leading world-class revenue teams, Elders has a proven track record of driving exceptional results for global software and services companies.

With AI innovations expected to boost global marketing revenues to $107.4 billion by 2028, AI-led tools will be essential for company growth moving forward. Cordial is leading the way, launching Cordial AI and setting out a roadmap for future releases that will continue to advance the AI and ML capabilities of the platform over the next several years. Product updates in 2023 included:

• Cordial AI: A new set of tools providing marketers with generative, predictive and prescriptive artificial intelligence capabilities to help marketers improve strategic decision-making, brand creativity and the customer experience. This is the first of many AI updates in the making for the company.
• Identity+: Customers can now seamlessly experience identity resolution, reporting, attribution and automated messaging with the power of data management and marketing execution across channels — all on one platform.
• Snowflake Integration and Partnership: Cordial now lists its data offering on Snowflake's Marketplace, allowing joint customers to unify their first-party data and unlock its potential by making it available across their entire business ecosystem through bi-directional data sharing.

"At the heart of our incredible journey, it's our people who shine and our culture focused on the well-being, development, and overall experience that genuinely sets us apart and fuels our success. From winning over prominent new clients to fostering a world-class culture, our teams have truly outdone themselves this year," said Cheryl Horner, director, people and culture. "Starting with our executive leadership and extending to our newest hires, we're united by a common vision — to inspire meaningful connections — both within our dedicated team and externally with our valued clients."

Companies pave the way for more accessible generative AI deployments with Llama 2 large language models and Dell systems to accelerate customer innovation

News summary 

• Dell Technologies is helping simplify deployment of Meta's Llama 2 models with Dell Generative AI Solutions on premises
• The Dell Validated Design for Generative AI offers customers a ready-made foundation of pre-tested software and hardware, purpose-built for GenAI efforts

Full story 

Dell Technologies is collaborating with Meta to make it easy for Dell customers to deploy Meta's Llama 2 models on premises with Dell's generative AI (GenAI) portfolio of IT infrastructure, client devices and professional services.

"We are at the beginning of a new era with generative AI transforming how industries operate, innovate and compete," said Jeff Boudreau, chief AI officer, Dell Technologies. "With the Dell and Meta technology collaboration, we're making open-source GenAI more accessible to all customers, through detailed implementation guidance paired with the optimal software and hardware infrastructure for deployments of all sizes. Now, customers can more easily deploy secure GenAI models on premises for powerful new approaches and insights."

Open-source GenAI fuels innovation on premises

The collaboration simplifies the on-premises AI environment by bringing together Dell's top-selling infrastructure portfolio and the Llama 2 family of AI models. Customers can accelerate their GenAI efforts on premises in a traditional data center or at edge locations. Dell has integrated Meta's Llama 2 models into its system sizing tools to help guide customers to the right solution to power their Llama 2 based AI efforts.

The Dell Validated Design for Generative AI with Meta's Llama 2 provides pre-tested and proven Dell infrastructure, software and services to streamline deployment and management of on-premises projects. With fully documented deployment and configuration guidance, organizations can get their GenAI infrastructure up and running more quickly and operate Llama 2 with more predictability.

With Meta's Llama 2 and the breadth of the Dell Generative AI Solutions technology and services portfolio, organizations of all sizes have access to more reliable tools to deliver GenAI solutions from desktops to core data centers, edge locations and public clouds.

The fully automated identity verification solution is optimized for greater speed, scalability, and conversion

Veriff, a global identity verification (IDV) provider, today announced significant updates to its fully automated IDV product. The solution uses advanced machine learning to enable a 100% automated identity verification process with zero human involvement.

With the enhanced IDV solution, customers have access to a fast method for validating user identities while providing more in-depth insights related to the session to enable organizations to make better-informed onboarding decisions. The solution has been optimized for decision speed, providing an output in five seconds, and the highest conversion rate for onboarding new customers, making the solution a great fit for risk-tolerant businesses. 

Building on the earlier iterations, the new solution has a faster response time, and each verification session has a decision, decision score, and more insights. These insights show in detail what happened in the verification session, providing information points that customers can use to build their own onboarding decision-making.

"This solution is ideal for businesses that require the fastest speed, highest conversion, and detailed session insights to provide their customers an extra layer of security," said Suvrat Joshi, Senior Vice President of Product at Veriff. "The great news for all our customers is that the automation advancements made to the fully automatic solution also enhance Veriff's core identity verification offering."

To better serve their customers' unique needs, Veriff offers two approaches to Identity and Document Verification: a fully automated solution or a hybrid solution. The automation advancements made to the core IDV technology enhance both fully automatic as well as the hybrid offering further benefiting all our customers. The hybrid option is highly automated but unlike the fully automated solution, it is supported by the reassurance of highly trained verification specialists. It has greater flexibility and offers higher fraud prevention and accuracy as well as more risk insights.

Forethought attains AWS Conversational AI Competency

Forethought, the AI-first customer support automation platform, today announced its participation in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Network (APN), a global community of AWS Partners that leverages programs, expertise, and resources to build, market, and sell customer offerings.

Additionally, Forethought is now available in the AWS Marketplace, making it easier than ever for businesses to leverage its advanced generative AI technology to enhance their customer service operations, simplifying the procurement process for Forethought's services and extending the reach of its powerful AI-driven support solutions.

“Working closely with AWS is a significant milestone for the Forethought team,” said Aaron Verstraete, Vice President of Strategic Alliances at Forethought. “By joining APN and AWS Marketplace, we are now able to bring Forethought’s services to more businesses and look forward to building these new relationships to further customer support efficiencies globally.”

Forethought is proud to be a part of the ISV Accelerate program, reinforcing the company's dedication to enhancing customer support, and the AWS ecosystem as a whole. The ISV Accelerate program offers Forethought valuable resources and support to better serve its growing customer base.

As part of this milestone, Forethought has achieved the prestigious AWS Conversational AI Competency distinction. This recognition underscores Forethought's commitment to delivering innovative, cloud-based solutions that empower organizations to provide exceptional customer support. The AWS Conversational AI Competency distinction demonstrates Forethought's success in delivering AI-driven customer support and its commitment to advancing the field of conversational AI.

Forethought's cloud-native solutions have been built on AWS, ensuring the highest levels of performance, security, and scalability for its customers. As an AWS Partner, Forethought looks forward to delivering even more innovative solutions to help businesses improve their customer support operations. With Forethought now available in the AWS Marketplace, customers can seamlessly integrate Forethought's solutions into their existing AWS infrastructure, simplifying the procurement process.

Following a decade of cord-cutting, that has seen pay-TV subscribers churning to paid online video services, Omdia expects 2024 to bring a new stage of market evolution, with users of paid online video services moving to free online video.

Omdia is tracking several market developments that are driving this pay-to-free (P2F) trend. The clampdown on password sharing by streamers, for example, has created a welcome subscription boost for them. But Omdia sees this as a short-term phenomenon, with that segment of the streaming customer base vulnerable to P2F churn in 2024, particularly as industry strikes and the cutting back on programming budgets will start to affect content quality.

The ongoing cost-of-living crisis will also lead to some pressure towards P2F churn. This is something that will become even more apparent as the streamers increase their prices to improve profitability while, at the same time, the attractiveness of free (Advertising Video on Demand/Free Ad Supported TV) alternatives grows.

And, while Omdia encourages streaming services to offer advertising options to maximize revenue, this step needs to be implemented as non-intrusively as possible, so the viewing experience is not significantly impacted by too many advertisements.

Maria Rua Aguete, Senior Research Director, in Omdia's Media and Entertainment practice, said: "We are expecting that streaming companies will manage ad loads in a sensible way, and so Omdia is still forecasting good growth for paid online video in 2024. The movement from free to pay will happen, although there will still be room for the paid services to continue to thrive. But all of the factors we have highlighted mean that the balance is quite precarious, and the poor implementation of advertising, or the imposition of price increases too quickly and too steeply, could well threaten that expected growth."

Boosts third-party integrations with Canva and FullStory–enabling organizations to amplify business results and further quantify UX impact

UserTesting, a leader in experience research and insights, today unveiled a series of enhancements to the UserTestingⓇ Human Insight Platform which includes new capabilities that simplify the process of reaching niche, hard to find audiences, new product integrations with Canva and FullStory that help organizations maximize the value of human insight, and a new Insights Services offering that gives organizations the ability to outsource research to UserTesting experts for time- and cost-efficient research and support delivery.

Features in this product update include:

Niche Audience Recruitment

• UserTesting’s Niche Audience Recruitment feature unlocks invaluable insights from distinctive and traditionally hard-to-reach groups. Users are able to quickly identify crucial audiences with UserTesting’s advanced tools, access unique viewpoints from previously elusive contributors, and maintain confidence in the quality by leveraging insights from rigorously vetted and trusted contributors. UserTesting’s advancements significantly streamline the path to insightful audience management. By honing in on target audience needs, businesses are better positioned to craft solutions that bolster their objectives.

UserTesting Insights Services

• Part of UserTesting’s professional services offerings, Insights Services allows organizations to cost-effectively outsource research to UserTesting’s in-house experts through customized research solutions for business growth and informed decision-making. UserTesting’s Insights Services help teams add research capacity and deliver turnkey insights faster. It also ensures data security, risk mitigation, and efficient research management.

New Integrations with Leading Third-Party Platforms

• FullStory Integration allows users to link UserTesting user feedback with FullStory’s high fidelity user session details to best prioritize digital optimizations and changes that create the biggest impact on the buyers’ journey.
• Canva Integration allows users to embed video-based insights from UserTesting in Canva assets to promote, elevate, and evangelize key insights across the organization for a shared understanding of the customer.

Additional updates include:

• UserTesting University Updates
  The various learning academies have been combined into UserTesting University to simplify customers’ learning experience. This includes UserTesting, UserZoom, UserZoomGo, and EnjoyHQ courses and product documentation. All courses are available in UserTesting University effective immediately.

“FullStory’s platform combines rich analytics, robust visitor session detail, and collaboration tools to help answer critical questions, understand issues, and uncover new conversion opportunities,” said Will Schnabel, SVP Alliances and Partnerships at FullStory. “By integrating with UserTesting’s Human Insight Platform, teams can delve deeper into customer journeys, gain a holistic understanding of their audiences, and make data-driven decisions that significantly impact the business.”

“Companies are building products and experiences for broader audiences than ever. As a result, we are seeing an increasing demand from businesses to be able to connect with niche audiences with unique specificities as a means to stay in-step with changing customer attitudes and behaviors,” said Marco Crolla, Chief Audience Officer at UserTesting. “We bring specialized experience to audience recruitment. Between our own and our vetted partner networks, we have the ability to find the most highly-targeted audiences, helping customers to locate the audiences they need to address their business imperatives—from international compliance challenges to accessibility considerations.”