TREW Marketing and Elektor have joined forces to provide never-before-seen insights about marketing to engineers and particularly technical buyers in Europe. The report, "Decoding Engineer Preferences," provides a new, comprehensive analysis of engineer preferences and technical buying behavior. It will be supported with an exclusive webinar on November 9, 2023 (16:00 CET).

The report offers need-to-know information for anyone marketing to engineers. Readers will benefit from unique and practical insights about how engineers interact with things like paid search ads, their preferred sources of information, and the types of content they find most valuable for work-related purchases. This cooperation between TREW Marketing, the US-based leading experts in engineer engagement, and Elektor, Europe's leading engineering community, truly offers the best of both worlds — highly useful research from a relevant and representative group of more than 1,200 technical buyers in Europe.

The November 9 webinar will be hosted by Erik Jansen, Managing Director of Elektor, and Wendy Covey, CEO of TREW Marketing. Together, they will present the highlights of this European-focused survey, and Wendy Covey will also offer some insightful comparisons to the State of Marketing to Engineers research released earlier this year. In one hour, Covey and Jansen will share results, highlight both similarities and differences, and provide attendees with a holistic view of engineer preferences when marketed to.

Some first highlights from the survey include:

• 58% of engineers avoid paid search links when searching online, but 29% will click if the paid link appears helpful.
• Technical publications (online) and supplier/vendor websites are the primary sources engineers turn to when researching products.
• Datasheets (86%) are overwhelmingly named as the most valuable content in decision-making, before Technical Articles (60%) and Product Reviews/Testimonials (50%).
• On a scale from 1 (no trust) to 10 (complete trust), engineers rate their trust in AI-based tools at 4.14.).

The webinar will also feature an interactive Q&A session where attendees can engage with the experts and dive deeper into the survey findings.

"We're thrilled to use our unique market position to share these insights with our community and clients," said Jansen. "Collaborating with the experienced team at TREW Marketing has not only added immense value to the report but has also been a rewarding experience for the Elektor team."

"Understanding engineer preferences is pivotal for businesses looking to tailor their marketing strategies effectively," Covey added. "This collaboration allows us to offer a global perspective on engineer behavior, empowering businesses to make informed decisions and strengthen their marketing efforts."

Springbrook Software, the leader in cutting-edge ERP platforms for local government agencies, has released a new modern AI-powered customer service solution: HelpDesk AI. The Springbrook HelpDesk AI empowers customers with lightning-fast access to vital product information, expediting their requests. This dynamic solution provides access to an extensive knowledge library covering all Springbrook Enterprise ERP modules, spanning Finance, HR, Payroll, Utility Billing, Payment Solutions, Tax Collection, Reporting, and Advanced Capital Budgeting.

Springbrook's HelpDesk AI harnesses ChatGPT technology and taps into Springbrook's immense product content library, packed with terabytes of video and textual resources.

"We are committed to providing our customers with the most advanced and easy to use solutions to address their everyday needs. Utilizing Artificial Intelligence in customer service takes us one step further in making our customer's works easier. Our new HelpDesk AI continually evolves through each customer interaction, fine-tuning its content delivery. Expect more groundbreaking technology like this across our Cirrus cloud-based finance ERP platform," says Robert Bonavito, Springbrook CEO.

Springbrook's HelpDesk AI boasts adaptive learning capabilities, expertly guiding customers to the right content using a series of questions and prompts. Backed by thousands of hours of customer service interactions, this solution is primed to handle virtually any request for training, guidance, or product details.

• Getty Images’ research revealed most popular visuals for Australasia, Japan, Southeast Asia, Hong Kong and Taiwan continue to rely heavily upon stereotypical, inauthentic imagery representing various communities.

• Despite Asia-Pacific’s extensive span of cultures and demographics, there is limited diversity in imagery. Representation gaps range from disparities in depicting cultural specificities, to limited portrayals of Asian working life, among others.

• Getty Images today launched the “Inclusive Visual Storytelling for Asian Communities” report to support brands and businesses in APAC as they endeavor to be more inclusive in visual choices.

Getty Images, a preeminent global visual content creator and marketplace, today launched “Inclusive Visual Storytelling for Asian Communities” report to help brands expand and deepen Asian narratives. This guidance is a result of Getty Images’ ongoing global research initiatives, revealing that visual representation of Asian communities in Asia-Pacific (APAC) advertising remains stereotypical.

Powered by insights from Getty Images' VisualGPS research, the guidelines informed that less than 10% of most popular visuals for Australasia, Japan, Southeast Asia, Hong Kong and Taiwan accurately represent Asian people and their lived experiences. Instead, most used imagery tends to lean heavily towards perpetuating common stereotypes: depicting Asians as youthful, slender, possessing lighter skin tones, and predominantly portrayed in work-related contexts. Furthermore, popular visuals remain similar in their underlying messages, styling, and emotion: often overly happy, and with little to no connection to each culture.

According to these guidelines, 4 out of 5 consumers across APAC agree that simply increasing the representation of individuals from diverse ethnicities, backgrounds, and appearances within advertising and media is insufficient, stating that companies also need to do a better job at capturing people’s true lifestyles and cultures. Strikingly, 3 out of 5 also said to feel they have been discriminated against based on body size, lifestyle choices, race, ethnicity, gender identity, disability, and sexuality. These findings underscore the imperative for the media and advertising industry to not only recognize the intricate diversity and multidimensionality inherent in Asian cultures, but also to align with consumer expectations in delivering authentic and meaningful portrayals of Asian identities.

To provide a comprehensive guide to visual storytelling centered on Asian communities, Getty Images’ new guidance encompasses various aspects of their identities, passions, and lived experiences, such as age, body, culture, disability, gender, gender identity and sexual orientation, profession, race and ethnicity. By presenting a robust spectrum of perspectives, the guidelines supply media and advertising professionals with practical and applicable insights, serving as visual checkpoints and equipping them to enrich Asian visual narratives within their brand communications.

“Despite the region's diversity, everyday images and videos that aim to capture Asian experiences often fall short, perpetuating harmful stereotypes or missing the mark entirely. This misrepresentation and underrepresentation in TV shows, social media and advertising has led to significant gaps in consumers’ understanding of the region's realities,” said Yuri Endo, Creative Insights Manager at Getty Images. “By sharing these guidelines, the report takes a significant step towards helping brands serving APAC customers promote accurate and respectful portrayals of Asian communities, ultimately contributing to a more inclusive and equitable visual landscape.”

Some of the identified representation gaps made visible in the report that are specific to APAC include disparities in depicting cultural specificities, underrepresentation of older adults, a lack of diversity in gender representation, limited portrayals of Asian working life, a prevailing preference for Eurocentric beauty standards and body types, an absence of individuals with disabilities, among others.

Delving into the nuances of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I), the “Inclusive Visual Storytelling for Asian Communities” report, includes insights applicable across APAC, but also incorporates detailed insights into the local landscapes of Australia & New Zealand, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Taiwan, Thailand, Singapore, and South Korea. Each country chapter provides local research about population demographics, imagery trends, underrepresented areas of diversity, and actionable strategies to combat stereotypes and promote inclusive representation.

The collaboration aims to boost digital sales and customer experience in the e-mobility era

Infosys, a global leader in next-generation digital services and consulting, today announced that it has signed a five-year collaboration with automotive marquee smart Europe GmbH to refine its Direct-to-Customer (D2C) business model in Europe and provide enhanced customer experience, data-driven personalization and engagement for the existing model smart #1, the newly announced smart #3, and other upcoming all-electric models from the iconic brand. Through this strategic collaboration, Infosys will help smart Europe GmbH redefine the online EV buying experience and apply state-of-the-art Machine Learning (ML) models to accurately forecast sales and aftersales demand.

Infosys was chosen to assist the premium EV maker in this transformation for its deep expertise in enabling consolidation across automotive sales and e-commerce processes and systems. To enable smart Europe GmbH derive exceptional value from software, data, and cloud investments, Infosys will leverage its trusted process, functional and technical expertise, complemented by a design thinking-led consulting approach. Infosys will also help smart Europe GmbH to efficiently sell electric vehicles across 15 European countries with a D2C sales approach and secure engagement across lead generation, prospect conversion, sales and aftersales channels, supplemented by end-to-end ownership and accountability.

Dirk Adelmann, Chief Executive Officer, smart Europe GmbH, said, "We are pleased to have Infosys as our partner on this journey. Infosys' strong leadership commitment backed by its ability to drive end-to-end application development and maintenance with efficiency and effectiveness, will help us boost our operational performance and user experience."

Jasmeet Singh, EVP and Global Head of Manufacturing, Infosys, said, "We are delighted to deliver our cutting-edge technologies to innovative companies like smart Europe GmbH to help ramp up their competitiveness in the European market. Infosys has demonstrated a steadfast commitment to powering innovation-driven customer experiences across touchpoints through our automotive and mobility offerings. Leveraging a blend of our expertise in the domain and strong regional presence, we will help smart Europe GmbH fast-track the adoption of cutting-edge digital solutions. The success of this engagement will be a real game changer for both smart Europe GmbH and Infosys in the electric mobility era."

• New Darktrace/Cloud™ solution now available via the AWS Marketplace; provides a real-time, architecture-based view of cloud environments so businesses can easily and quickly act against evolving threats and misconfigurations, and strengthen compliance.

Darktrace, a global leader in cyber security AI, today unveiled a new Darktrace/Cloud™ solution based on its unique Self-Learning AI. The new solution provides comprehensive visibility of cloud architectures, real-time cloud-native threat detection and response, and prioritized recommendations and actions to help security teams manage misconfigurations and strengthen compliance. When combined with insight from Darktrace solutions for network, email, apps, zero trust and endpoint, Darktrace/Cloud provides a deeper, contextualized understanding of the risks and threats currently facing an organization's digital estate.  

According to a recent report, "Gartner^® anticipates over 99 percent of cloud breaches will be based on a customer error, account takeover or misconfiguration until 2027"^[1]. Cloud environments are constantly evolving so security professionals need to increase the level of visibility while keeping up with changing compliance, risk and security requirements. The rise of cloud-native technologies including containers, Kubernetes and microservices also require new tools and techniques for detecting and responding to known and novel threats.

"Unlike static cloud security tools that provide snapshots of a specific point in time, Darktrace/Cloud is real-time, all the time. Our Self-Learning AI continuously learns patterns between workloads, assets, policy configurations and identities to provide a dynamic view of cloud architectures. We analyze the entire cloud stack from data to control plane, combining an understanding of architecture and network with a new flexible, scalable deployment model," said Jack Stockdale, Chief Technology Officer, Darktrace. "Our innovative approach to cloud security is built on more than a decade of leadership in Cyber AI that is already protecting our customers' critical business areas from network and email to operational technology."

Available today, the new capabilities in Darktrace/Cloud include:

• Comprehensive visibility and architecture modeling for insights into the constantly changing nature of cloud environments. This visibility is constructed dynamically from configuration, network, users and identity and access management (IAM) data. Darktrace establishes patterns of life for cloud resources, identities, and services to understand who has access to what and how. This is critical for detecting anomalies and unknown threats.
• Universal attack path modeling provides a dynamic view of where attackers may look to move next. Darktrace brings together real-time cloud data and a deep understanding of your cloud environment with a platform approach that provides insights about risks from other covered areas of the business (e.g., network, email) to highlight potential attack paths and prioritize important assets to secure.
• Unique real-time and cloud-native threat detection and response that provides a dynamic view of known and novel threats within the cloud. Darktrace combines deep cloud attack path knowledge with real-time anomaly and threat detection through cloud-native autonomous response actions, such as detaching a policy from a user or removing a workload from a security group.
• Prioritized cloud posture management that starts by examining cloud configurations against common compliance frameworks. Where misconfigurations are detected, Darktrace provides a prioritized view of what to fix first, based on a risk profile generated from security and business context. Guided steps can be provided to help teams proactively address these before they become a significant issue.
• Cost discovery to provide a better understanding of cloud resource allocation. This helps teams contextualize their cloud resources according to security and business priorities.
• Communication and collaboration capabilities to streamline workflows between security teams and DevOps teams. Tickets can be created on demand, teams can communicate directly via messaging platforms, and alerts and anomaly detections can be sent to Security Information & Event Management (SIEM) or Security Orchestration, Automation and Response (SOAR) products and the Darktrace Mobile app so they can be alerted on the go.
• Flexible deployment options include an agentless deployment by default so organizations can be up and running in minutes. Teams can use the dynamic architectural view and risk context to decide where to deploy agents for enhanced real-time actions and deeper inspection.

Sykes Cottages, a cloud-native travel agency platform in the UK, has experienced significant growth in the last five years and has relied on the cloud to help them scale throughout this period.

"When it comes to cybersecurity, having visibility and an understanding of what you've got and your risks is critical. If I don't know it's there, I can't protect it," said Jonny Mattey, Head of Cybersecurity, Sykes Cottages. "Having a holistic, live view of our cloud environment enables us to work pragmatically and use AI to cut down management time so that we can address security risks and improve our resilience."

The new Darktrace/Cloud solution is now available on Amazon Web Services (AWS) through the AWS Marketplace, a curated digital catalog that makes it easy for customers to find, buy, deploy, and manage the third-party software they need to build solutions and run their business. Darktrace and AWS have been collaborating since 2017 to help organizations secure their AWS environments. Darktrace protects AWS environments for organizations around the world including Sunwest Bank and ProPhase Labs. Darktrace is an AWS Security Competency Partner and is part of the AWS ISV Accelerate program.

"Security is job zero at AWS," said Paddy Fitzpatrick, Director – Independent Software Vendors, UK & Ireland at Amazon Web Services. "As the threat landscape continues to evolve, the availability of AI-based tools like Darktrace/Cloud on the AWS Marketplace will help customers to gain increased visibility, and respond more effectively to security risks and threats."

Darktrace first extended its Cyber AI capabilities to cloud environments in 2016, applying its world class algorithms to granular network traffic. Darktrace/Cloud was recently named Cloud Security Product of the Year for Large Enterprises by Computing Magazine in its 2023 Cloud Excellence Awards.

aiOla, a global leader in speech recognition technology, today announced a new partnership with Cloocus, a renowned digital transformation provider, to bring aiOla's innovative AI offerings to companies across South Korea.

The strategic alliance aims to combine aiOla's advanced speech-driven AI platform with Cloocus's expertise in digital transformation, data analytics, and cloud consulting. Together, the companies will deliver transformative AI solutions tailored to South Korean enterprises looking to streamline operations, boost productivity, and gain data-driven insights.

"The world's largest corporations are eager to implement cutting-edge AI capabilities, but doing so can be an immense challenge," said Amir Haramaty, CEO of aiOla. "With aiOla's intuitive and ready-to-deploy solution, enterprises can achieve immediate value and accelerate their AI adoption journey. We're thrilled to collaborate with an industry leader like Cloocus to bring our technology to their network of clients, who can benefit greatly from integrating Generative AI into their workflows."

Regardless of an organization's digital journey, data quality is crucial for their success. Although speech is a widely used form of communication, it often struggles to effectively capture data due to challenges related to business-specific jargon, accents, intonation, language understanding, and background noise. aiOla has the ability to adapt digital and paper processes into speech-driven systems for multiple languages, including Korean. This transformation allows businesses to realize value in a matter of weeks.

"aiOla's speech technology is unmatched in its ability to streamline workflows and generate insights through natural conversation," said Steve Hong, CEO of Cloocus. "Their platform can also quickly onboard new use cases within hours and easily scale as needed. We're thrilled to offer their innovative AI solutions to our network of over 800 clients and equip them with leading-edge capabilities that maximize efficiency and productivity."

South Korea has emerged as a global hub of technological innovation and advanced AI capabilities. This partnership brings together two leaders in AI and digital transformation to drive the next wave of disruption for South Korean businesses across electronics, automotive, ship building, environmental technology, chemicals and other industries.

Quick Custom Intelligence (QCI), a leading name in the field of business intelligence solutions, is delighted to announce the appointment of Alicia Hawkins as the company's new Gaming Business Intelligence Manager. With a remarkable 14-year track record in the gaming industry, Alicia brings a wealth of experience, expertise, and innovative insights to the very dynamic QCI team.

Alicia Hawkins commented, "QCI beautifully bridges technology with business operations, and as customers gain a passion for data-driven decision making and leverage data for business optimization, I have the privilege of embarking on this journey with them. I am excited to join the exceptional leadership team at QCI as the Gaming Business Intelligence Manager."

Forrester Consulting Uncovers 505% Return on Investment with Amperity through Recent Total Economic Impact Study

Amperity, the leading AI-powered enterprise customer data platform (CDP) for consumer brands, today announced more than 50% of its customer base has adopted Amperity for Paid Media. The rapid adoption of this new application of Amperity demonstrates the important role first-party data will play in informing paid media strategies.

Since its launch in May 2023, Amperity for Paid Media has used industry-leading ad connectors and first-party data to deliver more than 11 billion unified customer profiles each day. These are delivered to the ad platforms of Amperity customers, across a range of industries, including retail, quick-serve restaurants (QSR), consumer packaged goods (CPG), travel and hospitality, sports teams and leagues, and financial services.

Marketers and digital agencies continue to struggle to find a way to measure digital and in-store transactions to deliver highly personalized campaigns and optimize their budget spend - which is where Amperity excels. Brands using Amperity for paid media are experiencing the following results:

• 3X conversion rate using unified customer profile lookalike audiences over third party audiences
• 85%+ match rate across major ad platforms
• 30% onboarding savings
• 5x increase in ROAS (Return on Ad Spend)
• 94% savings in data management and stitch processing
• 70%+ reduction in marketing timelines

The elimination of third-party cookies and the ever-changing data privacy laws have ushered in a new era of challenges and opportunities. The days of relying solely on legacy methods to identify, retain, and acquire customers are gone. To stay ahead of the game and ensure brands are getting the most out of their largest spend channels, it's critical that brands tap into their own first-party customer data to maximize every campaign dollar, especially in this macro economic climate.

"Today, we find ourselves at the epicenter of a marketing revolution. The tides have shifted and the old ways of acquiring and retaining customers are giving way to a new era of data privacy and consumer-centricity,” said Barry Padgett, CEO at Amperity. “In Q1 of next year, Google is going to disable 1% of third party cookies and fully remove them by Q3. This poses a massive challenge for brands across the board. But within this challenge lies immense opportunity. At Amperity, we’ve taken it upon ourselves to lead the charge and help brands and agencies navigate this shift.”

To quantify the impact Amperity is having on paid media, the company commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study and examine the potential ROI enterprises may realize by deploying its CDP. To construct the TEI study, Forrester interviewed five Amperity customers, identifying the benefits, risks, and outcomes experienced while using the company's customer data platform for paid media and combined the results to form a single composite organization. According to the study, the composite organization not only experienced a 505% ROI, but also experienced the following benefits over three years:

• $3.4 million incremental increase in net operating revenue from effective messaging
• $3.8 million incremental increase in net operating revenue due to targeted paid media spend
• 25% increase in productivity impact of more efficient campaign preparation and execution resulting in a $1.3 million savings
• $4.5 million savings in paid media spend from deduplicating customer records

Amperity has become the customer data platform of choice for leading brands across numerous industries, most recently selected by First Hawaiian Bank, Forever 21, Palace Resorts, Shiseido America, and Virgin Atlantic. These brands join longtime users of Amperity including Alaska Airlines, Brooks, DICK’s Sporting Goods, Reckitt, Seattle Sounders, SPARC Group, and Wyndham Hotels & Resorts.