Huawei's mobile advertising ecosystem, Petal Ads, had a productive time at DMEXCO 2023, unveiling cutting-edge solutions for crafting effective digital campaigns. The event drew 800 international speakers, 40,000 international trade visitors, and 650 exhibiting companies.

Petal Ads hosted a masterclass and booth to showcase their strategies and services and participated in a panel organised by the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) on engaging high-value audiences.

Jaime Gonzalo, VP of Huawei Mobile Services Europe, said, "Petal Ads was thrilled to feature their two key business priorities at DMEXCO: helping brand advertisers craft compelling digital campaigns, while imbuing them with the tools to connect with high-value international audiences, mainly from China."  

Petal Ads Masterclass 

Helmed by Jaime Gonzalo, the Petal Ads Masterclass emphasised the need to target high-quality users, and highlighted industry leaders across sectors, including retail and automotive, who successfully blazed trails into China.  

He explained that Petal Ads can help companies enter the Chinese market, given Huawei's deep understanding of it, exclusive ownership of a large amount of high value users, and significant influence in this market. Huawei commands top spot for popularity in China according to YouGov Global Best Brand Ranking 2022, features a 47.4% market share in foldable smartphones, and offers exclusive access to over 500 million active users in China monthly. Furthermore, the platform offers comprehensive support with a dedicated team in Europe, from language and visuals to setup. 

MMA Panel 

The MMA panel featured industry experts who discussed the value of connecting with high-value audiences, explaining that using first-party data is crucial for achieving a highly granular segmentation. Petal Ads was represented by Alessandro Schintu, the Director of Ecosystem Development & Operations at Huawei.

Petal Ads Booth 

The Petal Ads booth buzzed with expert discussions on branding, app campaigns, and overseas expansion tactics, attracting hundreds of visitors. Guests experienced Huawei's latest innovative devices and learned about their successful partnerships with top global brands.  

Prime Day isn’t just big for Amazon; Attentive empowers companies to drive 13% more revenue year-over-year through use of personalized SMS

Attentive, the world’s #1 conversational marketing platform, has released new data from over 3,500 U.S. brands on how leading businesses used Prime Day to engage with their customers and drive revenue ahead of Black Friday/Cyber Monday. As the holiday season kicks off, SMS is a critical lever to drive revenue, helping brands break through the noise and reach shoppers where they are.

Based on Attentive’s internal data, brands sent personalized text messages leveraging the Prime Day event as a way to connect with their customers on mobile and convert browsers into buyers. This year, rather than sending mass generic texts to reach as many subscribers as possible, brands are honing in on delivering relevant messages based on customers’ shopping and browsing behaviors. These timely and tailored texts help customers stay engaged with the brand throughout their shopping journey, building loyalty and driving more revenue.

Findings show that brands:

• Sent out nearly 40% more text messages this year than last year.
• Know personalization is now table stakes, and sent out 33% more behavior-based SMS messages than last year, encouraging two-way interaction with their customers.
• Achieved 13% more revenue with personalized texts within the two Amazon Prime days compared to last year.
• Drove purchases by using SMS strategically. Deal announcements were sent earlier in the day (10am - 1pm), and behavior-based personalized texts were sent as follow-up with customers late afternoon/post work hours (4pm - 9pm).

“While Amazon is the obvious destination for Prime Day, savvy shoppers know there are best in class products both on Amazon and in other places to snag deals to kick off their holiday shopping, so they are especially responsive to limited-time offers, exclusive promos, and more,” said Amit Jhawar, CEO of Attentive. “Major brands used Attentive’s SMS platform to take advantage of this seasonal shopping moment to send more two-way SMS messages, allowing them to drive more revenue and build brand affinity by delivering the right offer at the right time, turning browsers into buyers.”

The latest addition in Calgary strengthens FullHost's presence across Canada, complementing its existing locations in Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal. This expansion delivers cutting-edge hosting solutions to cater to the escalating needs of both businesses and individual users.

FullHost, a leading Canadian hosting company known for its commitment to innovation and service excellence, is excited to announce the addition of a brand-new data center location in Calgary, Alberta. This latest expansion complements FullHost's existing locations in Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal, and underscores the company's mission to deliver premier hosting solutions across Canada.

"As the digital ecosystem in Canada continues to thrive, our goal is to ensure businesses and developers have access to top-tier hosting solutions that are both localized and reliable," said Chris Tilden, Director of Client Success. "Calgary represents a significant and strategic location for us, and we are thrilled to extend our services to this vibrant city."

Key Features of the Calgary Data Center:

Comprehensive Offerings: The new Calgary data center will support FullHost's signature services, including Elastic Hosting, Virtual Servers, and Managed VPS.

Cutting-Edge Infrastructure: Designed with redundancy, speed, and security in mind, the Calgary facility boasts state-of-the-art technology to ensure optimal website performance and data integrity.

Client-Centric Migration: Existing FullHost clients interested in relocating their services to Calgary can do so with ease. The company promises a smooth transition process, guided by their experienced support team.

The expansion into Calgary is a testament to FullHost's robust growth strategy and unwavering commitment to meeting the needs of its diverse clientele. As more businesses recognize the importance of a strong online presence, FullHost continues to position itself as a trusted partner in the web hosting space.

New Feature Helps Marketers Easily Gather, Measure, and License Both Organic and Sponsored Content

IZEA Worldwide, Inc., the premier provider of influencer marketing technology, data, and services for the world’s leading brands and agencies, today announced the release of Dynamic Content Requests in IZEA Flex, its comprehensive influencer marketing platform. With Dynamic Content Requests, marketers using IZEA Flex can solicit content submissions from both the paid influencers they work with as well as those creators who are publishing content about their brand organically. The new feature adds to IZEA Flex’s seamless creator experience that allows marketers and creators to collaborate with ease.

Paid Content Collection
Marketers can invite paid creators to submit content via email invitation or custom shortlinks that can be distributed via social media DM or other means. The system prompts influencers to upload their content, automatically associating it with the proper campaign, handle, and contact record within Flex.

Organic Content Licensing
Marketers can publicly distribute a content request on their website or social feed for broader solicitation of organic content. Submissions through the system grant marketers a usage license, allowing the marketer to republish the content on their own social media handles, so long as they credit the creator. Those who submit content via an organic content request automatically become a Flex contact, giving them a direct relationship with the brand for future sponsorship opportunities.

Dynamic Content Requests make gathering content easy for marketers and creators alike, with no requirement for creators to register for the platform. Content can be submitted through the system via URL or manual upload, with support for text, photos, and videos.

High-Quality Source Materials
In addition to live, published content, Dynamic Content Requests support the collection and submission of high-quality original photos, videos, and other production assets. These assets allow marketers to utilize influencer-produced content in a variety of ways, from paid social media ads to print marketing collateral.

Automatic Measurement and Analysis
Once paid or organic content is submitted in Flex, this content is actively measured for engagement. Marketers can associate the content with other Flex modules for advanced campaign performance tracking and insights.

“At IZEA, we understand the power of both paid and organic content,” said Ted Murphy, IZEA’s Founder and CEO. “With our new Dynamic Content Requests in IZEA Flex, we’re making it easier than ever for marketers to harness this power by streamlining the process of gathering, measuring, and licensing content. We’re not just simplifying the process, we’re enhancing it, providing high-quality source materials and automatic measurement and analysis. It’s the best of both worlds, brought together in one dynamic platform.”

IZEA Flex offers a comprehensive suite of tools to enhance influencer marketing efforts, catering to the needs of brands and agencies of all sizes. Other IZEA Flex features include AI influencer campaign briefs and storyboarding, creator payments, social listening, performance tracking, and contract management.

New features bring social in-platform, consolidating multi-channel campaign transactions and providing connected journey advertising intelligence alongside Open Web (video, native, display, audio, CTV), and DOOH.

illumin Holdings Inc. (“illumin” or “Company”), a Journey Advertising technology company that empowers marketers and lets them make smarter decisions about communicating with online consumers, today introduced new functionality for its journey advertising platform by establishing a fully integrated connection with Meta to provide new Facebook and Instagram capabilities allowing end-to-end Social Advertising.

With this latest product update, illumin expands connected journeys with its first social capabilities. The new feature brings Facebook and Instagram advertisements directly onto the intuitive journey advertising platform, offering consumers an enhanced experience while providing marketers with connected journey advertising intelligence. Marketers can now create, launch, manage, and report on their Facebook and Instagram campaigns within illumin and seamlessly pass their Open Web audiences into social campaigns through an intuitive, connected interface.

“This integration makes illumin’s platform a true one-stop shop by letting advertisers manage their Open Web and Social campaigns from a singular, connected interface,” said Rachel Kapcan, Chief Product Officer at illumin. “This social integration is the first step of many in creating a platform made for how marketers always wished they could work – and further solidifies illumin as the number one journey advertising provider.”

Company recognized for innovative, recently-enhanced incident response solutions that will be on display at the NetDiligence Cyber Risk Summit in Beverly Hills

ZeroFox, an enterprise software-as-a-service leader in external cybersecurity, today announced it was honored with the 2023 CyberSecurity Breakthrough Award for "Overall Incident Response Solution of the Year." This recognition underscores ZeroFox's commitment to delivering cutting-edge response capabilities that help organizations prepare, detect, contain and recover from cyberattacks and other security incidents.

The CyberSecurity Breakthrough Awards program celebrates outstanding cybersecurity companies, products, and professionals. ZeroFox Incident Response is an extension of its best-in-class external cybersecurity capabilities, designed to provide comprehensive digital forensics and incident response support to organizations around the world. Trusted by over 1,000 customers across 50 countries for breach and incident response in the last year, ZeroFox Response works swiftly to help organizations minimize the impact of breaches, protect customer trust, maintain business continuity, and meet regulatory compliance.

ZeroFox recently added intelligent pen-testing to its already robust portfolio of incident response offerings. This new service combines industry leading cyber intelligence into a rigorous intelligent penetration testing solution that helps customers identify potential weaknesses in their systems, and improve cyber defenses and resilience. Additional key features of ZeroFox Response include:

• End-to-End Response Services: ZeroFox offers comprehensive response services, from investigation to notification, allowing security teams to concentrate on critical tasks while ZeroFox manages the complexities of incident management.
• Adversary Disruption and Automated Takedowns: ZeroFox's global takedown service proactively disrupts phishing and fraud threats, preventing further harm from cyber adversaries.
• Continuous Dark Web Monitoring: ZeroFox monitors the dark web continuously, identifying compromised credentials, sensitive data leaks, and relevant attack planning and chatter to protect organizations' data and assets.
• Ransomware Readiness Assessment: ZeroFox assists organizations in assessing and prioritizing their defensive measures, enhancing their confidence in protecting against and responding to ransomware attacks effectively.
• Tabletop Exercises: ZeroFox curates and facilitates a customized scenario that is specifically designed to evaluate the preparedness of the organization in responding to a cyber attack or other cyber-related emergency. Tabletop Exercises involve a targeted group of people to discuss a hypothetical scenario to identify strengths and weaknesses in the response effort.
• Threat Hunting: Powered by ZeroFox’s world-class threat intelligence capability and Digital Forensics & Incident Response team, ZeroFox’s threat hunting service investigates the customer environment for evidence of malicious activity, undiscovered threats, and risks within existing security controls.
• NEW Intelligent Pentesting: Tailored pentesting that mimics threat actor TTPs likely to target an organization, followed by a full retest of the organization’s patched security platform following the original Penetration Test recommendations.

"We are honored to be recognized with the CyberSecurity Breakthrough Award for Overall Incident Response Solution of the Year," said Jamie Tolles, ZeroFox VP of Response. "This award reaffirms our position as a full end-to-end cybersecurity provider and our commitment to supporting organizations with the most advanced and effective incident response solutions to better protect their digital assets and reputation."

Ahead of next month's COP28 summit, Omdia's new report, 'Market Landscape: State of Sustainability in Retail Banking', has found the vast majority of banks do not have a fully-functional sustainability strategy; many are still analyzing, despite sustainability being a matter of strategic concern for several decades.

The increasing regulation around net zero presages a general movement from guidelines toward formal legislation around sustainability targets and standards. This presents banks with a significant task to respond accordingly within their strategies and policies. 

Key findings from the study include:

• Just 15% of retail banks stated they have a well-defined sustainability strategy that includes their supply chain, slightly below the global average of 18%.
• A larger number (36%) of banks with revenues between $50-$999m stated that they are in the assessment or formulation stage of building a sustainability strategy.
• Keeping up with the latest regulations and developments is the most challenging aspect, with 45% of retail banks noting this as one of their top three priorities.
• 39% of respondents overall put a lack of employee engagement and 36% a lack of clear metrics and suppliers who do not share their sustainability goals as challenges.

Many businesses are still in the early stages of building their sustainability strategies and deploying technology solutions to move them towards their ESG goals. The key concern is the lack of a clear definition of sustainability in retail banking that is hampering banks' efforts to implement it into their businesses in a way that is consistent with their broader strategic objectives.

Ouliana Smith, Omdia Senior Research Analyst commented: "Retail banks that are focused exclusively on the delivery of services will have meaningful impacts on sustainability only by leveraging their strategy through their supply chain; data centers, and manufacturers of the devices through which their services are deployed and used.

"Banks need to understand the developments across their entire value chain and monitor progress in real-time. Given the complexity of any major change in the value chain, as all suppliers will also be grappling with their own transition to sustainability, it is better to start sooner rather than later."