IntouchCX, a leading global customer experience and technology company, has announced its expansion into Egypt.

This is the second global footprint expansion for IntouchCX in 2023. In February, the Company expanded its operations to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. IntouchCX plans to open its state-of-the-art center of excellence campus in Cairo in the weeks to come.

"Opening our second greenfield geography in a year truly demonstrates our ability to grow successfully in strategic markets for our clients partners," said Greg Fettes, Founder and Chief Executive Officer at IntouchCX. "Egypt helps us accomplish speed to scale and enhances our ability to hit the performance targets on all the programs we serve."

Egypt's growing technology infrastructure and strategic location fosters enhanced global communication and collaboration. Cairo's highly educated and skilled workforce of IT, customer service, and finance professionals serving over 12 languages makes it a strategically positioned market for IntouchCX client partners.

"Egypt is truly special and there is an amazing diverse talent pool and hunger for career growth in the labor market here," said Dishant Bhojwani, Chief Operating Officer - APAC & Africa at IntouchCX. "We are excited to invest in Egypt and create strong community roots in Cairo and beyond."

Preannounces Preliminary Third Quarter 2023 Results

OptimizeRx adds new, proven, profitable technologies to become the most comprehensive healthcare marketing platform in the nation.

Consolidated revenue run rate will increase to nearly $100 million and the acquisition is expected to be immediately accretive to earnings.

Third quarter 2023 headline numbers to come in ahead of consensus with revenue for OptimizeRx standalone expected to be between $15.2-$15.5 million and non-GAAP net income expected to be $0.6-$1 million.

OptimizeRx Corp. (the “Company”), the leading provider of healthcare technology solutions helping life sciences companies reach and engage healthcare professionals (HCPs) and patients, today announced it has signed an agreement to acquire Scottsdale, Arizona-based Healthy Offers, Inc., dba Medicx Health ("Medicx”), a leading healthcare consumer-focused omnichannel marketing and analytics company. The transaction purchase price is $95 million, and certain members of Medicx’s management plan to invest approximately $10.5 million of their proceeds into the Company’s common stock. Closing is expected during the fourth quarter of 2023.

The acquisition of Medicx further advances OptimizeRx’s mission to create a more informed and empowered healthcare community using new technology solutions. The addition of the Medicx patient and HCP-focused Micro-Neighborhood^® Targeting Platform, built on its MX# advanced identity resolution technology, to OptimizeRx’s HCP-focused Dynamic Audience Activation Platform (DAAP) is expected to provide a single source of innovative technologies that will enhance the reach and efficacy of healthcare marketing for life sciences organizations.

“Our acquisition of Medicx is expected to be a major business accelerator for us as it encompasses all three of our growth drivers: expanding our audience, introducing new solutions, significantly opening client penetration and growth opportunities,” said Will Febbo, Chief Executive Officer, OptimizeRx. “Moreover, Medicx has a very healthy financial profile and we believe this acquisition will be transformative to our growth and profitability.”

“We’ve led the market in digital point-of-care expansion for pharma marketing and Medicx leads privacy-safe precision patient marketing. Together, we reach over two million HCPs and the majority of the US healthcare consumer population. As we bring our companies together, we see tremendous opportunity to address the unmet needs of our life sciences customers in creating meaningful brand connections with their two most important stakeholders, doctors and patients.”

“Coupling consumer and HCP marketing strategies is a natural next step for many of our customers,” stated Steve Silvestro, Chief Commercial Officer, OptimizeRx. “By being first to build out the connections, OptimizeRx is able to bring our customers two highly complementary solution sets on a single platform. We see an immediate opportunity with embedded customers of both organizations to benefit from the synergies we bring to the market as a combined collective of patient-centric marketing solutions.”

“I'm extremely proud of the leading patient-focused omnichannel platform the Medicx team has built, and believe our robust IP, data, and analytics capabilities will unlock significant customer value when coupled with OptimizeRx's DAAP technologies and its industry-leading HCP reach,” stated Michael Weintraub, Medicx’s founder and chief executive officer. “Integrating with a leading HCP-focused enterprise provides numerous efficiencies, but more importantly positions the combined companies to fulfill a greater vision of building an end-to-end communication platform that can inform and educate both patients and HCPs through a highly targeted and data rich methodology that has never before been brought together in a cohesive way.”

Strategic and Financial Benefits

• Positions in Key Growth Area: As part of OptimizeRx, Medicx technology and analytics solutions is expected to expand OptimizeRx’s addressable footprint in life science commercial digital budgets, a business area that is forecasted to grow 15% to 20% per year, and further enhance the Company’s position as a leading player in the digital pharma marketing landscape.
• Expands Landing Pads: The combined companies’ partnerships encompass most major and emerging media outlets leveraged by healthcare marketers, including advanced tv, programmatic digital display and video, social, digital radio, and digital point-of-care such as electronic health record (EHR), e-Prescribing, and telehealth platforms.
• Unlocks Value for Customers: In particular, fast-growing specialty brands looking to educate increasingly specific audiences of patients and HCPs will now be able to link the execution of HCP and consumer marketing strategies together into a truly customer-centric marketing ecosystem. We plan to initially focus the operational integration of the combined companies on the top three areas where clients are looking for long-term partners: new product launch support, increased reach to both HCPs and patients, and sustaining adherence.
• Significant Financial Benefits: Medicx is a highly profitable company that is expected to contribute meaningfully to revenue, revenue growth, EBITDA and earnings per share. The transaction is expected to be immediately accretive to earnings and on a combined basis will have a revenue run-rate approaching $100 million.

Transaction Details

OptimizeRx will acquire Medicx for $95 million in total consideration, and certain members of Medicx’s management plan to invest approximately $10.5 million of their proceeds into the Company’s common stock. The cash component of the acquisition is being funded from OptimizeRx’s existing cash and short-term investments and from the proceeds of a new $40 million credit facility provided by Blue Torch Capital. Following the transaction, OptimizeRx will have approximately $12.5 million in cash and short-term equivalents available.

RBC Capital Markets, LLC served as exclusive financial advisor to OptimizeRx with respect to the acquisition of Medicx. RBC Capital Markets, LLC served as exclusive placement agent for OptimizeRx with respect to the Blue Torch Capital financing. Blank Rome LLP acted as legal advisor to OptimizeRx for both the acquisition and the financing. Canaccord Genuity served as financial advisor and Weiss Brown provided legal counsel to Medicx.

Preliminary Unaudited Third Quarter Results

For the third quarter, the Company expects revenue between $15.2 million and $15.5 million and non-GAAP net income between $0.6 million and $1.0 million. The sequential revenue growth was primarily driven by strong organic growth in messaging driven by our recent DAAP platform enhancement.

"Insight Streams" leverages Generative Agents that synthesize millions of customer conversations into impactful business insights and transformative trends

Pathlight, the leader in Large Language Model (LLM)-based Conversation Intelligence (CI), today announced a game-changing expansion to its platform: "Insight Streams." Unveiled earlier this year, CI now processes millions of customer interactions for some of the largest enterprises in the market, underscoring Pathlight's market leadership as the pioneer in conversational intelligence. Insight Streams now provides businesses with Generative Agent technology that simulates "autonomous analysts" capable of synthesizing millions of customer conversations into impactful business insights and transformative trends.

"Every leader wishes they could talk to every customer and understand their every need. But as organizations scale, the gap between leadership and the customer just becomes wider and wider," said Alex Kvamme, CEO and co-founder, Pathlight. "Insight Streams ensures that leaders always have a clear, real-time understanding of the evolving customer landscape so that they can address issues and opportunities the moment they arise."

"We've achieved a breakthrough in LLM-based conversational intelligence," said Trey Doig, CTO and co-founder, Pathlight. "With the initial release of CI, we proved that LLMs can analyze millions of conversations with human-level accuracy. Now, with Insight Streams, we've created the next layer of AI in the stack, spinning up virtual analysts that can summarize and distill this information at the executive level. And this is only the beginning."

Benefits and Features of Insight Streams:

• Executive-Level Summaries: Distills complex data into actionable, high-level summaries, offering leaders a comprehensive yet concise view.
• Fully Expandable and Investigatable: Executives can navigate from a bird's-eye overview down to individual themes and conversations.
• Minimal Configuration Required: Discovers emerging themes and trends autonomously, without the need for predefined search parameters, with just a single sentence instruction.
• Open to Custom Instruction: Users can create specialized Insight Streams that look for specific trends, be it for retention, product issues, compliance, or conversion rate concerns. Each stream is tailored to focus on these specific aspects across all conversations, summarizing them at scale.

Insights Streams: Powered by Generative Agents

Insight Streams is built using cutting-edge Generative Agents, sophisticated AI models designed to interact, reason, and generate content based on vast amounts of data. Users initiate an Insight Stream, which deploys and instructs a Generative Agent to review every conversation for broad or specific themes. The Agent tackles conversations in batches, and upon identifying a theme, records it with an accompanying description. These identified themes are aggregated into broader categories, leading to an executive-level overview. All information is then loaded into a model, enabling executives to interact and chat directly with the synthesized insights.

Kvamme continues, "With Insight Streams, we're not just leveraging the latest in Generative AI; we're reshaping the way businesses understand customer interactions. By distilling complex customer conversations into actionable, high-level insights and trends, we're empowering businesses and their leaders to deeply understand what's happening at the frontlines between their teams and their customers. This clarity allows them to make rapid, bold decisions with total confidence."

Integration will enhance audiences across screens for advertisers

Yahoo Advertising today announced a new integration with Twilio Segment Customer Data Platform (CDP) to drive greater advertising reach and relevance without relying on third-party cookies. Twilio Segment’s direct integration with Yahoo ConnectID will enable advertisers to future-proof their business and activate first-party data across screens in a cookieless world.

Over 25,000 businesses use Twilio’s Segment customer data platform (CDP) to power their customer experiences and maximize their marketing ROI. Twilio Segment has been ranked the #1 Customer Data Platform for market share by IDC for four consecutive years, and provides a powerful solution for delivering precisely targeted advertising to privacy-conscious customers. Segment’s golden profiles give marketers a unified, real-time view of their customers, which can be used to identify behavior-based audiences, and activated across native messaging channels and every major digital ad platform. By partnering with Yahoo Advertising and integrating with Yahoo ConnectID, Segment users will be able to sync hashed, cookie-less data with their real-time customer profiles and drive greater reach and relevance for their campaigns.

Yahoo takes an integrated approach to identity across every digital environment. Yahoo Identity Solutions, which include Yahoo ConnectID and Next-Gen Solutions, account for both addressable and non-addressable inventory. Yahoo ConnectID for addressable inventory is powered by Yahoo’s consent-based, first-party and partner data, and today reaches nearly 200M authenticated users in the U.S. The solution has been adopted by over 28,000 publisher domains and is interoperable with 30+ of the industry’s top data platforms. Next-Gen Solutions is an AI-built privacy-preserving solution that leverages Yahoo ConnectID users as a panel audience and drives relevance and reach within non-addressable environments. This holistic identity suite enables advertisers to future-proof their business through the Yahoo DSP and maintain control and ROI in an identity-constrained world. With the integration, marketers will be able to leverage a single view of the customer to deliver on the promise of addressable advertising and ensure personalized consumer experiences, even as support for cookies and other traditional identity mechanisms fades.

“Data collaboration is paramount to ensuring brands are extracting value from their first-party data investment and delivering better advertising experiences to customers,” said Giovanni Gardelli, VP, Ads Data Products at Yahoo. “This integration will deliver what means most to advertisers - greater relevance, reach, and measurement. Fueled by first-party data, Yahoo ConnectID offers a differentiated and future-proofed approach to addressing a world with fewer identifiers.”

“First-party data continues to be one of the most powerful tools for brands looking to build effective marketing campaigns that make their audience feel seen and understood,” said Katrina Wong, VP of Marketing at Twilio Segment. “This integration will make it easy for marketers to leverage a real-time view of customers – built from direct, reliable, first-party data – to deliver the most relevant campaigns, and ultimately maximize their advertising return on investment.”

AdPlayer.Pro enhances reporting features and White Label Enterprise capabilities.

AdPlayer.Pro, a global provider of digital video advertising technology, has introduced notable functional upgrades to its flagship video ad server solution.

According to the company's official announcement, one of the key enhancements includes the release of reporting API 2.0, which implies the increased granularity and more precise segmentation of reported data, depending on the platform account roles.

Another essential update lies in the extension of the customization capabilities of the AdPlayer.Pro White Label Enterprise solution, offering greater flexibility, primarily in terms of the custom features configuration within Partner accounts.

As Natalie Romankina, CEO of AdPlayer.Pro, explained, the latest feature upgrade is primarily aimed at enabling the platform users to achieve maximum effectiveness in their video advertising activities using the deeper granularity of configuration options at each stage of the account, video ad campaign, and ad placement setup.

"What AdPlayer.Pro has always focused on is ensuring that all of our partners get access to the wide scope of tools for transforming and customizing their ad serving platform according to their particular business needs. And the recent revamp explicitly serves this goal, e.g. by enabling more granularity in its API-enabled capabilities," she claimed.

IAS will now bring viewability and invalid traffic measurement to Instacart Ads, reaching more than 5,500 brands leveraging Instacart Ads

Integral Ad Science, a leading global media measurement and optimization platform, today announced a partnership with Instacart, the leading grocery technology company in North America, bringing a new level of transparency to Instacart Ads. IAS's viewability and invalid traffic (IVT) measurement will be available on Instacart Ads, which partners with more than 5,500 brands.

"We are delighted to partner with IAS as a third-party measurement platform for Instacart Ads. Their powerful technology ensures that marketers invest their spend on real consumers that want to make a purchase," said Tim Castelli, Vice President of Global Advertising Sales at Instacart." Instacart Ads is a critical part of our business, with thousands of category-leading and emerging CPG brands using our platform and technology to meet consumers at the point of purchase."

Instacart's robust advertising products and solutions bring together the best of online advertising to help CPG brands of all sizes move products off shelves by providing advertisers with premium digital real estate to reach engaged customers. Instacart partners with more than 1,400 retail banners and is available to over 95% of households in North America.

"We're honored that Instacart selected IAS to be a measurement partner and today's announcement further reinforces IAS's leadership in the retail media network space," said Lisa Utzschneider, CEO, Integral Ad Science. "Instacart Ads has quickly established itself as one of the most effective retail media networks in North America. Advertisers recognize the power of the Instacart Ads platform and the impact it has on sales and they are looking to add third-party measurement for even greater transparency."

De Vet brings 20+ years of global sales experience at organizations including Acquia and Sitecore to role

Pantheon, the SaaS-based website operations (WebOps) platform for developers, designers, and marketers, today announced it has named Berrie De Vet Vice President of Sales for EMEA and APAC. De Vet is a renowned industry sales leader, with more than two decades of experience spanning roles at digital experience platform (DXP) companies including Acquia and Sitecore. He will focus on growing Pantheon’s global customer base, while empowering regional teams to connect WebOps value to organizations eager to boost team productivity and drive exponential business velocity.

De Vet is an ideal leader for Pantheon’s global sales efforts, as he brings unmatched insight and high-performance sales experience to the role. He has a deep understanding of the current DXP landscape, the pitfalls organizations experience with monolithic solutions, and the opportunities for digital teams to derive value from a combination of open source technology and Pantheon’s WebOps platform. De Vet has worked with hundreds of digital teams to build strong business cases for technology investments, while helping them navigate challenges like high operational costs, complex internal processes, and inefficient development cycles.

“The Pantheon Platform has proven to be transformative for companies around the world. It is a cost-effective, robust solution that delivers unparalleled time to market, swift scalability and business agility that translates to tangible ROI. That’s a combination digital teams can only find with Pantheon,” said De Vet. “I’m eager to lead the charge in EMEA and APAC, especially given the signals from the market. Pantheon customers overwhelmingly report they’d recommend the platform to a peer, which is evidence of a massive growth opportunity ahead of us.”

Earlier this year, Pantheon was named a Strong Performer in the 2023 Gartner Peer Insights Voice of the Customer for Web Content Management. Pantheon received 5 out of 5 stars on the overall rating scale in 50% of reviews synthesized for the document, and 93% of users who reviewed Pantheon said they are willing to recommend the platform, according to Gartner Peer Insights.

“Berrie has the experience, insight and passion that will supercharge our sales efforts in EMEA and APAC,” said Zack Rosen, Pantheon co-founder and CEO. “Our whole sales and marketing operation is about elevating the work of our customers, and anyone in the industry who knows Berrie understands his commitment to proving and delivering value; that makes him a perfect fit for Pantheon.”

Dentsu, via its DELTA solution, becomes first agency to strategically buy audiences guaranteed on VideoAmp Currency across publishers including A+E Networks, FOX, Hallmark Media, NBCUniversal, Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery

Dentsu and VideoAmp announced today an industry leading activation enabling dentsu’s US media agencies to seamlessly guarantee strategic audience buys across seven major media portfolios including A+E Networks, FOX, Hallmark Media, NBCUniversal, Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery, among others. Through dentsu’s Data Enabled Linear TV Activation (DELTA) platform, powered by VideoAmp’s leading big dataset, clients can now transact and guarantee on the same advanced audiences built within dentsu’s Merkury ecosystem that they currently plan and optimize against, with seven major publishers. This new activation is already being utilized with clients further helping advertisers to drive better outcomes and higher return on ad spend.

“As we look to the future of seamless video investment for our clients, this innovative advancement represents a positive shift in the marketplace, enabling advertisers to more effectively reach more valuable audiences in premium placements,” said Brad Stockton, SVP, Video Innovation, dentsu Media US. “This is our latest effort to drive adoption of alternative currencies as we seek to build out a unified investment approach rooted in the same source of truth through DELTA.”

DELTA leverages VideoAmp to provide advertisers with a unified solution for planning and measurement, and access to currency-grade data and insights. This results in a more effective way to optimize media spend and reach an advertiser’s target audience across premium publishers.

“The growth that we’ve been able to achieve since we first engaged with dentsu on currency in 2021 is incredible. Moving past testing to this kind of scale is a testament to the DELTA team and their commitment to providing clients with the benefits of using an advanced currency,” said Ross McCray, Founder & CEO of VideoAmp. “This is just the start and we look forward to collectively helping advertisers make their media investments work harder and smarter to achieve the business outcomes that matter most to them.”

The news builds off what has been a leading relationship between DELTA and VideoAmp as the industry moves towards more data-driven linear buys and gains more network support.

“This latest advancement between dentsu and VideoAmp marks an exciting step forward for our industry in enabling advertisers to transact against advanced audiences at scale, an approach we fully embrace at Warner Bros. Discovery,” said Marybeth Strobel, Executive Vice President, Ad Sales at Warner Bros. Discovery. “By leveraging these innovative solutions in audience-based buying, advertisers can better leverage Warner Bros. Discovery’s suite of premium IP, brands, franchises and coveted audiences and ensure the impact of their investment is more fully captured.”

This announcement is the latest from dentsu’s DELTA team as the organization seeks to lead the marketplace forward in mapping alternative currencies against advanced audiences. To showcase the benefits of moving in this direction and away from legacy solutions, VideoAmp and Paramount released case studies this past April, illustrating the power of guaranteeing on advanced audiences and the incremental lift that VideoAmp’s currency delivers in driving higher outcomes and conversions. VideoAmp has seen growing adoption and scale of its advanced currency and measurement solutions, with rapid acceleration across major broadcast and longtail networks, streaming providers and media agency holding companies including dentsu.