Visa has appointed Meble Tin as its new Head of Marketing for Oceania, overseeing Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands, effective 2 September 2025. Tin will be based in Sydney and joins from Airbnb, where she led Asia-Pacific marketing, following senior global brand roles at Apple.

Global Brand Expertise, Local Market Insight

Tin’s track record spans global brand development and regional adaptation, including leading Apple’s award-winning Today at Apple program across 500+ retail locations worldwide and steering Airbnb’s marketing strategy for diverse Asia-Pacific audiences.

At Visa, she will direct brand, client, and consumer engagement strategies while scaling marketing services for partners in banking, fintech, and merchant sectors. The role comes amid a shifting payments landscape and Visa’s push to deepen regional partnerships.

Strategic Marketing Services Push

Visa is investing heavily in data-driven marketing services for clients, aiming to help businesses grow through its data resources, creative capabilities, and marketing platforms. Tin’s experience translating complex technology into compelling narratives will be key to these efforts.

Alan Machet, Visa’s Group Country Manager for Oceania, called the hire “pivotal,” while Danielle Jin, Visa’s APAC Marketing Head, praised Tin’s instinct for connecting innovation with customer relevance.

Author - ITBrief  New Zealand

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In healthcare, every missed appointment isn’t just a lost slot—it’s lost revenue. Marchex (NASDAQ: MCHX) thinks it has the fix. The conversational intelligence company has launched a new AI-powered healthcare solution aimed at health systems, ambulatory care groups, and healthcare marketers that want to track patient leads more precisely, prioritize high-value appointments, and catch engagement issues before they become revenue problems.

Beyond Call Transcripts

Most healthcare contact centers can tell you how many calls they answered. Marchex wants to tell you why a patient did—or didn’t—book. Its Healthcare AI Solution ingests unstructured call data, applies healthcare-specific AI models, and spits out structured insights like:

• Conversion & fallout rates across the patient journey

• Reasons patients hesitate—insurance issues, pricing, appointment availability

• Which marketing channels bring in the most valuable patients

• Campaign tweaks to reduce cost per lead and improve bidding

The goal: replace generic AI summaries with context-rich intelligence that’s actually useful to operations, marketing, and patient experience teams.

Tuned for Marketing ROI

Healthcare marketing spend isn’t small, and attribution is notoriously messy. Marchex’s platform integrates advanced marketing attribution models so organizations can see which campaigns drive not just calls—but appointments with the highest potential revenue impact. That data can then feed back into ad spend optimization, lead scoring, and patient targeting.

Edwin Miller, Marchex CEO, puts it bluntly: “We empower leaders to respond proactively at scale… to improve patient satisfaction and accelerate growth.”

The Competitive Context

The move taps into a fast-growing niche: AI-powered conversation analytics for healthcare, where rivals like Invoca and CallRail have been making moves, but often with broader, less industry-specific tooling. By going deep into healthcare’s quirks—insurance checks, HIPAA constraints, complex scheduling—Marchex is betting that verticalized AI beats general-purpose solutions.

Given the industry’s pressure to do more with less staff, tools that connect marketing dollars directly to booked (and kept) appointments could quickly shift from nice-to-have to non-negotiable.

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Plenty of agencies talk about “embracing AI.” Online Advantages is putting its pivot on display for everyone to see. The SEO and internet marketing firm has launched a 60-day public case study—From SEO to AIO: The Roadmap to Reinvention—to document its transformation into a fully AI-powered, automation-driven marketing company.

The 10-part blog and press release series will walk through each stage of the shift, covering AI Overviews (AIO) optimization, semantic search strategies, and automation-first client services. In other words, the company isn’t just swapping a few tools—it’s rebuilding its entire business model for 2025’s search and content ecosystem.

From Ranking Pages to Optimizing for AI

Founder Matt Maglodi says the change reflects how search is evolving. “This isn’t just a rebrand—it’s a complete rebuild of our agency model to match the way search, content, and marketing automation work in 2025,” he explains.

Part of the overhaul includes a brand-new website—OnlineAdvantages.digital—designed to showcase updated services, transparent pricing, and measurable results tailored for the AI-driven marketing landscape.

With Google’s AI Overviews reshaping SERP visibility and semantic search making keyword stuffing obsolete, agencies are under pressure to adapt—or risk irrelevance. By going public with its transformation, Online Advantages is positioning itself as a case study in agency survival tactics for the AI era.

The move also plays into a growing trend: marketing firms leveraging transparency not just as a trust signal, but as a content strategy in its own right.

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If you’ve ever wished your static images could spring to life without wrestling with complicated AI prompts, GPT Proto just made that a reality. The AI model integration platform has announced a strategic integration with Higgsfield AI, a fast-rising name in AI video generation recently courted by Meta.

This move brings Higgsfield’s image-to-video tech—already making waves for its cinematic preset templates and professional-grade effects—directly into GPT Proto’s unified AI platform. For content creators, marketers, and developers, it’s essentially giving you Meta-grade AI capabilities without Meta’s budget requirements.

What’s New

GPT Proto users can now tap into over 70 preset templates to turn single images into dynamic videos—no cinematography degree required. The Higgsfield library covers everything from sleek advertising workflows to blockbuster-style visual effects like vehicle explosions, building breakdowns, and cinematic transitions.

Unlike other platforms where AI video requires complex prompt engineering, Higgsfield’s preset-first approach delivers predictable, high-quality outputs with minimal learning curve. That puts it in direct competition with the likes of Runway, Luma, and Keling—but with a focus on accessibility and speed.

Three Models, Three Budgets

GPT Proto is offering Higgsfield in three performance tiers:

• Higgsfield Standard ($0.5405 per time) – Highest fidelity, full template access, built for commercial advertising and professional production.

• Higgsfield Lite ($0.2703 per time) – Budget-friendly and optimized for mobile or edge computing with respectable output quality.

• Higgsfield Turbo ($0.3784 per generation) – Ultra-fast rendering with a balance of speed and quality, ideal for rapid iteration.

Why This Matters

The AI video generation market is heating up, with use cases exploding across social media, e-commerce, advertising, education, and entertainment. Higgsfield’s tech has already drawn acquisition interest from Meta—an endorsement that carries weight in an increasingly crowded field.

By integrating this tech into GPT Proto, users gain:

• Lower costs than direct API access

• Faster speeds thanks to GPT Proto’s infrastructure

• Enterprise-grade stability with reduced downtime

• Hands-on technical support—a rarity in the AI API market

Target Users

This integration hits multiple sweet spots:

• Influencers & Content Creators – Spin Instagram-worthy videos from static posts in minutes.

• Marketing Agencies – Build polished ad campaigns without full production crews.

• E-Commerce Brands – Generate dynamic product showcases straight from catalog images.

• Educators – Turn diagrams into animated explainers.

• Indie Filmmakers & Game Devs – Prototype visual effects without studio budgets.

Market Context

AI video platforms like Runway and Pika Labs have dominated early headlines, but their steep learning curves and unpredictable output often frustrate non-technical users. Higgsfield’s preset workflow sidesteps that, while GPT Proto’s infrastructure cuts cost and latency.

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Imparta isn’t just adding another AI platform to the corporate tech pile—it’s doubling down on the idea that AI should actually remember you. The UK-based sales enablement company has launched a fully agentic version of its award-winning i-Coach® AI system, designed to deliver personalized, proactive coaching at enterprise scale.

The upgrade aims to make every seller a top performer by combining human-like memory, proactive outreach, and an arsenal of 20+ specialized AI agents. Think of it as the difference between a polite waiter taking your order and a personal chef who knows you’re allergic to peanuts, remembers your favorite dish from last month, and has already started cooking it before you arrive.

From Reactive to Proactive AI

When Imparta introduced AI-powered coaching in 2023, it was already ahead of the curve. The new agentic i-Coach takes a bolder leap: it doesn’t just respond—it anticipates.

i-Coach AI remembers your role, goals, strengths, and past discussions. It tracks patterns, delivers methodology-aware roleplays, and sends follow-up prompts to keep sellers accountable. This isn’t the kind of chatbot that answers when you ask—it’s the kind that calls you to make sure you’re hitting targets.

20+ AI Agents, One Unified Platform

Under the hood, i-Coach AI runs on a hefty library of 1.5 million words of best-practice content across sales, service, and management. It powers over 20 AI agents with specialties ranging from call analysis and conversation intelligence to deal planning and creative problem-solving.

Where many AI tools risk becoming “islands” in the tech stack, Imparta designed i-Coach to integrate deeply into enterprise ecosystems. It connects to company data, orchestrates multiple vendor agents, and works with text, voice, and even video avatars. For companies already running AI tools, it can slot in as “headless agents” inside the existing environment.

Fixing the Analysis–Learning Gap

CEO Richard Barkey points out that many platforms can analyze conversations or offer training modules—but rarely both in a connected way. “They re-form the connection between analysis and learning that so many platforms break,” he says. The result is an adaptive coaching loop that doesn’t just evaluate performance but actively develops it.

Avoiding AI Silo Fatigue

Megan Andrew, Head of Platform and AI, says enterprise clients have been vocal about avoiding AI overload. “They already have too many ‘islands of AI’ leading to siloed data and poor UX,” she explains. i-Coach aims to unify those experiences, whether as a standalone platform or a behind-the-scenes orchestrator.

The Rollout Plan

To showcase the upgrade, Imparta is hosting live webinars and interactive demos starting August 28 and September 9. Attendees will get a closer look at:

• How agentic AI differs from traditional models

• The 20 AI agents your sales team actually needs

• The 5 types of human agents who make AI stick

• Key data integrations to maximize performance

• How to avoid AI silos for a unified user experience

Market Context

This launch lands in a crowded yet fragmented AI sales-enablement market, where tools like Gong, Chorus, and Outreach have made their mark. Imparta’s pitch? Skip the siloed analytics dashboards and invest in AI that learns, adapts, and actively coaches—without becoming another standalone system managers have to babysit.

If i-Coach delivers as promised, it could redefine how enterprise sales teams interact with AI—less as a reactive assistant, more as a proactive performance partner.

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Creating a believable AI avatar used to be a chore—think hours of video recording, tedious data uploads, and complex training processes. Pollo AI, an all-in-one AI video and image creation platform, says that era is officially over with the launch of its next-generation AI avatar generator.

Now, users can transform any image into a custom, speaking AI avatar in minutes. No pre-training. No pre-recorded footage. Just upload an image, add your script or audio, and the platform handles the rest—producing avatars that talk, gesture, and emote with uncanny realism.

“The need for pre-recorded videos or pre-training data is a thing of the past,” said Janet Smith, Pollo AI’s team leader. “We’re now in a new era of instant, effortless avatar creation.”

Longer Videos, More Realism

While many avatar tools top out at 30-second clips, Pollo AI pushes the limit with videos up to two minutes—complete with near-perfect lip sync, expressive facial movement, and even realistic hand gestures.

That opens the door to richer storytelling, whether it’s AI-powered explainer videos, product promotions, educational content, or even quirky formats like “AI baby podcasts” and talking pet videos.

Versatility for Creators and Brands

Pollo AI lets users choose from a library of pre-made avatars or craft entirely custom ones. Voiceovers can be generated with the platform’s natural-sounding AI or uploaded directly by the user. The tool also supports fine-tuning of speech pacing, emotion, and performance style—making it as suitable for polished brand campaigns as it is for creative social media projects.

The result is faster, more cost-efficient production without high-end video equipment or professional actors—potentially cutting production time from days to minutes.

Smith sums it up simply: “Just upload your image, input your script or audio, and you can start sharing realistic and relatable AI avatar videos that connect with audiences and maximize ROI.”

Millburn-based New Frontier celebrates its 200th free small business website launch in partnership with NJEDA, helping New Jersey storefronts grow online through the StoreFront Project.

Marketing agency New Frontier has hit a major milestone, celebrating the launch of its 200th New Jersey small business website through the StoreFront Project, a collaboration with the New Jersey Economic Development Authority (NJEDA). The program provides free websites, e-commerce tools, and digital marketing support to qualifying storefront businesses.

To mark the achievement, New Frontier handed out 200 ice creams at Cranford’s Vanilla Bean Creamery during National Night Out, inviting local community members, business owners, and program participants to join in.

“What began as a local initiative has flourished to produce a statewide impact,” said David Sorkin, President of New Frontier. “Partnering with the NJEDA allows us to scale our mission—helping small businesses thrive online by launching over 200 websites in less than two years.”

One of those businesses, Tiffany Pinero Style Company, credited the program with boosting sales:

“They did our website for free with a state grant, and it’s a perfect representation of our store. Our sales went up immediately,” said Tiffany Pinero.

About the StoreFront Project

The NJEDA Small Business E-Commerce Support program—delivered through New Frontier—aims to help brick-and-mortar businesses compete in a digital-first economy by offering:

• Custom website development at no cost

• E-commerce integration to drive online sales

• Digital marketing support to boost visibility and engagement

Eligibility: Open to New Jersey storefront businesses meeting NJEDA program requirements.

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Sprout Social, a leading provider of cloud-based social media management software, has expanded its partnership with Salesforce—becoming the first social platform to integrate with Salesforce Digital Engagement through the Bring Your Own Channel (BYOC) architecture.

The integration will route Instagram, LinkedIn, X, Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp conversations directly into Salesforce Service Cloud, alongside existing digital and voice channels, enabling customer service teams to resolve issues faster and deliver personalized responses without switching platforms.

With 73% of consumers willing to switch brands if social replies are delayed, Sprout and Salesforce are betting that tighter service-channel integration will be key to retaining customers in 2025.

“Social media is central to customer care, and brands need more unified solutions,” said Scott Morris, CMO at Sprout Social. “This collaboration will allow businesses to drive company-wide impact by embedding Social Intelligence into their primary engagement platform.”

Salesforce echoed the value of the integration:

“Sprout Social enables businesses to unify social and customer data for more personalized service—helping them build stronger, trusted brands,” said Kishan Chetan, EVP & GM of Service Cloud.

Key Benefits of the Integration

• AI-powered workflows: Leverage Salesforce’s Agentforce AI, reporting, and automation to act on social insights in real time.

• Unified workspace: Manage social messages alongside email, chat, and voice without new tools or training.

• 360° customer view: Merge social interactions with CRM data for richer context and faster resolution.

• Cross-team value: Give marketing, sales, and product teams direct access to real customer feedback and trends.

Sprout Social plans to showcase the integration at Dreamforce 2025 (Oct. 14–16), where it will announce general availability details.

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