Mediaocean has successfully acquired Innovid, merging it with Flashtalking to establish a leading independent ad tech platform. The combined entity empowers brands, agencies, and publishers with greater control, transparency, and intelligence across CTV, digital, social, and linear channels.

Seamless Omnichannel Ad Tech – Independent ad serving, creative personalization, and measurement in one platform.
AI-Powered Optimization – Real-time data-driven insights for efficient and effective campaign performance.
Freedom from Walled Gardens – A transparent, scalable alternative to big-tech solutions.

"This is a defining moment for our industry, giving advertisers the control they deserve over their media investments," said Bill Wise, Co-Founder & CEO of Mediaocean.

Driving Innovation & Advertiser Control

Zvika Netter (CEO, Innovid) will lead the combined entity, reporting to Bill Wise and joining Mediaocean’s Board.
Grant Parker (former Flashtalking head) is now President of the new entity.

"For too long, advertisers have been constrained by restrictive tech and limited transparency. We’re changing that by offering an unbiased global platform that puts brands and agencies back in control," said Netter.

With this acquisition, Mediaocean strengthens its commitment to an open, independent, and innovation-driven advertising ecosystem.

Sprout Social has unveiled Sprout Social Influencer Marketing, a rebranded and AI-powered platform formerly known as Tagger Media. With nearly half of all consumers making purchases based on influencer posts, this solution helps brands identify, activate, and manage influencers more effectively—driving authentic engagement and stronger ROI.

Benefits:
AI-Powered Insights – Discover the right influencers and optimize campaign performance.
Centralized Campaign Management – Streamlined workflows for efficiency and impact.
Data-Driven Decision Making – Advanced analytics to maximize ROI.

"With influencer marketing projected to be a $199B industry by 2032, brands must prioritize authentic, relationship-driven campaigns," said Scott Morris, CMO of Sprout Social.

A Forrester study found that brands using Sprout Social Influencer Marketing saved 25% of time on influencer discovery and management. Kroger Co.’s Social Media Manager, Ryan Wenstrup-Moore, emphasized its impact in finding value-aligned creators to drive authentic content.

Looking ahead to 2025, Sprout Social will roll out new AI-powered features, making influencer discovery, vetting, and partnerships even more seamless.

Upland Software, Inc. , a leader in AI-enabled cloud software for digital transformation, has announced a major upgrade to Upland Adestra. The latest enhancement, Audiences, revolutionizes data-driven analytics for email marketers and data analysts, enabling them to build deeper intelligence and optimize campaign performance.

Shawna Weaver, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Audience Engagement solutions at Upland Software, emphasized the importance of empowering marketers with actionable insights. With Adestra’s Audiences, users can unlock new opportunities within customer data, streamline processes, and drive revenue growth.

Features of Adestra’s Audiences

1. Identify Key Segments

• Utilize drag-and-drop charts, tables, and Venn diagrams to define and target high-value audience segments.
• Design tailored campaigns that drive engagement and conversion.

2. Uncover Critical Buying Patterns

• Analyze customer interactions to identify key behaviors and retention drivers.
• Develop a strategic view of audience engagement to boost customer loyalty.

3. Explore Actionable Insights

• Move beyond predefined workflows to ask dynamic, data-driven questions.
• Leverage insights for hyper-personalized campaigns and predictive trend analysis.

4. Maximize ROI

• Optimize resource allocation and campaign spending using derived data.
• Stand out in crowded inboxes with precision-targeted messaging.

Industry Endorsement & Impact

Sidney Ushurhe, Email Specialist at more2, praised Audiences for its transformative capabilities, noting how it consolidates multiple data sources into one unified view. The ability to target customer segments with overlapping Venn diagrams makes email marketing more efficient and precise.

With enhanced data-driven capabilities, Adestra’s Audiences provides marketers with advanced tools for audience segmentation, visualization, and high-performance campaign execution. These innovations elevate marketing efficiency, enhance collaboration, and drive higher sales conversions.

Resonate, a leader in predictive consumer intelligence, has released its Spring 2025 Outlook Consumer Trends Report, uncovering major shifts in American consumer behavior. As financial stability improves, more Americans are becoming debt-free, reshaping spending priorities and lifestyle choices.

According to Bryan Gernert, CEO of Resonate, these insights provide businesses with critical intelligence to optimize marketing strategies and adapt to evolving consumer sentiment.

Consumer Trends for 2025

1. Improved Financial Health

• Consumer debt levels have declined for the first time since November 2023.
• More Americans report being financially stable, leading to increased confidence in spending.

2. Shifting Spending Priorities

• With greater disposable income, consumers are prioritizing home improvements and major purchases.
• Brands catering to home and lifestyle upgrades are set to benefit.

3. Rise of the Staycation Trend

• 40% of Americans plan to stay closer to home this summer.
• Home-based leisure and local experiences are gaining popularity.

4. Lingering Economic Concerns

• Despite personal financial improvements, worries about healthcare costs, government leadership, and corruption persist.
• A record 42.5% of Americans believe the economy may never fully recover to pre-pandemic levels.

Implications for Brands & Retailers

• Businesses must align their marketing strategies with evolving consumer behaviors.
• Understanding financial trends and sentiment shifts is crucial for driving engagement and sales.
• Marketers should emphasize value-driven messaging and home-focused experiences to connect with changing consumer priorities.

SurveySparrow, a leading experience management platform trusted by global brands like Siemens and Toyota, has announced major expansions in its global infrastructure and product capabilities. This milestone strengthens its mission to revolutionize customer feedback collection and analysis.

With new data centers in Australia and Canada, SurveySparrow enhances data sovereignty, security, and regulatory compliance, ensuring better performance and reduced latency for regional customers.

Enhancements in SurveySparrow’s Global Expansion

1. New Data Centers for Enhanced Performance

• Launched in Sydney and Canada to ensure data residency and regulatory compliance.
• Expands existing network in Virginia, Mumbai, Dubai, Frankfurt, and London.
• Provides high availability, low-latency performance, and enterprise-grade security.

2. New Feedback Collection Channels

SpotChecks for Targeted Micro-Surveys

• Enables in-app micro-surveys to capture insights in real time.
• Helps collect product feedback, website experience data, and app-based responses.

WhatsApp Chatbot for Conversational Feedback

• Enables direct feedback collection via WhatsApp conversations.
• Supports post-purchase reviews, service experience feedback, quick polls, and follow-ups.

3. AI Copilot for Advanced Feedback Analysis (Coming Soon)

• AI-powered assistant for real-time sentiment analysis.
• Provides insights, trend predictions, and actionable recommendations.

4. Future Expansion into Market Research

• Plans to introduce conjoint and MaxDiff analyses for advanced market research.
• Aims to enhance research-driven decision-making for businesses.

Industry Impact & Future Roadmap

According to Balaji CM, CTO at SurveySparrow, the latest expansions reinforce the company’s commitment to enterprise-grade performance, security, and compliance. Meanwhile, Rishul Raj Aggarwal, Business Head, highlights how these advancements empower businesses to turn customer insights into actionable improvements effortlessly.

Looking ahead, SurveySparrow is set to redefine market research and experience management, further strengthening its role as a comprehensive customer intelligence platform.

HIVE Strategy, a Diamond HubSpot Solutions Partner and leading digital marketing agency, has launched MarketingGrader.AI, a groundbreaking AI-driven tool designed to analyze and optimize marketing efforts.

In today’s competitive landscape, businesses need more than just data—they need actionable insights to refine strategies and maximize ROI. MarketingGrader.AI empowers companies with AI-driven analysis, offering tailored recommendations for SEO, content, social media, and user experience.

Features of MarketingGrader.AI

1. AI-Driven Insights for Smarter Decisions

• Uses advanced AI tools, bots, and agents to analyze a company’s digital presence.
• Delivers customized recommendations based on unique marketing needs.

2. Comprehensive Marketing Performance Reports

• Assesses website analytics, SEO, content strategy, UX, competitors, and brand sentiment.
• Provides insights based on 500+ data points for a detailed marketing review.

3. Actionable, Data-Backed Recommendations

• Identifies strengths and areas for improvement in marketing strategies.
• Offers strategic guidance to boost engagement, optimize resources, and increase ROI.

Why MarketingGrader.AI Matters

HIVE Strategy has always prioritized a human-centric marketing approach, ensuring businesses can connect authentically with their audience. MarketingGrader.AI is built with this philosophy in mind, enabling brands to:

• Understand their marketing effectiveness with real-time insights.
• Optimize strategies based on AI-driven data.
• Make smarter decisions that align with business goals.

According to Dustin Brackett, CEO of HIVE Strategy,
"Marketing is about educating people. Without understanding where we succeed or fail, we can't effectively reach our audience. MarketingGrader.AI provides businesses with trusted data to take control of their marketing efforts and drive better results."

Permission.io, a pioneer in Web3 advertising technology, is partnering with impact.com, the world’s leading partnership management platform, to revolutionize affiliate marketing with crypto-powered rewards. Through this collaboration, brands can enhance consumer trust and engagement by rewarding users with ASK tokens—a privacy-first incentive model that aligns with GDPR and CCPA compliance.

With over 350,000 users and $45 million in rewards distributed, Permission.io is transforming traditional marketing into an interactive, value-driven experience.

Benefits of the Partnership

1. Enhanced Engagement for Advertisers

• Advertisers can integrate Web3 rewards into their campaigns via impact.com’s 1,000+ technology partners.
• Transforms passive impressions into active user participation, increasing conversions.

2. Consumer-Centric Rewards Model

• Consumers earn ASK tokens for engaging with affiliate content.
• Incentives create a direct stake in the brands they love, fostering long-term loyalty.

3. Real-Time Insights for Brands

• Access real-time engagement data to optimize marketing efforts.
• Strengthen trust-driven relationships with audiences through transparent incentives.

Why This Matters for Marketers

The digital marketing landscape is evolving, and Permission.io’s Web3-powered incentives offer:

• Higher Engagement & Conversions: Crypto rewards drive greater user interaction and advocacy.
• Sustainable Brand Loyalty: Consumers opt in for meaningful, long-term brand relationships.
• Future-Proof Privacy Compliance: Opt-in model ensures alignment with global data regulations.

Industry Impact

"This collaboration unlocks new opportunities for brands to seamlessly integrate Web3-powered incentives into their marketing strategies,” said Charlie Silver, CEO of Permission.io. “By bridging Web2 and Web3, we’re not just redefining affiliate marketing—we’re creating real, measurable value for brands and consumers alike.”

As marketing shifts towards consumer empowerment, this signals the next evolution of affiliate marketing, where brands, advertisers, and consumers all benefit from a fair, transparent, and value-driven economy.

TwelveLabs, a leader in video AI, has announced the release of Pegasus 1.2, a cutting-edge multimodal foundation model that sets new industry standards in long-video understanding. Capable of processing videos up to one hour long with best-in-class accuracy, low latency, and cost efficiency, Pegasus 1.2 is designed for production-grade video processing pipelines that demand precision and scalability.

Breakthrough Capabilities of Pegasus 1.2

1. Unmatched Long-Video Understanding

• Processes videos up to 60 minutes long while maintaining high accuracy.
• Reduces computational costs with intelligent embeddings storage that caches videos for faster, low-cost repeated queries.

2. Advanced AI for Text Generation

• Converts video content into summaries, highlights, titles, and detailed reports with AI-powered language generation.
• Leverages both visual and audio analysis for deeper contextual understanding.

3. Optimized Computational Efficiency

• Uses advanced vision encoding and token reduction methods to balance computational efficiency and precision.
• Seamlessly scales from short video clips to full-length video analysis, making it ideal for real-world business applications.

Industry Impact: Elevating Video Intelligence

"Video understanding represents one of the most complex challenges in artificial intelligence," said Aiden Lee, CTO of TwelveLabs. "Pegasus 1.2 introduces a novel approach to spatio-temporal comprehension, addressing fundamental limitations in existing video language models."

By integrating with TwelveLabs' Marengo model, Pegasus 1.2 delivers human-like video intelligence, transforming how businesses extract insights from video content.

Why Pegasus 1.2 Matters for Businesses

Efficient Content Analysis – Automates video summarization and reporting for media, marketing, and research.
Scalable Performance – Adapts seamlessly to varying video lengths and complexities.
Cost-Effective AI Processing – Optimized architecture challenges the need for massive computational resources.

Pegasus 1.2 represents a milestone in multimodal AI, proving that superior performance can be achieved without exponentially increasing model sizes.