B2B technology companies are increasingly competing not just for media coverage, but for ownership of the industry categories in which buyers make purchasing decisions. 10Fold has been named a finalist in the 2026 PRNEWS Platinum Awards for Campaign of the Year – B2B for its work with supply chain technology company Cleo, highlighting how targeted media relations, executive thought leadership and measurement can be combined to build category authority.

10Fold, a B2B technology communications and content agency, has been selected as a finalist for Campaign of the Year – B2B in the 2026 PRNEWS Platinum Awards for its Cleo Supply Chain Orchestration Media & Thought Leadership Campaign.

The campaign was built around a positioning challenge familiar to many enterprise technology companies: moving beyond being recognized as a software vendor and establishing a stronger role in a strategic business conversation.

For Cleo, that conversation centered on supply chain orchestration, a category that has gained importance as manufacturers, distributors and logistics organizations deal with increasingly fragmented global supply networks, multiple trading partners and more demanding requirements for real-time data exchange.

Rather than relying on broad technology coverage, 10Fold and Cleo targeted publications and audiences relevant to supply chain IT professionals, senior logistics executives and C-suite decision-makers. The program combined media relations with executive thought leadership, original research and digital amplification.

That approach reflects a broader change in B2B technology communications. Media coverage remains important, but enterprise software companies increasingly need a consistent body of evidence demonstrating expertise across multiple channels. Articles, executive commentary, research, podcasts and social content can collectively reinforce a company's position in a market rather than functioning as isolated PR placements.

For Cleo, the campaign aimed to make supply chain orchestration a more recognizable part of the company's market identity. The teams developed a steady stream of stories explaining the category, demonstrating demand and communicating the business consequences of better orchestration.

Cleo executives and subject matter experts also appeared across earned media, LinkedIn, podcasts and industry discussions. That helped extend the campaign beyond traditional public relations and into executive visibility and thought leadership.

The results reported by the companies point to the value of a sustained category-building strategy. Cleo achieved a 30.86% share of voice in 2025, exceeding its 25% campaign target, and secured 175 articles, including 70 articles that incorporated the company's supply chain orchestration message.

The campaign continued into 2026, with Cleo reportedly meeting or exceeding its 24% monthly share-of-topic target.

Those metrics are particularly relevant in B2B technology marketing because raw media volume does not necessarily translate into market influence. A company can receive hundreds of mentions while remaining poorly associated with the category it wants to own.

The distinction between share of voice and share of topic is therefore significant. Share of voice measures a brand's presence relative to competitors, while share of topic focuses more directly on whether the desired subject or category is appearing in coverage associated with the brand.

That type of measurement is becoming increasingly important as communications teams try to demonstrate business value. 10Fold cites its MetricsMatter platform as part of the program, giving Cleo visibility into campaign performance and helping the teams adjust the strategy based on data.

The trend extends beyond public relations. Modern B2B marketing programs are increasingly expected to connect earned media with search visibility, social distribution, executive branding and demand generation. A successful thought leadership campaign can influence how prospects encounter a company across Google, industry publications, social networks and increasingly AI-powered discovery systems.

That creates a strategic opportunity for technology brands operating in complex markets such as supply chain management. Buyers rarely make enterprise software decisions after reading a single article. Instead, they may encounter the company through an analyst report, an executive interview, a LinkedIn post, a podcast, a customer case study and a product page before entering a sales conversation.

Consistent positioning across those touchpoints can therefore become a competitive asset.

Cleo's campaign also illustrates why category creation is becoming a larger part of B2B communications strategy. Supply chain technology encompasses integration, visibility, data exchange, automation, analytics and orchestration, making the terminology used to describe the market particularly important.

Companies that help define those terms can influence how buyers frame their own problems—and, consequently, which vendors they consider.

The PRNEWS recognition comes as B2B technology marketers face a crowded media environment and growing pressure to demonstrate measurable impact from communications investments. In that context, the Cleo campaign offers an example of PR being used not simply to generate coverage, but to reinforce market positioning over an extended period.

The larger question is whether that media visibility ultimately contributes to commercial outcomes such as brand consideration, qualified demand and pipeline. Share-of-voice and share-of-topic metrics can demonstrate increased presence, but they remain intermediate indicators rather than direct measures of revenue.

For enterprise technology companies, the most mature communications strategies will likely connect those upper-funnel indicators with website engagement, branded search, account engagement and sales outcomes.

Market Landscape

B2B technology communications is moving toward integrated category marketing, where public relations, thought leadership, content, SEO and demand generation operate as interconnected functions.

Enterprise technology companies such as Salesforce, Microsoft, SAP and Oracle have spent years building extensive thought leadership and ecosystem programs around strategic categories. Smaller and mid-market vendors increasingly face the challenge of achieving similar authority with more focused campaigns.

Cleo's supply chain orchestration positioning sits within a market that includes supply chain management, integration platforms, logistics technology and enterprise automation. Competitors such as MuleSoft, Boomi, SPS Commerce and E2open operate across overlapping parts of that ecosystem, making category clarity important for differentiation.

In that environment, communications agencies are increasingly expected to provide measurement alongside media relationships. The competitive advantage comes not simply from generating placements, but from determining whether those placements are reinforcing the message a brand needs buyers to remember.

Strategic Outlook

B2B thought leadership is likely to become more measurable and more closely integrated with the wider MarTech stack.

As generative AI changes how buyers discover and summarize information, consistent third-party references may become increasingly valuable for enterprise technology brands. A category narrative repeated across credible publications, executive interviews, research reports and industry discussions creates a broader information footprint than a single press release can provide.

For communications teams, that means the future of PR may involve optimizing for authority, topic association and discoverability, in addition to traditional media volume.

The Cleo campaign demonstrates the potential of that model, but its longer-term value will ultimately be judged by whether stronger category recognition translates into sustained buyer engagement and commercial growth.

Top Insights

• 10Fold's Cleo campaign demonstrates how B2B PR can move beyond media volume by consistently associating a technology brand with a strategically important market category.
• Cleo reported 30.86% share of voice in 2025, exceeding its 25% target while securing 175 articles across the campaign's core media strategy.
• The campaign combined earned media, executive thought leadership, original research and digital amplification to reach technical and executive supply chain audiences.
• Share-of-topic measurement is increasingly important for B2B technology brands seeking evidence that communications are strengthening category positioning rather than simply generating coverage.
• As AI changes information discovery, consistent third-party coverage and authoritative thought leadership could become increasingly important components of enterprise brand visibility.

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Enterprise marketers are moving from using generative AI to draft isolated assets toward deploying agents that can coordinate entire workflows. WRITER says that shift has been recognized in the first Gartner Emerging Market Quadrant for AI Agents for Marketing — Startup Vendors, where the enterprise AI platform was named a Market Shaper. The recognition comes as marketing organizations look for ways to move agentic AI from experiments into governed, repeatable production workflows.

WRITER has been named a Market Shaper in Gartner's first Emerging Market Quadrant for AI Agents for Marketing — Startup Vendors, a research category published July 7, 2026. Gartner describes vendors in this emerging market as providers of low- to no-code AI agents and workflow builders aimed at nontechnical users, offering agility and specialized capabilities while carrying a higher risk profile than established enterprise platforms.

The recognition places WRITER in a market that is being formed in real time. Rather than treating AI as another productivity feature, these platforms are attempting to give marketing teams software agents that can execute multi-step processes, use organizational knowledge and interact with the systems where work already happens.

That distinction matters. Early generative AI adoption in marketing largely centered on content drafting, brainstorming, summarization and individual productivity. The next phase is more operational: agents are expected to complete sequences of tasks, apply business rules and deliver outcomes with less human intervention.

Gartner's broader 2026 research underscores the direction of travel. The research firm says 42% of enterprises expect to deploy AI agents in 2026, compared with 17% reporting deployment in 2025.

For marketing leaders, the challenge is not simply deploying an AI model. Enterprise workflows depend on brand standards, regulatory requirements, proprietary data, access permissions and auditability. An agent that produces a campaign faster but cannot reliably follow those constraints has limited value at scale.

WRITER is positioning its platform around that problem. The company combines its Palmyra family of large language models with WRITER Agent, a system designed to orchestrate workflows through reusable capabilities known as Skills and Playbooks. WRITER's documentation describes Skills as packaged expertise for specialized tasks, while Playbooks coordinate multi-step workflows.

That architecture is becoming an important pattern across enterprise agent platforms. Instead of asking a general-purpose chatbot to solve every problem from scratch, companies can encode institutional knowledge into repeatable components and connect them to business systems.

WRITER introduced its Skills and Playbooks capabilities in March 2026, allowing business teams to describe specialized workflows in natural language and turn them into reusable agent capabilities without requiring traditional software development.

The platform's latest expansion includes Palmyra X6 and upgrades to WRITER Agent, according to the company. WRITER says those improvements are aimed at making complex, multi-step marketing and revenue workflows more reliable and cost-efficient.

The strategic shift is significant because marketing organizations are increasingly trying to automate work that sits between content creation and revenue operations. Examples include campaign orchestration, account personalization, research, content adaptation, customer communications and high-volume relationship workflows.

WRITER also offers connectors for enterprise systems including Microsoft 365, Salesforce, Snowflake, Adobe and Google Workspace, according to the company's announcement. Those integrations matter because enterprise AI agents are only useful at scale when they can securely access the information and applications where employees already work.

This is one of the major competitive battles emerging across the AI marketing market. Salesforce is embedding agentic capabilities into its CRM ecosystem through Agentforce, Microsoft has Copilot and broader agent tooling, while Adobe is integrating AI into its marketing and customer-experience stack. These large vendors have an advantage in installed enterprise relationships and access to proprietary business data.

Startup vendors such as WRITER are competing differently. Their opportunity is to specialize around agentic workflows and give marketing and revenue organizations a layer that can operate across existing systems rather than requiring customers to rebuild their stack around one software ecosystem.

That specialization also creates a potential weakness. Gartner explicitly notes that startup vendors in this emerging market carry a higher risk premium, reflecting the earlier stage of the category and the uncertainty surrounding long-term vendor viability, scale and differentiation.

For enterprise buyers, governance therefore becomes as important as capability. WRITER says its platform includes granular permissions, audit trails and compliance guardrails. Its brand tooling is designed to enforce voice, terminology and style requirements across AI-generated work.

Those controls address a practical concern that has become harder to ignore: marketing teams cannot simply let autonomous systems operate without supervision when campaigns involve regulated claims, confidential data or highly visible brand communications.

WRITER's approach also reflects a broader change in how companies think about AI adoption. The unit of automation is moving from the individual task to the business process. In WRITER's own terminology, Skills define how a specialized capability is performed, while Playbooks define the broader workflow.

That model could become increasingly important as organizations attempt to standardize AI usage across departments. A successful agent strategy requires more than access to a powerful model; it needs reusable knowledge, clear permissions, reliable integrations and measurable outcomes.

For marketing teams, the potential upside is substantial. An agent could research a target audience, pull information from CRM systems, create campaign components, apply brand rules, route work for approval and update downstream systems without requiring an employee to manually coordinate every step.

But the technology also changes the nature of marketing operations. Teams will need to decide which decisions should remain human, which can be automated and which require approval thresholds. That makes agent governance a business process issue, not simply an IT concern.

WRITER's Gartner recognition is therefore notable less as a ranking of one company's technology than as another sign that AI agents for marketing are becoming a distinct enterprise software category.

The next question for vendors will be whether their agents can move beyond impressive demonstrations into dependable production environments where quality, compliance, cost and business impact can be measured continuously.

Market Landscape

The AI agents for marketing market is developing between two competing forces.

On one side are enterprise software giants such as Salesforce, Microsoft and Adobe, which can use existing CRM, productivity and marketing infrastructure to distribute AI agents quickly. Their advantage is deep integration, established procurement relationships and access to business data.

On the other side are startup vendors building agent-native platforms around specific business functions. Gartner's July 2026 research says these startups can provide rapid agility and specialized innovation beyond what established vendors offer, although buyers must account for the associated risk premium.

WRITER is positioning itself in the second group with a marketing- and revenue-specific approach. Its emphasis on Skills, Playbooks, brand controls, connectors and governance suggests a strategy built around operationalizing enterprise knowledge rather than simply adding a chatbot interface.

The category is likely to remain fluid. As large software providers add agent builders and startups expand into broader enterprise workflows, differentiation will increasingly depend on execution reliability, data access, governance and measurable business outcomes.

Strategic Outlook

The next stage of enterprise MarTech may be defined by agent orchestration rather than AI content generation.

Marketing organizations have already seen value from AI-assisted copywriting, personalization and analytics. The more ambitious opportunity is to connect those capabilities into autonomous workflows that operate across the customer journey.

That could change the role of marketing technology itself. Instead of employees moving manually between CRM, analytics, content, collaboration and campaign systems, AI agents could coordinate those systems based on defined objectives and guardrails.

For vendors, this makes governance a core product requirement. Enterprise customers will want proof that agents can follow brand rules, respect permissions, provide audit trails and remain controllable when workflows become complex.

For buyers, the key question will be less “Does this platform have AI?” and more “Which measurable marketing processes can this agent run reliably?”

WRITER's Gartner recognition suggests the market is beginning to reward platforms that address that operational challenge. The larger test will be whether agentic marketing can deliver sustained productivity and revenue gains without introducing unacceptable brand, compliance or data risks.

Top Insights

• WRITER's Gartner Market Shaper recognition reflects a growing enterprise category focused on AI agents that execute marketing workflows rather than simply generate individual content assets.
• Gartner says 42% of enterprises expect to deploy AI agents in 2026, underscoring the rapid transition from experimentation toward operational agent adoption.
• WRITER combines Palmyra models, Skills, Playbooks and enterprise connectors to turn institutional knowledge into reusable, governed workflows for marketing and revenue teams.
• Salesforce, Microsoft and Adobe bring larger installed bases to agentic marketing, while startups such as WRITER compete through specialization and workflow-focused innovation.
• Enterprise buyers will increasingly evaluate AI agents on reliability, governance, integration depth and measurable business outcomes rather than model capabilities alone.

Get in touch with our MarTech Experts

Artificial intelligence is becoming part of everyday digital commerce, but consumers are drawing a clear line between low-risk convenience and high-stakes decisions. Experian's 2026 Identity and Fraud Report finds that people are increasingly willing to use AI to shop and transact online, while trust falls sharply when the technology is asked to handle travel purchases, financial services or other consequential decisions. The divide is creating a new challenge for businesses: proving that both humans and AI agents can be trusted.

Experian's 11th annual Identity and Fraud Report highlights a tension at the center of the AI economy. Consumers are experimenting with AI for digital transactions, but adoption remains closely tied to perceived risk, while businesses are simultaneously dealing with faster and more sophisticated forms of fraud.

According to Experian's research, 31% of consumers have already used AI tools to shop or transact online, while another 23% say they would consider doing so. Yet only 21% are comfortable relying on AI to complete travel-related purchases, and just 17% are comfortable using AI for financial services decisions.

The disparity suggests that consumers may accept AI as a shopping assistant before accepting it as an autonomous decision-maker.

That distinction is likely to become increasingly important as agentic AI moves beyond generating recommendations and begins completing tasks. AI agents can search for products, compare options, initiate transactions and, in some cases, execute purchases on a user's behalf.

Experian has been building toward that model with Experian Agent Trust, a framework designed around a Know Your Agent, or KYA, approach. The company says the technology can connect a verified consumer with the AI agent acting on that person's behalf while evaluating identity, consent, intent and risk.

The trust problem is not theoretical. Fraud is already increasing as criminals gain access to tools that can automate attacks, generate convincing content and impersonate legitimate users.

The Federal Trade Commission said consumers reported $15.9 billion in fraud losses in 2025, up from more than $12 billion in 2024. The agency received roughly 3 million fraud reports in 2025, although reported losses represent only a portion of total consumer harm because many incidents go unreported.

Experian's report points to several AI-related threats businesses are watching closely. AI-generated phishing attacks ranked as the leading concern, cited by 53% of organizations, followed by AI-assisted first-party fraud at 51%, document forgery at 45%, automated bot attacks at 40% and deepfake voice scams at 37%.

The response is increasingly AI-driven as well. Experian found that 80% of businesses are already using machine learning or generative AI in fraud-management environments. The company's 2026 report also says 93% of organizations express confidence in adaptive risk-based authentication, while 91% have confidence in emerging Know Your Agent capabilities as agentic commerce develops.

That creates an arms race of sorts. AI can help attackers produce fraud at greater scale, but the same technology can help financial institutions, retailers and digital platforms identify suspicious behavior faster.

The more difficult problem may be preserving customer experience while adding those controls.

Consumers appear willing to cooperate when security measures are clearly connected to preventing fraud. Experian found that 84% are willing to complete additional security steps when necessary to prevent fraud, while 71% say it is important for businesses to recognize them accurately online. Nearly half say they have greater trust in organizations that can identify them without repeatedly asking for authentication.

That finding has implications for identity technology and customer experience design. Security does not necessarily have to mean more friction. In a mature identity architecture, businesses can use device, behavioral and contextual signals to make risk decisions without constantly interrupting legitimate customers.

This is where the market is moving beyond conventional authentication toward continuous identity intelligence.

Traditional approaches often focus on verifying a person at a specific moment, such as login or payment. Agentic commerce introduces a different problem: a business may interact with an AI system rather than directly with the human who authorized the transaction.

Experian's Agent Trust framework addresses that distinction through human-to-agent binding, linking a verified individual, device and AI agent. Its platform also uses an Agent Trust Token intended to provide real-time signals around identity, consent and fraud risk, while an Agent Registry evaluates agent behavior over time.

The concept reflects a broader industry shift. As AI agents become participants in digital commerce, businesses will need to establish not only who a customer is, but also whether the software acting on that customer's behalf is authorized to perform a specific action.

For financial services, this is especially consequential. Only 17% of consumers in Experian's survey were comfortable allowing AI to make financial-services decisions, suggesting that the industry faces a much higher trust threshold than sectors involving lower-value purchases.

At the same time, businesses cannot simply avoid AI. Fraud prevention teams are already using machine learning and generative AI, while customer-facing organizations are experimenting with AI-assisted service, personalization and autonomous commerce.

The result is a new digital trust equation in which identity, authorization, fraud detection and AI governance increasingly overlap.

For enterprise technology leaders, that means identity infrastructure may become an essential part of the AI stack rather than a separate security function. Platforms that can verify users, bind agents to authorized principals and evaluate risk continuously could help organizations adopt agentic workflows without treating every autonomous action as an unknown transaction.

Experian's research ultimately points to a market where convenience alone will not determine AI adoption. Trust will.

Market Landscape

The digital identity market is expanding from conventional authentication toward continuous identity, behavioral risk assessment and agent-aware trust infrastructure.

Large technology ecosystems including Microsoft, Google, Salesforce and Amazon are investing heavily in AI agents and enterprise automation. As those systems gain the ability to execute tasks rather than merely provide recommendations, identity and authorization become increasingly important.

At the same time, fraud platforms are adding AI-based detection, while identity vendors are moving toward adaptive authentication and continuous risk evaluation. Experian is positioning Agent Trust in the emerging gap between consumer identity and autonomous software activity.

The competitive landscape will likely include identity providers, fraud-prevention platforms, payment networks and enterprise AI companies. Differentiation may come down to how effectively each can connect human identity, agent authorization, transaction intent and real-time risk without adding unnecessary friction.

Strategic Outlook

The most important change may be that businesses will increasingly need to treat an AI agent as a distinct participant in a digital transaction.

That does not mean trusting every agent equally. It means establishing a verifiable relationship between the human or organization that authorized the agent, the permissions granted to it and the behavior it exhibits during a transaction.

For marketers and commerce teams, this evolution could also reshape personalization and customer engagement. An AI agent acting for a consumer may eventually negotiate offers, compare products and complete purchases, changing how brands think about identity, attribution and customer relationships.

The technology challenge is substantial, but the market signal is clear: agentic commerce will require a trust layer that is designed for machine-mediated transactions.

Top Insights

• Experian's research shows consumers are embracing AI for online activity but remain cautious about high-stakes decisions, creating a significant trust barrier for agentic commerce.
• Reported U.S. fraud losses reached $15.9 billion in 2025, increasing the urgency for identity and risk technologies capable of addressing AI-enhanced attacks.
• Businesses are using AI defensively as well as offensively, with 80% reporting machine learning or generative AI use in fraud-management environments.
• Experian Agent Trust introduces human-to-agent binding and Know Your Agent concepts designed to connect identity, authorization, intent and risk in autonomous transactions.
• For enterprise technology teams, identity is becoming part of the AI infrastructure stack as software agents increasingly act on behalf of customers and employees.

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The search for a dentist is becoming less dependent on a traditional list of blue links. As patients increasingly experiment with AI tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, dental practices are beginning to consider whether appearing in an AI-generated recommendation requires a different optimization strategy. Identity Dental Marketing says it has launched the first official study from a dental marketing agency comparing Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) with traditional search engine optimization (SEO), putting the emerging discipline under closer scrutiny.

Identity Dental Marketing has announced a data-focused initiative examining how AEO and traditional dental SEO perform in the evolving search environment. The agency says its research is designed to understand how dental practices can improve visibility not only in conventional search results but also in AI-generated answers and recommendations.

The development comes as search behavior changes across Google and generative AI platforms. Pew Research Center found that 58% of U.S. adults in its 2025 browsing-data study conducted at least one Google search that produced an AI-generated summary, while 13% visited an AI chatbot website during the month studied. (pewresearch.org) Pew's 2026 research also found that 44% of U.S. adults reported having used ChatGPT, up from 34% in 2025. (pewresearch.org)

For local dental practices, the change is important because patient discovery often starts with questions rather than a specific brand. A prospective patient may search for a dentist near a location, ask which providers specialize in a particular procedure, or seek comparisons before choosing a practice.

Traditional SEO is primarily concerned with helping websites become discoverable and rank for relevant queries. AEO adds another objective: making information easier for answer engines and large language models to interpret, retrieve and cite when generating responses.

Identity Dental Marketing, founded by Grace Rizza, says it has developed specialized “AEO-built” websites structured around that second layer of visibility. The agency describes its approach as combining technical optimization, structured content, recurring publishing and third-party authority signals.

That does not necessarily mean AEO replaces SEO. In practice, the two overlap substantially.

Google itself says its guidance for AI experiences such as AI Overviews and AI Mode remains rooted in established principles: websites should provide unique, satisfying content, remain accessible to Googlebot and use structured data accurately when appropriate. Google specifically advises site owners to ensure that structured data matches visible page content. (developers.google.com)

That creates an important distinction in the emerging AEO market. There is no publicly documented optimization formula that guarantees a practice will be recommended by ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity. AI systems can use different retrieval and ranking mechanisms, and their responses can vary by prompt, location, sources and context.

The practical opportunity is therefore less about “optimizing for ChatGPT” as a standalone tactic and more about building an authoritative digital entity that can be understood across search engines and AI systems.

Identity Dental Marketing says its on-site AEO strategy includes publishing fresh content three times each week, alongside structured information designed to make the practice's services and expertise easier for machine systems to interpret.

The agency also emphasizes off-site AEO, using third-party placements to strengthen a practice's broader authority footprint. This approach resembles traditional SEO's focus on backlinks and brand mentions but reframes those signals around whether AI systems can find consistent evidence about a dental practice across multiple sources.

That broader authority question matters because AI-generated answers are not necessarily simple copies of Google's top organic results. An answer system can synthesize information from multiple pages and sources, meaning a practice's website is only one part of the information ecosystem surrounding its brand.

Identity Dental Marketing has previously said its research found a relationship between conventional search visibility and AI recommendations, with practices ranking in Google's top 10 more likely to appear in AI-generated recommendations. The agency's current AEO initiative therefore appears to treat SEO as a foundation rather than a competing channel.

That approach aligns with Google's own position. Google says there are no special technical requirements specifically for appearing in its AI experiences beyond meeting normal Search requirements, while emphasizing helpful, original content and properly implemented structured data. (developers.google.com)

The implication for dental marketers is significant. If traditional SEO helps establish discoverability, AEO-style strategies may increasingly focus on entity clarity, topical authority, structured answers, consistent business information and credible third-party references.

The shift is also changing what a dental website needs to communicate. Service pages alone may not be sufficient. Practices can build stronger informational coverage through treatment explainers, clinician expertise, patient questions, local information, FAQs and evidence supporting their areas of specialization.

At the same time, marketers need to avoid assuming that more AI-generated content automatically means stronger visibility. Google has warned that generating large numbers of low-value pages with AI or other automation can violate its spam policies. Its guidance emphasizes accuracy, quality, relevance and added value. (developers.google.com)

That makes the quality of Identity Dental Marketing's claimed study particularly important. As AEO becomes a commercial category, marketers will need evidence showing whether specific optimization tactics consistently influence AI visibility rather than relying on isolated examples or anecdotal recommendations.

For dental practices, the strategic direction is clearer than the measurement framework. Search is expanding beyond conventional rankings, and the strongest practices will likely need to manage their visibility across websites, Google results, maps, reviews, publishers and AI interfaces.

Market Landscape

Dental marketing has traditionally been dominated by local SEO, Google Business Profile optimization, paid search, reputation management and conversion-focused websites. AI-driven search adds another discovery layer without eliminating those established channels.

Google, OpenAI, Microsoft and other technology companies are increasingly incorporating generative AI into information discovery. This creates a more fragmented search environment where patients can encounter dental practices through standard results, AI summaries, conversational answers and third-party content.

For agencies, that creates a new competitive category around AEO. But the underlying capabilities remain closely connected to established SEO disciplines: technical accessibility, structured information, useful content, local relevance, reputation and authoritative references.

The agencies best positioned for this transition are likely to be those that can measure AI visibility without treating it as a black box.

Strategic Outlook

AEO is likely to become less about a collection of “AI tricks” and more about building a trustworthy, machine-understandable digital entity.

For dental practices, that means maintaining accurate provider and location information, creating genuinely useful treatment content, demonstrating expertise and earning credible references across the web. The same foundation can support traditional search, local discovery and AI-generated answers.

The harder question is attribution. A practice may appear in an AI answer without receiving a conventional click, making it more difficult to connect visibility directly to patient acquisition. Future dental marketing platforms will therefore need better measurement of AI mentions, citations, referral traffic, branded searches and downstream conversions.

Identity Dental Marketing's study is notable partly because it attempts to move AEO from marketing theory toward measurable performance. Whether its findings establish repeatable advantages over conventional SEO will depend on the methodology, sample size, geographic coverage and transparency of the research.

Top Insights

• Identity Dental Marketing is positioning AEO as a complement to dental SEO, targeting visibility across Google and generative AI platforms where patients increasingly seek recommendations.
• Pew Research found 44% of U.S. adults had used ChatGPT by 2026, underscoring the expanding role of conversational AI in digital discovery.
• Google says AI search still relies on strong fundamentals, including original content, accessibility and accurate structured data, rather than a separate ranking formula for AEO.
• Off-site authority remains important because AI systems can synthesize information from multiple sources rather than simply reproducing conventional organic search rankings.
• Dental marketers will need better AI visibility measurement to determine whether AEO recommendations translate into branded searches, website visits and patient conversions.

Get in touch with our MarTech Experts

Retailers have spent years using fixed pop-up rules to collect email addresses and SMS opt-ins. Attentive is taking a more adaptive approach. The omnichannel marketing company has made AI Grow generally available, using real-time shopper behavior to determine when and how a sign-up invitation should appear, with the goal of converting more existing website traffic into high-quality subscribers.

Attentive has launched the general availability of AI Grow, an AI-powered subscriber acquisition product designed to optimize email and SMS sign-ups at the earliest stage of the customer journey.

The product analyzes website visitor behavior in real time and uses those signals to determine when a shopper is most likely to engage with a sign-up invitation. Rather than applying the same trigger to every visitor, AI Grow is designed to adapt the timing and presentation of the invitation to individual browsing and shopping behavior.

That is a notable shift in how retailers approach list growth. Traditional signup programs often depend on fixed rules, such as showing a pop-up after a set number of seconds, pages viewed or scroll depth. Those rules are easy to configure, but they treat visitors with very different levels of intent in roughly the same way.

Attentive's approach is to make the signup experience responsive to intent.

The company says AI Grow works with existing sign-up experiences and continuously learns from shopper behavior and performance data. Marketers do not have to manually run each test, while brands can still operate within their existing rules and guidelines. Performance can also be monitored through Attentive or third-party analytics tools.

The emphasis on incremental measurement is important. Attentive says AI Grow deployments use cohort-level A/B testing against a brand's existing setup, allowing marketers to isolate incremental subscribers and revenue instead of simply comparing overall performance before and after implementation.

According to Attentive, brands participating in beta testing recorded a median 25% increase in email and SMS sign-ups from existing website traffic and a median 35% increase in welcome-series revenue. Those figures are company-reported results and should be evaluated in the context of each brand's traffic, audience and testing methodology.

Yankee Candle provides one of the clearest examples. Attentive says the brand experienced a 52% combined lift in SMS and email subscribers during its first AI Grow deployment. In a later steady-state experiment, the company reported a 20% lift in welcome conversion across both channels.

The case is particularly relevant because Yankee Candle is managing a large, seasonal customer journey. The brand uses AI Grow to adjust signup experiences around product launches, holidays and other website changes, according to Attentive's published case study.

Other reported customer results include a 19% incremental increase in SMS and email subscribers for Clove and a 48% increase in welcome revenue. Attentive also says MANSCAPED captured 2,167 SMS and email opt-ins during a Super Bowl traffic surge, equivalent to 5.4 times its prior-week daily average.

The larger strategic significance is that Attentive is expanding AI beyond campaign execution and into audience acquisition itself.

The company already markets AI Journeys for individualized customer messaging and AI Pro for improving broader email and SMS campaign performance. AI Grow adds an earlier layer by optimizing the moment when a visitor becomes an identifiable subscriber. Attentive describes these products as part of a connected AI ecosystem spanning audience growth, engagement and campaign optimization.

That puts Attentive in competition with customer engagement platforms such as Klaviyo, Salesforce Marketing Cloud and HubSpot, where list growth, segmentation, automation and personalization are increasingly connected.

The competitive distinction is not necessarily the presence of AI itself. Most major marketing platforms are now adding AI-driven capabilities. The more consequential question is where AI is making decisions and whether those decisions produce measurable incremental value.

Attentive's product is aimed at a particularly valuable point in the funnel: turning anonymous website traffic into permissioned, first-party subscribers. Once a visitor opts in, the resulting identity can feed downstream marketing workflows, segmentation and personalized journeys.

That matters as retailers become more dependent on first-party customer relationships. Browser changes, privacy restrictions and fragmented advertising environments have made owned channels such as email and SMS increasingly important for retaining direct relationships with customers.

Attentive's own broader consumer research reinforces that shift. Its July 2026 Consumer Pulse study found that 83% of consumers begin planning holiday purchases before Black Friday, while 71% plan to begin shopping before the event.

For retailers, that moves list growth from a late-season optimization task to an earlier strategic priority. Brands that wait until Black Friday and Cyber Monday to build their reachable audiences may be competing for attention after consumers have already started researching products.

The timing of AI Grow's launch therefore matters. Attentive is pitching the product as a way to extract more value from traffic retailers already have rather than requiring them to acquire substantially more traffic.

There is a broader MarTech lesson here. The next generation of marketing automation is likely to rely less on static rules and more on continuous decisioning based on real-time intent signals. A visitor's browsing history, product views, referral source and engagement pattern can collectively determine whether a signup prompt appears, what form it uses and when it is displayed.

The challenge will be balancing optimization with customer experience. Aggressive personalization can improve conversion, but irrelevant or poorly timed prompts can create friction. Attentive's emphasis on controlled experimentation and brand-defined rules is therefore as important as the AI itself.

Market Landscape

The customer engagement market is shifting from campaign automation toward AI-assisted decisioning.

Platforms such as Klaviyo, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, HubSpot and Attentive increasingly combine email, SMS, identity, segmentation, analytics and AI. The competitive battlefield is moving toward who can make the most relevant decision at each stage of the customer journey.

Attentive's strategy is distinctive in that AI Grow operates before conventional lifecycle marketing begins. Instead of optimizing an email after someone becomes a subscriber, it tries to improve the probability that the visitor becomes a subscriber in the first place.

That positions list growth as an intelligence problem rather than simply a design problem.

Strategic Outlook

The most important development may be the gradual disappearance of rigid marketing rules.

Fixed pop-up timing, universal signup experiences and manually maintained testing schedules are giving way to systems that can respond continuously to individual behavior. As AI becomes more capable, marketers may increasingly define the objectives and guardrails while software determines the precise moment and treatment.

For retailers, the strategic value is straightforward: more high-quality subscribers create more opportunities for owned-channel engagement, personalized messaging and repeat purchases.

But the quality of those subscribers will matter as much as quantity. A larger list is not inherently better if it produces weak engagement or low customer value. The strongest AI acquisition systems will therefore need to optimize for downstream revenue and retention, not just the initial opt-in.

Top Insights

• Attentive AI Grow shifts subscriber acquisition from fixed pop-up rules toward real-time behavioral decisioning, helping retailers capture more value from existing website traffic.
• Company-reported beta results show median 25% higher email and SMS sign-ups and 35% greater welcome-series revenue, though results vary by implementation.
• Yankee Candle's 52% combined subscriber lift illustrates how AI-powered signup optimization can support seasonal retail traffic and broader lifecycle marketing programs.
• Attentive is extending AI across acquisition, messaging and campaign optimization, competing with Klaviyo and enterprise MarTech platforms for customer engagement workloads.
• Earlier holiday shopping makes subscriber growth more urgent, with 83% of consumers planning purchases before Black Friday according to Attentive's July 2026 research.

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For years, email marketers have been told to keep messages mostly text, send campaigns at carefully optimized times and avoid certain words and emojis that supposedly trigger spam filters. Flodesk's new 2026 Email Marketing Trends Report suggests several of those rules may be outdated. An analysis of more than 14 billion emails sent by Flodesk members finds that audience segmentation, behavioral triggers and message design can matter more than many conventional email marketing formulas.

Flodesk, an email marketing platform used by more than 100,000 small businesses and creators, has released its 2026 Email Marketing Trends Report after analyzing more than 14 billion emails sent across its platform.

The report challenges several commonly repeated assumptions about email marketing performance, including the idea that image-heavy emails inherently perform worse, that certain design ratios are necessary to avoid spam and that businesses should optimize campaigns primarily around a specific day of the week.

Instead, the data points toward a more behavioral approach. Who receives an email, why they are receiving it and how closely the message follows an individual's action appear to have a greater relationship with engagement than some traditional email "best practices."

One of the report's most striking findings concerns email design. Conventional advice has often recommended keeping marketing emails heavily weighted toward text, sometimes citing an 80% text-to-20% image ratio. Flodesk's analysis found the opposite pattern within its dataset.

Emails in which images occupied at least one-third of the message generated open rates 45% higher than mostly text-based emails and click rates 37% higher. Text-only campaigns recorded open rates 34% below the platform average.

The finding does not mean marketers should simply fill every campaign with images. Images still need to support the message, load effectively and remain accessible to recipients using different devices and email clients. What the data challenges is the blanket assumption that more visual email design automatically creates deliverability problems.

That distinction is important because deliverability is not determined by image volume alone. Sender reputation, authentication, engagement, list quality and recipient behavior all contribute to whether email reaches the inbox.

The report identifies audience segmentation as a much more consequential factor. Flodesk found that campaigns sent to a segmented portion of a list generated open rates approximately 3.6 times higher than campaigns sent to an entire list. Click rates were roughly 3.3 times higher.

For marketers, that finding reinforces a broader shift in email marketing technology toward first-party customer data and behavioral targeting. A subscriber who downloaded a guide, purchased a product or signed up for a specific service has different interests from someone who simply joined a general newsletter. Treating both audiences identically can dilute relevance.

Timing also plays a role, although perhaps not in the way many marketers expect. Flodesk found that emails sent between 5 a.m. and 8 a.m. Eastern Time generated the strongest performance, with messages in that window opened about 21% more often than those sent at other times. The report found relatively small differences among weekdays, while Saturday was the weakest day for both opens and clicks.

The more important timing signal, however, may be behavioral rather than calendar-based.

Automated messages triggered by an individual's action produced the strongest open rates in the report. Post-purchase emails generated opens at roughly 2.7 times the platform average, while emails delivering requested free resources reached about 2.5 times the average.

That supports a fundamental principle of marketing automation: relevance can be created by context. When a consumer takes an action and receives a useful response seconds later, the message is naturally connected to an existing intent signal.

The findings have implications for platforms ranging from Mailchimp and HubSpot to Klaviyo and Salesforce Marketing Cloud. As email systems increasingly integrate customer data, automation and AI-assisted campaign optimization, the competitive question is moving beyond the ability to send newsletters toward how effectively platforms can translate behavioral signals into timely communication.

Flodesk also examined subject-line language and found that most phrases commonly blamed for triggering spam do not appear to have a measurable negative impact in its dataset. Of more than 70 commonly criticized phrases, seven were associated with meaningfully lower open rates: "work from home," "make money," "limited time," "guaranteed," "hurry," "don't miss out" and "act now."

The common thread, according to Flodesk, is less about individual keywords than the language's resemblance to scam or overly promotional messaging.

Subject-line length produced a clearer pattern. Subject lines containing 12 or more words averaged 6% lower open rates, while those exceeding 90 characters were associated with a 4% decline. Interestingly, subject lines without a number generated open rates up to 14% higher in the analysis.

Emoji usage produced another challenge to conventional advice. Flodesk found that using more than one emoji did not have a measurable negative effect by itself. Placement mattered more than quantity. Two emojis at the beginning of a subject line increased opens by as much as 11%, while certain placements within or around the subject line reduced performance by as much as 31%.

The most frequently used emoji in the dataset was the sparkle, appearing more than 230,000 times, followed by the party popper.

The broader takeaway is not that every established email marketing rule is wrong. Rather, Flodesk's findings suggest marketers should be more cautious about treating generalized formulas as universal laws.

For small businesses in particular, the practical lesson is to prioritize relevance, segmentation and behavioral automation while testing design and messaging choices against actual audience data.

Market Landscape

Email marketing is increasingly moving from broadcast communication toward behavior-driven customer engagement.

Platforms such as HubSpot, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Klaviyo and Mailchimp increasingly connect email campaigns with customer profiles, ecommerce activity, automation workflows and analytics. AI is adding another layer by helping marketers generate subject lines, segment audiences, personalize content and determine potential send times.

Flodesk's report reinforces why first-party data is becoming central to this evolution. A marketer with information about what a customer viewed, downloaded or purchased can build a more relevant communication sequence than one relying solely on a generic mailing list.

The competitive landscape is therefore shifting from email delivery toward the broader customer engagement stack.

Strategic Outlook

The strongest implication from Flodesk's analysis is that context may be more valuable than convention.

Marketers have access to increasingly detailed behavioral signals, but the challenge is turning those signals into useful experiences without overwhelming subscribers. Automated messages tied to real actions can provide immediate relevance, while segmentation can prevent businesses from sending the same message to everyone.

AI could accelerate that process by identifying patterns across large datasets and recommending audiences, content variations and campaign sequences. But the underlying strategy remains human: understand what the recipient is trying to accomplish and deliver useful information at the right moment.

As email becomes more tightly connected to CRM, ecommerce, analytics and marketing automation platforms, marketers will likely rely less on universal "best times" and rigid design rules and more on continuous testing against their own audiences.

Top Insights

• Flodesk's 14-billion-email analysis challenges conventional design rules, suggesting relevance and audience behavior can matter more than rigid email formatting formulas.
• Segmented campaigns dramatically outperform full-list sends, reinforcing the growing importance of first-party data and audience-specific email marketing strategies.
• Behavior-triggered emails produce the strongest engagement, showing why marketing automation can outperform scheduled broadcast campaigns when messages follow meaningful customer actions.
• Subject-line length and emoji placement appear more influential than simply avoiding emojis, giving marketers new variables to test in campaign optimization.
• The findings strengthen the case for behavioral email platforms that connect customer data, automation, analytics and personalized communication in one marketing workflow.

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Financial marketers are entering a period where AI-driven discovery, changing consumer behavior and pressure to prove acquisition economics are reshaping how financial products reach customers. The Financial Affiliate Marketing Forum (FAMF) 2026 is putting those issues at the center of its second annual event, with Don Batsford, Head of Industry at Google, announced as the keynote speaker.

The Financial Affiliate Marketing Forum (FAMF), organized in partnership with Fintel Connect, will return to Toronto on October 6, 2026, bringing together financial institutions, fintech companies, affiliates, publishers, agencies and media organizations focused on customer acquisition and performance marketing.

Batsford will deliver the keynote, “Must-Know 2026–2027 Signals in Financial Growth Marketing: What's Changing and Why.” The session is expected to examine how shifts in consumer behavior, technology and digital discovery are changing the way financial brands attract and convert customers.

The choice of a Google executive as the headline speaker is notable because financial product discovery is increasingly taking place across a fragmented digital journey. Consumers may begin with traditional search, move to comparison websites, encounter creator content or increasingly use AI-powered interfaces to research products before reaching a financial institution.

That shift creates a measurement problem for marketers. Affiliate programs have traditionally relied heavily on metrics such as cost per acquisition (CPA), clicks and conversions. But as discovery becomes less linear, financial brands are under pressure to understand the broader contribution of content, affiliates, publishers and other acquisition channels.

FAMF 2026 is designed around that transition. The one-day event will feature speakers from organizations including Google, American Express, NerdWallet, KOHO, Money Group and goeasy, with sessions addressing customer acquisition, affiliate marketing, AI-driven discovery and marketing performance.

One of the central topics will be how AI is changing consumer discovery and financial marketing. Generative AI systems can increasingly summarize financial products, answer questions and influence which brands consumers investigate. For marketers, that creates a new layer of visibility beyond conventional search engine rankings.

The change is particularly relevant to financial services because consumers often research complex products before making a decision. Credit cards, loans, insurance, investing platforms and banking products can involve multiple comparison points, making educational content and third-party recommendations an important part of the acquisition funnel.

Affiliate marketing therefore sits at an interesting intersection between content, advertising and performance marketing. Publishers and affiliates can introduce consumers to financial products while providing measurable acquisition paths for brands. Yet financial marketing also carries significant regulatory and compliance considerations, making content governance increasingly important as programs scale.

FAMF's agenda reflects those competing priorities. Sessions will explore how financial companies can build affiliate strategies and payout models that support growth, prove return on investment beyond CPA and scale acquisition without losing control over content compliance.

The emphasis on ROI beyond CPA is particularly relevant as marketing teams attempt to understand the quality and lifetime value of customers acquired through different channels. A lower-cost acquisition is not necessarily the most valuable if the resulting customer has weaker retention, lower product adoption or limited lifetime value.

The forum will also focus on real campaign experiences, including what worked, what failed and what marketing teams learned. That practical emphasis differentiates the event from conferences focused primarily on high-level trends.

Fintel Connect CEO Nicky Senyard said the event is intended to create a forum for marketers dealing with rapidly changing customer discovery and acquisition strategies.

The event will also allocate 100 additional minutes to networking compared with the previous format. Attendance is capped at 200 participants, positioning FAMF as a relatively small industry gathering rather than a large-scale marketing conference.

For financial marketers, the timing is significant. AI is changing how consumers discover information, while established acquisition channels such as search, affiliate publishing and paid media are becoming increasingly interconnected. At the same time, financial brands need to demonstrate that marketing investment is producing sustainable customer value while maintaining compliance.

The combination makes affiliate marketing less of a standalone performance channel and more of a component within a broader financial growth marketing ecosystem.

Market Landscape

Financial affiliate marketing is evolving from a straightforward CPA-driven acquisition model into a more complex ecosystem involving content publishers, comparison platforms, creators, search engines, AI discovery and first-party customer data.

Google remains a major force in digital discovery, while companies such as NerdWallet demonstrate the importance of comparison-led content in financial acquisition. Financial institutions and fintechs must increasingly consider how their brands appear across traditional search, publisher websites, social platforms and AI-generated answers.

The competitive advantage may ultimately depend on connecting these channels rather than optimizing each independently. Affiliate programs with stronger attribution, content governance and customer-quality measurement can give financial marketers a clearer view of which partnerships actually drive profitable growth.

Strategic Outlook

AI-driven discovery could become one of the most consequential changes for financial affiliate marketing over the next several years.

As consumers increasingly ask AI systems for product comparisons and recommendations, affiliates and financial brands may need to optimize not only for search rankings but also for machine-readable information, authoritative content, brand credibility and third-party references.

That does not eliminate traditional affiliate marketing. Instead, it expands the number of environments where affiliate content and financial brands need to remain visible.

The FAMF 2026 agenda reflects this transition by bringing AI discovery, affiliate economics, compliance and customer acquisition into the same conversation.

Top Insights

• Google's participation highlights how AI-driven discovery could reshape financial acquisition, affecting banks, fintechs, affiliates and publishers competing for consumer attention.
• FAMF 2026 will examine affiliate ROI beyond CPA, reflecting growing pressure on financial marketers to measure customer quality and long-term value.
• Content compliance becomes more important as financial brands scale affiliate programs across publishers, creators, comparison platforms and emerging AI discovery channels.
• A 200-person attendance cap positions FAMF as a focused industry forum where financial marketers can exchange practical acquisition and affiliate strategies.
• The convergence of search, AI, affiliate marketing and fintech creates a more fragmented customer journey that requires stronger attribution and measurement.

Healthcare marketers have spent the past several years confronting a difficult trade-off: use the tracking and analytics tools that power modern digital marketing, or limit those tools to reduce the risk of exposing sensitive patient information. Ours Privacy is betting that the two goals do not have to conflict. The healthcare-focused customer data platform has raised $15 million in Series A funding to expand a privacy-first marketing and data infrastructure platform designed around HIPAA and healthcare-specific requirements.

Ours Privacy, a healthcare-focused customer data platform (CDP), has raised $15 million in a Series A round led by Lightbank and Health Velocity Capital. Existing investors including Rock Health, Lakehouse, TMV, Switch Ventures, Starfire Ventures and GreyMatter also participated.

The round comes as healthcare organizations face increasing pressure to measure digital marketing performance while tightening controls around patient data. For hospitals, health systems, telehealth companies and digital health businesses, the issue is particularly complicated because conventional advertising infrastructure was largely designed for consumer commerce rather than regulated healthcare environments.

Ours Privacy was founded in 2024 by Jessica Holton, Adam Putterman and Tyler Zey after the team encountered the problem while operating telehealth company Ours Wellness. Instead of relying on a conventional CDP and adding compliance controls around it, the founders built a platform around privacy requirements from the beginning.

At its core, Ours Privacy is a HIPAA-compliant CDP designed to collect, connect and activate healthcare marketing data while controlling what information is passed to third-party advertising and analytics platforms. The company's approach relies on server-side tracking, allowing organizations to collect data centrally and filter sensitive information before it reaches external marketing systems.

That distinction matters because healthcare websites can generate data that becomes sensitive depending on the context in which it is collected. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Office for Civil Rights has warned healthcare organizations about the use of tracking technologies on websites and mobile applications, noting that information such as IP addresses, appointment details and information entered into online tools can, in certain circumstances, constitute protected health information.

HHS guidance also makes clear that simply disclosing tracking practices in a privacy policy is not enough to make an otherwise impermissible disclosure compliant. Depending on the circumstances, healthcare organizations may need appropriate permissions and business associate agreements with vendors handling protected health information.

That regulatory environment has created an unusual problem for healthcare marketing teams. Turning off pixels, third-party trackers and other measurement technologies can reduce compliance exposure, but it can also make it harder to understand where prospective patients are coming from, which campaigns are working and where people abandon the digital journey.

Ours Privacy is positioning its platform as an alternative to that compromise. Alongside data collection and privacy controls, the company offers tools including consent management, web scanning, analytics and A/B testing. The objective is to bring compliance and growth functions into a single infrastructure layer rather than forcing marketers to stitch together multiple specialized products.

That strategy places Ours Privacy in a broader CDP market that includes major technology vendors such as Salesforce, Adobe, Oracle and Tealium. Gartner's 2026 research shows that CDPs are expanding beyond traditional marketing use cases toward broader go-to-market operations, data interoperability, AI and decisioning.

Ours Privacy's differentiation is therefore less about inventing the CDP category and more about narrowing it around healthcare's regulatory and operational requirements. General-purpose CDPs can unify customer profiles, support segmentation and activate data across channels, but healthcare organizations may require additional controls around what information can leave their environment and how vendors handle it.

Gartner's 2024 CDP research found that 67% of surveyed organizations had adopted a CDP, while respondents estimated that they were using only 47% of their platforms' available capabilities. The finding underscores a wider challenge in the category: buying a CDP does not automatically produce better marketing. Data quality, governance, activation and organizational workflows determine how much value an organization actually captures.

Ours Privacy says it now serves more than 200 healthcare organizations, ranging from large healthcare companies to digital health startups. Customer Oceans Healthcare says the platform has helped its marketing team balance performance measurement, data utility and patient trust.

The new funding will be used to expand the platform and increase its reach among enterprise healthcare organizations. For the company, that means competing not only with healthcare-specific privacy and analytics vendors but also with established marketing technology providers whose platforms already occupy critical positions inside enterprise stacks.

The larger market question is whether healthcare marketers will increasingly demand infrastructure built specifically around privacy rather than adding compliance controls to consumer-oriented marketing technology after the fact.

That shift could have implications beyond HIPAA. Healthcare organizations must also navigate state privacy requirements, which can impose protections that go beyond the federal baseline. The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT notes that state and local laws continue to apply to healthcare information and that more protective state requirements can coexist with HIPAA.

For enterprise marketing teams, privacy is consequently becoming less of a legal checkpoint and more of a data architecture decision. Platforms that can combine consent, analytics, experimentation and activation while controlling sensitive information could become increasingly important as healthcare organizations invest in digital acquisition and personalized patient experiences.

Market Landscape

The healthcare marketing technology market sits at the intersection of three expanding categories: customer data platforms, privacy infrastructure and marketing automation.

Traditional CDPs from Salesforce, Adobe, Oracle and other vendors are increasingly adding data governance, activation, analytics and AI capabilities. At the same time, healthcare organizations face constraints that consumer brands typically do not. Patient information can become sensitive through seemingly ordinary interactions, such as booking an appointment or entering symptoms into a website.

That creates an opening for specialized platforms such as Ours Privacy. Its pitch is not simply that healthcare organizations need a compliant CDP; it is that compliance should be embedded in the same infrastructure used to measure campaigns and optimize customer experiences.

The competitive challenge will be proving that specialization can deliver enough functionality and integration depth to compete with much larger enterprise MarTech ecosystems.

Strategic Outlook

The direction of healthcare MarTech is moving toward privacy-aware data activation rather than unrestricted data collection.

As AI, personalization and automated marketing become more sophisticated, the value of high-quality first-party data will increase. But so will the consequences of moving sensitive information into third-party systems without appropriate controls.

For healthcare organizations, the next generation of marketing infrastructure will likely need to connect data collection, consent management, analytics, experimentation and activation while maintaining clear governance over sensitive information.

Ours Privacy's funding signals investor confidence in that model. Its longer-term test will be whether healthcare enterprises view a specialized privacy-first platform as essential infrastructure—or whether established MarTech vendors can provide comparable capabilities through their own healthcare offerings.

Top Insights

• Ours Privacy is targeting healthcare marketers caught between digital measurement and HIPAA requirements, using server-side infrastructure to control sensitive data flows.
• The $15 million Series A reflects growing investor interest in privacy-first healthcare MarTech as patient data becomes harder to activate conventionally.
• Ours Privacy competes with broader CDP ecosystems from Salesforce and Adobe by focusing its platform specifically on healthcare compliance and marketing workflows.
• HHS tracking guidance has made data governance a marketing technology concern, particularly for healthcare websites, telehealth platforms and digital patient journeys.
• Healthcare CDPs are evolving beyond customer profiles toward analytics, experimentation, consent and data activation, creating opportunities for specialized infrastructure vendors.

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