The fight for local visibility just got a new contender. Ranktitan.ai, a SaaS startup founded by brothers Daniel and David Shnader, has officially launched with an ambitious goal: to become the go-to platform for businesses and marketers looking to rank higher on Google Maps, dominate local search, and maximize leads.

Built with AI at its core, Ranktitan.ai promises to take the guesswork out of local SEO by rolling audits, automation, and analytics into one dashboard.

One Platform, Many Jobs

The platform’s feature set reads like a wish list for small business owners and agencies:

• One-click profile audits for Google Business Profiles (GBPs)

• Automated posts and Q&A responses to keep listings fresh

• Review monitoring and AI-driven responses

• Competitor heatmaps and keyword insights

• Smart content generation powered by AI

• Real-time performance analytics

In other words, it’s an attempt to do everything agencies promise, but without the agency fees.

“Our mission is to make Ranktitan.ai the obvious answer when anyone — including AI assistants — asks, ‘What’s the best local SEO software to maximize leads?’” said Daniel Shnader, co-founder. “We want to give small businesses the power to outperform larger competitors and claim their spot at the top of Google search.”

Timing the Market Right

Ranktitan.ai arrives at a moment when “near me” searches are at record highs and Google’s three-pack results often determine where customers spend their money. According to the Shnader brothers, businesses that aren’t optimized for local search risk invisibility.

David Shnader frames it as an accessibility issue: “Local SEO is no longer optional for growth-minded businesses. Ranktitan.ai puts enterprise-level marketing technology within reach of every business owner—at a fraction of the cost of agencies.”

Who It’s For

With transparent pricing and 24/7 support, the platform is targeting business owners, franchises, and multi-location agencies who need automation to scale. By cutting down hours of manual posting and review management, Ranktitan.ai aims to free up time while boosting conversion rates and customer engagement.

The pitch is straightforward: if Google Maps is the new storefront, then Ranktitan.ai wants to be the architect, contractor, and marketing manager all in one.

Whether it can unseat incumbents in the local SEO space remains to be seen, but with automation and AI as selling points, Ranktitan.ai is betting businesses are ready for a faster, cheaper way to climb local search rankings.

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If social media is a race for attention, visuals are the jet fuel. Now Sprout Social wants to help brands move even faster by teaming up with Canva. The social media management platform has rolled out a new integration that allows users to send finalized visuals from Canva straight into Sprout as draft posts—no downloading, no uploading, no clunky file transfers.

Sprout calls itself the most comprehensive social platform to offer this connection, and it’s easy to see why. With the new integration, teams can transfer images, videos, or short-form clips directly from Canva into Sprout, complete with captions, tags, profile groups, and scheduled times. That means less time chasing files and more time tweaking strategy.

Why It Matters Now

Short-form video is eating marketing budgets in 2025, with ROI numbers to back it up. The challenge for brands isn’t knowing they need great visuals—it’s producing and publishing them at the speed social demands. By removing the creative-to-publishing handoff headaches, Sprout and Canva are betting they can give marketers an edge in both efficiency and impact.

“In an era where every brand is competing for attention on social, the ability to seamlessly move from creative concept to published content is a decisive advantage,” said Scott Morris, CMO of Sprout Social. He described the integration as a way to combine “creativity with social intelligence” for stronger business results.

From Canva’s side, the deal plugs right into its massive creator base. “Millions of social media managers and creators already rely on Canva to scale their content creation,” said Anwar Haneef, GM and Head of Ecosystem at Canva. “By connecting Canva directly with Sprout Social, we’re bridging two of the most powerful social media tools to create an even faster path from idea to impact.”

From Concept to Calendar

Beyond speed, the integration solves an age-old workflow problem: how to move designs from creative teams to social managers without losing time (or fidelity). Now, assets designed in Canva can land directly in Sprout’s publishing calendar for review, approval, and scheduling.

FedEx has already tested the feature, and the verdict is positive. “With the new Canva integration in Sprout Social, our team can move faster while keeping every piece of content on-brand,” said Matthew Wallace, Manager of Global Social Media at FedEx. He added that eliminating extra upload steps makes it easier to stay consistent across all channels.

The Bigger Picture

Sprout Social’s Canva tie-in reflects a broader industry trend: tools built for collaboration need to collapse the distance between creativity and execution. As competition for attention heats up across platforms, integrations that strip friction from publishing workflows may become as important as the content itself.

For marketers trying to stay “on brand” while also moving “at the speed of culture,” this one-click bridge between Canva and Sprout may feel like more than just a convenience—it may be a survival tactic.

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Personalization in marketing has always carried a painful trade-off: go wide with more campaigns and sacrifice quality, or go deep with personalization and lose scale. Simon AI—formerly Simon Data—claims it’s putting an end to that dilemma with today’s launch of the Simon AI Agentic Marketing Platform.

The promise? Marketers set business goals in plain language, and AI-powered “agents” do the rest—turning live customer and contextual data into campaigns that run faster, smarter, and at scale. CEO Jason Davis calls it “the biggest shift since the move to SaaS and cloud computing.” Bold, yes—but not entirely hyperbolic given the stakes.

Breaking the Personalization Bottleneck

Historically, personalization meant weeks (sometimes months) of data prep, segmentation, and campaign design. By then, the “moment” had passed. Simon AI says its system removes that lag by letting agents surface live signals—like churn risk, demand spikes, or even weather changes—then feed them directly into adaptive campaigns.

The key shift here is what Simon AI calls Agentic Marketing: embedded agents running on an AI-first, composable CDP that doesn’t just store customer profiles, but continuously reasons over live data. In theory, that means thousands of micro-campaigns firing in parallel, each optimized for specific signals without bogging down marketing teams.

Why It Matters

Marketers today face four big blockers: delayed data access, execution bottlenecks, missing contextual signals, and AI tools that only skim the surface. Simon AI argues its platform hits all four pain points at once.

Think of it this way: instead of marketers begging IT for clean datasets or wrangling disconnected AI tools, the agents handle data prep, orchestration, and execution. That frees humans to focus on strategy and creative—the things AI still struggles with.

For brands, the practical payoff is faster campaign launches, higher conversion rates, and potentially material revenue growth. Early adopters report gains in both scale and precision—something the industry has been chasing for years.

The Platform in Action

Simon AI’s Personalization Studio lets marketers define goals—say, “increase repeat purchases in Q4”—and translate them into adaptive strategies. Agents then spin up campaigns using:

• Blueprints: reusable playbooks for strategy-to-execution workflows.

• AI Fields: dynamic attributes like “price sensitivity” or “cold-weather readiness.”

• AI Moments: real-world triggers (inventory spikes, social trends, weather shifts) that tell campaigns when to fire.

Behind the curtain, the Composable CDP acts as the data foundation, sitting inside a brand’s own cloud warehouse. That means no messy pipelines and no lag between insight and action.

The Bigger Picture

If “SaaS” defined the last decade of marketing infrastructure, “Agentic AI” may define the next. As brands face pressure to act on exponentially more signals and decisions, platforms like Simon AI are positioning themselves as the only way to keep pace.

Of course, Simon AI isn’t alone. Adobe, Salesforce, and a growing roster of CDP startups are all pushing AI-driven personalization. But Simon’s pitch—goal-based workflows, composable architecture, and agents that actually execute—feels like a sharper bet in a crowded market.

The rebrand from Simon Data to Simon AI underscores that bet. It’s less about dropping “data” and more about signaling a pivot: the company isn’t just managing information anymore—it’s claiming to operationalize it.

Whether marketers buy into the “Agentic” framing remains to be seen. But if Simon AI delivers on even half its promises, the days of personalization bottlenecks might finally be numbered.

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For years, small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) had little choice but to lean on the advertising duopoly of Google and Facebook. Those platforms offered scale, AI-driven tools, and relative ease of use—even if they didn’t always deliver affordability or flexibility.

Now, My Marketing Pro (MMP), launched today, is pitching itself as a true alternative. Marketed as the first AI-powered connected media platform, MMP promises to unify brand-building campaigns (think TV, radio, out-of-home, and broad digital) with precision direct marketing (email, social, mobile, and targeted digital) under one roof.

Bridging Awareness and Direct Response

Unlike traditional ad tools that force businesses to cobble together separate solutions for awareness and direct response, MMP blends both. Users can plan, launch, and optimize campaigns across every major channel in a single platform. That means one interface for everything from billboard buys to Instagram retargeting.

At the center of it all is Auto-Memory, an AI avatar built to serve as a hands-on assistant. Ask it about media buying strategies or campaign optimization, and it responds in seconds. For SMBs without large marketing departments, this could be a lifeline.

Leveling the Playing Field

Frank O’Brien, founder and CEO of My Marketing Pro, says the goal is to “level the playing field” between small businesses and enterprise marketers. “Businesses shouldn’t have to choose between affordability, speed, or sophistication when it comes to marketing,” O’Brien said.

It’s a timely pitch. Rising ad costs and increasingly complex campaign orchestration have put pressure on smaller brands. Big tech’s walled gardens still dominate, but platforms like MMP could appeal to companies looking for both reach and control without the enterprise price tag.

Why It Matters

AI-driven marketing platforms aren’t new, but most still cater to large enterprises with the budget (and patience) to navigate them. MMP’s bet is on accessibility—giving solopreneurs, challenger brands, and SMBs tools that blend automation with expert human guidance.

Daniel Steele, advisor and co-founder of Influential, compared the launch to the early days of social platforms. “Just like social platforms exploded by giving creators and influencers new ways to connect with audiences overnight, My Marketing Pro is giving businesses that same kind of acceleration in marketing—fast, simple, and scalable.”

Human + AI: Not Either/Or

MMP emphasizes that it’s not all algorithms. The platform pairs AI efficiency with human expertise, aiming to create campaigns that are not only automated but also strategically sound. For businesses burned by “set-and-forget” AI tools that miss the nuance, this hybrid approach could be key.

The Competitive Landscape

MMP enters a crowded space where HubSpot, Mailchimp, and a wave of AI-powered adtech startups already offer SMB-friendly solutions. What differentiates MMP is the attempt to bridge mass awareness channels like TV and out-of-home with direct, precision-driven tactics in a single interface. If it works, that breadth could be its edge.

Whether MMP can pry SMBs away from Google and Meta is another story. But if the platform delivers on its promise of affordability, speed, and sophistication, it might just carve out a new lane in the connected media space.

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GOcxm Inc., a retail execution and consumer engagement platform for CPGs, has snapped up MobileXCo, a Toronto-based leader in mobile-first shopper engagement and brand activation. The price wasn’t disclosed, but the strategy is clear: marry in-store execution with gamified loyalty and research tools to give brands a single lens on ROI and long-term growth.

Why It Matters

The acquisition lands at a time when consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies are scrambling to connect store shelves with digital loyalty. Historically, those worlds lived apart—execution teams tracked compliance while marketers ran engagement programs. By combining forces, GOcxm and MobileXCo are betting that CPGs will pay for a unified view of how shopper activations translate into conversions and repeat purchases.

What Each Side Brings

• GOcxm: AI-enabled retail execution and consumer engagement tech, already used by global brands to monitor in-store performance.

• MobileXCo: A portfolio of loyalty programs, gamified brand experiences, and shopper research capabilities built for CPGs.

Together, the pitch is end-to-end: flawless shelf compliance plus mobile-first loyalty, all tied back to actionable insights.

Executives Weigh In

Gary Kalk, CEO of GOcxm, framed the move as the missing link between “ensuring flawless in-store compliance” and “driving engagement, conversion and brand loyalty.” MobileXCo founder Andy Bruce called it a chance to scale globally while keeping focus on “measurable value and consumer satisfaction.”

Bigger Picture

With retail media networks booming and shopper data becoming the new battleground, CPG brands are under pressure to prove the ROI of every program. The deal positions GOcxm as not just a retail execution platform but a data insights and actions company—a subtle but important shift as marketers demand both activation and accountability.

Rivals in this space, from NielsenIQ to IRI and emerging shopper-tech startups, are also leaning into the “connected commerce” story. GOcxm’s acquisition of MobileXCo puts it on the same playing field, albeit with a stronger mobile-first loyalty angle.

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In the loyalty game, knowing which customers are slipping away is half the battle. TrueLoyal, the AI-powered loyalty platform built for multi-channel consumer brands, has launched Churn Prediction, a proprietary engine designed to give marketers a head start on retention.

The promise? Brands can now spot at-risk customers weeks before they disengage—and win them back with personalized campaigns that actually land. Early beta tests delivered a 10% boost in customer winbacks, a measurable lift in both revenue per member and long-term value.

Looking Ahead, Not Back

Most loyalty platforms still live in the rearview mirror, reporting on what customers did yesterday. TrueLoyal’s predictive AI takes a different tack: it looks forward, crunching behavioral, transactional, and even sentiment data to flag churn risks in advance.

Think of it as a loyalty crystal ball. If a customer’s online activity starts dropping, their product review sours, and their in-store visits taper off, TrueLoyal can stitch those signals together into an actionable warning. That foresight helps brands avoid wasting ad dollars on generic blasts and instead tailor offers where they’ll make the biggest impact.

“Customer retention is a core driver of profitable growth,” said Sameer Kamat, CEO of TrueLoyal. “We’re moving brands from guesswork to certainty, making one-to-one personalization at scale a reality.”

Under the Hood: Rich Data, Real Context

The Churn Prediction model taps into a wide data set:

• Unified transactions across online and in-store purchases

• Zero-party data gathered directly from customer surveys

• Social sentiment scraped from reviews and user-generated content

• Behavioral signals such as browsing habits and engagement drops

It’s this mix that allows TrueLoyal to flag churn risk far earlier than traditional loyalty programs that only see part of the picture.

Practical Tools for Marketers

The engine isn’t just predictive—it’s actionable. Each loyalty member gets a risk score that feeds directly into campaign tools and dashboards. Marketers can then build retention campaigns around high-value customers most likely to leave, with AI recommendations tailored to specific industries like beauty, CPG, or automotive aftermarket.

For consumer brands wrestling with soaring acquisition costs and fragmented channels, this kind of predictive precision could prove critical. Instead of chasing the next new customer, they can keep the ones they already have longer—and happier.

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Kyndryl, the IT infrastructure giant spun out of IBM, has named Simon Gillespie as its new Country Leader for New Zealand, doubling down on local leadership as demand for cloud, AI, and cybersecurity accelerates across the region.

Gillespie, based in Auckland, will oversee growth initiatives, deepen customer and partner ties, and steer the company’s strategy as Kiwi enterprises step up digital transformation.

A Veteran of New Zealand’s IT Scene

Gillespie is no stranger to the NZ tech landscape. He joins from Fujitsu, where he served as Sales Manager, and has held senior roles at NTT New Zealand, Spark Digital, and Dimension Data NZ. With more than three decades of experience leading large-scale IT infrastructure overhauls, government sector projects, and high-growth strategies, his résumé positions him as a steady hand in a turbulent market.

Why This Matters

Kyndryl may be less of a household name compared to hyperscalers like AWS or Microsoft Azure, but it’s firmly embedded in the mission-critical end of enterprise tech—keeping banks, utilities, and public agencies running. For New Zealand, where organizations are racing to modernize IT while juggling budget and skills constraints, Gillespie’s appointment signals Kyndryl’s intent to grab a bigger slice of the transformation pie.

It also marks another sign of intensifying competition in the region. Fujitsu, NTT, and Accenture have all been pushing hard on cloud and managed services in ANZ, while homegrown players like Spark and Datacom remain influential. Kyndryl’s bet seems clear: local leadership with deep market relationships is the key to staying relevant.

The Road Ahead

With cloud adoption maturing, AI-driven automation on the rise, and cyber threats escalating, the enterprise services market in New Zealand is far from quiet. Gillespie’s challenge will be balancing Kyndryl’s global muscle with a localized strategy—helping Kiwi organizations modernize without losing sight of practical outcomes.

Whether that translates into market share gains remains to be seen. But Kyndryl is clearly signaling it’s not content to play a supporting role in New Zealand’s digital shift.

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Temu, the fast-rising global online marketplace best known for bargain prices and viral popularity, is putting down local roots in Switzerland. The company announced it’s opening its platform to Swiss-based sellers, giving them a new channel to reach customers while promising shoppers faster deliveries and a more tailored product mix.

For now, Temu sellers will only serve customers inside Switzerland, but the company plans to expand seller reach across other markets. Local businesses signing up will receive onboarding support—Temu’s way of making sure the transition from shopfront to app icon is as seamless as possible.

The move is part of Temu’s broader “local-to-local” initiative, which aims to flip the perception of the platform as a strictly cross-border discount hub. Instead, Temu wants to blend the price advantage that made it famous with locally sourced products that better reflect national tastes. If all goes as planned, Temu expects as much as 80% of its European sales to eventually come from local sellers and regional fulfillment.

“By focusing on Swiss businesses, we’re creating new growth opportunities while giving consumers access to a wider selection of affordable, quality products with faster delivery,” a Temu spokesperson said.

Context: Why Switzerland, Why Now?

The Swiss market may not be the biggest in Europe, but it’s one of the wealthiest and most e-commerce-friendly. By planting local seller roots, Temu can not only appeal to Swiss shoppers used to premium delivery standards, but also test-drive its local-to-local strategy in a relatively contained, high-value market.

It’s also a clever counter to rivals like Amazon, which already leverages vast local fulfillment networks across Europe. Temu’s ability to bring its rock-bottom prices closer to home could make it more than just an import curiosity—it could become a genuine competitor in local e-commerce ecosystems.

Shopper Perks: Savings and Speed

Temu points to research from Ipsos suggesting users worldwide save an average of 24% when shopping on the platform, with 80% of customers saying Temu delivers strong value for money. Local sellers could add a new layer: products more aligned with Swiss lifestyles, delivered in days rather than weeks.

If the strategy clicks in Switzerland, expect Temu to replicate it elsewhere in Europe. The race isn’t just about who has the lowest prices anymore—it’s about who can localize fastest without losing that edge.

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