Sprout Social, Inc., an industry-leading provider of cloud-based social media management software, today announced the appointment of Crystal Boysen to chief people officer (CPO), effective March 25, 2024. As CPO, Boysen will oversee Sprout’s global people function and have an essential role in building and elevating Sprout’s world-class team.

Boysen brings more than 15 years of deep, cross-functional HR experience. Prior to Sprout, Boysen was the CPO at Vimeo where she was responsible for driving a people-first organization and culture, and attracting, engaging and retaining talent globally as the company scaled. Boysen also previously held the role of Global Head of People at Canva where she oversaw a people team of 140 and drove the people strategy to enable Canva’s hyper-growth. Under her leadership, Canva scaled from 500 to 2,500 employees while growing from $200 million to $750 million in annual recurring revenue, and was recognized as one of Australia’s Greatest Places to Work.

"The dedication and intentional focus Sprout has put on developing their people to reach their highest potential is inspiring, and I am energized by the opportunity to fuel innovation and growth with an exceptional team,” said Boysen. “Together, we'll foster a high-performance culture where everyone thrives and teams not only excel professionally, but find fulfillment in their work.”

“Crystal has the perfect combination of experience, passion, humanity and high standards that we look for in our leaders—with a deep understanding and thoughtful perspective on what it takes to build and elevate an engaged, inclusive culture and world-class team,” said Justyn Howard, CEO of Sprout Social. “Our team is critical to the success of our business and customers, and creating a workplace where they continue to be empowered to do their best work will be a key priority for Crystal and the People team.”

New offering brings together Brevo’s Marketing, Conversations, and Customer Data Platforms, providing a cohesive experience for customers

Brevo, a leading provider of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions, announced the launch of Brevo Commerce Suite, a new solution that provides retailers and e-commerce companies with a 360-degree view of their customer data, empowering them to easily retain and engage customers with personalized, multi-channel communications. With 30 percent of its existing customers in the retail and e-commerce industries, Brevo Commerce Suite will accelerate the company’s position in the global e-commerce market, which is projected to be worth $8 trillion by 2027.

Tackling the Industry’s Most Complex Issues
Consumer demand for better customer experience continues to grow in line with the rapid growth of the global e-commerce market. However, providing an ideal customer experience has become increasingly complicated for merchants who have both e-commerce and brick-and-mortar locations, where online and offline data don’t always communicate with each other.

With the Brevo Commerce Suite, merchants can analyze the full spectrum of their customers’ purchasing habits across all channels, allowing them to send more personalized recommendations. They can also improve the customer experience through multi-channel communication adapted to each customer by email, SMS, chat, and social media.

“Today’s merchants face fierce competition when it comes to attracting and retaining customers,” said Armand Thiberge, CEO and founder of Brevo. “Consumers expect hyper-personalized content, immediate answers to their questions, and seamless customer experiences. Failing to meet these expectations could lead them to shop elsewhere next time.”

Brevo Commerce Suite: A Turnkey Solution
Brevo Commerce Suite extends the comprehensive suite of Brevo’s best-in-class solutions and capabilities and enables retailers and e-commerce companies to:

• Increase the customer lifetime value
  • Expand reach and push contacts closer to purchase with multichannel campaigns (email, WhatsApp, SMS, Web Push and more).
  • Use automation to increase abandoned cart recovery, make product recommendations, and more.
  • Personalize content and suggest relevant products using enriched data.

• Leverage consolidated customer and product insights
  • Unify online and offline customer data, mapping it to a multi-table retail data model.
  • Integrate with e-commerce store data to get a full view of their customer purchase history.
  • Incorporate analytics and built-in dashboards to help identify product performance, repeat customers, purchase frequency and more.

• Optimize customer experience and engagement
  • Empower customers to interact on their preferred channels, from website chat to social media messages and phone calls.
  • Humanize the digital buying experience by proactively starting live chat conversations with online visitors, helping them find what they need and get to checkout faster.
  • Provide instant 24/7 service using automated responses and predefined scenarios in a chatbot, even when agents are offline.

Teads, the global media platform, today announced an expanded global partnership with LG Ad Solutions, a global leader in connected TV (CTV) and cross-screen advertising, on exclusive CTV native advertising inventory in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand, and across 10 Asia Pacific countries, including Indonesia, Vietnam, Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan, and India.  These new territories extend Teads' current exclusive footprint on LG Smart TVs in France and Belgium. Now the sole premium partner for the first touch point on LG TVs in these regions, Teads is furthering quality advertiser reach on the largest screen in consumers' homes.

Bertrand Quesada, Co-Founder and Co-CEO, Teads said: "Our expanded partnership with LG Ad Solutions enables brands and agency partners to extend exceptional creative across all screens and further their storytelling with vast audiences. In just less than a year, we've already seen tremendous success in France and Belgium, as they embrace CTV native advertising to leverage omnichannel strategies. We look forward to our elevated relationship as we deepen our CTV presence globally with a world-class leader."

In France, Teads partnered with Danone to launch their first CTV campaign as an Olympic Games sponsor, utilizing LG Ad Solutions' exclusive, high-impact CTV Native format. This omnichannel approach, augmented by Teads Studio and refined with contextual and retail data, effectively reached audiences across various devices, ensuring the brand's presence in an ultra-premium, brand-safe environment.

Thibaud Rivals, Lead Media Manager at Danone in Paris, shared, "The strategy deployed by Teads enabled us to respond to the challenges of media fragmentation and the new uses of our audiences. We were delighted to have been one of the first companies to test this new CTV screen, through the partnership between Teads and LG Ad Solutions."

Teads and LG Ad Solutions' exclusive deal across the globe supplements existing partnerships in Central and Eastern Europe on LG Smart TVs. The broader footprint allows advertisers to benefit from the targeting capabilities of LG Ad Solutions' Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) technology. The seamless ad integration and targeting accuracy promotes relevant experiences for viewers and optimized media performance for advertisers.

Serge Matta, President of Global Ad Sales said: "As Smart TVs are increasingly becoming the central device of the household around the world, we are thrilled to expand our exclusive partnership with Teads in these new regions. We're eager to further elevate our direct-to-glass strategy and shared mission in partnering with brands to deliver incremental audiences."

Brands can now benefit from LG Ad Solutions' ACR data in these regions, allowing them to understand the viewing behaviors of LG TV users via visual and audio recognition tools in a fully privacy-compliant manner. Teads will be able to target specific audiences based on the type of TV consumption (linear/streaming), content and ad exposures, and other relevant viewership data on LG Smart TVs. LG Ad Solutions' advertising formats create a bridge between linear TV and OTT content consumption on the largest screen in the home, providing prominent brand placement, interactive ad formats, and direct access to advertised content and products.

Teads works closely with industry-recognized partners such as Kantar, Comscore, and TVision to conduct comprehensive and reliable measurement solutions. This provides clients with robust insights and performance metrics, enabling them to assess the effectiveness of their campaigns and make informed strategic decisions. Teads collaborates with Comscore and LiveRamp on audience offerings, while also developing its own genre-targeting capabilities, enabling buyers to target their ideal consumers on CTV platforms efficiently.

This strategic partnership with LG Ad Solutions not only opens doors to new CTV audiences by expanding access to Teads' premium inventory but also allows brands to leverage Teads' holistic omnichannel targeting strategy to ensure precision targeting and impactful campaigns across screens. Combined with tailored ad formats that further amplify brand storytelling, Teads is empowering brands to cut through the clutter and captivate viewers on the biggest screen, thereby maximizing engagement and driving measurable results in the ever-evolving digital advertising landscape.

AIOps Company Expands Executive Team To Accelerate Growth 

BigPanda, Inc., the leading AIOps platform for automating IT Operations, announced it has appointed Tom Melzl as chief revenue officer. In his role, Melzl will oversee the BigPanda sales and go-to-market strategy, leading the team as they bring AIOps into the modern world for enterprises.

Melzl joins BigPanda with decades of sales leadership experience and a proven track record of driving results by leveraging data, engineering, and marketing. He has spent the entirety of his career in the technology and software industry, where he developed a passion for big data, AI, and generative AI in the realm of ITOps. Most recently, Melzl served as chief revenue officer at Coveo and supported the company’s IPO in 2021. During his tenure at Coveo, Melzl led the company from $50M ARR to $120M ARR. Previously, he served as chief revenue officer for FaceFirst and StackIQ.

“Tom’s proven track record of scaling high-performing revenue teams and fostering winning cultures is exactly what we were looking for at BigPanda,” said Assaf Resnick, CEO and founder of BigPanda. “His experience and customer-centric approach will be invaluable for BigPanda as we scale our go-to-market activities.”

“When I first met with Assaf and the team, I was blown away by BigPanda’s unique value proposition, market opportunity, and its clear ability to transform ITOps from reactive to proactive,” said Tom Melzl, chief revenue officer at BigPanda. “I was equally impressed with the intelligent, creative, and collaborative leadership team and their emphasis on working cross-functionally. I’m excited to continue elevating BigPanda as an AIOps leader alongside them.”

Over the past year, BigPanda announced multiple new features to improve the IT incident lifecycle. In July 2023, BigPanda unveiled its Automated Incident Analysis product a new generative AI capability that provides ITOps teams with fast, accurate, and consistent insights into every incident. In September, the company launched its updated Root Cause Changes feature, which leverages explainable artificial intelligence to correlate incident alerts with infrastructure change data. With these updates, BigPanda can dramatically improve incident root-cause identification and reduce response times by 50%.

Zumigo, Inc., the leader in mobile identity authentication, today announced the launch of new authentication and onboarding capabilities in Zumigo DeRiskify, the company’s award-winning flagship anti-fraud solution for e-commerce. The enhancements significantly improve the customer sign-up/sign-in experience by eliminating the need for passwords, as well as providing merchants with deeper transaction insights so that they can understand how fraud affects their business.

Zumigo DeRiskify leverages deterministic digital user information such as the customer’s phone number, payment details, email and IP addresses to authenticate transactions. The resulting trust score empowers merchants to fulfill only the low-risk transactions. Merchants reduce losses and eliminate chargebacks by stopping fraudulent orders before processing them.

“Merchants can now offer a more streamlined and more secure onboarding experience to customers, which will improve overall conversion rate,” said Chirag Bakshi, CEO of Zumigo. “In addition, the new dashboard provides details of each transaction which allow merchants to understand how their business is affected by fraudulent purchases.”

Learn more about these new capabilities to be unveiled at next week’s ShopTalk 2024 at Mandalay Bay, Las Vegas. Zumigo is hosting meetings with attendees. Contact Zumigo to schedule a meeting and demo before the event.

Zumigo DeRiskify’s expanded capabilities are in response to e-commerce merchants’ growing priorities to boost revenue and ensure customer satisfaction. The solution offers a passwordless log-in option to reduce customer friction and increase conversion, as passwords pose security risks and are often cumbersome to handle. To streamline the checkout process, after completion of initial enrollment, the customer’s shipping and billing information can be automatically filled in.

The transaction dashboard provides deeper insights into purchase activities. Merchants can see how their orders are performing at a glance, including the number of total transactions, what are the high-risk orders and customers, the number of fraud orders processed and their value, the type of merchandise that is high risk, and the location/origins of risky transactions. Merchants can also drill into each transaction for more information.

“We have been using Zumigo DeRiskify for two years now, and we have seen great results,” said Shoaib Ahmed, Founder and CEO from Scooty Mobility, Inc. “Our fraudulent purchases have declined by 26% – which is a significant amount. Our next step is to make the customer experience even more delightful. Now with the new passwordless log-in capability, we will be able to achieve that while preventing fraud.”

“The State of Email and Collaboration Security" 2024 (SOECS) report. According to the research, cyber threats are growing at an unprecedented pace, and the year ahead is fraught with cybercrime and incidents anticipated ahead of the busy election year where over 50 countries head to the polls. With new threats like AI and deepfake technology, the stakes are higher than ever to execute a strong cyber defense. 

Mimecast has expanded the eighth edition of this annual report to include insight on collaboration security in addition to email. SOECS is based on an in-depth global survey of 1,100 information technology and cybersecurity professionals.  

Highlights from this year’s report include: 

Human risk is today's biggest security gap, and IT teams must better equip employees with the right tools and training. 74% of all cyber breaches are caused by human factors, including errors, stolen credentials, misuse of access privileges, or social engineering.  

IT teams are proactively stepping up their defense strategies, especially as AI presents new challenges. The emergence of AI is accelerating the spread of phishing and ransomware by making it easier for threat actors to perpetrate successful attacks. 8 out of 10 respondents are concerned about new threats posed by AI and 67% say AI-driven attacks will soon become the norm. As companies prepare for new threats, they’re viewing cyber risks as a bigger business problem, not just an IT problem. 

Email remains the primary attack vector for cyber threats like phishing, spoofing, and ransomware, but collaboration tools pose new and dangerous points of entry for bad actors. 70% expect collaboration tools to pose new threats, and 69% believe it is likely that their company will be harmed by a collaboration tool-based attack.

“Emerging tools and technologies like AI and deepfakes, along with the proliferation of collaboration platforms are changing the way threat actors work; but people remain the biggest barrier to protecting companies from cyber threats,” said Marc van Zadelhoff, Mimecast CEO. “Cybersecurity and IT teams need to work with wider business leaders to prioritize understanding human risk. With the right tools and education, companies can better safeguard against threats and manage human risk.” 

For more insights download the full “The State of Email and Collaboration Security” 2024 report. 

Mimecast: Work Protected™  
Since 2003, Mimecast has stopped bad things from happening to good organizations by enabling them to Work Protected. We empower more than 42,000 customers to help mitigate risk and manage complexities across a threat landscape driven by malicious cyberattacks, human error, and technology fallibility. Our advanced solutions provide the proactive threat detection, brand protection, awareness training, and data retention capabilities that evolving workplaces need today. Mimecast solutions are designed to transform email and collaboration security into the eyes and ears of organizations worldwide.  

Mimecast, the Mimecast logo, and Work Protected are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Mimecast Services Limited in the United States and/or other countries.  All other third-party trademarks and logos contained in this press release are the property of their respective owners.   

DataDome, a leading provider of AI-powered online fraud and bot management, today announced the launch of DataDome Ad Protect, designed to combat fraudulent traffic affecting digital ad campaigns. This innovative solution is set to transform how organizations manage and secure their online advertising efforts, ensuring that marketing budgets are spent effectively and reach genuine audiences.

In an era where digital ad spend is at an all-time high, malicious bots pose a significant threat by inflating metrics and draining budgets through fraudulent clicks. By applying DataDome's unparalleled detection accuracy to the ad fraud problem, DataDome Ad Protect detects fraud from the first click, quickly eliminating wasted ad spend and improving ROI for advertisers.

"With DataDome Ad Protect, we're leveraging the best bot detection engine in the market to tackle ad fraud head-on. Already, we've uncovered that up to 35% of our customers' ad traffic is fraudulent," said Benjamin Fabre, co-founder and CEO at DataDome. "But our solution is not just about identifying wasted spend; it's about reclaiming valuable time for marketing and IT teams, eliminating the need for cumbersome spreadsheets, and accelerating the value derived from marketing campaigns."

DataDome's solution solves an acute problem for advertisers. According to Statista research, bad bots are responsible for nearly 18 percent of internet traffic in the marketing industry. DataDome Ad Protect empowers marketers to allocate their campaign funds more effectively, focusing on genuine user engagement and reducing fraudulent clicks. This not only optimizes marketing budgets but also enhances the overall effectiveness of digital advertising campaigns.

By detecting abnormal behavior and safeguarding web and mobile ad campaigns from bot interference, DataDome Ad Protect empowers its users to:

• Reduce wasted ad spend by accurately detecting automated click fraud in marketing campaigns. DataDome's bot detection models pinpoint and categorize illegitimate automated traffic, allowing marketers to make precise adjustments to campaign budget allocations.
• Make informed campaign decisions, leveraging full buyer metrics and the precision of our trusted, industry-leading bot detection. DataDome distinguishes between genuine and fraudulent interactions, ensuring advertisers only pay for authentic engagement.
• Boost the bottom line. DataDome Ad Protect detects fraudulent ad traffic from the first click, saving valuable time and reducing manual efforts, enabling enterprises to save money faster.
• Take more control with a tool from an unbiased source with a transparent and objective perspective on click fraud.

Today's news comes on the heels of several recent announcements, including DataDome's expansion of its bot bounty program, the release of Device Check, its channel partner program expansion, and closing $42M in Series C funding. DataDome has received widespread recognition in the past year for its market-leading detection and mitigation capabilities, including being the only bot detection & mitigation provider to rank on G2's prestigious Best Security Products of 2024 list, Best Use of Machine Learning/AI in the 2023 SC Europe Awards, the 2023 Fortress Cybersecurity Award for Application Security, the 2023 Global Infosec Award for Most Innovative Bot Mitigation

Gracenote, a Nielsen company, is helping TV providers optimize their user experiences by providing the most accurate, up-to-date and comprehensive datasets covering subscription video on-demand (SVOD) and linear (FAST) content availability. The Gracenote solutions pair TV, movie and sports programming availability data with normalized program metadata to ensure that streaming aggregators, digital platforms and MVPDs offer content-first user experiences that facilitate universal search, discovery and tune-in capabilities to drive maximum audience engagement.

According to Nielsen's State of Play report, 20% of consumers say they abandon a viewing session when they can't find something compelling to watch. With content frequently moving between providers, a blockbuster movie that is available on a VOD platform one day could be gone the next. Different streaming services may feature different seasons or individual episodes of a popular TV show hampering seamless viewing experiences. Accelerating fragmentation among live sports rights makes finding a single game difficult and following a team throughout a full season nearly impossible.

While the streaming age has brought compelling content and on-demand access to consumers, it has also brought frustration among viewers unable to find what they're looking for. To address the fragmented viewing experience, Gracenote has launched three primary offerings in its Availability solution that can help video providers put compelling content first and solve common "where, when and how to watch" as well as "take me to watch" use cases.

Together, these offerings enable customers to address consumer pain points, deliver improved user experiences and drive better monetization:

• Streaming Sports Catalogs - Highly accurate availability data, viewing options and deep links plus normalized metadata for live sports events helping CTV and digital customers point fans to games no matter what streaming service they're on
• Streaming Video Catalogs - The industry's most comprehensive and up-to-date TV program and movie availability data, viewing options, deep links and normalized metadata helping connect viewers to the entertainment content they want across various services
• FAST / Streaming Channels - High-quality normalized metadata for nearly 2,000 linear channels worldwide helping digital platforms launch FAST offerings more quickly and easily than ever

"As the entertainment ecosystem continues to evolve, a massive opportunity exists to drive the next iteration of streaming," said Trent Wheeler, Chief Product Officer at Gracenote. "For it to reach its full potential as a channel, streaming needs to deliver better user experiences enabled by search and discovery of all content - TV, movies and live sports - wherever it's available. With our unmatched availability and program metadata, Gracenote is uniquely positioned to help customers drive success in streaming now and into the future."

Gracenote has a long history of powering the user experiences of the world's biggest and most innovative TV providers since 1965. The company's industry-leading program metadata, imagery and ID offerings which have been integral to linear EPGs are now fueling the next generation of streaming service UIs and CTV home screens that seamlessly connect viewers to the content they're most interested in. As the entertainment industry continues its evolution, Gracenote is transforming its offerings in step to ensure customers can effectively leverage programming to maximize engagement and monetization.

Gracenote is the content solutions business unit of Nielsen, providing entertainment metadata, content IDs and related offerings to the world's leading creators, distributors and platforms. Gracenote technology enables advanced content navigation and discovery capabilities helping individuals to easily connect to the TV shows, movies, music and sports they love while delivering powerful content analytics making complex business decisions simpler.