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.

DataGrail, the leading Data Privacy Platform,™ today announces its AI Governance Solution. At a time when 48% of CISOs cite AI security as their biggest concern, DataGrail’s AI Governance Solution uncovers AI risks in third-party apps and systems that power their business, helping organizations get the benefits of AI innovation, while understanding and managing its associated risks. 

Additionally, in response to customer demand, DataGrail unveiled its Responsible AI Use Principles & Policies Playbook. Available to enterprises and consumer brands, DataGrail provides a framework for businesses to develop their own customized AI principles and policy based on their values. This two-pronged approach– assisting brands in creating their own policies while simultaneously examining AI risk posed by third parties– is game-changing for companies navigating an uncertain, rapidly evolving data privacy landscape.

“The AI landscape is evolving quickly. As such, we must teach AI to work with us, not against us, and that means taking a pragmatic approach to discovering where you’re using AI, monitoring its usage, and controlling it when possible,” said DataGrail CEO and Co-founder Daniel Barber. “Regulations are coming, but not soon enough. To preserve the human right to data privacy, companies must act now. With DataGrail for AI Governance and our playbook on responsible AI use, we provide organizations with everything they need to move forward mindfully.”

Gary Flake Joins DataGrail Advisory Board

Underscoring its commitment to leading companies into an AI future, DataGrail also announced that technology visionary Gary Flake will take on an active advisory role, weighing in on the company’s AI policies and procedures, as well as how AI fits into its product roadmap. Flake is currently the Chief Scientist of e14.ai, a startup seeking to decode EEG for brain-health insights and the future of human-computer interactions. Flake has also held executive positions at Microsoft, Yahoo!, Salesforce, and Overture and has advised dozens of startups, public companies, non-profits, universities, and government research institutions. Notably, Flake has filed over 150 patents and has numerous publications spanning over 35 years, focusing on machine learning, data mining, search, data visualization and complex systems.

AI Governance That Meets the Moment

Amid increased third-party risk, and rising consumer data privacy expectations, CISOs in particular are tasked with understanding data risk from generative AI, interpreting what sources it has access to, and uncovering its classification of data. DataGrail’s patent-pending Responsible Data Discovery uncovers shadow AI within a business. With this technology, DataGrail found it’s likely at least 40% of businesses are either knowingly or unknowingly using OpenAI at their businesses.

With DataGrail’s AI Governance Solution security and privacy teams can:

• Discover traditional AI and generative AI models in third parties: DataGrail’s Responsible Data Discovery continuously detects AI and generative AI models used throughout an organization's SaaS and third-party systems.
• Easily categorize systems & data: Automatically identify models within your systems and apply smart categories, providing an up-to-date view of business risk.
• Assess, audit, and monitor AI risks: Build AI risk assessment to meet regulatory requirements, including the EU’s AI act and California’s automated decision-making enforcements. Extend Data Protection Impact Reports (DPIAs) or Privacy Impact Assessments (PIAs) to understand third-party vendor AI usage and give a holistic view of vendors using AI.
• Orchestrate data requests across your AI systems: No matter where personal information lives across your AI systems, DataGrail will orchestrate deletion, access, and opt-out requests.

A Playbook Designed to Safeguard the Future in an AI World

DataGrail collaborated with several customers to develop a playbook that guides leaders through a straightforward process that others can learn from in order to create their own AI Use principles and policies that meet their needs and brand values. Simultaneously, DataGrail worked to formulate its internal policies on responsible AI use. The DataGrail Responsible AI Use Principles & Policies Playbook removes the headaches, stress, and uncertainty companies experience when trying to craft policies themselves by walking teams through a series of basic steps and principles. This simple yet essential resource also includes worksheets, questions, and examples that can further assist companies in their efforts to take advantage of AI responsibly.

“AI is transforming the world– it’s something every company should adopt– but with care,” said new DataGrail Advisor, Gary Flake. “Generative AI in particular is an innovation accelerator, yet as with any new technology, there can be unintended consequences. DataGrail helps companies be prepared. This is one of the most important missions of our time, and I look forward to working with the team to ensure companies adopt best practices to get the most out of AI with the least risk.”

MikMak, the global software company that helps the world’s leading brands grow commerce-first, today announced a series of product enhancements to its leading eCommerce acceleration platform MikMak 3.0, including the new MikMak Headless Commerce API and MikMak Insights’ Custom Report Builder.

With these upgrades, MikMak enters the world of ‘headless commerce’, an approach that separates the back-end functionalities of an eCommerce application from the front end. MikMak will work closely with brands’ IT leaders to enable custom, privacy-safe, compliant, and scalable ‘where to buy’ technology integration to their brand websites worldwide.

Introducing the MikMak Headless Commerce API

The new MikMak Headless Commerce API enables brands to take full control over their customer experience by giving them the ability to build, design, and customize their eCommerce websites and media experiences, powered by MikMak’s best-in-class global retail network, inventory data, and sales attribution. Brands can increase the discoverability of their products, and prevent consumers from reaching dead-end experiences such as ‘out-of-stock' pages.

This upgrade to the MikMak Commerce solution – which already enables brands to create a premium shopping experience and seamless path to checkout at any retailer – will further increase brands’ ability to enable frictionless commerce across their entire media mix and further develop their digital innovation strategies.

“MikMak has been an instrumental partner throughout our digital transformation, especially across the IT, Marketing, Product, and eCommerce teams here at Mark Anthony Group. We’re an agile organization that moves fast, so one of the main reasons we chose to partner with MikMak over other providers is that they're constantly innovating, and this product release is another example of just that,” said Nuno Pedro, Global Head of the Digital Center of Excellence at Mark Anthony Group.

Upgrades to MikMak Insights: Custom Report Builder

In addition to fully customizable multi-retailer checkouts, MikMak brand partners also boost marketing effectiveness with the launch of MikMak 3.0’s Custom Report Builder.

The Custom Report Builder allows brands to build bespoke reports that identify the key variables driving purchase intent and sales with the desired metrics, dimensions, and filters in the MikMak Insights Platform. The reports can be quickly and easily shared within organizations, thus improving collaboration, and saving time and money for brands.

“Our dedication to enabling and measuring commerce globally drives us to provide brands with constant innovations to ensure more shoppers convert better and faster than ever before,” said Rachel Tipograph, Founder and CEO of MikMak. “With our latest platform upgrades, from headless commerce to AI, we’re equipped to deliver customized experiences based on actionable data so brands can make stronger, faster business decisions and know exactly where, how, and when to spend their next marketing dollar.”

Adopting Self-Service and Single Sign-On capabilities: Further platform enhancements

To boost business efficiencies further, MikMak has also introduced Single Sign-On to the MikMak 3.0 platform. This feature supports productivity and security by cutting down time spent tackling password barriers, reducing the need to manage multiple passwords, and mitigating the risk of phishing attacks, keeping brand data safe and secure.

Other incoming MikMak Commerce upgrades include a user-friendly method for creating and deploying inventory-aware, multi-retailer checkout on brand websites using MikMak’s in-platform self-service tools and pre-built templates.

Supporting brand compliance of industry-specific regulations with new automated controls

MikMak has integrated new features into the MikMak 3.0 Platform to support compliance with Alcohol and Toy industry laws and regulations. This includes addressing challenges posed by Tied-House laws, Marketplace laws, various state regulations, and the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule.

These automated controls are easy to access and update in the MikMak 3.0 platform.

Building on momentum

These platform enhancements come off the back of significant momentum for MikMak. With the recent acquisition of ChannelAdvisor’s Shoppable Media and Brand Analytics product lines from Rithum (formerly CommerceHub), as well as its newly formed partnerships with NIQ and Circana, MikMak is bolstering its global expansion, product innovation, and optimization of the world’s most advanced Commerce enablement and analytics platform, MikMak 3.0.

Over the next year, MikMak will expand its product portfolio into other areas of brands’ commerce marketing tech stacks, focusing on attribution capabilities, data partnerships, and AI-powered predictive analytics and product information. Ramping up these initiatives will support businesses in acquiring deeper omnichannel insights and optimizing marketing initiatives by channel, platform, suggested retailers, and more.

Cloudinary, the image and video technology platform that powers many of the world’s top brands, today announced a series of new intelligent image optimization capabilities, including Automatic Crop (c_auto), the only solution on the market to ensure a contextually consistent, picture-perfect crop for every image at incredible scale. The company also introduced its latest generative AI innovation, Image Enhance (e_enhance), which automatically improves image quality and produces professional-looking results, as well as Enhanced Downscaling, which ensures the highest quality remains when images are reduced for use as thumbnails or previews. 

Delivering picture-perfect visual assets to online audiences is critical for any digital business but cropping every image for every digital experience scenario would be impossible for brands to do manually – especially for those managing millions of visual assets. More than 10,000 brands and 1.5 million developers rely on Cloudinary to ensure they deliver fully optimized and performant images and videos. Cloudinary’s newest set of optimization features deliver on the fast and flawless promise that its customers such as Adidas, Etsy, Bass Pro Shops and Fiverr have come to expect.

Cloudinary’s latest optimization innovations enable users to automatically:

• Crop complex images such as product images featuring human models and sports-action photos. Automatic Crop (c_auto) delivers unrivaled intelligence and simplicity and is a complement to Cloudinary's best-in-class AI Auto Gravity (g_auto), a popular capability that ensures the most interesting areas of an image remain the image’s main focus.
• Turn low-quality images into professional-grade assets by solving common issues such as exposure balancing, white balancing and color vividness. With Image Enhance (e_enhance), brands can trust that every image on web- and mobile-responsive sites looks and performs optimally.
• Create picture-perfect image thumbnails and previews through Enhanced Downscaling, which preserves more details when reducing image dimensions.
• Deliver all images and videos in the optimal format and size by default based on the user’s device, browser and bandwidth - including new and modern formats such as AVIF, JPEG XL and AV1. Auto-Optimize eliminates the risk of poorly-performing images and videos that harm page-load times and negatively impact the user experience, while also helping to reduce a brand’s digital carbon footprint. Tests of the new feature have shown Cloudinary’s video API is the fastest in the market for delivering optimized videos across the full range of viewing contexts.

“Cloudinary’s media science and AI expertise empowers us to build the most complete set of solutions for delivering dynamic and picture-perfect visual experiences at scale,” said Tal Lev-Ami, co-founder and CTO, Cloudinary. “The intelligent image optimizations announced today further reinforce Cloudinary as the most complete platform for automating the complex and time-consuming optimizations required to engage modern consumers.”

Kajabi, the leading creator commerce platform, today announced a collaboration with Adobe Express and the public launch of Creator Studio a generative AI tool that, in seconds, enables creators to turn a single video into more than 40 pieces of content across social posts, blog posts, email and more. As part of this unique tech team-up, Adobe Express—the all-in-one AI content creation tool—is now directly integrated into Kajabi's Creator Studio, pairing the power of generative AI with high-impact editing and design capabilities, empowering creators to accelerate the growth trajectory of their online ventures.

Since the Creator Studio beta launch in May 2023, Kajabi users have created over 50,000 pieces of content and reduced their time spent on content creation by over 90%. Unlike any other tool on the market, Creator Studio is fueled by over 13 years of marketing data and leverages these insights to create the most optimal marketing campaigns, quickly and easily for creators.

To date, the innovative new tool has helped Kajabi creators:

• Unlock 40+ types of marketing content, including social media clips, emails, mini-courses, community posts, and more.
• Build a polished brand and profitable business with Adobe Express' editing tool without marketing, design, or video editing experience.
• Create share-worthy content for social media from a course lesson, coaching call, or webinar to help creators create marketing gold, then share it directly to social media in just a few clicks.
• Grow and convert audiences using a full-scale marketing funnel to turn leads into customers.

Top-earning creators use AI tools, like Creator Studio, to increase their marketing content output and build their online businesses. According to Kajabi's State of Creators 2024 report, 72% of six-figure creators use AI tools at least weekly, compared to only 54% of lower-earning creators. By using Creator Studio, creators and entrepreneurs save over 20 hours a month and reduce time spent on marketing by 90%.

"Creator Studio is a game-changer for creators," said Graham Cochrane, author, speaker, and podcaster. "Its user-friendly features have reduced my workload and significantly simplified my content creation efforts. On top of that, it's allowed me to get more mileage out of my existing content. The time I've saved with Creator Studio is now being used to build out my long-term strategy and accelerate my business growth."

Powered by the Adobe Express Embed SDK, the new integration of Adobe Express in Creator Studio gives Kajabi creators the access to tools and capabilities that will reduce the time, effort, and resources required to work across different platforms for each stage of the creative journey. Users will start in Creator Studio by uploading a video and selecting the content types they'd like to create, then they'll utilize the all-in-one editor in Adobe Express to enhance the editing process by adding effects, animations, AI-powered text effects, images, and more—all within one platform. With Adobe Express video editing tools, Kajabi creators will have access for the first time, to quickly and easily cut, crop, and trim video footage as well as add music from hundreds of royalty-free Adobe Stock soundtracks. Additional product integrations between Adobe Express and Kajabi are in development to support the growth of creator businesses.

"Product innovation lies at the heart of Kajabi's mission. As we continue to level the playing field for aspiring entrepreneurs, leveraging generative AI remains a pivotal part of our long-term strategy," said Ahad Khan, CEO of Kajabi. "Our collaboration with Adobe Express exemplifies our shared goal of empowering ambitious creators with top-tier creation tools and cutting-edge technology. Together, we're redefining creators' approaches to their craft, enhancing their productivity, and, most importantly, expediting their business growth. With Creator Studio, we're helping creators save time and resources, enabling them to channel their energy where it truly counts: creating content and building business they control."

"We're excited to be teaming up with Kajabi to bring the best of Adobe Express – including social video creation – to creators at a time when content demand is exploding," said Aubrey Cattell, Vice President, Developer Platform & Partner Ecosystem, Adobe. "This new integration, powered by the Adobe Express Embed SDK, demonstrates the combination of Adobe's industry-leading AI content creation app and vast creator expertise from Kajabi to help users of all levels both generate and edit standout content without disrupting their creative workflows."

The collaboration with Adobe Express follows recent news that YouTube creators Colin and Samir have partnered with Kajabi to help more creators take ownership of their incomes. These moves demonstrate Kajabi's commitment to making the creator economy more accessible to everyone and increasing the revenue potential for all creators and digital entrepreneurs.

In 2023, Kajabi announced it had surpassed $6 billion in creator revenue just a few months after reaching the $5 billion mark. Additionally, the creator commerce platform launched its own payment processing solution, Kajabi Payments, and the branded mobile app, allowing creators to build their own mobile app experiences without technical complications or a high price tag. So far, in 2024, Kajabi released its comprehensive annual 'State of Creators' report revealing key trends in the creator economy, including the rise of creator ownership, the diversification of income streams, and creator forecasts for 2024.

Trust Stamp, the Privacy-First Identity Company^TM has announced the commercial release of its new age-estimation technology using deep-learning algorithms.
                                               
Andrew Gowasack, Trust Stamp’s President, commented, “Understanding the age of online users is critical not only to ensuring that services and content appropriate for mature audiences are not accessed by minors but also ensuring that services that are expressly designed to allow young people to interact are not infiltrated by adult users. This is increasingly being recognized by legislative initiatives, and in some cases, algorithmic-based age estimation is expressly being authorized. As with any product of this type, our technology cannot provide an exact age for a user but does provide a confidence level as to an age range allowing platform operators to focus document-based age verification on a subset of their users.”

Andrew Gowasack went on to say, “We recently participated in a bake-off against an industry leader in the age verification field and based upon the performance of our deep-learning technology in that test, we are now negotiating the first commercial implementation for the technology. We can deliver this technology as a SaaS application through our Orchestration Layer, as an on-prem installation, via an SDK for integration into mobile applications or, potentially, as a stand-alone application that can run on the edge without Internet access. Although our first potential customer is an online platform, the demand extends to offline venues and can remove the need for more intrusive in-person requirements. This is a very substantial and fast-growing market opportunity for us and an excellent compliment to our existing identity authentication services.”    

LivePerson, the enterprise leader in digital customer conversations, and Infinity, the award-winning call analytics platform, today announced a partnership to help brands better personalize digital experiences through the power of conversational data and intelligence.

The new partnership drives enhanced personalization and measurable ROI by making it easy to connect attribution data across voice calls and digital messaging conversations. This bi-directional attribution — inclusive of conversations handled with AI and automation — makes it easier to understand a customer's end-to-end, omnichannel journey with a brand. By connecting this data across channels at the individual interaction and aggregate levels, brands can:

• Strengthen their visibility into online-to-offline engagements
• Optimize marketing spend with improved first-touch attribution data
• Better understand factors driving escalation from digital to voice
• Improve sales and service outcomes through more personalized experiences

"According to LivePerson's State of Customer Conversations 2024 report, the vast majority of consumers want the option to seamlessly switch between calls and digital conversations depending on their preference in the moment," said Dan Sincavage, Senior Vice President of Global Partnerships at LivePerson. "The combination of LivePerson's industry-leading digital customer conversation platform and analytics with Infinity's powerful call intelligence allows brands to unlock an exciting and high-impact set of data and insights that make conversations across these channels more powerful than ever, accelerating their digital transformation."

LivePerson customers have seen benefits including up to 25% boosts in customer satisfaction and 30% reductions in operating costs, and Infinity customers have seen benefits including up to 45% increases in phone leads and 64% reductions in cost of acquisition.

"This is just the beginning for our partnership with LivePerson," said Warren Newbert, CEO of Infinity. "We're already making it possible to attribute calls and ROI to digital conversations, and we're excited to offer even more valuable insights to marketers, sales teams, CX professionals, and contact centers as our partnership progresses. I'm exceptionally excited that Infinity has found the right partner to bring our services to digital conversations"

Infinity's Vice President of Partnerships, Kris Wagland, added, "Our partnership and integrated solution with LivePerson enables mutual clients to greatly improve ROI from marketing spend, while optimizing the experiences they deliver at scale for their clients across channels. This is a win-win for brands and their customers — and it's indicative of the bold vision we share with LivePerson for the opportunities within the conversational intelligence space."