The Addition of COMM Creates More Digital Marketing, ABX, Branding, and Creative Depth to the Growth-Focused Marketing Services Platform

RTC Partners, a growth-focused private equity firm, today announced an investment in COMM, formerly CommCreative, a Boston-based marketing agency that specializes in digital marketing strategy, demand generation, account-based marketing, and marketing technology solutions. COMM joins four prior RTC investments - fama PR, Intelisent, MarketBridge, and Quarry – which together partner with leading brands to accelerate growth across a spectrum of client marketing and sales initiatives. 

Founded in 1994 and led today by partners Ashley DePaolo, Joanna Bittle, Janet Sifakis, and Alex Nosevich, COMM combines strategy, data, and storytelling to help brands connect and interact with their audiences. The 50-person team provides a range of in-demand marketing services, including branding, creative, media strategy and buying, digital, lead generation, web development, and social media to B2B, B2B2C, and B2C clients. The agency possesses deep experience in high-growth and high-value business categories such as cybersecurity, SaaS, HealthTech, financial services, manufacturing tech, and retail. Key clients include Bose Automotive, Raymarine, Wilmington Trust, Guidehouse, PTC, and RSA Conference. COMM also partners with various adtech providers including 6sense and Influ2.

“The COMM team and its deep capabilities and industry expertise are tremendous additions and accelerants to our vision of integrating growth strategy together with leading in-market programs, informed by marketing science and technology, to drive growth for our clients,” said John Shomaker, an Operating Partner with RTC Partners and CEO of the marketing services platform.

“The entire COMM team is energized by the boundless opportunities this partnership presents for both our valued clients and dedicated team members,” said Ashley DePaolo, President of COMM. “We are thrilled to join forces with these four best-in-category agencies to build a marketing and sales organization where collective expertise, innovation and passion converge to deliver unparalleled value.”

The combined platform currently comprises more than 260 professionals across six locations in the United States and Canada and partners with more than 150 clients worldwide, including many of the most respected market leaders across the technology, financial services, and healthcare industries. Ashley DePaolo, Partner and President, and Joanna Bittle, Partner and Strategy Leader, will remain in their current roles and join the platform’s senior leadership team.

SAP SE today announced transformative data innovations that will help customers harness the full power of their data to drive deeper insights, faster growth and more efficiency in the era of AI. New capabilities in the SAP Datasphere solution, including new generative-AI features, transform enterprise planning through simplified data landscapes and more-intuitive data interaction.

"Capturing data to make better decisions is an enterprise technology imperative that's become increasingly critical as AI – which relies on quality data – revolutionizes every aspect of business," said Juergen Mueller, SAP Chief Technology Officer and member of the Executive Board. "Our newest SAP Datasphere innovations, as well as an expanded partnership with Collibra, represents a quantum leap in our ability to help customers drive intelligent business transformations through data."

At the heart of these announcements is the business data fabric, an architecture that helps ensure data is not just an asset but also the core underpinning of strategic initiatives. The innovations and partnership announced today equip organizations to deliver meaningful data to data consumers – with business context and logic intact.

"We have decided to leverage SAP Datasphere for a modern business data fabric architecture in conjunction with our SAP S/4HANA landscape. It allows us to effectively establish a modern data analytics platform that enables a business self service capability on the basis of trusted data and data models," said Achim Welter, Senior Director ERP, Digital & IT Strategy, Hershey's.

Today's SAP Datasphere innovations help customers achieve a unified data view that simplifies their data landscapes while retaining context and logic – enabling them to adapt faster to market changes and make more-efficient decisions. From new copilot and vector database capabilities that help ensure business context remains constant in generative AI outputs to a new knowledge graph that helps uncover insights and patterns in complex data, SAP's data innovations help ensure customers have the full power of their data at their fingertips.

Today's key innovations include:

Generative-AI Copilot and AI Governance

SAP's generative-AI assistant, the Joule copilot, is now coming to the SAP Analytics Cloud solution to automate the creation and development of reports, dashboards, plans and more. This automation is enabled by the SAP HANA Cloud vector engine capabilities, which combine the power of large language models with the relevant data of your organization – helping ensure business context is a constant for generative-AI outputs.

Incorporating generative AI across the business isn't possible without trusted and governed data. To provide organizations with a solution to govern the policies, processes and practices of AI, SAP is announcing an expansion of our partnership with Collibra to integrate Collibra's AI Governance with SAP data assets. This can help provide transparency and accountability for organizations and help ensure regulatory, compliance and privacy policies are met.

Discover Hidden Insights and Patterns with Knowledge Graph

With the new SAP Datasphere knowledge graph, organizations can discover hidden insights and patterns across their applications and systems. This enables both technical and business users to deeply understand the relationships between data, metadata and business processes, as well as boost the effectiveness of machine learning and large language models.

Unified and Advanced Planning and Analytics

The new SAP Datasphere integration with SAP Analytics Cloud offers a single data management system and advanced analytics to power cross-organizational planning. Planners can leverage a single flexible model to break down silos between planning using one tool for data preparation, modeling and planning.

Additionally, business users can use the new compass capability in SAP Analytics Cloud to realize better outcomes in planning and analytics through data-driven simulation. It enables organizations to run complex simulations using a chat interface to evaluate predictive outcomes and continually adjust controllable variables to find the optimal plan.

This supports customers to transform their planning by unifying financial, operational, supply chain and workforce planning with native connection to SAP applications and third-party data.

Email marketing leader announces new Link Monitoring in Email Guardian solution 

Litmus, a leader in email marketing, announces the launch of Link Monitoring in Litmus Email Guardian, the only solution that proactively monitors emails for unexpected changes and now, broken links. As email volume rises, this new feature detects potential issues before they negatively impact subscriber experiences. With 86% of customers abandoning a trusted brand after just two poor experiences, broken links are more than just an inconvenience. Link Monitoring is essential for marketers to create consistent, high-quality email interactions that build trust, boost loyalty, and drive revenue.

Email Guardian's Link Monitoring continually checks link functionality in monitored emails, proactively alerting marketers when broken or slow-loading links are detected. Marketers can view their link journey, including the time it takes any redirects to load, and preview the link destination page all without leaving their email. Ultimately, Link Monitoring empowers marketers to protect their reputation before and after they hit send.

This new feature is the latest addition to Litmus' Email Guardian monitoring solution, helping brands ensure successful engagement and positive subscriber experiences while reducing the chances of poor engagement and a drop in clickthrough rates, which can lead to lost subscribers and deliverability issues. Always-on email monitoring is essential for marketing success, as every error can frustrate audiences, causing them to unsubscribe and brands to lose revenue. With 25-35% of revenue on the line, brands cannot afford to neglect effective email monitoring.

"With email volume tripling over the past three years alone, manual link testing is an insurmountable task for marketers," says Erik Nierenberg, CEO of Litmus. "Litmus Email Guardian's Link Monitoring empowers marketers to send emails with confidence, safeguarding their brand's reputation, orchestrating seamless customer journeys and maximizing email revenue. In today's digital landscape, emails transcend mere messages; they're a reflection of your brand identity and customer commitment. Maximizing the effectiveness of every send has become a necessity for any successful email marketing program."

Only Litmus Email Guardian enables marketers to:

• Automatically monitor links in enrolled emails 24/7 without any manual work.
• Proactively receive alerts when broken or slow-loading links are detected.
• Resolve critical issues pre-send, ensuring seamless subscriber experiences.

Industry veteran brings extensive SaaS expertise to drive development across Precisely product portfolio, including Data Integrity Suite

Precisely, the global leader in data integrity, today announced it has promoted Christopher Hall to Chief Product Officer. In his new role, Christopher will oversee product strategies and roadmaps for the entire Precisely product portfolio, including the continued innovation and delivery of the Data Integrity Suite. 

“Chris brings to Precisely a unique skillset that includes strong operational excellence and expertise to successfully drive our product direction and development. He has the SaaS background and market experience that’s essential to lead our product organization as we continue to innovate and scale our Data Integrity Suite and the rest of our product portfolio,” said Eric Yau, Chief Operating Officer at Precisely. “We’ve been on a transformational product journey and Chris is key to ensuring optimal product alignment and execution, accelerating our growth in the data integrity market.”

With more than 20 years of senior leadership experience, Christopher most recently served as SVP, Product and Operations at Precisely where he led the vision, strategy, and execution for the Engage portfolio. He was responsible for the businesses’ product engineering, user experience, product management, professional services, presales, customer support, and customer success. Christopher joined Precisely through the company’s acquisition of Pitney Bowes. He has also held management positions at Red Ventures, Imagitas, Sharecare, Eventful, The Active Network, AOL, and served as an Acquisition Officer for the United States Air Force.

“With initiatives such as GenAI and advanced analytics at top of mind for organizations, it is absolutely critical to have confidence in the underlying data,” said Hall. “I’m proud of our extensive track record providing customers with accurate, consistent, and contextual data for driving successful and trustworthy outcomes. I look forward to working closely with our world-class product team and accelerating our innovative software, data, and data strategy offerings to market.”

The Precisely Data Integrity Suite brings market-leading capabilities as SaaS services that seamlessly work together to address all aspects of data integrity. It continuously expands to address new and innovative use cases through a flexible set of services that integrate, improve, govern, and add context to data whether it lives on-prem, in the cloud, or in hybrid environments.

Precisely will showcase its unique combination of software, data, and strategic services, including the Data Integrity Suite, at booth #1634 during the Gartner® Data & Analytics Summit in Orlando, Florida from March 11-13, 2024.

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Former Chief Digital Trust Officer and CISO of Takeda and GlaxoSmithKline to Further Veza’s Mission to Secure Access to Data Everywhere

Veza, the Identity Security company, today announced the appointment of Mike Towers as Chief Security & Trust Officer. In this role, Towers will spearhead Veza’s cybersecurity and data protection strategy, lead Veza’s Advisory Board, evolve Veza’s product and platform capabilities, and showcase to customers the unique value of Veza’s industry-leading Access Control Platform. 

As a career security executive and recognized expert in digital transformation and trust, Towers’ arrival marks a significant addition to Veza’s senior leadership team. His previous tenure as Chief Digital Trust Officer at Takeda, coupled with his time as Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) at Allergan plc and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), has equipped Towers with the hands-on experience to advance trusted digital and data platforms, and ultimately transform how leading organizations secure and manage access in today’s interconnected world.

“With Veza, we are taking on cybersecurity’s toughest challenge - helping organizations understand who can take what action on what data,” said Tarun Thakur, Co-Founder & CEO, Veza. “To be successful in our mission, we look for leaders and people who innately believe in our mission to help secure access to data everywhere. Today, we added one of the world’s most respected cybersecurity leaders to our leadership team. Mike’s vast experience helping organizations navigate digital trust, global information security and risk management will enable us to drive meaningful change for our customers.”

The addition of Towers comes during an important inflection point in cybersecurity. As businesses rely more on technology, they face exponential complexity of securing access to data across multiple cloud platforms, SaaS applications, and data systems. Identity is the new perimeter, and this has led to increasing demand for Veza’s Authorization Graph, which allows customers to visualize and control who can take action on data, no matter where the data resides.

“Through my 25 years working with organizations to drive technology and security initiatives, it has been a recurring challenge to navigate the complexities of least privilege,” said Towers. “Veza’s innovative authorization graph technology reveals the true picture of access, powering a modern approach to access governance for all identities, human and non-human. I am excited to join this visionary team tackling one of cybersecurity's most pressing issues.”

The appointment of Towers comes on the heels of significant momentum for Veza. Earlier this year, the company integrated its Access Control Platform with Google Drive so customers can secure access to enterprise files, surpassing the milestone of 200 integrations with mission-critical enterprise systems. Veza also recently announced an integration with CrowdStrike to combat identity-related breaches, and launched groundbreaking new features for non-human identity management, privileged access monitoring, SaaS access security, next-gen IGA, and data system access. The company has onboarded numerous high-profile customers across all key verticals, such as financial, healthcare, legal and law firms, and big tech, as security leaders everywhere are increasingly recognizing the need for next-gen identity security.

“Veza’s momentum has validated the need for a fresh approach in identity security,” said Karim Faris, General Partner at GV (Google Ventures). “I am happy to have Mike join Veza on their mission because they share a passion for revolutionary approaches to cybersecurity challenges.”

Sharethrough, one of the top global independent omnichannel ad exchanges, announces a direct omnichannel integration with global DSP platform Adform. The integration benefits ad buyers that access Sharethrough's video, CTV, display and native ads through Adform with increased scale, buying power, better performance and improved sustainability.

The direct integration naturally increases scale while expanding media buying power by removing intermediaries previously required to access some of Sharethrough's inventory. Additionally, buyers will have direct access to Sharethrough's turnkey ad enhancements such as Dynamic Video Captions for video, CTV SportsTicker Overlay and Weather Overlay, and Display Countdown, all of which are proven to help improve advertiser performance.

Another main priority for this partnership is to enhance the sustainability of the advertising ecosystem, an important focus area for both companies. Sharethrough has pioneered sustainability in digital advertising with industry-first products like GreenPMPs and Low-Emissions PMPs, that help measure, reduce and compensate for advertisers' carbon emissions, and their new Net Zero Publisher Program that covers the first-year of cost for publishers to measure their company-wide carbon emissions to help them establish and achieve their net zero emissions goals. Earlier this year, Adform became the first global DSP to integrate with Scope3 to help advertisers measure and reduce their carbon emissions.

The direct integration goes a step further by providing all media buyers in Adform's public deal library access to Sharethrough's GreenPMPs.

"We are encouraged to see DSPs like Adform prioritizing enhanced sustainability internally and externally for their buyers," said JF Cote, CEO of Sharethrough. "Our direct integration is a net benefit to Adform buyers, who can now much more easily improve both the sustainability and performance of their ads."

Vicky Foster, VP Global Commercial Partnerships, Adform commented: "Advertisers eager to change the game in 2024 are looking directly at the omnichannel opportunity. Especially that available in fast-developing channels like CTV. We are excited to be partnering at this juncture with Sharethrough, a fellow pioneer of sustainable and uncompromising advertising, in providing this scale and performance for brands."

Steve Simpson joins as President, Data, Audiences and Technology; Shiva Vannavada appointed as President, Data and Technology Solutions

Dentsu (brand: dentsu; Head Office: Dentsu Group Inc.; Location: Tokyo; Representative: President and Global CEO Hiroshi Igarashi) today announced the appointment of Shirli Zelcer as Chief Data and Technology Officer (CDTO), sitting on dentsu’s Group Management Team. In this role, Zelcer will be responsible for all of dentsu’s client-facing data-driven, analytics and technology-enabled products and platforms, driving innovation and sustainable growth for clients.

Dentsu also announced today that Steve Simpson has been appointed as President, Data, Audiences and Technology, dentsu and Shiva Vannavada as President, Data and Technology Solutions, dentsu. Simpson will join the Global Media Practice leadership team to support the development of a winning Media Practice community that delivers continued excellence in its offering to clients, driving client growth and transformation. In his newly created role, Simpson will be responsible for the strategic planning and delivery of a globally-scaled, data-driven and technology-enabled audience platform that drives growth for clients, while Vannavada will focus on creating synergies across product and platforms, AI innovation, analytics and across Dentsu Global Services (DGS).  

Zelcer brings over 20 years of experience in analytics and insights, business advisory and organizational design, AI and data science, and cloud and marketing technologies. She was most recently the Global Head of Analytics and Technology at Merkle, where she led a global division of over 5,600 practitioners across the Americas, EMEA, and APAC. In her new role at dentsu, Zelcer will be responsible to innovate the vision, roadmap, development and commercial impact of dentsu's data and tech strategy across our three core practice areas: Media, CXM and Creative, working closer with Practice leads and Jean Lin, Global President – Global Practices, dentsu. The role will lead a newly formed team brought together from these Practice areas to drive consistency, interoperability and ultimately to deliver growth to dentsu’s clients through more unified capabilities. 

Joining from Publicis, in his new role, Simpson will lead a global team of experts from across data management, identity, personalization, media activation and dynamic creative production, and partner with dentsu’s global products and platforms team to integrate and scale the platform across dentsu’s Global Practices.

Simpson will also be accountable for evolving dentsu’s global media delivery platform. Enabled by programmatic media delivery, enriched with 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd party data, it will leverage dentsu’s leading Merkury products suite to drive client competitiveness. 

Having previously served as Global Chief Product and Technology Officer, dentsu Solutions, Vannavada’s expanded responsibilities as President, Data and Technology Solutions will include driving cross-practice and product collaboration, nurturing dentsu’s AI Connective community and leading his team to contribute to tech-enabled solutions and strategy. 

“Innovation across data and technology are two of dentsu’s most critical points of differentiation, having led the market for many years in the development, adoption and application of proprietary platforms which give our clients the edge,” said Hiroshi Igarashi, President and Global CEO, dentsu. “We are very proud to appoint Shirli, Steve and Shiva into these new strategic roles which bring together our efforts across the organization, honing our capabilities and ensuring that dentsu and our clients remain at the forefront of innovation.”

The leadership of the broader Data and Tech organization at dentsu includes: Head of Product, Matt Seeley, and Sunil Rao leading Analytics, and Peter Rogers leading Data Platforms. DGS will also now report into Zelcer’s Data and Technology structure and in turn, Zelcer will report into Michael Komasinski, CEO, dentsu Americas & Global President - Data & Technology, dentsu. 

Business continuity service offering introduced due to strong demand

NICE today announced that it has launched a second CXone Cloud Region in Japan. This presents a unique and critical functionality tailored specifically for the Japanese market. NICE will provide a business continuity (BCP) service for CXone in Osaka, enhancing the overall resilience of CXone cloud infrastructure for Japanese customers. Osaka’s robust infrastructure and connectivity made it a strategic choice for hosting BCP cloud services, providing reliable and high-performance solutions for NICE customer business needs. 

There is increased demand in Japan for reliable and secure cloud services. Many organizations in Japan have strict requirements to ensure business stability during unexpected outages. The new Osaka business continuity offering is designed to enable CXone customers in Japan to be able to operate contact center services within Japan observing regulatory requirements, in the event of a natural disaster. With this new BCP service, NICE customers in the region can deliver exceptional Enlighten-powered CX without interruption and while keeping their data protected.

Darren Rushworth, President, NICE International, said, “This investment demonstrates NICE’s commitment to better serve its Japanese customers. NICE understands the unique challenges in the region when it comes to natural disasters. This enhances the overall resilience of the CXone cloud infrastructure, ensuring business continuity for customers in the face of unforeseen events like earthquakes and typhoons. NICE intends to continue to invest in Japan to optimize service in the market.”

Mary Wardley, VP Customer Service and Contact Center Applications, IDC, said, “The challenge of delivering global solutions is providing for the requirements of each geography. NICE’s continued investment in Japan represents the company’s focus on delivering consistent and secure CX AI technology to its customers in the region.”