Industry Veteran's Joining Underscores Company's Commitment to Helping Omnichannel Media Companies Succeed Amid Changing Digital Landscape

• Eric Kelleher promoted to President, Customer Experience & Communications

• Ed Daly to succeed Eric Kelleher as Chief Customer Officer

• Christine Halvorsen joins Okta as CTO, Public Sector

Okta, Inc., the leading independent identity partner, today announced three new executive appointments on its go to market team as customers embrace the increasing importance of Identity. Eric Kelleher has been promoted to President, Customer Experience & Communications, Ed Daly has been promoted to Chief Customer Officer (CCO), and Christine Halvorsen has joined Okta as the company’s first Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for Public Sector. 

These appointments highlight Okta’s commitment to investing in its go to market leadership and unlocking new growth through stronger engagement with new and existing customers. They follow the recent appointments of Jon Addison as Chief Revenue Officer and Kerry Ok as Chief Marketing Officer.

Eric has held leadership roles at Okta for 7 years and has served as Chief Customer Officer since 2020. He has played a pivotal role in scaling Okta to over $2 billion in revenue, empowering teams, and promoting a culture of innovation to drive the success of Okta’s nearly 19,000 customers. In his new role, Eric will oversee Marketing and Communications, in addition to the Customer First organization, and will continue to co-lead the go to market function with Jon Addison. He and his leadership team will continue to focus on driving demand and growth for Okta across all stages of the customer lifecycle, delivering great customer experiences, building brand loyalty, and raising industry awareness of the importance of identity.

Ed has served as Okta’s SVP of Customer Success and Renewal Sales since 2018. He has led the company’s Global Customer Success and Renewal sales teams through the rapid growth and adoption of Okta’s platform. In his expanded role as CCO, Ed will now oversee Okta’s global customer support and education, services, customer success and renewals sales teams. He will be responsible for ensuring every customer understands and maximizes the value of Okta’s products and services to advance their identity security, reduce complexity, and improve the user experience.

Christine has joined Okta as the company’s first Public Sector CTO. During her over 20 years serving in the Federal government, Christine successfully led small to enterprise sized IT modernization projects with a focus on mission outcomes and Cybersecurity. She expanded her support to Public Sector during her time in the private sector focusing on cloud technologies, cybersecurity, & Trust and Safety. She joins Okta at a time of rapid growth for the company within U.S. Federal and State and Local organizations as they look to modernize their services and adopt Zero-Trust architectures. With Okta managing nearly 400 million authentications and over 24 million users across the public sector, Christine will focus on helping customers simplify their processes and secure their IT infrastructure allowing them to rapidly advance their mission.

“Okta has an exciting opportunity ahead as organizations around the world understand that modern identity is critical to their security, operations, and efficiency,” said Todd McKinnon, Okta’s CEO and co-founder. “With Eric and Ed taking on new roles and Christine joining the company, Okta’s go to market team is well positioned to capitalize on our customers’ interest in identity and our industry-leading innovation to drive growth.”

Integration is available for download today on the HubSpot App Marketplace 

Rebrandly, the world's leading secure, branded link management platform, has announced an integration with HubSpot, the customer platform for scaling businesses. Now, everyone using HubSpot can improve campaign performance and engagement with Rebrandly-branded short links and gain access to artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled link scheduling recommendations. Rebrandly's AI makes marketers "smarter" by telling them the best times to send links to generate the highest click-through rates.

"In social campaigns — and all digital marketing communications — it's critical that audiences trust every link and call-to-action they receive," said Carla Bourque, Rebrandly CEO. "Generic links often behave like spam and breed distrust, resulting in them being blocked or flagged for abuse; conversely, branded links have a 39% higher click-through rate. This strategic integration with HubSpot allows marketers to take their social posts and campaigns to the next level: using Rebrandly AI to generate custom short links that people recognize, trust, and click — at the optimal time — resulting in a more positive customer experience and ultimately more conversions."

With millions of active users, Rebrandly has generated more than 1 billion links to date for brands worldwide and across industries. Marketers, IT, and security professionals rely on Rebrandly to easily customize, track, and manage their links for greater business performance.

Now, through the Rebrandly-HubSpot integration, anyone using HubSpot can:

• Replace generic short links in social media posts with Rebrandly branded links. Instead of using a generic short link that's not tied to a brand, HubSpot customers can use Rebrandly to easily generate a recognizable link that reflects their website domain and brand, like rebrandly.is/links. This way, their audience will be more likely to click without worrying that the link may be malicious.
• Create and publish social posts directly through Rebrandly. All Rebrandly-enabled posts appear on the brand's social channels, as well as within HubSpot's social media software, so marketers can save time without having to switch from tool to tool.
• Maintain link control and visibility. After creating their social media posts through Rebrandly, marketers maintain complete link tracking and visibility in HubSpot. In addition, they gain access to Rebrandly's powerful link analytics, including click data and information on the user's geography, device, browser, platform, language, time-of-clicking, and more.
• Change destination URLs after a campaign has launched. Managing the lifespan of a digital asset can be tricky. Still, with the Rebrandly + HubSpot integration, anytime marketers need to change where their Rebrandly-generated short URLs direct to (such as after a rebrand or if an asset like a QR-code has been retired), the process is reliable, quick, and easy (no more error 404s!).
• Import pages, posts, and files from HubSpot into Rebrandly. Marketers can automatically generate branded short URLs for website or landing pages, blog posts, or files stored in HubSpot — saving time and improving campaign performance quickly and easily.

HubSpot and Rebrandly customers can take advantage of the integration immediately: In just a few minutes, marketers can configure the connection, add their existing domain (or choose a new branded domain, such as .link), and start creating branded short links that boost performance.

"Rebrandly brings added value to HubSpot customers, which is why we offer the App Marketplace," said Scott Brinker, VP Platform Ecosystem, HubSpot. "Using AI to tell marketers the best times to send links is powerful. Now, by integrating Rebrandly AI-enabled branded short links into their campaigns, social media, and customer communications, marketers can directly benefit from improved brand recognition, deliverability, and campaign performance."

HubSpot App Partners like Rebrandly are independent software vendors who have built an integration with HubSpot and have been accepted to the App Marketplace. HubSpot's App Partner Program is an ecosystem of valuable third-party integrations.

New Siteimprove capabilities are designed with the current state of marketing in mind – helping marketers make impactful decisions that drive better conversions 

Siteimprove, the leading platform empowering brands to stand out with accessible, high-performing digital content experiences, today launched brand new capabilities designed with the current state of marketing in mind – helping marketers to easily and confidently make impactful decisions that drive better conversions. Today's launch includes 11 major initiatives including AI Remediate, SEO Enterprise and Funnel Comparison that span across Siteimprove's holistic offering.

According to Gartner^®, Inc., "seventy-five percent of CMOs report being asked to 'do more with less' in 2023, and the majority are readjusting their commitments to marketing's channels, resources and programs." We believe the launch of these new capabilities enables marketers to do just that, while also facilitating the seamless integration of AI workflows to free up their time for even greater creativity and innovation, while showcasing the tangible link between content improvements and actual business outcomes.  

Here's the value we're adding to our customers:

• AI Remediate – a continuation of AI Generate, now applied to code suggestions
  • Web Ops teams spend hours figuring out how to fix issues and errors, which leads to teams being more "reactive" than "proactive." This means businesses have less time to invest in developing UX that drives business outcomes. With AI Remediate, Web Ops teams can get instant, AI-driven recommendations on how to fix errors on their website to improve SEO and Web Accessibility.
• SEO Enterprise – Our SEO capability that offers the highest keyword limits available but also ensures rapid data processing, enabling businesses to stay ahead in the fast-paced digital landscape
  • SEO teams now more than ever need greater support across the board to meet their SEO goals. With SEO Enterprise, marketers will enjoy an expanded and best in the market keyword cap of 150,000 keywords to match the scope of their marketing oversight needs.
• Funnel Comparison – instant and accurate data analysis to improve decision making
  • Whenever content marketing teams update landing pages or content on their website, they find it difficult to show how this change leads to a greater impact on driving conversions or visitors down the funnel. With Funnel Comparison, content marketing teams can gauge how their content performs based on how many conversions it generates.

"AI Remediate is a great way to assist developers who are still early in the learning curve of accessibility," said Jason Whitehead, Accessibility Consultant Specialist at Allstate Insurance Company. "AI is the future of everything, to ignore its benefits would be careless."

"At Siteimprove, we know that reporting on the ROI of marketing efforts, especially when it comes to the value of content created, is a notorious challenge," said Arjang Parsa, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Siteimprove. "In a landscape where marketing leaders are grappling with proving ROI, introducing workflow for acceleration and managing tighter budgets, we're confident our latest innovations will help them make impactful decisions that drive better conversions."

Archiving for Intermedia Unite preserves and protects critical communications data - including call recordings, video meetings, chats, and SMS – with a new 30-day retention option being offered for free to new and existing Intermedia Unite users

Intermedia Cloud Communications, a leading global provider of intelligent cloud communications and collaboration solutions to businesses and the partners that serve them, today announced that Intermedia Archiving's 30-day retention option is now available for free to new and existing users of the all-in-one communications and collaboration solution, Intermedia Unite.   

Named Best Business Phone System by U.S. News and World Report and Best Overall Business VoIP by PC Magazine, Intermedia Unite combines voice, video, chat/SMS, contact center, file management, and more on one tightly integrated, highly secure, and reliable platform. By adding Intermedia Archiving to Unite, businesses are now able to have continual historical access to their Unite call recordings, video meetings, chats, and SMS – with contact center engagements slated to follow soon.

Intermedia's state-of-the-art archiving platform is more than just information storage; Intermedia Archiving is designed to safeguard vital business information and communications from accidental or inappropriate deletion, assist with dispute resolutions, support compliance with internal governance, address legal and regulatory requirements, maintain information continuity, training and coaching, and much more. It offers a secure, searchable record to help quickly identify and retrieve relevant interactions, with a powerful contextual search capability based on a view of all users across different channels.

And now, Intermedia is making Intermedia Archiving available for free to all current and new Intermedia Unite users with a rolling, 30-day retention period. The 30-day rolling archive helps businesses better manage and maintain their data, preserving the most recent 30 days of communications. If a customer wishes to extend their data retention period beyond 30 days, seamless upgrades to longer-term options ranging from 1 to 10 years are available at any time.

Since its launch in early 2023, Intermedia Archiving for Unite has gained wide interest and traction not only among Intermedia's customers, but the broader communications industry, having recently received the 2023 Best Practices New Product Innovation Award from preeminent analyst firm, Frost & Sullivan.

"As Intermedia continues to transform businesses communications, we are excited to announce the addition of free Intermedia Archiving for all Intermedia Unite users," said Irina Shamkova, Intermedia Executive Vice President of Product Management. "Businesses' day-to-day communications are often filled with valuable knowledge, intellectual property, and insights; with Archiving's centralized platform, organizations can leverage their communications, protect themselves, build insights across all available channels, and support various productivity, legal, and compliance requirements." 

Intermedia Archiving will continue to evolve this year, as it becomes a data-warehouse foundation for business data intelligence and insights. As part of an aggressive development roadmap in 2024, artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics are expected to be integrated to further offer innovative data-analysis capabilities. These planned value-added features and capabilities are intended to enable businesses to make more informed decisions to help drive revenue, increase efficiency, and reduce overall operational costs. No matter the size of the organization, the opportunities and benefits of analyzing archived communications data can be significant across industries, including professional services firms (legal, accounting, etc.), financial, automotive, hospitality and leisure, government, healthcare, and many more.

FullCircl, a UK-based SaaS platform that removes the regulatory and verification roadblocks to drive revenue growth, is excited to announce the launch of its first white label orchestration platform through W2 by FullCircl to help regulated businesses onboard more customers and meet regulatory requirements.

It's essential that regulated businesses deliver secure, compliant verification and onboarding processes, whilst balancing the customer experience. FullCircl's new white label platform offers out-of-the-box access to the full spectrum of W2's global capabilities – KYC processes, PEPs, sanctions, identity screening, AML, fraud prevention, and financial risk affordability checks – with a fully-brandable dashboard (colours, typography, and logo) and custom URL. 

The white label experience can be delivered rapidly and cost effectively for organisations seeking to significantly enhance compliance with stringent regulations, and rapidly scale up efficient customer onboarding capabilities. Benefits include:

• Instant access to 20+ global identity verification suppliers within one platform
• Expanded product proposition and additional revenue stream generation
• Industry-leading customer compliance and enhanced tracking capabilities
• Fully embedded solution that integrates seamlessly into existing digital customer journeys.

Speaking about the launch Lynsey Hoxha, Head of Channel partnerships at W2 by FullCircl, commented: "We're excited to bring our white label experience to market. As a result of legacy technology, too many organisations still treat identity verification and fraud prevention as siloed processes which has a huge impact on the quality of onboarding processes. We believe in simplifying processes - our white label platform takes the headache out of dealing with multiple suppliers, eliminates the technical and cost implications that too often impact transformation, and ensures the best possible onboarding experience for users and customers alike."

Birdeye, the top online reputation management and digital customer experience for multi-location businesses, today announced the release of its "State of Online Reviews 2024" report. In an era where online presence defines business success, this report serves as an indispensable guide for businesses navigating the complex landscape of online reputation management.

Drawing from an extensive analysis of data from over 150,000 location-based businesses spanning various industries, this report highlights the evolving dynamics of consumer behavior and provides actionable strategies for businesses to harness the power of online reviews to stand out amidst fierce competition.

Key findings from the report:

• Steady growth: Online review volume grew 5% in 2023, highlighting their growing influence on consumer decisions.
• Google dominance: Google reviews emerged as the frontrunner, accounting for a staggering 79% of all online reviews, affirming the platform's dominance in the review ecosystem.
• Robust engagement: Businesses accrued an average of 66 new Google reviews per location in 2023, signifying ongoing engagement with customers.
• Automation adoption: With the emergence of various AI tools, automation in responding to reviews has become more prevalent, particularly in sectors like home services (79%) and legal (71%), reflecting a growing trend towards efficiency.

Reflecting on the report's significance, Anil Panguluri, SVP of Product at Birdeye, stated: "In the digital age, understanding and engaging with customer feedback is not just beneficial; it's essential for growth. Our report offers a comprehensive view of the landscape, providing businesses with the insights they need to grow online."

The engagement will leverage Sabio's unique non cookie-based data sets and solutions so McDonald's can effectively connect with and reach the growing U.S. multicultural audience 

Sabio Holdings Inc., a Diverse owned leader in the Connected TV ("CTV")/over-the-top ("OTT") ecosystem helping brands reach, engage and validate diverse consumers through technology) today announced it has entered into an engagement with McDonald's USA, through a partnership with Publicis Groupe. The relationship strengthens McDonald's commitment to diverse communities, and specifically with diverse-owned media partners, by leveraging Sabio's unique non cookie-based data sets and solutions so the brand can effectively connect with and reach the growing U.S. multicultural audience.

McDonald's ongoing mission is to foster an inclusive environment, where diversity is embraced. A key audience, Gen Z, is the most ethnically diverse generation to date. U.S. Census data suggests that as of 2019, 49.1% of Generation Z is diverse and growing, with 13.8% Black, 25.0% Hispanic, and 5.3% Asian. 29% of Gen Z are children of immigrants or immigrants themselves, compared to 23% of Millennials when they were at the same age. 

"Sabio and McDonald's share a common mission to more effectively connect and engage with diverse consumers through a deeper understanding of the communities they represent," said Aziz Rahimtoola, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Sabio. "As a diverse owned technology and analytics company, we are excited to collaborate with an innovative brand like McDonald's to help achieve their objectives."

McDonald's will have access to Sabio's CTV/OTT inventory and customized audience segments at advantageous rates. The company can also utilize App Science's™ (a wholly owned division of Sabio) proprietary 55MM HH graph data, which provides insights and access to Quarterly Trends reports, first-looks at published vertical and multicultural reports and exclusive analyses customized toward McDonald's campaigns and properties.

As CTV continues to grow and attract attention from advertisers and brands, the biggest gap lies within the diverse audience data sets. Fragmentation from evolving platforms and growing audiences, and legacy audience measurements that are not representative of diversity, have increasingly made it difficult for the industry to connect brands and the right audiences. Sabio's comprehensive set of solutions tailored to CTV environments allow advertisers to move beyond traditional age and gender demographics, to a far deeper understanding of the evolving consumers' preferences in app affinities and content they're watching at the household level.

"McDonald's remains committed to reaching multicultural audiences in authentic ways, and engaging with diverse-owned companies like Sabio ensures we're able to do that most effectively," said Caleb Pearson, VP – Customer Engagement & Media, McDonald's USA. "Our shared mission, values and commitment is at the crux of the collaboration with Sabio. Sabio's CTV/OTT inventory sources and the App Science Household Graph will make it easier to efficiently activate at scale, while connecting with McDonald's audiences more granularly."