PRWeek and Cision examine opportunities and challenges for PR pros, including generative AI adoption, influence in the C-suite, and budget constraints

Cision, the global leader in consumer and media intelligence, engagement, and communication solutions, today released its 2024 Global Comms Report: Elevating & Evolving in partnership with PRWeek, highlighting the evolving role of strategic communicators as business drivers. Now in its seventh year, the annual report examines the perspectives of more than 400 PR and corporate communications professionals across 10 countries on what it means to be a strategic communications professional today. The report sheds light on the challenges and opportunities they currently face amid factors like increased pressure to prove impact, more sophisticated data and analytics, emerging technologies like AI, shifting consumer behaviors, and a complex media landscape.

Among the report's most intriguing findings is the growing role of – and dependencies on – PR and corporate communications teams within the C-suite. Nearly half (41%) of senior-most communications leaders report to the CEO directly, and a remarkable 92% say their C-suite sought their counsel more often last year than in years prior, up from 87% who said the same in 2021. With this level of influence comes greater expectations of how communicators can impact the bottom line. PR and comms teams indicated feeling increased pressure to play a key role in moving the needle on business factors such as revenue, share of voice, and overall brand equity. When asked to name the factors they consider CEOs' biggest priorities for comms, nearly two-thirds (60%) of respondents cited "building sustainable growth and value," an increase of 6 percentage points from just a year ago. Other priorities include the ability to respond in a timely manner to changing marketplace dynamics and opportunities (55%), customer acquisition/engagement (43%), and driving sales/revenue (42%).

"Strategic communicators have more than proven their value to the C-suite and have earned a seat at the table when it comes to influencing strategy and driving business outcomes," said Carrie Parker, Chief Marketing Officer at Cision. "High-performing PR and Comms teams are aligning their arsenal of tools and expertise with organizational goals to drive transformative change."

Additional Report Takeaways:

• Generative AI: The majority of PR and comms professionals (65%) have started experimenting with generative AI for things like content creation, press release writing and audience research; however, the degree of adoption varies, with 32% of comms teams describing their usage as "frequent," and 33% saying it is "infrequent." The rest are only in the consideration stages of experimentation (27%), unlikely to use them at all (7%) or unsure about their plans (1%).
• Identifying Influence: Everyday consumers are considered the most effective influencers, as brands look beyond celebrities to boost awareness and enhance sales.
• Need for Reliable Data: Comms professionals are increasingly focused on measurement, with 42% saying they very much rely on data and analytics - up from 30% who said the same last year.
• Social Media Dominance: Reliance on both earned (53%) and paid (46%) segments has increased year on year.

"PRWeek has been collaborating with Cision on the Global Comms Report since 2017, and I have always been proud of the enlightening and detailed global PR snapshot we've been able to provide, along with valuable counsel from various industry leaders," said Gideon Fidelzeid, Editorial Director at PRWeek.

LiveRamp is the first company in the industry to become Addressable Media Identifier (AMI)-certified by the Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA), the ad industry’s self-regulatory body for relevant digital advertising. Publishers, marketers, and the broader ecosystem can leverage and build upon LiveRamp’s solutions with confidence they will endure beyond third-party signal loss. With this certification, companies can recognize LiveRamp as a partner that is suited to help both the buy- and sell-side to better connect data and improve customer experiences, as they work to ensure they stay compliant with varying legal and regulatory requirements.

LiveRamp’s Authenticated Traffic Solution, as well as its durable, privacy-centric identifier, RampID, have been successfully reviewed and found compliant with the Digital Advertising Alliance’s (DAA) Policy Framework for Addressable Media Identifiers. In a rigorous process, TRUSTe, a subsidiary of TrustArc, reviewed LiveRamp’s solutions in five critical areas, validating the steps LiveRamp has taken to establish, maintain, and continually improve privacy practices aligned with the DAA’s self-regulatory AMI frameworks. The areas of evaluation included:

• Policies and Standards, including ensuring that controls are in place to limit the use of AMIs to only those purposes allowed under DAA policy
• Processes, including processes to maintain records and reports to demonstrate compliance with the DAA Policy Framework for AMIs
• Use, Retention, and Disposal, including purpose limitation, special requirements outlining prohibited uses of AMIs, and the use of sensitive information with AMIs that require the individual’s opt-in consent
• Transparency, including providing enhanced notice and website notice regarding the use of AMIs and adherence to the DAA Policy Framework for AMIs
• Reporting and Certification, including accessibility to AMIs under equal, reasonable, and non-discriminatory terms and conditions

“LiveRamp has been an industry leader in adopting rigorous industry-backed, independently-enforceable standards to strengthen privacy practices while improving partner outcomes, and we are delighted that they’ve become the first company to complete the DAA’s AMI certification,” said Lou Mastria, CIPP/US, executive director of the DAA. “This achievement serves as a clarion call for the industry to move quickly to ensure their cookie-based and next-generation advertising solutions are compliant with the DAA’s past and current standards. LiveRamp is setting a model for the industry at making meaningful and timely progress towards this goal.”

The DAA and its standards are supported by the leading ad industry trade groups, including the 4As, American Advertising Federation, Association of National Advertisers/ANA, Interactive Advertising Bureau, and Network Advertising Initiative. The DAA’s AMI Certification advances the industry’s commitment to consumer privacy self-regulation by, among other things, introducing the concepts of permitted and prohibited uses of data. Through responsible data collection and use, coupled with transparency and control, AMI Certification shows a renewed commitment to high standards by responsible actors in the digital advertising ecosystem.

“We’re grateful for the DAA’s focus on maintaining critical functionality across the digital ecosystem, something we’ve championed ourselves with LiveRamp’s connectivity and interoperability,” said Travis Clinger, Chief Connectivity & Ecosystem Officer. “With the 100% deprecation of the third-party cookie just months away, for anyone that’s just getting started or shifting their focus to their cookieless transition, this can give them the confidence of picking a solution that enables the scale and performance they need.”

PureWeb, a leading innovator in cloud-based streaming solutions, is proud to announce an important addition to its platform - the release of high performance On Demand infrastructure providers. These providers, powered by top-tier rendering GPUs available in CoreWeave, are set to redefine the streaming landscape and empower creators to achieve unparalleled performance.

Available immediately in both the Western and Eastern United States, PureWeb's high-performance providers are equipped with NVIDIA’s formidable RTX A6000 GPUs, 32 GB of RAM, and 10 vCPUs. These specifications make them the ideal choice for handling the most demanding Unreal Engine and Unity streaming projects.

“What sets these new providers apart is their exceptional performance,” says Chris Jarabek, VP of Product Development at PureWeb. “We conducted extensive testing with GPU-intensive workloads, and the results were impressive. In Unreal applications, we saw frame rate improvements ranging from a substantial 28% to a very healthy 67%. Similarly, in Unity environments, enhancements ranged from 35% to an impressive 48%, when compared to our standard CoreWeave providers.”

Depending on rendering demands, clients can find success utilizing these new On Demand providers in conjunction with AWS current-generation G5 instances for enhanced global accessibility, enabling them to customize their infrastructure to meet their project's unique performance requirements.

“We’re really excited about this new On Demand provider and, when PureWeb introduces support for AWS’s next-generation G6 instances, we think the two will make the perfect dedicated pairing for our new On Demand offering,” says Chris.

• Ballesteros To Lead Wizeline's Brand Marketing and Go-To-Market Strategy Globally.

• She brings 20+ years of experience in marketing and communication strategies from leading technology and multinational corporations, including Cognizant, Softvision, Globant, Shell, Unilever, and American Express

Wizeline, a global technology company providing AI-focused digital services, recently named Fausta Ballesteros as Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), with the goal of advancing the global brand and ‘go-to-market’ strategy, and elevating the company's positioning in the technology sector.

"We are thrilled to welcome Fausta to the Wizeline team”, said Bismarck Lepe, CEO and founder of Wizeline. “Fausta’s experience, energy and creativity with multinational companies, particularly in the technology and software industries, will be instrumental in enhancing our market position as well as our overall world-class culture.”

Fausta has more than 20 years of experience working in global markets, including the United States and North America, Mexico and Latin America, Europe and Asia. Originally from Argentina, she has been in New York since 2007. She holds a master's degree in Marketing from the University of San Andrés in Argentina, a Women Leadership Program from the Yale School of Management, and an Entrepreneurship Program from the Austral University in Buenos Aires.

Fausta has worked for technology companies and multinational corporations, including Cognizant, Softvision, Globant, Shell, Unilever, American Express, and Urban PR, where she has been involved in strategy, branding, and communication. Her expertise includes creating culture-defining initiatives, global communications programs, thought leadership and content, and go-to-market products and strategies that help drive growth, engage internal and external audiences, and build community. Under her leadership, campaigns have resulted in bottom-line growth as well as attracting professionals with engineering and digital skill sets such as product strategy and delivery, experience design (UX, UI), cloud, AI, software development, application modernization, gaming, data, mobile, DevOps, Java, .Net, Full Stack and QA.

In addition to her professional work, Fausta is passionate about STEAM education, women entrepreneurs, corporate culture, parenting, and Hispanics in the US.

"I am proud and grateful to join this stellar and proven Wizeline team,” said Ballesteros. “Under Bismarck’s leadership, Wizeline is reinventing business processes globally with AI-based technological solutions. I look forward to working with everyone at Wizeline and helping accelerate growth and creating a world-class marketing organization.”

As part of Wizeline's growth strategy, the company promotes female talent in the technology industry, recognizing women as a fundamental accelerator for this purpose, aiming to maintain its leadership in the technology sector and the development of AI and Big Data-based products.

In initial integration testing, advertisers leveraging the new integration saw up to a 5x increase in attributed conversions and a 82% improvement in CPA

MNTN, the Hardest Working Software in Television and a trailblazer in Performance TV advertising, today announced a full integration with leading marketing analytics platform Rockerbox. With this integration, Rockerbox’s clients gain enhanced cross-device measurement and the ability to attribute MNTN’s proprietary Verified Visits™ and business outcomes generated by their Connected TV (CTV) campaigns accurately in the Rockerbox platform. 

"CTV is one of the most promising channels for marketers right now, and that's why it's so pivotal for companies to have access to quality data and the right measurement strategies to measure its impact," said Ron Jacobson, Rockerbox CEO. "Rockerbox's MNTN integration meets this need, and since it's cookie-less, marketers have the peace of mind that they're relying on a future-proof solution."

MNTN’s integration with Rockerbox comes at a time when marketers are demanding more accurate and transparent measurement of the site traffic, conversions and revenue influenced by their CTV campaigns. In initial integration testing, advertisers saw up to a 5x increase in attributed conversions and an 82% improvement in CPA with Verified Visits data, compared to the performance with default impression-to-IP matching.

“We first launched Verified Visits to give marketers a way to accurately measure the real site traffic and conversions they were generating with their CTV campaigns,” said MNTN Chief Product Officer Marwan Soghaier. “Marketers need to be able to measure the performance delivered by all of their marketing channels in the same source of truth. With Rockerbox and other third party integrations, marketers can keep a consistent approach to measurement—empowering better decisioning and ultimately stronger performance.”

Through the integration, Rockerbox’s clients, including National University, gain the confidence that site visits will only be attributed to connected TV ads when those ads actually prompted users to take action.

“Integrating MNTN’s Verified Visits with Rockerbox’s precise measurement platform has been extremely effective in analyzing performance,” said Michael Rossini, Associate Director of Paid Media and Performance Marketing at National University. “We are now able to measure the performance of National University’s CTV campaigns alongside our other marketing channels, and use that unbiased measurement to better inform strategic decisions. The knowledge gained has enhanced confidence as we scale our CTV campaigns.”

Revel Digital^®, a leader in SaaS based digital signage and media distribution, is excited to announce a strategic partnership with Intelligent Ad Media, a company known for its innovative approach to audience engagement through digital screen technologies. This partnership will leverage Revel Digital's expertise in enterprise digital signage with Intelligent Ad Media's diverse and extensive network of digital displays.

Intelligent Ad Media aims to enhance their existing and future digital signage deployments with a number of technologies provided by the Revel Digital platform including AdHawk, which is a suite of tools specific to audience analytics and sensor driven content. These technologies will bolster audience engagement with the ability to fine-tune and present content at the optimum time. This, in turn, will result in a better return on investment for DooH advertisers. In addition to AdHawk, Revel Digital also provides the ability to specifically target mobile devices which opens up an entirely separate modality for content distribution. This content is accessible via QR code, NFC, or Bluetooth and can coincide with content on an associated display, or can be an entirely separate campaign.

Peter Mayhew, CEO of Intelligent Ad Media, comments on the partnership with Revel Digital: "We have been working with Revel from our inception in 2019 and have scaled our business from NY to Hawaii and everywhere in between. We researched many CMS platforms and could not find one that gave us the flexibility to create custom experiences nor have a team willing to provide additional engineering services when our clients needed something unique. Their template tool allows us to free-form each venue to give it its own unique look and feel. At our request, Revel integrated with Vistar, PlaceExchange, and soon to start Hivestack programmatic platforms. Very happy to have such a great team behind the scenes keeping us front and center with our clients."

Mike Tinnes, CTO of Revel Digital, comments on the partnership: "Intelligent Ad Media is a perfect partner for Revel Digital as they have a large footprint in the physical spaces most applicable to our offerings in digital signage, digital out-of-home advertising, and audience measurement. We look forward to working with IAM on not only optimizing their existing network but also introducing some innovative new capabilities into their existing tech stack."

Box, Inc., the leading Content Cloud, today announced that it has acquired Crooze, a leading provider of no-code enterprise content management applications built on the Box Platform. Box will leverage Crooze’s team and technology -- including the company’s no-code app builder and metadata capabilities -- to help organizations address business-critical processes like contract lifecycle management, digital asset management, controlled document management, enterprise content libraries, and more.

“Content is central to a huge number of critical business processes in the enterprise today, and with rapid innovation in AI and a dynamic security landscape, the ability to manage those processes in the cloud and enable teams to get the most out of their content is essential to digital transformation,” said Aaron Levie, co-founder and CEO of Box. “It’s time to modernize ECM and leave outdated systems behind. Crooze has built advanced ECM capabilities on Box, already working with some of our largest customers. By natively integrating Crooze’s technology into Box, we’ll reshape what enterprises can do with their content.”

"Box has long been on the cutting edge of the enterprise content management industry,” said Alan Monier, co-founder of Crooze. “They pioneered cloud content management and have set the bar for security, compliance and data privacy. Building on their enterprise-grade platform was an easy decision for us.”

“From its inception, Crooze’s mission has been to help organizations unlock the full potential of their content and we are very excited to join the Box family to scale that vision in the enterprise,” said Mark Lane, co-founder of Crooze.

Today, Crooze provides a broad range of capabilities to help customers get the most out of their content in Box:

• A no-code builder for critical business-document applications.
• An extensive set of metadata tools to greatly simplify all aspects of metadata, including adding, analyzing and managing it at scale.
• Customized dashboards and views of underlying Box content and metadata.
• Forms and document generation capabilities.
• Ability to integrate with Box Relay to automate content workflows.

Crooze's capabilities enable customers to easily and quickly build apps to manage critical content on Box, including contracts, digital assets, and controlled documents:

• Contract management: Organizations can digitally transform their legal contracts repository and processes with the ability to generate documents on-demand, streamline e-signatures with Box Sign, and automate processes with Box Relay for efficient handling of contracts.
• Digital asset management: Marketing teams can organize, manage, share and distribute assets, automate processes through Box Relay to manage end-to-end asset lifecycles, deliver curated assets internally and externally, and streamline metadata management with robust tools for enhanced productivity.
• Controlled document management: Departments can establish a secure document library on Box for controlled documents like corporate records, HR policies, and financial records, leverage Box Shield for document protection, enforce retention policies with Box Governance, manage metadata at scale by applying, editing, and searching across thousands of files, and automate processes seamlessly with Box Relay for review and approval protocols.

Modernizing the ECM Market with AI

According to IDC’s Worldwide Content Services Applications Forecast, 2023-2027:

The worldwide content services applications market (including ECM) is expected to grow* from $15.1 billion in 2022 to $23.8 billion in 2027 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 9.6%.

The vast majority of enterprises today continue to struggle with the productivity, security, and cost challenges posed by having their content and workflows fragmented across a variety of legacy on-premises ECM systems and point solutions. To enable modern work and secure their intellectual property, these organizations need a single, secure platform to centrally manage content across a variety of use cases. Further, new technology like Box AI presents an unprecedented opportunity to unlock insights from content and drive further automation and transformation.

"Organizations looking to modernize their approach to managing enterprise content should consider the new synergies afforded by Box with Crooze,” said Holly Muscolino, group vice president, Content Strategies and the Future of Work at IDC. “Crooze’s no-code app builder and metadata capabilities further enhance the robust set of content services offered by the Box Content Cloud. IDC research shows that organizations that invest in modernizing content management experience reduced business risk, improved decision-making and increased stakeholder satisfaction and engagement, including both customers and employees.”

EPAM's Retail Media Orchestration Toolkit provides a solution for retailers to scale their retail media business and leverage the analytical capabilities of Google Cloud

Retail media offers a significant revenue-generating opportunity for retailers to sell advertising space fueled by customer transactional data and insights. However, scaling such a business poses a significant challenge for many. EPAM Systems, Inc., a leading digital transformation services and product engineering company, today announced a partnership with Google Cloud, aligned with its Industry Value Network (IVN) initiative, to develop a composable suite of retail media accelerators to help retailers solve efficiency, scalability and functionality challenges.  

EPAM's Retail Media Orchestration Toolkit, developed on and in collaboration with Google Cloud, is a set of composable cloud accelerators that allows retailers to work more effectively with multiple technology vendors via a single, integrated platform while reducing dependence on third parties and optimizing cost. Retailers can leverage the scalability and analytical capabilities of native Google Cloud components, along with a network of retail media software vendors, eliminating the need to build their own in-house solution.

With more consumers shopping online than ever before, retail media is the fastest-growing segment in the advertising industry, with the potential to generate billions of dollars of annual revenue. In a currently heavily fragmented space, EPAM's Retail Media Orchestration Toolkit provides a solution for creating higher-quality advertising experiences with greater measurement and targeting capabilities.

The Retail Media Orchestration Toolkit features the following:

• Multichannel reporting with automated campaign metrics from multiple platforms into a single dashboard.
• Automated omnichannel measurement to help brands understand the incremental sales and revenue impact of their retail media investments across channels and platforms.
• Advanced audience creation using analytical tools within Google Cloud, enabling brands to create powerful, predictive audiences across channels and platforms.
• Brand and consumer insights to analyze category share, consumer profiles, purchase channels and basket composition, helping brands plan more effective campaigns and increase their media investments.

"We're pleased to announce this collaboration with Google Cloud to help retailers of all sizes scale their retail media business without the need for costly capital investments," said David Billings, VP, Global Head of Media Practice at EPAM. "Our clients often work with multiple retail media technology partners and need a comprehensive data and analytics layer that can seamlessly integrate these partners to enhance value for advertisers and reduce their operational burden."

"Retailers are already working with Google Cloud to power their digital transformations with cloud infrastructure, data and AI," said Pallab Deb, Managing Director, Solutions and Industry Value Networks at Google Cloud. "Our approach to Industry Value Networks helps these customers more quickly bring together and create value from multiple partner platforms on Google Cloud, and we're pleased that EPAM will expand its work with Google Cloud and our ecosystem of partners to accelerate digital transformation in the retail industry."

As a market leader in developing composable cloud media and marketing platforms, EPAM has designed and built custom media technology platforms for some of the world's largest advertisers and retailers. Initial integration partners of EPAM's Retail Media Orchestration Toolkit include Moloco and Salesforce, with first use cases focusing on multi-channel measurement, brand and consumer insights generation and high-value audience creation.

"This partnership will enable the world's largest retailers to build and grow their own retail media technology ecosystem with Moloco's machine learning powered platform at the center of that stack," said Nikhil Raj, Vice President, Retail Media Platform Business at Moloco. "We expect this partnership will help move the entire industry forward with an increased focus on transparency, measurement and performance."