Interviews, insight & analysis on digital media & marketing

NDA News Roundup: Endava, CreativeX, Hootsuite and many more

Endava, a global provider of digital transformation, agile development and intelligent automation services, has announced that it has been selected as the 2022 Stripe Partner Award winner for Partner of the Year – UK and Ireland. The Stripe Partner Awards recognise selected Stripe partners – both Technology and Consulting – who are leading the way with customer solutions through Stripe and showcasing their Stripe expertise through specialisation. Endava joined Stripe’s Partner Ecosystem in April 2022, to enhance its product portfolio by integrating core payments products and developing bespoke software builds.

Ahead of Earth Day on 22nd April, CreativeX, the creative data platform for the world’s largest brands, unveils new analysis revealing the ongoing but limited use of sustainability messaging in advertising. The analysis was facilitated by creative data from 2.5 million ads across 9 markets, supported by $2.8 billion in ad spend, from January 2020 to March 2023. Creative data – extracted from the assets themselves – was filtered for sustainability messaging. Ads were taken from 11 industries (many of which are facing pressure to achieve ESG targets in the drive toward Net Zero, such as automotive, retail, and food and beverage). Across this time frame, 4% of all ads analysed contained sustainability messaging, with retail and consumer healthcare sectors containing the least amount of climate-focused messaging in their ads, at just 1%. Budget allocations behind these ads were comparatively disproportionate, amounting to 8% of total spend. Nevertheless, this still only accounts for less than a tenth of spend across 2020-2023. 

Hootsuite is excited to announce the launch of its AI-powered content generator, OwlyWriter AI. To match the speed of social, social marketers are pumping out content with agility, every single day — accompanied by the inevitable challenge of creative block. From launching a comprehensive suite of content creation aids, to equipping social marketers with a social media toolkit to overcome creative dry spells, Hootsuite has been dedicated to enabling more effortless content creation with readily-available content and ideas to scale on social. Enter, OwlyWriter AI. OwlyWriter AI has been developed as a clear, step-by-step tool that requires very little information to generate post ideas and captions that are tailored to social. This content creation tool provides social marketers the opportunity to automate content creation tasks that will help simplify writing processes, spark innovation and inspiration, save time and boost efficiency in workflows.

Oracle and Zoom Video Communications, Inc. are expanding their collaboration to deliver faster, easier, and more effective telehealth services. By connecting telehealth capabilities with Oracle Cerner Millennium, Oracle and Zoom can enable providers around the world to join patient appointments more quickly and easily with the relevant patient electronic health record (EHR) at their fingertips. The connected solution provides a connected, familiar workflow for clinicians and tools to record updates from visits back into the patient’s EHR, saving valuable time that can be invested back into patient care. Zoom already enables millions of simultaneous meeting participants on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure with its performance, scalability, reliability, and cloud security.

Deployteq, a self-service marketing automation provider, is targeting growth in the UK market with its user-friendly ‘no code’ platform, putting marketers in control of their omnichannel campaigns and driving significant ROI. With more than 5,000 active users and a rapidly expanding UK customer base, the move is designed to further grow Deployteq’s European market share at a time when British businesses are seeking greater ROI. Existing UK clients include Wickes, Virgin Media, Renault, Marston’s and Pendragon. The Deployteq platform is specifically designed to enable marketers to concentrate on delivering high-impact omnichannel campaigns across email, SMS, mobile app, landing pages as well as many other channels. Additional features include intuitive campaign-building tools, a dynamic relational database, instantaneous segmentation, unlimited integrations, and in-house dedicated campaign support. 

Smart Money People, the UK’s dedicated financial services review and customer insight platform, has acquired the award-winning money blog, Be Clever With Your Cash. The investment will enable Smart Money People to attract more reviews, meaning an even greater depth and breadth of insights and benchmarking for financial providers and consumers. Be Clever With Your Cash is a complementary brand to Smart Money People. The two are very like-minded businesses and are united in their aim to help improve standards in financial services and create better outcomes for businesses and consumers. Smart Money People views this investment as an important step in reaching new users: Be Clever With Your Cash will steer its audiences towards Smart Money People’s reviews earlier in their decision-making as they start to research a new product or provider. It will also enable Smart Money People to react more quickly to news and financial products and services as they are launched. Smart Money People and Be Clever With Your Cash will both retain their editorial authenticity and independence to help consumers make smart and unbiased decisions about their finances.

absolute labs, the first Wallet Relationship Management™ (WRM™) platform that is revolutionizing how growth and marketing teams acquire, engage, convert, and retain customers in the next Internet, has announced the close of a $8 million Seed fundraising round including Aglaé Ventures, Alpha Praetorian Capital, The Luxury Fund, Near Foundation, MoonPay, Plassa Capital, Punja Global Ventures, Samsung Next, Sparkle Ventures (Animoca Brands), and W3i. The Web3 CRM platform, which is already trusted by trailblazers such as LVMH, MoonPay, The Sandbox, Mocaverse (Animoca Brands), and others, is enabling brands to embrace and leverage wallet data on public blockchains to gain deep data insights, build actionable segments, and automate cross-channel campaigns including NFT air drops, nurture social community engagement, and more.

Rokt has announced the deepening of its partnership with Uber Eats, the online food ordering and delivery platform, alongside a new partnership with ManoMano, the biggest marketplace in Europe for DIY, home & garden. The announcement follows a period of rapid growth for Rokt, which includes its valuation of $2.4 billion in December 2022 as the company celebrated its 10th Anniversary. Rokt is expanding its partnership with Uber Technologies to help the fast-growing business seize the full potential of the transaction moment and unlock new revenue opportunities. After launching in the UK, Germany, and France, Uber Eats is also launching in Spain and Ireland with Rokt. This will enable the ecommerce giant to tap into additional revenue streams and deepen its relationships with existing customers, giving advertisers an opportunity to reach millions of Uber Eats customers across Europe with access to more relevant offers. Rokt is pleased to announce a new European partnership with home improvement marketplace, ManoMano. Since the project went live in January across France, Germany, Spain, and the UK, Rokt will help ManoMano generate further revenue through monetising its ecommerce confirmation pages – with more than 10 million transactions completed in the four countries already – as well as acquiring new customers with Rokt Ads.

Pioneering reusable period wear brand, WUKA, has launched its first-ever TV advertising campaign following a six-month creative review process with Clearcast, the advertising review body responsible for clearing TV adverts of potential misleading, harmful or offensive content. The taboo-busting ad by WUKA encourages women to ditch plastic-riddled disposable pads and tampons in favour of its sustainable period wear. The advert shows an honest depiction of real period stories in an effort to normalise conversations around menstruation. WUKA funded the campaign using the £250,000 media value earned from winning the Sky Zero Footprint Fund in 2022.

App marketing and analytics platform App Radar has launched a further OpenAI integration, Ad Copy Generator, enabling marketers to create effective ad copy for mobile app campaigns with Google Ads and Meta Ads. Ad Copy Generator is a powerful tool that can benefit app businesses in terms of time, cost, and efficiency. The tool cuts the ad copy creation process in half while at the same time enabling app marketers to boost ad conversion, improve ads testing framework and to stay ahead of their competition. The new tool is simple to use, and all App Radar users need to do to start getting results is fill out a form with information such as ad channel, app name and description, valuable features, target audience, tone of ad copy and select English or German. Instantaneously, the Ad Copy Generator suggests ad headlines and descriptions optimised for Google Ads and Meta Ads.

IT Managed Services Provider, Emerge Digital, has teamed up with the software company within the MSP space, ConnectWise, to make enterprise-level cyber security protection accessible to SMEs and help reduce the spiralling cost of security for corporations. Last year, 54% of SMEs experienced a cyber-attack, according to a Vodafone study, an increase of 15% in two years. In a separate report, 38% admitted to having insufficient budget to adequately protect themselves against cyber-attacks. For corporations, the growing cyber security skills gap has led to a lack of in-house expertise to manage their complex networks, while paying a premium for their IT security solutions. By partnering with ConnectWise, Emerge Digital hopes to redefine cyber security for SMEs, bringing proven industry expertise and enterprise-grade cyber security protection to the market at SME-friendly prices. The new offering from Emerge Digital, called ‘OnyxSecure’, will be available in three tiers. Each will include a dedicated team of highly certified cyber security engineers, and advanced protection from world-leading vendors including Microsoft, ThreatLocker and CybSafe, all of which are typically unaffordable for SMEs 

Brightcove the streaming technology company, has announced it has entered into a partnership with Frequency, a cloud-based video platform powering linear channel creation for content providers. As a leader in free ad-supported streaming TV (FAST) channel solutions, Frequency’s integration into Brightcove’s award-winning video platform allows customers to seamlessly create, launch and manage FAST channels to expand their reach and increase their revenue. Brightcove and Frequency’s partnership combines their solutions to help customers create linear channels for distribution to FAST aggregators, MVPD and vMVPD, and distribution channels globally. With the integration available within the Brightcove Marketplace, customers can connect their video library with Frequency for world-class scheduling and distribution. Through the partnership, Brightcove aims to take the work out of building channels to make it easy for customers to publish their content to FAST channels.

Research from Bynder’s inaugural State of Content report has revealed that despite the current economic climate, 69% of global marketing teams have increased or maintained their spend on content creation, management, and distribution this year. The survey of 1,297 global CMOs found that the increased investment in content creation, management, and distribution was a tactical decision to be more agile and adaptable during uncertain times. Bynder’s survey also revealed CMOs are planning to review their existing martech stacks to identify and remove redundant or unused services, and invest in technology that unites various solutions into a connected ecosystem. More specifically,  83% of marketers are focused on consolidating their technology systems and reducing agency spend this year. In addition to this, streamlining the creation of digital content experiences was also top of mind, with a staggering 98% of those surveyed prioritising faster time to market and the delivery of content experiences across multiple platforms this year. In particular, speeding up time to market was noted as a top priority for two-thirds of marketers worldwide. The data also revealed that 85% of marketers intended to invest in a digital ecosystem powered by DAM. 

CHAMPIONS UK Plc is celebrating after landing a string of awards. The business consultancy specialists have received four gongs in the space of just a few weeks. The family-run firm, which specialises in supporting businesses to grow, was named Business Management Consultancy Of The Year in the Central England Prestige Awards. In another coup, the East Midlands-based outfit was awarded a gong for being the Best Business Growth Consultancy by Acquisition International and they also landed a Business Excellence Award from E2 Media. The awards come just weeks after Champions were placed among the Insider’s list of the top 300 SME enterprises in the Midlands. 

Tech PR agency Wildfire has launched the world’s first ASMR video using B2B content including whitepapers, webinars, and LinkedIn posts to put people to sleep. The 45-minute video, launched in partnership with ASMR influencer WhisperAudios, promotes the need for B2B brands to get creative, avoiding tired content that “bores customers to sleep”. Triggering an Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, ASMR videos have become a popular way to fall asleep at night, stimulating a relaxing sensation known as ‘tingles’. The video forms part of a wider ‘B2Bold’ campaign from Wildfire, encouraging B2B brands to get creative and dispelling the myth that B2B buyers solely rely on cold, unemotive decision-making.

Over half (57%) of UK workers laid off this year are exploring alternatives to full time work, according to a new survey of 500 UK office/white collar workers who have been laid off since December 2022. Almost half (47%) of respondents said they no longer trust full time employment, with 35% of those laid off planning to keep a side hustle running even when they eventually go back into full time work. With an increase in job cuts in the UK, particularly among the tech sector, the new research from Fiverr explores why workers believe they were laid off, the implications of this, and what their future career plans entail.

WACL, (Women in Advertising & Communications Leadership) a catalyst for change, launches ‘The 50%’ – a new campaign to support its mission to achieve 50% of CEO roles in advertising and communications filled by women, and for those women to proportionally represent the full diversity of British society. Based on the current rate of change, women won’t hold 50% of CEO positions until 2060, a statistic that feels all the more unacceptable as WACL celebrates its centenary year in 2023. So today, WACL is asking leaders across the advertising, marketing and communications industry to step up and ‘#MeasureWithMeaning’: encouraging and empowering those in positions of leadership and influence to take a meaningful and transparent view on where they are on the journey to 50%, and commit to continuing to do so as they work to get there. At the heart of the call to “Measure With Meaning” is a mandate for leaders across the industry to provide clarity about their organisation’s progress on the journey to equal representation. In support of this collective mission, WACL are today launching “The 50% CEO Playbook” – a practical roadmap for organisations to use, that details five levers of change to help achieve the 50% representation target.