Interviews, insight & analysis on digital media & marketing

New Business Bulletin: Kantar, FACEIT, Speechmatics and many more

Kantar, the marketing data and analytics company, has announced the sale of Kantar Public to Trilantic Europe, a pan-European private equity firm focused on mid-market transactions, is complete. With this transaction, Kantar Public establishes itself as an independent business and becomes the largest global specialist evidence and advisory business to government and the public realm, outside of the US. Trilantic Europe will partner with Kantar Public CEO Dr Michelle Harrison and her leadership team to deliver the next phase of its purpose-based growth strategy to create a better public realm.

FACEIT, the competitive gaming platform with over 26 million players worldwide, and InfoSum, the world’s leading data collaboration platform, have announced their partnership. In a first for the esports industry, clients and partners can now leverage their first-party data to reach a unique audience of players through FACEIT, reaching the right people with the right message at the right time with in-platform ads – all while maintaining full control of their own first-party data and without having to risk data leakage or data sharing. 

Speechmatics, the autonomous speech recognition technology scaleup has now added Language Identification (Language ID) to its industry leading speech-to-text engine. This latest addition allows customers to automatically identify the predominant language spoken in any media file. Customers will save time and effort on manually reviewing files, safe in the knowledge that they will be provided with an accurate transcription of any media file. This latest update can be used with pre-recorded media files, works with up to 12 languages and adds a confidence score to show the certainty of the predominant language. Supported languages are English, German, Spanish, French, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Dutch, Portuguese, Russian.  

Storyly, the user engagement platform that embeds full screen, interactive, and immersive Stories in mobile apps and websites, has announced that it has joined the Braze Alloys programme as an official technology partner. By joining Braze Alloys, Storyly becomes part of a curated ecosystem of best-in-breed technology and solutions partners to help integrate, customise, and amplify customer engagement capabilities. The program reimagines the Braze technology solution as a fully integratable customer engagement platform, creating a simple, scalable system for making it easier for Storyly customers to use Braze in concert with an ever-wider range of technologies and solutions to support meaningful brand experiences. The program makes it easier for Storyly customers to leverage agencies, consultancies, and other partners in concert with Braze and its ecosystem of technology partners to provide users with highly personalized, highly effective brand experiences at scale.

Oracle Red Bull Racing and Zoom Video Communications, Inc. have announced a new innovation partnership, integrating Zoom’s communications platform into all areas of Oracle Red Bull Racing to advance performance and engage with their fans. To highlight this, Zoom branding will also be displayed on both RB18 cars, drivers and team race shirts and overalls, pit wall, garage, and online. Additionally, some elements will be going live this weekend at the Formula 1 Heineken Dutch Grand Prix in Zandvoort, Netherlands.

Leeds-based digital marketing agency, Modo25 has partnered with customer experience platform specialised PRIMIS, to collaborate across their SaaS platform to benefit retailers and clients using Modo25’s marketing intelligence platform BOSCO™. The partnership will see both platforms support each other in delivering an improved post-purchase consumer experience to both customers and retailers. PRIMIS’s mission is to improve the open interactions between the consumer and retailer to improve post-purchase customers in a way that transforms how consumers think, react, and buy online. The goal is to promote final-mile communication and build lasting customer relationships. 

Taboola has announced rapid growth and new innovation for its Taboola News offering, which is expected to cross $50M in revenue for Taboola in 2022. Taboola News integrates content recommendations from Taboola’s large publisher network with leading mobile device manufacturers across multiple touchpoints, including Minus One screens, news notifications, and browser applications. The newest offering from Taboola News brings editorial recommendations, curated beautifully via wallpaper experiences, on mobile device lockscreens. The product is now live in over 80 markets around the world.

 Qlik® has announced it has become the official Analytics Partner of Team Qhubeka Professional Cycling Team for the 2022 / 2023 race season. With Qlik, Team Qhubeka will expand its long-term strategy of using data and analytics to optimize the logistics, planning and performance of every aspect of its mission-driven cycling team. Team Qhubeka has a clear mission of fostering ambition, creating opportunities and changing lives with bicycles. The team is also one of the most technologically enabled cycling teams in the world, using innovative solutions to optimize performance, while driving brand-awareness through a purpose-led, shared value approach. This aligns perfectly with Qlik’s goal of helping organizations access and transform data into meaningful action across the globe to create a sustainable, data-literate world. With Qlik, Team Qhubeka will for the first time be able to bring together all the team’s data for analysis in one platform, leveraging common APIs to break down data silos. This will allow the team to query and explore their data on a whole new level for better informed decision-making across the team’s entire staff.

AI-driven CRM platform provider, SugarCRM, and ResPax, a tour reservation system provider with thousands of customers worldwide reaching millions of travelers globally, has announced a strategic partnership offering the first fully integrated CRM and tour booking platform for the travel and tourism industry. The goals of the partnership are to help fuel travel and tourism industry growth through cutting-edge tools to scale operations, turbocharge visitor numbers, boost customer experience and loyalty, enhance job creation and drive revenues. With this powerful combination of technology, operators can achieve the benefits of a holistic view of customers, tight data integration and collaboration, and enhanced customer insights fueled by AI. The SugarCRM and ResPax partnership provides travel and tourism operators with world-class innovative technologies to streamline business operations, gain an enhanced understanding of visitor needs and preferences, provide a high-definition customer experience, and stay on top of shifting consumer habits and preferences.

Optimizely, the digital experience platform (DXP) provider, has announced strong growth of Welcome, its content marketing platform (CMP) that brings teams together on a single solution to ideate, collaborate on assets, and execute campaigns, following its acquisition last year. In the eight months since the acquisition, the Welcome business has seen consistent quarter-over-quarter growth, resulting in year-over-year growth of over 60%. To date, 19 Optimizely customers including AJ Produkter, Hunter Engineering and Siteimprove, have successfully onboarded the Welcome CMP and Digital Asset Management (DAM), which are now integrated.