Kevel, the API-first ad serving company for building custom, in-house ad platforms, and Placements.io, the leading revenue management platform for media companies, today announced a strategic partnership that will empower retailers and ecommerce brands to seamlessly manage, optimize and scale their retail media networks with unparalleled flexibility and precision. The partnership will integrate Kevel’s state-of-the-art Retail Media Cloud™ solution with Placements.io revenue management system. With this unified platform, retailers can manage, monetize and scale their ad inventory effectively in-house, which will help to maximize return on ad spend and drive more significant results from retail media investments. By integrating Kevel’s cutting-edge API infrastructure with Placements.io’s robust order and billing management capabilities, this partnership aims to provide a solution that unifies processes and data across ad operations, sales, and finance to show the true value of advertising and address the unique challenges of the retail media landscape.
Digital Marketing leader Incubeta has announced its acquisition of Shout Bravo, a organic content marketing partner. This will enable Incubeta to offer a complete organic search experience that represents the future of search. This follows the acquisition of leading advanced data and analytics partner, Persuasion, and significantly enhances Incubeta’s ability to drive its total search offering. SEO has entered its biggest shift in a decade and the way people search, where they search, and the search experience as a whole is changing, and this partnership will ensure Incubeta continues to offer a market-leading service. The integration of the two companies promises to enhance Incubeta’s total search offering, combining the best in PPC and organic search, and will be fueled by the company’s award-winning total search platform, Seamless Search. This unique technology will feed inspiration to the Shout Bravo team to deliver the best results for Incubeta’s client’s wider digital strategy.
Twilio (NYSE: TWLO), the customer engagement platform that drives real-time, personalized experiences for today’s leading brands, announced the global availability of Rich Communication Services (RCS) messaging via its Programmable Messaging and Verify APIs. RCS enhances traditional messaging by introducing branded sender identification in their default messages app, ensuring customers can immediately recognize and trust the source of their messages. With this update businesses will be able to send branded, verified messages that build trust and drive customer loyalty—all without the need for code changes. For businesses looking for a more dynamic and interactive communication channel, RCS offers a secure, trusted, and enhanced alternative to SMS. While SMS remains a vital tool for many use cases, RCS provides a standardized, feature-rich platform that bridges the gap between traditional messaging and the interactive experiences offered by over-the-top (OTT) channels like WhatsApp. Branded communications ensure that businesses can deliver seamless, engaging experiences that resonate with customers and build lasting trust.
smartclip, RTL Group’s adtech development unit and leading provider of adtech solutions across Europe, has expanded its integration capabilities, introducing SSP orchestration within smartx — its proprietary ad server and SSP. This innovation empowers media owners to streamline ad requests, manage inventory through a variety of third-party SSP partners, and optimise yield through a unified auction — all while benefiting from the extensive feature set available on smartx. smartclip’s new SSP orchestration capabilities enable media owners to seamlessly connect with various third-party SSPs, unlocking unique demand sources, including international budgets and region-specific opportunities. By centralising the final ad decision on the smartx platform, broadcasters and publishers maintain full control of their monetisation strategy while maximising revenue potential through a streamlined approach. Beyond unlocking new demand, this solution can be utilised as a standalone product, offering a full-stack approach to ad management. It provides a unified auction environment that holistically integrates SSPs, DSPs, and ad servers, thereby reducing the growing complexity on the publisher side. Media owners can streamline their operations by leveraging smartx’s comprehensive features, including ID solutions, unified financial reporting, creative approval, and ad rule management, all within a single platform.
Channel 4 and Yospace, the dynamic ad insertion expert, have extended their multi-year partnership, taking them to over ten years of collaboration. The partnership will see Yospace help the broadcaster grow its digital advertising business further as it targets becoming a digital-first public service streamer by 2030. Yospace’s server-side ad insertion (SSAI) technology plays a pivotal role in Channel 4’s digital ambitions by opening up addressable advertising across its live streams – in a way that delivers a frame-accurate, broadcast-grade experience for the viewer. In addition, Yospace has helped Channel 4 extend the reach of its monetisable channels across big screen connected TV (CTV) platforms and devices, including Android, iOS, and most recently Amazon Fire, Roku, Sky Q and Sky Glass, with more to follow.
SHOPLINE, a leading commerce services platform, has announced its partnership with the UK and Europe’s leading golf equipment distributor, Masters247. The partnership modernises Masters247’s B2B Commerce platform, upgrading the distributor’s digital capabilities to enhance customer experiences while delivering efficiency and consistency to its commerce operations. A leader in the golf industry across UK & Europe, Masters247 boasts a wealth of its own brand product and an unparalleled distribution service for the leading brands in golf retailing. Before partnering with SHOPLINE, Masters247 operated with legacy systems with no digital footprint. With SHOPLINE, it has now embarked on a journey of strategic digital transformation that has allowed the brand to move into international markets and generate faster revenues. As Masters247 strives to strengthen its digital capabilities for its B2B business, SHOPLINE has now integrated a range of functionalities, such as customer log-ins and invoicing, to streamline account management and deliver an improved user experience. SHOPLINE has also improved campaign management efficiency for Masters247’s B2B offering, helping to facilitate an increase in repeat orders and enhance sales.
GoWit, a leading AdTech company, has joined forces with CarrefourSA, the leading brand in Turkey’s food retail sector, for a revolutionary Retail Media Advertising partnership. This collaboration was established within the framework of the GoWit Retail Media Advertising platform (GoWit RMA), powering the transformation in Retail Media Ads integration and monetization. Through this Retail Media partnership, brands and sellers within CarrefourSA aim to expand their customer base, strengthen brand awareness, and increase sales by creating effective and personalized advertising campaigns via the GoWit RMA platform. Since entering the Turkish retail sector in 1993, CarrefourSA has stood out with its innovative approaches and customer satisfaction-oriented service. A joint venture of Sabancı Holding and Carrefour Group, CarrefourSA has been the pioneering brand in the Turkish retail sector, especially in the concept of hypermarkets, committed to the mission of ‘Right products, from the right manufacturer, at the right price.’ Now, through its collaboration with GoWit, CarrefourSA is set to transform digital advertising and make a strong entry into Retail Media.
Quantum Metric, the customer-driven digital analytics platform, introduces its newest product suite, designed to elevate the analytical capabilities of digitally complex businesses and scale operations. Leading the release is Metric Builder, a groundbreaking tool that allows businesses to create custom digital KPIs, uniquely tailored to their strategic goals. While universal metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS) or Customer Effort Score (CES) set industry standards for customer experience, digital brands are increasingly personalizing their offerings. This evolution creates a demand for customized metrics that better reflect each business’s unique priorities and needs. Metric Builder answers this need, allowing businesses to create and track custom KPIs tailored to their specific goals. With advanced formulas and unique metrics, Metric Builder seamlessly aligns Quantum analysis with business objectives. This includes the ability to assign different weights to customer behaviors to map to the team’s specific goals and priorities. With Metric Builder, organizations can now seamlessly connect user experiences to revenue or business outcomes, making strategic decisions that directly influence growth.
Qlik®, a global leader in data integration, analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI), announces new enhancements to its AutoML capabilities. These updates make it easier for analytics teams to build and deploy high-performing machine learning models, providing native analytics to explain predictions in real-time. With full integration into Qlik Cloud, these features enable businesses to move from reactive to proactive decision-making, helping them anticipate trends, address challenges, and optimize outcomes with greater confidence. The latest enhancements to Qlik AutoML enable analytics teams to make proactive decisions with predictive analytics and full model explainability through a straightforward, no-code interface. These updates include real-time API access for up-to-date insights, associative exploration and what-if analysis for scenario planning, and enhanced security for data protection. Multi-language support ensures global accessibility, while AI model monitoring and retraining keep predictions accurate.
Confluent, Inc. (NASDAQ:CFLT), the data streaming pioneer, has acquired WarpStream, an Apache Kafka®-compatible data streaming platform. WarpStream’s Bring Your Own Cloud (“BYOC”) data streaming architecture is designed for organisations running large scale workloads with relaxed latency requirements in their own cloud environment, perfect for logging, observability, and feeding data lakes. With the acquisition of WarpStream, Confluent now has a data streaming offering for every company no matter the need—whether that’s fully managed with Confluent Cloud, self-managed with Confluent Platform, or BYOC with WarpStream. Many organisations find that unlocking the full value of data needed for today’s most important business use cases is much harder than it should be, due to the fractured and siloed nature of the data estate. According to Confluent’s latest data streaming report, 91% of IT leaders are banking on data streaming platforms to drive their organisation’s data goals forward. Confluent’s mission is to build a data streaming platform for everyone so they can set their data in motion, regardless of their configurations and workloads. BYOC has emerged as a third option that falls in between fully managed and self-managed data streaming. BYOC uses a shared responsibility framework where the customer and the vendor are jointly responsible for the operations and health of the system. This joint responsibility gives customers more deployment flexibility, albeit at the cost of some operational overhead.
Pi Datametrics, a leading provider of enterprise SEO and content performance solutions, has announced the launch of Optimize Now, an AI-powered Content Optimization tool which generates actionable opportunities for improving page and SEO content performance. Leveraging advanced GPT-4o technology, Optimize Now delivers personalised contextual recommendations for optimizing a target URL and keyword for maximum search visibility across three key tools. Through the optimization of online content, Optimize Now allows enterprise and content SEO teams to increase their organic performance and maximise their ROI by decreasing content decay, mitigating cannibalisation risk, and streamlining their workflow. The launch of Optimize Now marks a significant expansion in Pi Datametrics’ suite of SEO tools, reinforcing its commitment to delivering actionable SEO insights and advanced content optimization solutions. Seamlessly integrating within the existing Pi Datametrics platform, Optimize Now provides a streamlined content optimization solution for enterprises looking to optimize content at scale.
Optimizely, the leading digital experience platform (DXP) provider, today kicks off Opticon 2024 in Stockholm, the first leg of its annual global event to showcase its vision for the future of digital marketing. In a year marked by significant growth and innovation, Opticon 2024 will bring together 1,200 technology, business and marketing leaders to celebrate in the city where the company’s journey began 30 years ago. Nodding to the magic of Optimizely One’s seamless suite of tools, this year’s Opticon theme is “Welcome to Onederland,” a world crafted exclusively for marketers – because happy marketers lead to happy customers. To give marketers what they desire most — the power of choice — Optimizely has announced the launch of CMS 13. This latest version will help marketers manage increasingly complex content supply chains with new tools, including Optimizely’s latest SaaS CMS features such as Visual Builder and Optimizely Graph upgrades, enhanced DAM integration, Admin Centre improvements with intuitive UI updates and Headless vs. PaaS optionality. The Stockholm event has come to life thanks in part to Diamond sponsor Valtech and Gold sponsors Contentsquare and Epinova.
Displayce, the European leader in programmatic digital out-of-home (DOOH) advertising, marks a new milestone by becoming the first specialised platform to integrate generative artificial intelligence for recommending personalised DOOH strategies. After a year of research and development, Displayce is launching CampaignAI, an intelligent assistant designed to transform how advertisers and agencies design their DOOH campaigns. As artificial intelligence tools experience exponential adoption, with global productivity gains estimated at $4.4 billion, advertising agencies rank generative AI among the top four most attractive topics for 2024. Displayce, already a pioneer in using AI for optimising DOOH buys, is taking a new step by integrating generative AI into its programmatic platform, becoming the first to offer such an innovation in this field. CampaignAI not only simplifies the creation of DOOH campaigns but revolutionises the process by analysing client briefs to generate personalised strategies perfectly aligned with marketing objectives and target audiences. Thanks to this innovation, each campaign benefits from unparalleled precision, relying on personalised and data-driven scenarios. This approach not only improves efficiency but also maximises the impact of advertising campaigns. Platform users are thus free to choose the most relevant recommendation, allowing them to script media plans that reach the audience in the most pertinent contexts – based on location, time of day, and surrounding activities.
fifty-five, an international consulting firm specialising in data, is expanding its offering to include optimisation of brand websites and their measurement tools based on carbon footprint reduction and sustainability goals. The new methodology was developed as the outcome of a new study on the carbon footprint of brand websites, with a focus on their measurement tools, having identified this as an area that is often overlooked. The latest study builds on fifty-five’s pioneering open-source study on the carbon footprint of digital advertising from 2022. Based on knowledge of digital processes, case studies drawn from experience, well-known emission factors in the digital domain and information from a solution provider in the sector, fifty-five has defined a method for calculating and reducing the carbon footprint of brands’ website activities. fifty-five’s approach to carbon footprint reduction combined two elements: maximising site efficiency for sustainable impact and minimising the carbon footprint of measurement.
