Singapore – The digital disruption during the offset of the global pandemic has made businesses in the Asia Pacific prioritize investment in improving insight and analytics capabilities, a new report from computer software company Adobe shows.

The APAC-centric report shows around 49% of businesses willing to invest in insight and analytic solutions for their business to achieve their top marketing goals this year. In addition, one third (35%) of ANZ leaders believe their organization has strong capabilities in accuracy, actionability, speed, and access of insights, while Asian leaders are far more pessimistic at around 9%.

With that in mind, leaders in ANZ think their interest in investing to analytic support is a focus on personalized customer experience as 33% of respondents agree to this reasoning, while Asian leaders are committed to enabling digital customer acquisition (35%).

Duncan Egan, vice president of DX Marketing, APAC, and Japan at Adobe commented that organizations with better access to insights are more likely to say their customers are positive about their digital experience compared to their peers with lower levels of insight.

“For brands across every sector, 2020 brought a loss of predictability. Organizations of all kinds were driven online at an accelerated rate, creating a wave of new digital customers with increasing expectations. Customers now have the upper hand in the ‘digital relationship’, with more than half of marketing respondents across APAC reporting unusual changes in customer behaviors and journeys in 2020,” Egan said.

He added, “A company with a strong customer experience (CX) strategy is more likely to achieve long-term growth than its competitors, as they are better positioned to adapt to changeable customer behaviors and markets. This report highlights that organizations need to accelerate their insight and action capabilities by moving to more flexible technologies and cloud-based platforms, as well as a unified and real-time view of the customer journey.”

The report also showed that respondents who are confident about their company’s customer experience feel optimistic about their corporate strategy (63% in ANZ vs. 73% in India vs. 56% in Asia) and their own prospects for career growth (61% in ANZ vs. 70% in India vs. 57% in Asia). In addition, organizations across APAC report three significant barriers that are hampering marketing and experience: legacy technology and systems (51% in ANZ, 37% in India and Asia), workflow issues (38% in ANZ, 33% in India, and 48% in Asia), and a lack of digital skills and capabilities (34% in ANZ, 24% in India and 43% in Asia).

Egan explained that the manifested data has been a result of the current shift to remote work, which in turn has a significant and enduring impact on businesses moving forward, requiring new marketing strategies for reaching and keeping customers.

“Companies have never been more interested in being agile and adding new capabilities for seamless digital execution, with one third (34%) saying they’ve been unusually agile and able to make quick decisions,”said Egan. 

“A hybrid approach to technology – comprising cloud and other data management systems – allows organizations to be flexible and collaborative, letting them work better with existing solutions and quickly integrate new ones. The effects of such an approach within these organizations can be seen in the improved capability in key areas of analytics and insights, added Egan

Furthermore, the report also found that transparency is still lacking with only a small number of leaders (13% in ANZ and 12% in Asia) claiming their organization is effective at communicating how data is collected and used. Also, only 10% in ANZ and 13% in Asia believe they are highly effective at communicating the value offered in exchange for customers’ consent when they first encounter the brand.

Lastly, Adobe reported that most organizations are still a long way from authentically displaying digital empathy. Just over a third (37%) of Indian executives have significant insights into customer mindset, followed by 27% in ANZ and 19% in Asia. Drivers of purchase, friction points, and attribution of how marketing actions relate to customer behavior fare only marginally better.

Singapore – Global SaaS analytics platform AppsFlyer has appointed Sanjay Trisal as its general manager for the teams in India, Southeast Asia, Australia, and New Zealand (INSEA/ANZ) to strengthen regional collaboration for greater market optimization.

Trisal will be responsible for AppsFlyer’s regional growth over multiple markets across INSEA/ANZ, improving cross-border collaboration and ensuring smoother efficiencies across teams. As Trisal is currently based in India, he will first oversee, plan, and coordinate operational strategies. For his new role, Trisal will also be playing a critical role in strengthening AppsFlyer’s commitment to the ANZ region, as the expansion only happened last November 2020.

Prior to his promotion, Trisal was AppsFlyer India’s country manager for almost six years and has grown AppsFlyer’s presence in India across all verticals and domains. During the shift to work-from-home in early 2020, he has set up a strategy that ensured good productivity results and one that retained backend processes intact for the team in India.

Before joining the AppsFlyer, Trisal has had more than 20 years of strong sales, new business development, and management experience in the IT, high-tech, and consulting sectors. He spent almost three years as head of sales at mobile ad platform InMobi and was responsible for expanding the LATAM market.

Commenting on his appointment, Trisal said that the regional collaboration will continue to be the key to their success, saying that he is excited to be in a position to work across core markets to drive business objectives and grow to meet the demands of the region alongside a high-performing team.

“AppsFlyer’s solutions help marketers to work smarter and fuel data-driven initiatives in a market that is constantly evolving. I look forward to tapping into the numerous opportunities INSEA/ANZ offers,” added Trisal.

Meanwhile, Ronen Mense, the president and managing director of AppsFlyer for APAC region, said that they are very pleased that Trisal is taking on a broader role in AppsFlyer, as the company has been growing over the last year. He further shared that with the opening of the latest APAC office in Sydney, Trisal’s remarkable talents will surely bring cohesive collaboration across their core markets.

“Sanjay’s notable accomplishments in India make him a perfect fit for this new role and we have full confidence that he will play a critical role in spearheading a successful collaboration between regions,” said Mense.­­

Sydney, Australia – HypeAuditor, an AI analytics platform for measuring effective influencer marketing, has today released a new competitor analysis tool called Competitor Grid, which allows brands to check the reach of influencer marketing campaigns of their competitors.

Through the new tool, Competitor Grid gives marketers the ability to easily analyze the performance of competitors’ influencer marketing campaigns. Arming them with important information, such as the full list of influencers they work with, analysis of the creatives used, and amount spent per post on a campaign. HypeAuditor’s aim is to help marketers make more strategic decisions for their brand’s influencer marketing activity. 

Furthermore, the tool gives users full access to analytics on how competitor brand’s influencer marketing campaigns are performing, including a close analysis of the following criteria namely engagement rate, audience quality, influencer quality, cost per engagement, and reach.

Competitor Grid’s development comes in response to the demand from marketers, as highlighted in research conducted in January 2021 by HypeAuditor, which found that 1 in 3 marketers (31%) are unaware of the influencers their competitors are working with, whilst almost half (45%) do not know the audiences their competitors are targeting through influencer marketing and with 87% finding it helpful to get a list of Instagram posts with competitors’ mentions.

“As influencer marketing matures, brands are reevaluating how they work with influencers. Instead of one-off deals with hundreds of influencers, all using the same copy, marketers, and agencies are now looking for more long-term, authentic partnerships that give influencers more creative control.” said Alex Frolov, CEO of HypeAuditor

Following the release of Competitor Grid, HypeAuditor conducted a research analysis of Australia-based brands and measured them against each other based on Instagram influencer marketing.

In the study, HypeAuditor noted that Australian home-grown brand Chemist Warehouse is the highest performer in influencer marketing in Australia, in terms of beauty brands. HypeAuditor notes such strong performance due to the brand achieving 1.51% average engagement rate for the quarter, an average cost of $0.32 per engagement, and 89 sponsored and likely sponsored posts from 61 Instagram influencers such as Sophie Monk, Christina Sikalias, and Jules Robinson.

The research also noted that global beauty brand Sephora failed to compete against its Australian local counterparts, with home-grown brands like Bondi Sands and Priceline Australia still taking the lead in influencer marketing reach.

“To do this effectively, they need data that they can rely on when developing influencer marketing campaigns. Our new Competitor Grid answers these new needs and helps marketers make the right decisions when looking at implementing an influencer marketing strategy, based on valuable information gathered about competitors’ strategies,” Frolov added.

Singapore – Global SaaS analytics platform AppsFlyer has announced the launch of its new predictive analytics feature, PredictSK, a new solution that will be a part of its SKAdNetwork suite, SK360

SKAdNetwork is about to become a major part of campaign measurement and optimization on iOS, following Apple’s latest privacy changes. This deterministic attribution framework provides advertisers with some data on their iOS campaigns, and while Apple has been continuously making updates to improve its offering to advertisers and app developers, it also introduces critical limitations.

Through the new solutions suite, brands are able to configure and optimize their conversion value, validate their data and keep it fraud-free. They will also be able to integrate with their choice of partners, all through a dedicated, centralized analytics dashboard. 

PredictSK is made in response to the current limitation of SKAdNetwork where advertisers rely on short window time in measuring campaign performance. With only 24 hours of user activity to work with, optimization is nearly impossible. With PredictSK, advertisers will be able to leverage early signals of engagement, which is usually in the first 24-72 hours, to predict long-term campaign performance. 

Furthermore, PredictSK puts mobile attribution in SKAdNetwork on ‘auto-pilot’, removing the measurement and timing barriers and allowing advertisers to maintain and strengthen their competitive edge in this new reality.

According to Barak Witowski, vice president for core product at AppsFlyer, the company’s developed solutions have always been at best for the benefit of advertisers, adding that PredictSK will help brands be empowered against limited data availability.

“AppsFlyer’s SK360 suite will empower brands to eliminate the uncertainty brought on by limited data availability and limited measurement capabilities, while maintaining end user privacy, by combining multiple solutions for maximum coverage,” Witowski stated.

He added, “Moreover, PredictSK will enable measurement across all user events to quickly and accurately predict user loan-to-value (LTV), helping advertisers save precious time and money. With SK360, Advertisers can stay in the driver’s seat while complying with the strictest privacy requirements,”

Meanwhile, Liwei Chen, staff product manager at Twitter, stated that they were working closely with AppsFlyer in delivering a fully operational plug-and-play SKAdNetwork solution.

“The solution was designed together to validate all advertisers’ needs from SKAdNetwork are met: data trust, granularity, optimization, and measurement. This is another exciting step for advertisers, delivering upon our promise of helping drive business success while maximizing end-user privacy,” said Chen.

The new product will be available after Apple starts enforcing its AppTrackingTransparency framework in early spring. The SK360 suite will continue to support the ecosystem throughout Apple’s upcoming privacy updates.

San Francisco, California, USA – Marketing technology company Kenshoo has announced its acquisition of market intelligence company Signals Analytics, which entails enhanced accelerated e-commerce adoption for their clients in the midst of the pandemic.

As businesses are facing the need to rapidly transform engagement from physical to digital, there is a rise in the emergence of disruptive direct-to-consumer models and increased sensitivity to consumer privacy. Through the establishment of an AI-powered platform that connects internal and external data sets to surface insights across the entire marketing value chain, Kenshoo will empower enterprise clients to make stronger predictions and unleash their growth potential.

“Given the exponential growth we are experiencing in performance marketing, specifically around e-commerce, Kenshoo sees firsthand how brands make decisions to bring products to market online. The channel discussion is changing from media platforms to distribution types—direct-to-consumer or retail—and we are relied upon to support those decisions,” said Kenshoo CEO and co-founder Yoav Izhar-Prato.

He also added, “We looked for a powerful platform that best captured holistic consumer and market insights by connecting external data sets layered with cutting-edge, advanced analytics capabilities, and we found both in Signals Analytics. With a proven record in curating and augmenting external data and utilizing unique assets in artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) to infuse decisions with relevant, actionable insights for very prestigious brands, the team wowed us.”

Through the acquisition, the combined company assets will help create a connected knowledge graph across brand, consumer, product, campaign, publisher, and market data silos. This then allows consumer insights and analytics teams to streamline trend analysis in order to identify white space opportunities; provide marketers the ability to build more effective strategic plans, and give social, retail, and publisher partners access to broader cross-channel intelligence to generate value.

“Signals Analytics was founded on the premise that more sound, timely market intelligence could improve business outcomes as a critical bridge to fast-moving customers. My co-founder Kobi Gershoni and I recognized that the way to get there was by extracting available market signals from the noise that were often missed given the sheer volume of data constantly generated online,” said Gil Sadeh, Signals Analytics co-founder, and CEO.

“By connecting these signals in a robust, configurable data fabric using patented AI and natural language processing, we have helped some of the world’s most discernible consumer brands accelerate product innovation, improve launch metrics, support marketing teams, and ultimately drive growth. Joining forces with Kenshoo means we can advance our collective mission of enabling smarter, faster go-to-market decisions in the current, highly dynamic digital commerce era,” Sadeh added.

Kenshoo has established its presence in Asia Pacific and Japan back in 2014, with its regional headquarters located in Hong Kong and two satellite offices in Singapore and Japan.

Mumbai, India – Local-based entertainment super-app ZEE5 has partnered with XroadMedia,  a cloud- and server-based content discovery and recommendations back-end solutions for  digital media, to ramp up its hyper-personalized video-on-demand (VOD)  offerings and social media services. 

Through the partnership, ZEE5 will be using XroadMedia’s content discovery platform Ncanto, which will help in creating multiple content discoveries, recommendations, and personalization use-cases for its users.

“ZEE5 has always believed in the power of great content and powerful technology coming together to offer the best experience to a viewer. We believe gone are the days of broadcast; even the current trend of viewing audiences in clusters and cohorts will soon give way to individual personalization,” stated Rajneel Kumar, business head for expansion projects and head of products at ZEE5.

He added, “We have benchmarked their solution for a few months and found adoption and click-through-rates on recommendations were significantly higher along with a substantial increase in average time spent by a user. XroadMedia’s cloud-based services have also provided us with a higher level of flexibility to serve personalization use-cases and I’m confident this partnership will heighten our seamless content viewing experience, a feat we take great pride in and work tirelessly to maintain.”

Furthermore, Ncanto will aid ZEE5 in creating dynamic personalization of VODbased on interests and watching behavior. 

“Our partnership with ZEE5 is another major milestone in the history of XroadMedia and proves the progress we have made over the past few years. We are particularly excited to work with ZEE5 as they are using our solution to its full extent – from personalizing entire screens in the user interface via creating and managing editorial services to applying our solution across multiple content types and sources. We are very pleased with this partnership, as the application of our solution shows how important personalization is to ZEE5 and I am sure together we will push the boundaries of content discovery and personalization even further in the future”, said XroadMedia Co-Founder and CEO Adolf Proidl.

Singapore – To improve app marketing measurements and fraud prevention for their digital advertiser clients, app marketing platform Adjust has joined the Adobe Exchange Partner Program to utilize client-inclined strategies for performance marketing online, through Adobe’s Experience Cloud.

The Adobe Exchange Partner Program is an ongoing partner program designed for technology partners, which include software and data vendors to integrate third-party apps to companies looking to diversify and analyze their digital reach impact.

With this partnership, current and prospective mutual clients will be able to build a more complete view of the user journey across all channels — augmenting their customer experience stack analytics. This is done with a combination of mobile app data and data collected from other touchpoints.

Furthermore, the partnership entails a combination of solutions for marketing, analytics, advertising, and e-commerce, and the inclusion of a suite of measurement, fraud prevention, and automation products to provide data integration between Adjust and Adobe.

“As a driver in innovation in mobile marketing, we’re thrilled to become a premier level partner in the Adobe Exchange Partner Program, bringing actionable analytics and measurement, fraud prevention and automation to leading businesses globally — and with a single platform approach Adobe customers are used to. We are excited to see the business benefits both our current and future clients will see from this new relationship,” said Andrey Kazakov, VP Partnerships at Adjust.

Cody Crnkovich, head of platform partners and strategy at Adobe Experience Cloud commented, “As customer activity shifts along with the pandemic, advertisers are facing greater challenges connecting mobile marketing spend to app revenue and customer lifetime value. Adobe is delighted to have Adjust as a business partner, giving advertisers the capability to see mobile data across all available channels, automate campaign reporting and protect ad dollars from fraudsters in one place.”  

Sydney, Australia – Mobile advertising company Adludio is expanding its presence to the Australian market by forging a new partnership with ad-tech company Inskin Media, bringing Adludio’s ad unit accessible for Australian marketers.

Adludio’s services revolve around interactive mobile advertising that helps users engage in ad campaigns. This then allows marketers to collect anonymous audience engagement data, which is then fed to Adludio’s algorithm to deliver high engagement rates across mobile devices.

On the other hand, ad-tech Inskin Media focuses on providing multi-screen display advertising. Itmerges design and technology to promote clientele ad campaigns across online publishers and websites, which scopes under the umbrella of mobile advertising.

“This partnership with Inskin Australia is a testament to our constant evolution and development of Adludio in the APAC region. Through this partnership with Inskin, we’ll be able to present innovative Australian advertisers with a more robust offering to engage mobile audiences in the region,” Adludio CEO and co-founder Paul Coggins (left of banner picture) said.

For Inskin Media APAC General Manager Georgia Woodburne (right of banner picture), the recent deal means bringing more opportunities to Australian marketers to create more immersive ad experiences for their mobile audiences.

“We share the same values and both believe in the importance of a well-designed, outstanding creative. Becoming Adludio’s exclusive reseller is a fantastic commercial opportunity for both parties,” Woodburne stated.

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia ー United Overseas Bank (UOB) Malaysia has launched Mighty Insights, a mobile banking app based on artificial intelligence (AI)ーa first in the countryーto create simpler banking transactions for customers of the said bank.

Said app features a dashboard for the customer’s monthly expenses based on their credit card spending, app alerts for third-party subscriptions, merchant payments, or insufficient balance. A Quick Response (QR) code payment function has been also added to the app to ensure safer fund transfers or payments. 

The app also features advanced data analytics, machine learning, and pattern recognition algorithms to help customers provide financial guidance in terms of spending, life age, and lifestyle priority variances. 

Driven with the same analytics as UOB’s AI-driven predictive analytics engine and TMRW, a mobile-only bank designed for ASEAN millennials, Mighty Insights is second in the line which launched AI-driven mobile banking.

Ronnie Lim, managing director and country head of personal financial services for UOB Malaysia, expressed that the recent mobile banking app launch is just one of the bank’s strategies to further harness the technological capabilities for banking and finance for customer-centric experience.

“As technology continues to improve the way we manage our finances, we designed Mighty Insights to anticipate our customers’ banking needs and to offer them the most suitable financial solutions to help them save and spend wisely. Each insight is personalised based on the customer’s spending habits and banking behaviour. Driven by AI and machine learning, Mighty Insights enables customers to track their day-to-day spending conveniently and to view easily the categories they have been spending on the most,” Lim stated.

The app is available for download at the Google Play Store, the Apple App Store, or at Huawei AppGallery.

Singapore-Digital analytics company Contentsquare has recently announced its organizational expansion within the Asia Pacific (APAC) region by establishing several regional offices and appointing two new executives to aid in the company’s operations.

The company upholds its provision of services, including customer behavior, behavior analysis through billions of anonymous web, mobile and app interactions, transforming this knowledge into advisories that increase revenue, engagement and growth.

Its new regional offices are located in the cities of Singapore, Tokyo, Melbourne, and Sydney. 

Following this endeavor, Contentsquare has also employed two key executives for the overall operations of the group. David Bochsler, a former senior head at Microsoft, has been hired as the regional managing director for APAC operations, while Frazer Adnam, former head of CRM Marketing for Deliveroo and later on Afterpay, joined as ANZ Country Manager. The company said the expansion endeavor is part of its goal for the year to specifically expand within the APAC region, which it hopes to stay in the longer run. 

“When I first saw the Contentsquare platform, I was just so excited about the technology. I was the decision maker on the brand side that Contentsquare would have traditionally sold to. I thought, ‘this solves problems that I literally would have needed five people to solve.’ From someone who had been working in customer experience roles for a long period of time, I was completely fascinated by what I saw was going to be the new wave of customer experience technology,” Frazer Adnam, country manager for ANZ Contentsquare stated.

Meanwhile, David Bochsler, Contentsquare’s APAC managing director commented, “Contentsquare is perfectly positioned for substantial growth in Asia. It caters exceptionally well to those very large mature, highly data driven organizations but also caters to those people that are just getting their feet in the water as far as understanding what their online visitors are doing. It’s the first time I’ve seen any technology that’s shown me what’s inside that black box of customer behavior online. It allows brands to finally understand why their digital visitors behave the way they do”.