Singapore – Businesses are increasingly integrating customer data platforms with AI and analytics to personalise customer experiences and drive business success, according to a new report from customer engagement platform Twilio.

Data from the report suggests that amidst the widespread adoption of AI, businesses are grappling with an exponential increase in data volume, with Twilio Segment processing a record high of 12.1 trillion API calls in 2023.

This increase is indicative of a larger trend towards more sophisticated, data-centric operations, emphasising the essential role of real-time data processing and seamless AI technology integration.

With this in mind, Twilio emphasises that the ability to quickly harness data insights through CDPs that are open and interoperable with data warehouses is a critical competitive edge, enabling businesses to efficiently collect, unify, and activate data across various platforms.

Going into detail, other key findings of the report claim that data integrity is essential for deriving meaningful customer insights and leveraging AI competitively, as the effectiveness of AI hinges on the data it’s trained on. 

Additionally, data warehouses continued to spike in popularity as one of the most popular destination categories for customer data in 2023, as businesses pave the way for deeper analytics and AI-driven insights.

Talking about these findings, Kathryn Murphy, SVP of product and design at Twilio, said, “In 2024, more and more brands will turn to AI to deliver better, more personalised experiences for their customers. Our report showcases the essential role customer data plays in maximising AI’s effectiveness.”

“At Twilio, we’re seeing a significant trend towards leveraging the interconnectedness of AI, data warehouses, and digital communication channels. The ability to interoperate with data warehouses is essential, ensuring that CDPs act as a pivotal technology for brands eager to leverage AI and data to forge even stronger relationships with their customers,” she added. 

Meanwhile, Chris Hecht, SVP, corporate development and product partnerships, at Databricks, commented, “As businesses look to break down data silos and rely on a unified data platform to power their analytics and AI initiatives, the importance of data sharing and data quality has never been more apparent.”

“Our collaboration with Twilio Segment signals our dedication to ensuring that organisations leverage the full potential of their data – no matter where it lives – and can effectively bridge the gap from data to insights using cleaned and verified event profile data”, he added.

Singapore Omnicom Media Group’s data and analytics subsidiary, Annalect, has teamed with InfoSum, a worldwide data collaboration platform, to build a neutral clean room solution suited for clients in the Asia Pacific area.

The project tackles issues related to dispersed data sources by emphasising data collaboration that is efficient, sustainable, and privacy-conscious. It seeks to get a thorough understanding of companies’ customers and break down data silos.

Annalect in Australia spearheaded the initiative, and in partnership with InfoSum, formed cooperative alliances with the Australian reward program FlyBuys and data provider Experian. This collaboration sought to develop a complete and practical understanding of customers. Audience profiling is critical in this endeavour because it allows marketers to migrate from asserted data profiles to true customer data.

The incorporation of InfoSum functionalities into Omni, Omnicom Media Group’s industry marketing orchestration operating system, permits the secure use of data across the whole marketing workflow, from planning to activation and optimization.

It is expected that privacy-focused measures, such as the elimination of third-party cookies, will have a major impact on data-driven marketing. This innovative industry step aims to improve measurement accuracy and ensure access to consumer information and segment profiling capabilities to prepare itself for the future.

By combining dispersed insights creation with data privacy and data utility, it goes beyond the conventional use of clean rooms. Instead of moving or replicating the data, this entails relying on mobile code and sharing the algorithm that extracts insights.

The InfoSum platform acts as a neutral clean room and creates a statistical duplicate of the given location, behavioural, and purchase data. By ensuring that no vendor data is copied or imported onto InfoSum’s platform, this procedure protects customer privacy and lowers operational risks. All parties involved can work together while still having control over their data.

By maximising match rates across many data sources, InfoSum, among other things, creates lookalike audiences and finds new prospects for offline advertising purchases based on location-based insights.

In Australia, proof of concepts were conducted in a variety of industries, including FMCG, alcohol, telco, and automotive. The concept will be expanded to additional markets in Asia Pacific.

Through the use of these addressable audience segments, Omnicom Media Group clients may improve their communication strategies and applications like data partnerships, channel selection, and adaptive creative messaging.

Speaking about the partnership, Paul Shepherd, president of Annalect, Omnicom Media Group Asia Pacific, said, “This is an important move to ensure data privacy and optimise data utility through the innovative concept of distributed insights generation. This approach offers deeper and meaningful insights into existing and prospective customers from diverse data sources, allowing a holistic understanding of consumer behaviour while safeguarding individual privacy.”

Meanwhile, Richard Knott, InfoSum GM, ANZ, expressed, “We’re excited to see the innovative and compelling use of our technology by Annalect to enrich their clients’ marketing strategies. InfoSum enables organisations to safely scale and leverage their consumer data through privacy-first, multi-party data collaboration. Pioneering organisations like Annalect are leading the industry in this transition, harnessing that concept and turning it into real-world, actionable benefits.”

New York – Global technology company Lotame has launched its next-generation data platform Spherical, which is targeted at helping marketers quickly drive the most value from known and unknown first-party data for customer engagement and acquisition.

The platform also aims to empower brands and media owners to drive growth and revenue through actionable customer intelligence, data-informed audiences, and identity-powered activation in cookie-restricted, cookie-enabled, or authenticated environments. 

Spherical will be enabling interoperability and data portability across brand and media owner tech stacks. It also aims to extend first-party data living in data warehouses or customer data platforms (CDPs) into the marketing and advertising technology (madtech) ecosystem. 

Moreover, leading CDPs integrated with Spherical will include BlueConic, Meiro, mParticle, Rudderstack, Salesforce, Simon Data, Tealium and Treasure Data. Lotame plans to expand support to additional CDPs on an ongoing basis.

Andy Monfried, Lotame’s CEO and founder, shared the news in his talk at the IAB’s Annual Leadership Meeting. He said, “There’s no shortage of pain in our industry. Everyone wants first-party data but not everyone has it. Many that have it don’t know how to make the most of it. Preserving addressability and data connectivity are gridlocked by a host of macro and micro issues.”

He also added that Spherical was designed to address these issues instead of focusing on the ‘symptoms.’

Carlos Payares, CSO LATAM at Omnicom Media Group, also commented, “Spherical empowers digitally native brands to onboard customer emails as they authenticate onsite in real time. That eliminates the lag time between first-party data ingestion and activation, and is a tremendous competitive advantage, especially in markets with limited onboarding functionality. We’re excited to test with our clients straightaway.”

San Francisco, USA – Zero-party data marketing platform Octane AI, announced two new executive leadership appointments. Longtime Octane AI executive Megan Berry has been promoted to Chief Product Officer (CPO), after five years of contributing to Octane AI’s product development, and Alex Gurevich was promoted to Chief Operating Officer (COO) after serving as its Vice President of Finance and Operations for the past year. 

Both strategic appointments will help guide Octane AI as the company prepares to make its leading zero-party data software more accessible for e-commerce merchants of all sizes through machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Octane AI CEO, Matt Schlicht, said, “Our mission is to provide businesses with the tools they need to understand not just what their customers are doing, but what they are thinking. Megan and Alex embody this mission, and their new roles enable them to continue to drive growth, build a world-class team, and help businesses scale with zero-party data.”

As CPO of Octane AI, Megan Berry will lead the product, design, and engineering teams in enhancing Octane AI’s platform to enable more users to create relationships with their site visitors based on real data, and turn them into customers. 

Megan Berry, CPO of Octane AI, commented, “I’ve never been more excited about what we’re building here at Octane AI! We want to empower every e-commerce merchant to have more conversations with their customers and to leverage zero-party data to humanise their shopping experience.” 

According to Berry, merchants know the importance of collecting and owning customer data, but these merchants need solutions that make it easy to use data to improve the full customer journey. “That’s why we are prioritising AI features that will make collecting zero-party data a no-brainer. We are making it incredibly fast and easy for marketers to get up and running with zero-party data marketing,” added Berry. 

After joining Octane AI as the Vice President of Finance and Operations, Alex Gurevich quickly transformed the operations of the company to be in a position to scale both the customer base and the internal team. In the new COO role, Gurevich will oversee internal functions, such as finance and people operations, as well as customer-facing functions, such as account management.

Alex Gurevich, COO of Octane AI, commented, “Since I joined in March of 2021, it’s been really great to see our customer base grow 80%+ and the monthly Gross Merchandise Value these customers generate through our software more than double.” 

On his new appointment, Gurevich said, “Looking at our roadmap and seeing how powerful our software will become with machine learning, I am excited about driving increasing value for our customers and making their businesses more automated, smarter, and personalised.”