Tag: MarTech

In today’s digital era, most businesses already have some form of marketing technology – also known as MarTech – in place. It is within this frame that MarTech is seen to be a key component for recovery, with over 60% of leaders planning to increase spends on technology in 2021, according to Gartner.

However, even with all its potential, MarTech still presents a myriad of challenges for businesses. While leaders understand that integrating a MarTech stack generates immense value-add for their operations, they do not necessarily understand what is required after the very first stage of implementation. 

Accelerated Demands in Southeast Asia

As the world continues to become more digital, MarTech is likely to continue thriving. According to Gartner Inc’s CMO Spend Survey, 26% of the total 2021 marketing budget will be dedicated to tech, making it a top priority for most Chief Marketing Officers.

In Southeast Asia alone, there is strong demand for MarTech solutions in the past few years. Some businesses have already successfully implemented five to 10 different systems on average, but tend to neglect them halfway. Therein lies the problem; while brands have managed to convince business leaders to invest in the technology, they may not necessarily have the time or resources to ensure they are utilizing the solutions to the fullest extent.

What’s the Hold Up?

These brands are sitting on a lot of value. While the global COVID-19 pandemic has definitely been a driver for brands to understand how to best utilize these solutions to their full potential, one key challenge is linking MarTech back to the business’ broader strategy. Many leaders miss a critical next step of building a capable team, which is an investment that is actually harder to justify.

In addition, while demand is growing for tech-savvy marketers in Southeast Asia, we are still seeing a shortage of talent today. Nearly 70% of tech hiring managers in the region say it takes more than three months to fill an open tech position on their team, according to a survey by Robert Walters. Moreover, LinkedIn finds that the top three fastest growing job categories in Southeast Asia for 2021 are digital content, data analyst, and software technology.

Tapping on MarTech’s Full Potential

There is a natural instinct for leaders to get caught up on the “next big thing.” They tend to focus more on getting the tech up and running but lose focus on the entire lifecycle after the initial launch. The challenges mentioned above can be addressed by first identifying specific pain points to tackle with and understanding which aspects of the business need solving. After all, a solution is only useful if it can be integrated with existing infrastructure and translated to business outcomes.

Here are a few ways to unleash MarTech’s full potential:

  1. Expand the team. Most businesses have very lean teams; more often than not there is only one person responsible for running the entire MarTech stack. Leaders should focus on investing in and building a core team to ensure continuity in the long run.
  2. Build specific return on investments around MarTech. Clear ROIs will help the leadership team to better assess the investment and become open to new opportunities that lie ahead. Getting organizational buy-in also helps create a stronger digital mindset among employees across different departments beyond the core MarTech team.
  3. Update and integrate systems as early as possible. With thousands of MarTech solutions to choose from, and new products and features emerging daily, redundancy within a business’ MarTech stack is inevitable. However, marketers need to take a strategic approach to avoid siloed operations. According to Gartner, only 33% feel their existing tech is useful, while over 80% are sitting on a short-sighted or outdated MarTech roadmap. Thus, examining current MarTech stack and employing efforts to either maximise, improve, or even re-evaluate their current stack are critical. This is also a signal that it is high time for many MarTech stacks and roadmaps to go through a level of audit to accommodate innovation, emphasis on business differentiation, or even just simple updating for records.
  4. Explore MarTech-as-a-Service and its benefits. MarTech-as-a-Service provides an opportunity for businesses to analyze operations holistically across the sales and marketing funnel. This also helps businesses choose the right solutions that match the business’ maturity level and to optimize current stacks.

There is no one-size-fits-all approach because all businesses are different. From objectives, company size to business priorities, MarTech can help solve challenges across departments and teams where relevant. 

With a dynamic set of MarTech solutions to choose from, it will be key for businesses to adopt a strategic approach — aligning the right tools to their processes and ensuring best-in-class technology in all data-driven decisions. As we forge ahead into the next half of 2021, it is worth considering the dynamic trends that are shaping the current and future environment of MarTech to stay ahead of the curve.

This article was written by Christopher Wiseman, head of marketing technology at ADA.
 

Sydney, Australia – IntelligenceBank, an Australian-based marketing technology company, has secured a US$37 growth investment, which will help fuel the continued growth of IntelligenceBank, fortify its market leadership position, and support global expansion plans.

Made possible by global growth equity firm Five Elms Capital, said funding will also accelerate IntelligenceBank’s innovative product roadmap which includes initiatives such as next-gen AI, flexible integrations and powerful content governance and compliance features.

The $37 million (USD) investment comes as brands and enterprises have realized that outdated technologies, disjointed data sources, and manual processes make it challenging to efficiently manage essential marketing workflows and ensure compliance across the organization. 

IntelligenceBank digitally transforms manual processes and poorly stacked systems with a purpose-built platform to improve marketing efficiency, increase speed to market, and minimize marketing compliance risks. 

Speaking about the investment, Tessa Court, CEO and founder at IntelligenceBank, stated that the funding will help the company to scale its platform and further support its rapidly expanding global customer base.

“We are looking forward to working with the Five Elms team to accelerate our growth during a time when marketing departments are undergoing massive digital transformations. There is a growing need for IntelligenceBank’s marketing system of record to better manage content, deliver go to market efficiencies, and streamline approvals as well as brand and regulatory compliance. The new funding will help us move faster and leverage global market opportunities that will serve our customers’ needs,” Court stated.

Meanwhile, Joe Onofrio, Managing Director at Five Elms, commented: “We have gotten to know Tessa and her team over the last four years, and during that time they have efficiently executed on their plan to build a world-class organization helping clients access, manage, deploy, and control their digital assets at scale. IntelligenceBank has an evangelical customer base across numerous industries and continents. 

He added, “The company’s platform is leading the way as organizations manage digital transitions and increases in remote workforces. We could not be more excited to support IntelligenceBank in their quest to deliver innovative solutions that enable marketing organizations to be more collaborative, efficient, and strategic.”

California, USA – Global customer data company Tealium has recently announced new features in its customer data platform (CDP), Tealium Features, which allows customers to connect to custom destinations, transform data, automate workflows, and launch new use cases faster with simple code.

Specifically, Tealium Features can aid customers through building or customizing integrations to connect to custom destinations and transforming real-time streaming data prior to activation to ensure that it is in its most usable format across the tech stack. In addition, it also aids in automating workflows to minimize repetitive, time-consuming tasks and increase high-scale efficiency and quickly connect customers to external datasets to leverage critical data that lives outside of a business’ CDP.

“We pioneered this type of customization capability in the market when we introduced extensions in Tealium iQ Tag Management and Tealium Functions brings the same customization flexibility to our server-side products,” said Mike Anderson, CTO and founder at Tealium.

Tealium iQ Tag Management pertains to one of the systems of Tealium, which aids customers to take in charge of their marketing technology implementations, which in turn eases the deployment of new vendor tags and makes edits to existing ones.

“Most of the customer experience is digital but the ecosystem of data and technologies powering these experiences are rarely based on a single platform. To keep the entire journey connected, businesses need more flexibility and options from their customer data platform (CDP) to quickly build custom ‘just for me’ integrations, automations and transformations for their unique application stack and use cases,” the company said in a press statement.

Today, Tealium Functions is generally available for Tealium’s other services such as EventStream API Hub and AudienceStream CDP customers enabling them to create custom functions for data destinations and integrations. Later this year, Transformations in Tealium Functions will be available to further expand customization capabilities and allow customers to create functions at the point of data collection to transform, modify, or validate events before processing.

“With Tealium Functions, our vision is to eventually enable customers to create a customization layer that can be used at any point of the data lifecycle so they can truly identify and address their most complex business needs,” Anderson concluded.

Singapore – Recognizing the need for brands to transition from the traditional dependence on ‘cookies’ for their digital advertising to a privacy-centric method, MARKETECH APAC, the news content platform dedicated to the advertising and marketing industry in the APAC region, has recently conducted its webinar last 2 June to spur the dialogue on the topic. It provided marketers and advertisers in Asia a view of the best practices they can adopt for their transition to a new internet landscape that is fast putting the premium on consumer privacy. The virtual event on Wednesday also uncovered firsthand insights from marketing professionals in Asia with a panel that saw the gathering of esteemed leaders from the industries of insurance, digital payments and fast food. 

In the first half of the webinar, Creative & Media Innovation in Asia | Preparing your brand for a cookieless world, Travis Teo, co-founder and executive director of Adzymic, presented a discussion on the status quo of third-party cookie usage in marketing and the challenges and opportunities it would leave once they are finally phased out in 2022. 

Meanwhile, in the said panel discussion, industry practitioners shared their experiences as they shift away from cookie targeting techniques. Marketing leaders from Payoneer, Burger King, and Income discussed the strategies they are employing to get ready for the not-so-distant future. 

Privacy-centricity and creative technology: modern marketing techniques for the new cookieless era

In the first presentation, Teo discussed a three-pronged approach that brands can follow to continue driving campaign performance in the post-cookie world: how to sustain accurate audience targeting, where should the ads appear, and how creative messaging strategies should shift to adapt to the new targeting methods. 

He discussed in detail the key alternatives to third-party cookies, sharing the pros and cons of Google’s cohort-based interest targeting, and first-party data targeting methods through hashed/anonymized email addresses or first-party cookie collection. Other considerations discussed were the scale of universal ID adoption of online publishers, accessibility of second-party data from publishers and leveraging adtech to scale up on creative testing and performance. 

Round table discussion on how brands are preparing for transition

The panelists included Tanushri Rastogi, brand and media lead at Burger King Indonesia; Anny Huang, head of digital business at Income; and Eileen Borromeo, head of marketing for Southeast Asia & Pakistan at Payoneer; with the session moderated by Peggy Koh, head of growth and client success at Adzymic. 

Through the lens of the panelists’ unique business environments, the group discussed how they are sharpening focus on capturing quality first-party customer data via consumer mobile apps or BTL events, and investing in martech stacks that include data management platforms to run campaigns. They concluded by sharing client perspectives on the expectations they had of media agency or martech partners to be knowledgeable and proactive in making recommendations for future-ready methods of running campaigns.

The webinar was conducted under MARKETECH APAC’s webinar series Inside Innovation, in partnership with Adzymic, which attracted a total of 396 registrations across Asia and ANZ.

On-demand access to the webinar is now available. Register here to get your access.

Singapore – Martech startup Affable.ai has announced that it has raised US$2m in total funding, which will be used by the startup to bolster its influencer marketing platform to more clients globally who seek aid on running high-impact influencer marketing campaigns.

The funding was backed by venture capital companies Prime Venture Partners, Decacorn Capital, and SGInnovate.

Founded in 2017 by Nisarg Shah and Swayam Narain, Affable’s end-to-end Influencer Marketing Platform allows brands and agencies to streamline their influencer strategies throughout the planning, discovery, activation, and reporting phases. Affable uses advanced machine learning and big data analytics to help brands find influencers, manage and measure campaign performance. 

With the influencer marketing process being extremely manual, time-consuming and completely based on guesswork, Affable provides brands with data-driven insights and analytics to help streamline their micro-influencer marketing process.

Affable also utilizes artificial intelligence and machine learning to create accurate influencer-brand mapping and measuring campaign ROIs. In addition, Affable indexes all the social media users and identifies potential influencers that a brand could work with. 

Using Affable, marketers can find influencers, manage them campaign-wise, and measure post-campaign analytics such as engagement from in-target audience, influencer success(as a group and individually), measure the overall effectiveness of the campaign, as well as measure clicks and sales.

According to Nisarg Shah, CEO and co-founder at Affable.ai, they see a huge opportunity in working with brands to enable the much needed, data-driven influencer marketing campaigns, as the brands and agencies, they work with reinforce their belief in the need for analytics to streamline the micro-influencer marketing process. 

“Prime brings a depth of experience in scaling global SaaS companies, operational expertise, as well as a strong network that we can leverage during our growth phase and we are very excited to partner with them. At the same time, participation from our existing investors is a great endorsement for us,”

Affable currently serves a multitude of over 45 top brands and agency clients including Huawei, Wipro, Pomelo, Fresh, Omnicom, dentsu, and WE Communications. The company tracks more than three Million Influencers across Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok.

Stockholm, Sweden – Global software Bambuser, which primarily specializes in interactive live video streaming, has announced the acquisition of global martech company Relatable, as both companies are vying to use their combined resources to empower the future of live video shopping as well as influencer marketing campaigns.

The acquisition, valued at US$24m, will also help enable brands and retailers to scale high-impact livestream shopping implementations and drive business results.

Bambuser’s recent move follows after a year of remarkable growth for Bambuser and widespread adoption of the company’s SaaS solutions for interactive e-commerce. The two companies will operate and service customers independently, yet collaboratively. 

In line with the acquisition, Relatable founder Martin Garbarczyk will join Bambuser’s executive team as chief revenue officer (CRO), contributing his extensive experience building high-performing sales organizations to further accelerate Bambuser’s global growth.

“Bambuser and Relatable are a match made in heaven. I’m excited to build a global sales organization that leverages the enormous market demand and fuels growth to our SaaS business,” Garbarczyk said.

As a first step in the new relationship, Bambuser will add creative and strategic services from Relatable to its customers, enabling them to amplify campaigns before, during, and after Live Video Shopping events. Teams will be co-located in Sweden, the U.S. and U.K., where each company has an established presence, to enhance synergies and drive opportunities for cross- and upselling.

“By joining forces with Relatable, we increase our market pole position with an unrivaled SaaS offering that clearly differentiates us from the competition,” said Maryam Ghahremani, CEO of Bambuser.

Singapore – Data Analytics Ventures, Inc, the loyalty and data business unit of Philippine conglomerate JG Summit Holdings, has tapped the services of marketing technology company Antsome to empower its data-related product and services marketing to its market by integrating Antsome’s customer data platform Antsomi CDP 365.

JG Summit is one of the largest and most diversified Filipino conglomerates, engaged primarily in businesses that serve a diverse market in the Philippines, Southeast Asia, and Australia with businesses that span retail, airline, consumer goods, manufacturing, and more.

Antsomi CDP 365 is an artificial intelligence-driven customer data platform which helps companies unify their customer data from multiple sources, such as mobile apps, web, social media, digital ads, customer relationship management (CRM), Point-of-sale (POS), offline channels, among others. It then delivers relevant activations with rich personalization across multiple touchpoints via both online and offline.

Furthermore, the CDP empowers companies to understand their customers’ behavior and intent across various channels and build a 1-to-1 customer journey at scale.

Serm Teck Choon, co-founder and CEO at Antsomi, is thrilled to have DAVI as their client, stating that DAVI is tasked to be the change agent for the JG Summit group, and they are born with the DNA of data.

“We are so excited to have the opportunity to work with them to unlock the opportunity of data-driven campaigns. Through Antsomi CDP 365, we help DAVI to enrich the customer experience of millions of customers through marketing automation,” Serm stated.

Speaking about the integration, Carla Yap-Sy Su, head of data, strategy and growth marketing at DAVI, commented, “Building a holistic approach to data allows us to better understand what offers and experiences can bring more value to our customers.”

She added, “Through our partnership with Antsomi, we are able to act on these insights and implement seamless and personalized customer journeys, integrate our platforms,and deliver iterative, performance-driven campaigns across multiple channels.”

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia – The Malaysian arm of consumer data and analytics company, Milieu, has announced a new executive joining its team – Aaron Low – to take charge of its commercial operations in the country.

Low is a seasoned martech expert, and consultant, coming from data technology company Zanroo, where he brings over eight years of experience working in martech and software-as-a-service (SaaS) industries. Through his new role, Low will be responsible for building up the sales pipeline and commercial operations for Malaysia, and forging strategic partnerships.

Low was regional strategic partnerships and business development head for APAC at Zanroo. He has also worked with the Malaysia arm of IT services company Meltwater, where he served as a senior business development consultant; and with corporate media marketing company, marcus evans Group, as a corporate sales executive.

Commenting on his appointment, Low Said, “After meeting Milieu for the first time, I got really excited about the product, company vision, and the team. A lot of businesses fail to make the right decisions simply because market research is too complex, too slow, or too expensive. Milieu’s approach really resonates with me in terms of how it can be used to help companies of all shapes and sizes make better decisions.”

Low will report to Marcus Lim, Milieu’s regional head of growth in APAC.

“2020 was a milestone year for us, and we’re proud of what we accomplished with a small team and in the face of the global pandemic. We saw incredibly strong demand for our product in the market as many businesses, both big and small, are now under immense pressure to make data-driven decisions in the face of tight budgets. We’re excited to welcome Aaron to the team and to start building up a base of clients in Malaysia,” Lim stated.

Singapore – Data and artificial intelligence company ADA has announced the launch of its new martech-as-a-service offering across Asia-Pacific to help clients optimize end-to-end sales and marketing efforts.

Through the new service, users can analyze a client’s business operations across the sales and marketing funnel by consulting and matching with ADA’s existing expertise to grow and scale. The new service can also help clients choose the right Martech solutions that match the business maturity level and to optimize current stacks.

“ADA has continuously evolved to create new ways for businesses to adopt data-driven marketing. We are excited to offer these new MarTech services that complete the circle for our clients by allowing them to look at their full sales and marketing funnel with an always-on approach,” said Srinivas Gattamneni, CEO of ADA.

Furthermore, ADA’s new solution can act as an extended arm of the client to enable, train, and scale in-house talent to ensure continuity of strategy and execution. Clients will benefit from this new addition to the current suite of products and services, as ADA continues to use existing data analytics skill sets to drive impactful business outcomes.

The new martech solution responds to the greater need of businesses for updated marketing measures. According to Gartner, some 80% of organizations feel they are sitting on an outdated MarTech roadmap, and 67% think their existing technology is not useful. Meanwhile, a study by Harvard Business Review found that 80% of marketers want better tools to measure return on investment.

“ADA’s MarTech services exist to support businesses in unlocking the full potential of their MarTech investments and to drive growth across all their sales and marketing channels. We believe business growth is not driven by one solution, but many tactics and approaches. We want to be there to collaborate with our clients through the entire journey and to grow together,” said Chris Wiseman, head of marketing technology at ADA.

Manila, Philippines – Marketing technology engagement platform Zoomd has announced a new deal with Philippine-based media company GMA Network, in embedding Zoomd’s on-site search engine within GMA’s platform.

Through the partnership, Zoomd aims to increase the page views of GMA News’ site, decrease bounce rate, and extend average session length for GMA web visitors, which is estimated to be more than 200 million.

“This is a hot period for our sector and we intend to maximize monetization opportunities and target regional expansion, getting more publishers and more clients to adopt Zoom onto their platforms. The Philippines is an important and strong market for us and we welcome GMA to our line of top-tier publishing clients,” said Amit Bohensky, chairman and co-Founder of Zoomd.

Zoomd uses artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) technology, which is aimed to provide new advantages to publishers by optimizing site traffic via on-site search, and guiding advertisers in managing their user acquisition (UA) across hundreds of media channels.

Founded in 2012, Zoomd allows advertisers to save significant resources that would otherwise be spent consolidating data sources, thereby maximizing data collection and data insights while minimizing the resources spent on the exercise. 

Further, Zoomd is a performance-based platform that allows advertisers to advertise to the relevant target audiences using a key performance indicator-algorithm that is focused on achieving the advertisers’ goals and targets.