Tag: Technology

Singapore – InMobi, a leading provider of content, marketing, and monetization technologies, has announced the appointment of Susannah Llewellyn as its vice president of agency partnerships for Asia Pacific to drive its strategic growth with key media agency partners whilst holding companies in the region.

Llewellyn brings with her an experience working across media, technology and digital space. Before joining InMobi, she worked as business agency director at Google. She has also served as international and regional business director at media agency MEC.

Rishi Bedi, managing director for Asia Pacific at InMobi, said that Llewellyn is appropriate for the role due to her adtech and agency background, which is an advantage to drive their growth in APAC through localised go-to-market strategies across our global platforms.

“My depth of experience across the various facets of the media industry including AdTech, agency, and digital marketing will bring valuable insight to my new role at InMobi,” Llewellyn added.

Last month, InMobi also named Aditya Varadarajan as its regional head of the newly expanded Microsoft business in Southeast Asia.

Paris, France – Market research company Ipsos has launched an end to-end innovation solution for Quick Service Restaurants (QSR) to support their development and optimisation of the product life cycle. 

This new solution serves as a comprehensive response to empower QSR innovation in the midst of evolving QSR industry, from cost management and pricing, evolving health trends, home delivery, packaging options, and digitised experiences to premiumisation.

This will also focus on screening and validation, optimising menu and price, developing products and packs, right through to demand forecasting, turning datapoints into compelling, in-context, actionable insights, and strategies to ignite brand growth. 

Moreover, this solution serves as an integral part of the company’s larger suite of innovation products to help clients in taking opportunities and boost their confidence in bringing products and services to the market.

Virginia Weil, global leader of innovation at Ipsos, said that these new QSR solutions by Ipsos will offer clients an agile and flexible way to optimise and forecast their innovations.

“Working globally with many of the leading QSR chains, we partner with clients at any stage of their QSR life cycle to unlock the recipe for predictable success,” she added.

Ipsos draws from multiple science disciplines providing a QSR tailored approach through a business lens. It has offices in more than 90 markets worldwide.

Singapore – Wunderman Thompson has announced three new key appointments across its technology and content teams across Asia-Pacific. They include Hasan Hasnie as chief technology officer, Geoff Smeaton as head of technology, and Nicholas Yeam as head of content.

Hasnie was recently the managing director at Accenture Song, and has spent 19 years with the company serving roles in digital and technology consulting. In his new role at Wunderman Thompson, he will work closely with clients as a strategic partner helping enable growth in their organisation, as well as focusing on deepening the agency’s current technology capability set.

“I am very happy to be joining Wunderman Thompson at this juncture of our growth journey. I hope to truly immerse myself in the exciting world of advertising, relying upon my experience of commerce and marketing technology delivery in a scaled and distributed fashion. We have amazing clients in diverse industries, and I hope to learn a lot from them as well as my talented and experienced colleagues at Wunderman Thompson,” he said.

Meanwhile, Smeaton still retains his role as chief technology officer for Australia as part of his expanded role. He has extensive experience providing technical and architectural leadership on highly complex projects with varying scales of size and complexity. 

“Being able to help our markets deliver world class technology solutions for clients across APAC is a fantastic challenge and opportunity for me to be taking on, alongside our fantastic team of leaders and practitioners all through the region,” he stated.

Lastly, Yeam previously led the production and operations as executive producer at Huge and spent time at Media.Monks and Hogarth Worldwide. In his new role, he will continue to drive growth for the agency’s studio by delivering content solutions and operations for clients – bridging the gap between inspiration and execution for brands.

He commented, “It’s an exciting time to be joining the team, as we’re observing a period of transformation in the content landscape. There’s an ever-growing demand for scale, efficiency, and quality, and I’m confident that Wunderman Thompson’s borderless approach to production excellence will allow us to continue to meet and exceed the needs of our clients.”

Wunderman Thompson recently announced the appointment of Emily Chang as CEO of West Coast region, as well as the appointment of a new chief growth officer and chief client officer for South Asia

Singapore – Customer support tech company Zendesk, Inc. has announced a five-year strategic collaboration agreement (SCA) with Amazon Web Services (AWS). The partnership aims to help businesses deliver personalised customer experiences at scale, with technology that grows with them.

The strategic collaboration will help businesses provide faster, tailored conversational experiences to customers across all channels while also improving the efficiency of support operations through the use of AI-powered tools, bots and analytics on an open and flexible service. 

Moreover, the collab will make customer experience (CX) more seamless for both customers and agents to help businesses to stay competitive, retain customer loyalty, and adapt to rapidly changing market conditions.

The SCA will also extend Zendesk Suite’s latest innovations in customer service to AWS and AWS Marketplace with the following capabilities:

  • Enterprise-grade, secure customer service programs and chatbots on reliable cloud architecture that scales with the business
  • Conversational experiences across potential customer channels and devices
  • Multi-channel support in Zendesk Sunshine Conversations, Amazon Connect, and AWS Contact Center Intelligence.
  • Personalised interactions and quick problem-solving with embedded chatbots 
  • Boosting customer retention by using AI to analyze customer emotion and take the best action 
  • Driving agent productivity with AI-based tools that help agents respond and resolve issues faster by providing self-service options, time-saving routing, and AI-powered workflows

“Zendesk has been both a member of the AWS Partner Network and a customer for many years, leveraging our cloud services to create innovative customer and employee experience solutions for customers,” said Ruba Borno, vice president, worldwide channels and alliances at AWS. 

She also added that the SCA with Zendesk will allow companies to personalise experiences using data, taking customer experiences to the next level and helping businesses automate and scale their customer service operations on the cloud.

Pascal Pettinicchio, vice president, alliances and corporate development at Zendesk, explained, “Zendesk research found that 61% of customers are excited by the prospect of immersive experiences, and 80% of businesses plan to increase their CX budgets in 2023. By taking advantage of easy-to-use software powered by Zendesk AI and AWS, CX teams can free up time and resources to focus on what they do best — creating powerful customer interactions.” 

He added, “Zendesk’s platform delivers high-level performance to provide enhanced customer experiences — we knew that, by collaborating with AWS, we could meet customers’ demands.”

Meanwhile, Steve Franklin, global head of customer service at Siemens Financial Services also commented that Zendesk brings ‘stability’ to their company’s customer service operations and allows them to provide unrivaled experiences and timely responses to their customers. 

“They help us quickly get control when volumes spike, both in terms of understanding what is happening, so we can take steps to proactively reduce the volumes and also in the handling of the queries, to reduce the backlog back down again,” he added.

Last year, Zendesk has also launched its Intelligent Triage and Smart Assist, its artificial intelligence (AI) solutions that empowers businesses to triage customer support requests automatically.

Sydney, Australia – Independent technology company PubMatic, in partnership with Proximic by Comscore, a leading provider of addressable programmatic targeting, has launched an ID-less targeting solution which will help marketers and media companies to propel incremental reach and performance at scale without using IDs.

Proximic’s content targeting solutions, which are powered by a contextual natural language processing engine and intelligent categorization technology, will be integrated to PubMatic’s platform to make it available for all media buyers. This will provide privacy-first access to market-leading data and insights to enhance the processes of packaging and transacting inventory and data.

The integration will also allow PubMatic’s clients to maximise new targeting options to reach key audiences in premium, brand-safe environments across desktop, mobile, and connected TV.

Brandon Lee, director of addressability for APAC at PubMatic, said that the company is committed to providing advertising solutions that deliver results. Its partnership with Proximic will help them offer addressable audiences, wider reach, and better performance to clients.

Meanwhile, Jessica Trainor, head of partnerships at Proximic by Comscore, said that their team is excited to partner with PubMatic to make predictive audiences easily accessible for targeting on the sell-side.

“This partnership offers buyers access to ID-less audiences that can be applied to private marketplaces to help close the addressability gap left by the many compounding factors driving signal loss in our industry,” Trainor added.

PubMatic helps digital content creators across the internet in controlling access to their inventory and increase their monetization by enabling marketers to drive return on investment and reach addressable audiences across ad formats and devices.

Singapore – InMobi, a leading provider of content, marketing, and monetization technologies, has appointed Aditya Varadarajan as the regional head for its newly expanded partnership with Microsoft Advertising in Southeast Asia to strengthen the in-market presence and enhance relationships with strategic and enterprise clients. 

Varadarajan’s remit also includes helping brands and agencies maximise impact from the multitude of Microsoft advertising products and solutions.

He will be based in Singapore and expand the regional sales team across the key markets such as Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia. His team will also be responsible for sales, account management, client servicing, and billing in the region.

Varadarajan brings with him an extensive background in handling account management, digital marketing, affiliate marketing, and data analysis. Before joining InMobi, he worked with brands including Google, WalkingTree, and Madhura Agro where he specialised in performance and brand marketing.

Rohit Dosi, vice president and general manager for Microsoft Advertising business at InMobi said that they are delighted to welcome Varadarajan as their regional head in the newly expanded business whilst looking forward to enabling the advertising ecosystem across Southeast Asia, one of the focus markets with growth potential for InMobi and Microsoft Advertising.

In 2022, it can be noted that InMobi and Microsoft have expanded their partnership in Southeast Asia to support enterprise and strategic advertisers in the region.

California, USA – Global advertising technology company Quantcast has announced three new appointments to strengthen its operations in Asia-Pacific and Southeast Asia, including Sonal Patel as its new managing director for APAC, Daniel O’Connor as commercial director for Australia and New Zealand, and Rueben Vijaratnam as its sales director for Southeast Asia.

Patel brings with her an experience in technology and media industries. Some of the notable roles that she previously held covering APAC markets include director of Display Platform Strategy at Yahoo, president for programmatic services & product at dentsu, and managing director and Vice President for APAC at AppNexus. In her new role, Patel will oversee Quantcast’s presence across Australia, New Zealand and entire Asia.

Meanwhile, O’Connor also brings with him a working experience in technology and media industries. Prior to joining Quantcast, he was with IAB SEA and India as programmatic committee member. In his new role, O’Connor will now lead the sales team in Australia and New Zealand whilst reporting to Patel.

Moreover, Vijaratnam also brings his expertise in technology and media. Before joining Quantcast, he was a head of programmatic at technology company Oath. In his new role, Vijaratnam will lead the sales teams in Southeast Asia to develop the company’s presence in the region and will also report to Patel.

Konrad Feldman, CEO at Quantcast, said that they are looking forward to continue the company’s breakthrough in digital advertising as they establish this strong leadership team and relationships with brands and agencies across these regions.

Patel said, “It’s both an exciting and interesting time to expand my remit to include Australia and New Zealand. The region here is incredibly dynamic, with new privacy legislation, expanded legislative powers for both the ACCC and ACMA to keep the tech giants in check, and explosive growth in CTV and retail media, as well as volatile consumer behaviour post-COVID.”

O’Connor added that he’s thrilled to take the new role in the company whilst looking forward to lead the company’s sales team in its transformational phase.

Meanwhile, Vijaratnam commends Southeast Asia’s vibrant digital economy and its huge opportunities for further growth which makes him excited to expand their presence in the region by delivering more value to clients.

Quantcast focuses on programmatic advertising using its patented AI-powered audience platform to provide rich consumer insights, reach audiences, and drive performance and business outcomes for brands, agencies, and publishers.

Amsterdam, Netherlands – Global digital agency DEPT has launched DEPT®/AI, its new AI-focused practice that aims to help brands solve complex challenges and increase productivity through turnkey AI solutions and innovative creative experiences.

With a multidisciplinary team of over 400 specialists on five continents, DEPT®/AI enabled 30% of the agency’s revenue in 2022 and boasts a client portfolio that includes Philips, Google, and eBay.

“AI is unlocking limitless possibilities and potential for brands,” said Isabel Perry, VP of Emerging Technology at DEPT. She also explained that one of the main reasons for the launch is that DEPT’s clients are eager to leverage AI but are often daunted by the complex questions surrounding design, ethics, and operations.

“We give them an experienced AI implementation partner to capitalise on today’s opportunities, in a way that goes beyond the hype and makes sense for their business,” she added.

Dimi Albers, global CEO at DEPT also said, “We’ve been pioneering AI technology for over six years, helping brands like Just Eat Takeaway to deliver personalisation at scale, and Philips to analyse its data more effectively. We’ll continue to push the potential of AI, and believe it will power 80% of what we do as a marketing and technology services provider.”

The launch follows DEPT’s AI initiatives such as the AI-powered docking station to steer cargo ships, a machine learning hand tracking system to teach the American Sign Language alphabet, and the generative AI collectible cards for eBay’s MCM Comic Con campaign.

Last December, DEPT also launched a 300-person team called WEB3/DEPT to aid clients in experimenting with blockchain technology and building immersive experiences in the metaverse.

Manila, Philippines – New Bold University, the locally inspired version of Singularity University in Silicon Valley, is returning for its 2023 masterclass with the theme, ‘New Bold U 2023: The Country’s Biggest Gathering of the Passionate,’ this March 1 to 4, 2023 at the University of the Philippines Diliman, Quezon City.

Spearheaded by 2022 Gen T List Awardee and serial entrepreneur Ralph Layco, New Bold U is set to help executives, entrepreneurs, and professionals upskill, reinvent themselves, and stand out in a competitive job market increasingly transformed by Artificial Intelligence (AI), robotic processes, digital solution platforms, web3, and blockchain, to name a few.

“Reinventing ourselves should be the most important skill of the century. During these evolving and disruptive times, it is no longer about our college degree that will identify with our name. It will be updated skills and mindset on how we can move forward with this,” said Layco.

He also added that New Bold U has a crucial role in creating a space, bringing in change-makers, and reflecting on changes brought about by emerging technologies in people’s lives.

New Bold U features more than 20 speakers and mentors to share valuable insights on how to stay market-ready and relevant amid the rise of disruptive technologies and discuss entrepreneurship, scaling, Facebook and Tiktok advertising, marketing, startup, finance, law, and mental health.

Some of the speakers of the 4-day masterclass include:

  • Steve Sy, Father of Filipino E-Commerce and founder of Great Deals
  • ER Rollan, CEO of Growsari
  • Nina Cabrera, CEO of Niv Della Beauty Innovations, which operates beauty brands Colourette Cosmetics and Fresh Formula
  • Randell Tiongson, author, columnist, and speaker on personal finance
  • Cherry Pua Africa, NFT expert, author, and founder of The World Stage International Network
  • Constantin Robertz, founder and CEO of cloud logistics platform Locad
  • Kia Abrera, creative entrepreneur and founder of Likha Summit
  • Alec Cuenca, host of top-rated Spotify podcast “Small Talk”
  • Lowel Magdadaro, founder and chairman of Shantahl Direct Sales, Inc.
  • Kaye Layco, co-Founder and CEO of Noah Solutions

New Bold U’s mission this year is to spark more than 500 founders, entrepreneurs, and passionate people into a life of abundance and impact. 

“Through NBU, we want them to actually provide a discourse, tickle their minds, and help them realize they are needed to bring new ideas back to their communities and organizations,” said Layco.

Founded in 2019, New Bold U has produced outstanding thought leaders, entrepreneurs, and professionals who have become CEOs and produced relevant solutions to respective industries.

New Bold U calls on all executives, founders, and aspiring entrepreneurs in the country to join this year’s edition. Those interesed may visit https://newboldu.com/ or their official Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/newboldu for more details on the enrollment process.

MARKETECH APAC is a media partner of the New Bold University 2023.

Johannesburg, South Africa – Global outdoor advertising technology provider Moving Walls has partnered with digital marketing and communications firm Dentsu Africa to launch a full-stack Out-of-Home (OOH) adtech platform across multiple markets in the continent.

Through the partnership, Dentsu Africa will be launching a DOOH tech solution powered by Moving Walls, including a supply-side platform that is targeted at aggregating OOH inventory information and connecting media owners in the continent to advanced inventory and campaign management tools.

With this, advertisers can leverage advanced DOOH activations and measurement capabilities from a single platform. The solution is also set to launch in three of the largest African markets with a series of pilot campaigns for leading brands.

Alex Tutu, regional director at Dentsu Location Services, commented on the partnership. 

“With their global scale and platforms that address the entire ecosystem, Moving Walls is the ideal partner to launch these new DOOH capabilities for our region. It is especially important that this is a tech solution that allows for flexible customisations for the different markets we are launching in,” he said.

Srikanth Ramachandran, founder and group CEO of Moving Walls also added that the partnership is ideal for quickly scaling solutions to a region where OOH remains fragmented.

Ramachandran added, “Our platforms have been battle-tested in regions where even neighbouring countries have vastly different OOH ecosystems. By launching this solution with Dentsu, some of the largest advertisers across Africa will be able to transform how they run OOH advertising.”

Moving Walls’ supply-side arm Location Media Xchange (LMX) and strategic sales partner Mizet has also recently entered a partnership with Pyxis to launch a new retail DOOH screen network in the United Arab Emirates.