The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has released a report demonstrating how much COVID-19 has impacted advertising.
As the coronavirus pandemic began impacting businesses, advertising was one of the areas hardest hit. The IAB conducted a survey of 242 companies to see how the pandemic has changed advertising, and how it will continue to do so going into 2021.
In a bit of good news for the industry, the IAB projects that digital advertising will see an overall increase of 6% in 2020, compared to 2019. That’s where the good news ends, however, as overall advertising across all mediums is expected to drop by 8%. Traditional media advertising is to blame for the drop, experiencing as much as a 30% decline.
Looking ahead to 2021, as much as 70% of businesses have ballpark estimates of their budget at best, are not clear or have no idea how much they plan to spend. Those buyers that do have some idea of their 2021 budget, plan to spend 5.3% more than in 2020.
While the pandemic continues to take an obvious toll, one thing is clear: digital advertising is coming into its own as a result.
Using spatial reality to combine the virtual and physical world, Sony’s new Spatial Reality Display creates an incredible 3D optical experience that is viewable to the naked eye.
“It’s unlike any conventional display,” says Sony Product Designer So Morimoto. “It’s like you’re looking at the real thing. The Spatial Reality Display compared to other displays is amazing. Obviously, conventional 3D displays can show things in 3D, but this actually follows your eye movements, making it feel like a real object. I love that the display feels so natural to the human senses.”
For designers, this is a huge breakthrough says Sony Product Designer and Mechanical Engineer Tatsuhito Aono. “If we could share designs that are life-size with this kind of clarity, it would make things much smoother. We could get the planner, the designer, and everyone else on the same page, so I think efficiency would improve and so would the quality. It’s almost like you are looking at the same image side by side.
“I quickly realized that I’m seeing a whole new world here,” says Morimoto. “
https://youtu.be/HY2uI39-r9I
“Every single person I’ve seen observing this display is just like wow… I’ve never seen anything like it,” says Dan Phillips, Executive Producer for Emerging Technology at The Mill, a technology creative partner for agencies, production companies, and brands. “I mean you are literally looking at magic happen on the screen. At The Mill, we always take a brief and try to expand on it, whereas this is no kind of precedent.”
“We’ve all seen holographic effects but this is one that you can see with your own eyes in a very physical sense. It tracks your eyes and it’s just got this depth that is just pretty magical.”
“Seeing it was kind of mesmerizing and kind of mind-blowing,” says The Mill Creative Director Andrew Proctor. “You’re not designing a set frame but you’re giving a window. Look deeper, look further. You find yourself leaning around and seeing something.
https://youtu.be/lBnJ9PV6OMA
Here’s how it works according to Sony:
High-speed Vision Sensor – The SR Display is based on an innovative high-speed vision sensor that follows exact eye position in space, on vertical, horizontal, and depth axes simultaneously. The display monitors eye movement down to the millisecond while rendering the image instantaneously, based on the location and position of the viewer’s eyes. This allows creators to interact with their designs in a highly-realistic virtual, 3D environment, from any angle without glasses.
Real-time Rendering Algorithm – Additionally, the SR Display leverages an original processing algorithm to display content in real-time. This allows the stereoscopic image to appear as smooth as real life, even if the viewer moves around.
Micro Optical Lens – The micro optical lens is positioned precisely over the stunning 15.6 inches (diag.) LCD display1. This lens divides the image into the left and right eyes allowing for stereoscopic viewing with just the naked eye.
“There’s a real recognition that digitization and transformation are not doing what you used to do in the physical world,” says Publicis Sapient CEO Nigel Vaz. “Digitizing that and translating that is essentially the journey of going from being a caterpillar to a butterfly. Real transformation. How do you reimagine yourself in the context of a world that now is entirely digital? Customers are thinking very actively about how they actually create products and services that essentially create value for customers entirely digitally.”
Nigel Vaz, CEO of Publicis Sapient, discusses how the current pandemic has forced organizations to reimagine their businesses digitally. Nigel works closely with clients such as McDonald’s, Nationwide, and Unilever to deliver transformative experiences and business models:
https://youtu.be/VOKcTLcxHXw
Businesses Being Reimagined In A World That Is Now Entirely Digital
Digitization Has Become Existential For Business
I think Digital has always been important for business. Now more than ever what’s becoming very clear is this has gone from being something that’s important to something that’s existential. How do you support customers to make orders entirely online when your stores are closed? How do you create mashups with other partners to be able to facilitate deliveries when your own deliveries don’t suffice? How do you try to create experiences online through self-service that minimize the impact of people calling your call centers?
All of these things are things clients are facing on a regular basis. Most CEOs I’m in conversation with are acknowledging the fact that this has now got to be a priority, that they have to be ready more so than they’ve ever thought before.
3 Key Things Happening With the Transformation
There are three things happening here in terms of transformation. The first is the change in human behavior where I think there’s a recognizable shift now. We’re seeing significant accounts of over-70s, for example, ordering from retail and ramping that up. We’re seeing a big shift in institutions like schools and educational institutions, which historically had not thought about transformation as particularly applicable to them.
We’re also seeing a shift in industries like leisure looking at creating virtual experiences since physical experiences are essentially restricted and people can’t use them. The human behavior shift is translating to big investments in technology and technology platforms that enable this.
Businesses Being Reimagined In A World That Is Now Entirely Digital
Then lastly, new business models. There’s a real recognition that digitization and transformation are not doing what you used to do in the physical world. Digitizing that and translating that is essentially the journey of going from being a caterpillar to a butterfly. Real transformation. How do you reimagine yourself in the context of a world that now is entirely digital?
Customers are thinking very actively about how they actually create products and services that essentially create value for customers entirely digitally. There are plenty of examples in this from telemedicine and from the educational space with new courses coming online which can scale faster than traditional courses limited by a classroom and a professor.
It was a merger that started out nearly a year ago as a perfect idea and was even approved by the U.S. government. In the end, it turned into a perfect storm because of the ad industry upheaval caused by the coronavirus and subsequent business closures followed by massive unemployment and fewer clicks on ads. Ad prices then dropped dramatically which changed the value proposition for both Outbrain and Taboola.
The world’s two leading companies in the discovery & native advertising industry will remain fierce competitors in what still is a chaotic and unpredictable ad market.
“As part of the process we exchanged financial information with each other,” says Taboola Founder & CEO Adam Singolda in a blog post. “Based on the relative performance of the two companies, we decided the original deal does not make sense anymore. We could choose to pay the same price of 30% in equity + $250M, but our shareholders thought it’s too much for what we would get based on the relative contribution of the two companies. Nothing emotional, not about culture fit, just data.”
“Out of deep respect, we tried to do a deal that was equity only (but less equity), or equity and cash (but less cash) that matched Outbrain’s financial contribution to Taboola. We failed, and we called it off.”
“It is now public news that Outbrain’s planned merger with Taboola is heading to termination in the near future. This isn’t the outcome any of us anticipated for this process. We believed when entering this deal that there is great potential value to be had for our employees, our marketers and publisher partners, and our shareholders. However, this combination apparently was simply not meant to be. We worked hard to mix water and oil, but ultimately the companies proved to be too different to be mixed.”
“During a very stormy year for the Outbrain team, due to both the pandemic and the cloud of the merger, Outbrain’s character as the #1 most trusted partner for the world’s best publishers has shone through very brightly. We’re excited to continue innovating and building the best native advertising products for publishers and marketers as an independent company for many years to come.”
DocuSign has acquired Liveoak Technologies in an effort to offer remote notarization services to customers.
As an unprecedented number of individuals are working from home and companies are conducting business remotely, the ability to sign documents remotely is more important than ever. Unfortunately, notarization is a weak point in the process, often still requiring in-person dealings.
DocuSign is working to change that with the acquisition of Liveoak. The two companies previously had a partnership, integrating DocuSign’s eSignature into Liveoak’s platform. With the acquisition, DocuSign will use Liveoak’s technology to rollout DocuSign Notary, a remote notary service that will use video concerning to enable legally binding, notarized transactions. State laws are increasingly recognizing these kind of agreements, and the pandemic is likely to drive further adoption.
“DocuSign is practically synonymous with the electronic completion of agreements from almost anywhere, on almost any device,” said DocuSign COO, Scott Olrich. “But there is an important class of high-value agreements that require the live participation of a notary or other representative. With this acquisition, we intend to bring the DocuSign experience to those agreements too—so signers and those assisting can get business done no matter where they are.”
“Given the state of technology today, people often wonder why they still need to sign any document in-person—and the pandemic has only exacerbated this concern,” said Liveoak CEO, Tim Ramza. “We’ve been working to solve this very issue for years, and we’ve had a strong partnership with DocuSign as a result. By joining forces and fully integrating our solutions now, we can bring the ease and simplicity of DocuSign to the execution of notarized and other complex assisted agreements.”
DocuSign Notary is the next evolution of electronic document signing, and will help address one of the pain points associated with contracts and transactions.
OTT is increasingly being tested by advertisers as more inventory becomes available, says Nicole Whitesel, SVP of Enterprise Strategy at Publicis Media. “In the past, OTT was seen as a nascent channel with limited reach,” said Whitesel. “I think now you’re seeing a lot more inventory there available to them to buy. I think their willingness to test things where they’re unsure of outcomes has been increased more than ever before.”
Nicole Whitesel, SVP of Enterprise Strategy at Publicis Media recently discussed the increased experimentation with OTT by agencies and their clients in an interview with BeetTV:
OTT is the Next Step in the Digital Revolution for Ad Buyers
One of the things we’re seeing is clients appetites being larger than ever before to explore. In the past, OTT was seen as a nascent channel with limited reach. I think now you’re seeing a lot more inventory there available to them to buy. I think their willingness to test things where they’re unsure of outcomes has been increased more than ever before.
We’re really talking about kind of the next step, the digital revolution maybe seven years ago and people were early movers in that space and they had an advantage.
We’re thinking about the space in a similar way. There’s an opportunity to get in early and test things, build operational muscle between teams that maybe haven’t worked together as closely before. We really see that as an opportunity this year to do a lot of that work.
Agency Teams Working Together to Buy OTT Inventory
You have teams where historically broadcast teams and national teams have bought broadcast. Then you have teams that are more precision or audience driven that buy programmatic. You’re seeing a lot of work between those teams now to think about the way we’re buying connected TV, inventory if you will, or OTT.
You have a broadcast team that might be negotiating as part of an upfront and then you have an activation team who’s actually activating within a quarter against a specific audience, buying that inventory in-quarter.
Those are teams that historically don’t work as closely together on an ongoing basis outside of upfront. We’re seeing that that’s an opportunity to bring those teams closer together and working more closely with clients who learn these new channels and understand that. That goes as well to analytics and measurement. How are we measuring them? What’s the contribution when compared to historically traditional channels like linear TV?
Opportunity for Direct to Consumer Companies
I think there’s an opportunity for direct to consumer companies (DTC) to enter the space through these new channels that didn’t exist before from a linear broadcast perspective. A lot of inventory was sold in the upfront and there was limited inventory available on an ongoing basis. That’s changing with these new channels in inventory that’s available through connected TV or FEP inventory.
They have an opportunity to buy that in a way that benefits their business model and works with the way that their business has set up to run with retail quarters, seasonality, the things that make sense for them. They don’t have to make a commitment a year in advance. They can do it when it makes sense for their business.
Getting Smarter With Broadcast Partners
I think there’s an opportunity for us to get smarter about the way we partner with our broadcast partners. Historically we’ve gone in and we say we want this CPM and this flexibility and this is the programming or dayparts we want to buy.
I think there’s an opportunity for us to say, hey, we want to buy this from an upfront perspective, but here’s all the other inventory that you manage that we also want to think about buying. We can collectively leverage dollars and get things that are valuable for our brands and our clients that allows them the flexibility to test these new channels.
TV Attribution – A Big Next Step for Ad Buyers
I think TV attribution is one of the big next steps for our industry. Being able to understand a contribution of a specific channel and its cost and associated with an outcome the brand’s care about is I think the next big opportunity for us. Then we’ll understand investment in media mix across those different video channels.
OTT is the Next Step in the Digital Revolution for Ad Buyers
YouTube TV is notifying users that it has lost the rights to Sinclair-owned channels, including Fox Regional Sports and the YES Network.
Sinclair stations have been steadily disappearing from streaming services over the last couple of years. The now defunct PlayStation Vue lost Sinclair channels in May 2018, only to gain them back five months later. Sling TV lost access in July 2019, and fuboTV lost access on January 1, 2020. With YouTube TV now losing the channels, that leaves AT&T TV Now and Hulu + Live TV as the only two streaming services that still have access to them.
At this point, it’s anyone’s guess if Sinclair-owned channels will return to any of the streaming services that have lost them. As TV streaming continues to grow, at some point Sinclair will hopefully start feeling the loss in viewership and renegotiate new deals.
In the meantime, here’s a copy of the email YouTube TV is sending out:
Hi there,
Our goal with YouTube TV is to offer you the content you love, delivered the way you want.
To make this happen, we need to enter into deals with our partners. Unfortunately, we have been unable to reach an agreement with Sinclair to continue to carry the FOX Regional Sports Networks and YES Network.
Starting February 29, 2020, you will no longer be able to watch live, on demand, or recorded content from your local FOX Regional Sports Network or YES Network.
Please know that we do not take this decision lightly. We value your membership and will continue to strive to build the best streaming experience possible.
DocuSign is moving into AI with the acquisition of Seal Software, maker of AI-driven contract analysis, for $188 million in cash.
DocuSign is one of the leading electronic contract platforms, providing a way for companies to share, organize and sign electronic documents. DocuSign already resells Seal’s software as part of its DocuSign Agreement Cloud. The acquisition will drive further integration between the two platforms.
“As the Agreement Cloud company, DocuSign is about digitally transforming the very foundation of doing business: agreements and agreement processes,” said Scott Olrich, DocuSign’s chief operating officer. “We believe that AI will play a vital role in this transformation. And by integrating Seal into DocuSign, we can benefit from its deep technology expertise and its broad experience applying AI to agreements.”
According to the statement, “Seal is recognized as one of the pioneers in AI-driven contract analytics. Its technology can rapidly search large collections of agreements by legal concepts (rather than just by keywords); automatically extract and compare critical clauses and terms side-by-side; quickly identify areas of risk and opportunity; and deliver actionable insights that help solve legal and business challenges.”
DocuSign will continue to sell Seal’s software, in addition to integrating it with DocuSign CLM.
“For DocuSign customers, these capabilities will mean faster, more efficient agreement processes. Seal customers will in turn benefit from deeper access to the full capability of the DocuSign Agreement Cloud—especially document generation and advanced workflows.”
DocuSign’s acquisition of Seal Software illustrates the wide-ranging industries AI continues to impact.
Peter Naylor, SVP Advertising Sales at Hulu, says that they are “exploring new ad experiences for binge watchers.” Naylor indicated to AdAge that Hulu may introduce a binge ad product to advertisers at the upcoming NewFronts. The challenge for Hulu is how to capitalize on consumers who are binge-watching shows without raising their annoyance level too high.
In 2013, Netflixbegan releasing all the episodes of its original programming in one batch. This practice quickly became known at binge watching. The concept was used by Netflix as a way to quickly hook viewers and reduce subscription churn. It also made the service distinctly different from regular TV networks. It was clear from the start that subscribers loved binge-watching their favorite shows on Netflix.
Bulk releasing of a seasons worth of shows is now standard practice on many subscription platforms including Amazon Prime and Hulu.
Hulu is exploring new ad experiences for binge watchers, according to Peter Naylor, head of ad sales, as the streaming TV service looks for ways to insert brands into shows without being too intrusive.
As Hulu prepares to pitch advertisers during the NewFronts, it is thinking about ways to create a less interruptive experience. While there is no specific product for marketers to buy currently, Hulu is analyzing what the commercial experience might look like when it is clear the viewer is committed for the long haul, Naylor says.
“We know if someone watched the first, second, third episode in a row, they’re binging,” Naylor says. “That’s an opportunity to create some kind of binge advertising.”
“The invite-only auction, which is I would say our new shiny toy that’s getting wrapped in the PMP, provides us the opportunity for a variable floor price,” says Doug Fleming, Head of AdvancedTV at Hulu. “So now the advertiser pays what they deem appropriate for that specific audience. It gives them more choice and control. When we look at our offering that’s what it’s about. It’s the genesis behind us rolling out a programmatic offering. Advertisers want choice and control and we want to allow them to have that.”
Since the inception of programmatic advertising, the goal always was that it was on equal footing with direct sold. We didn’t separate it. This wasn’t a remnant solution. As we’ve grown to 25 million subscribers we now have enough inventory and enough access that we have decided to create a team under me to go out and affect those agency trading desks and those folks that have decided to bring programmatic buying in-house.
When we look at the landscape you can see this march towards automation and we’re not going to get in the way of that. We’re going to embrace that and we’re going to do it in a very private curtailed way. There is no concept of a remnant provider reselling our inventory. Everyone has to be blessed and driven through the Hulu process.
Hulu Works with Telaria But Owns the Delivery Logic
On the demand side, it’s a mix of everyone. There is client direct, there are agency trading desks, and then the DSPs are good partners too. In each of those scenarios, we need and identify the brands before they come in so that they are attributed to the appropriate seller on our side. There’s no semblance of a DSP just hanging on and reselling in an always-on situation. We actually curate that environment and make sure that all of our t’s are crossed and i’s are dotted so that we know who the advertiser is coming in and we can manage that.
What’s unique about our work with Telaria is really that the Hulu ad server owns the delivery logic. So in this case what separated Telaria was that they enabled us to do things the way we wanted to do them. They kind of powered us. We have very smart people in place who oversee these positions and they came in and worked with us to develop the appropriate technology for us to go to market the way we wanted to go to market.
Hulu Private Marketplace Gives Advertisers Choice and Control
What it’s given us is the ability to take all advertising in. We can category block appropriately, so people maintain their category exclusivity within pods. We have the ability to take multiple advertisers and a single deal ID and manage all that blocking. It also allows us to open up to the programmatic marketplace a full suite of products. We’ve always run a private marketplace. However, in the past, we had automated guaranteed and unreserved fixed. Those are fixed price deal types. Unreserved gave you the ability to make a data-driven decision and if you chose to take that impression you paid the fixed price that we agreed on.
The invite-only auction, which is I would say our new shiny toy that’s getting wrapped in the PMP, provides us the opportunity for a variable floor price. So now the advertiser pays what they deem appropriate for that specific audience. It gives them more choice and control. When we look at our offering that’s what it’s about. It’s the genesis behind us rolling out a programmatic offering. Advertisers want choice and control and we want to allow them to have that.
“The biggest pain point for media companies today with regards to cross-media campaigns is the execution,” says Susie Hedrick who is SVP of North America Sales at WideOrbit. “The more complex the sale, the more complex the buy, the harder it gets.”
I think the most interesting observations from the conversations I’ve had with customers are the new sales organizations. They’re creating organizations that are matrix. You have a team that may go across many different products and then you have specialists that come in and go deep within those products. But the expectation isn’t that the sales team can go wide and deep. They’re able to go wide where we have people who are very good at going deep.
My take on the data issue is that there is a ton of data out there. We haven’t quite figured out how to use that data in the day-to-day sales effort in adding value to the products that we’re trying to sell. It’s there, we can present it, but we haven’t automated that through software.
Automating Sales Processes is Huge
There’s a lot of technology available that makes selling easier and more efficient. Automating that process is huge and it’s a huge driver for us within WideOrbit. If we can solve that we can create an environment where salespeople are able to use their time doing more revenue-generating activity and more strategic activity.
What we don’t want is to promote an industry where we’re doing a bunch of busy work or we’re swivel-chairing between systems because we can’t enter something in one system and have it go out to digital and traditional broadcast.
Cross-Media Campaign Execution is a Pain Point
The biggest pain point for media companies today with regards to cross-media campaigns is the execution. It’s simple. Not that the selling or buying is simple. Where it really gets complex is when you have different media types and you have to go through the execution process through delivery, invoicing, attribution back into the system, and collection. So that full process, the more complex the sale, the more complex the buy, the harder it gets.
It’s more complex because the execution system for every single media type may be different. You have a different ad server for digital versus streaming versus TV. There are all different ways to execute across different platforms and the more that fragments the more work there is to do on the backend.
Domino’s software engineers and digital ad team have created a unique AI-powered ‘Piedentifier’ to launch it’s Super Bowl week marketing blitz. Domino’s is encouraging people to send in a photo of any pizza, even if you made it yourself, and it’s system will determine what type of pizza it is and give you ten points toward a free pizza in their rewards program.
‘Piedentifier’ launching for Super Bowl week marketing blitz
We’re going to give Piece of the Pie Rewards points for any pizza. Our customers are going to be able to use our great technology to take a picture of any pizza, send it up to us, and earn ten points toward a free Domino’s Pizza. The great thing about this is our team got together and created something called the ‘Piedentifier.’ What it does is it uses your phone to look for what they have referred to as the open-faced expression of crust sauce and cheese. Anything that looks like a pizza and you’re getting ten points.
Today we’ve got more than 20 million active members of our Piece of the Pie Rewards program. We don’t know the exact number of how many customers will come on board with us, but as the leader in the pizza category, we see this as a great opportunity not only to grow the overall pizza category, but also to invite new customers in to download our app and to try our product. We feel that when customers try our product we’ve got the opportunity to bring them back again and again.
This Sunday is a huge day for us. On Super Bowl Sunday, we’re typically up about 40 percent over a normal Sunday. We’ll sell about 2 million pizzas and about four million chicken wings. Each year, it’s the biggest day of the year for us. It tends to not matter which teams are in the game. Certainly in individual cities maybe it does, but broadly across the US it’s a huge day no matter who’s playing.
Average Franchise Makes $140K Per Year EBITDA
Opening up a Domino’s Pizza store is still a terrific return for our franchisees. Across the globe cash on cash returns are better than three years in our business. Just a few weeks ago at our Investor Day, we released again our unit level average for our franchisees in the US. Once again it went up. We’re expecting it to be somewhere between $137,000 and $140,000 a unit in the US on EBITDA on a Domino’s Pizza store that you can open for $350,000.
Driving is Still a Great Opportunity
Driving for Domino’s is a great opportunity because of the volume that we do out of our stores. In a lot of cases, drivers are able to come in and earn a lot more than they can driving for some of these other businesses. As we continue to tighten down our territories through our fortressing program, it’s giving our drivers the opportunity to get more runs per hour. That means more tips per hour and in turn, higher wages.
In addition to a job that earns a decent wage driving at Domino’s is also an opportunity potentially to be a franchisee in the long term. Over 90 percent of our franchisees today started as drivers or started in as CSRs answering our phones in our stores.
Self-Driving Cars Will be Here Someday
Self-driving cars will be here someday. We don’t exactly know what day but we’re working hard to really try to understand how our customer interface with that car when it pulls up to their curb. They’re used to having a uniformed Domino’s pizza delivery expert bring that pizza to the door. So we’re learning. As the technology evolves we’re going to learn how the customer wants to interact with us and we’ll be ready when it does get here.
In this age of shiny web applications and mobile computing, emails have sustained their supremacy over all the other channels. It is the communication tool that has worked seamlessly for all your prospects.
Email marketing is a dynamic, paradigm-shifting field with a rich scope of innovation. Through 2017 and 2018, it has fostered diverse trends like typography, gamification, dynamic content, CSS-based animations to name a few.
In 2019, something even more fascinating, where extraordinary stuff is likely to get mainstream, awaits email enthusiasts.
In the Infographic ‘Top Email Design Trends of 2019,’ exclusively provided to WebProNews by EmailMonks, you will get a sneak peek into what kind of email marketing designs lie ahead.
Click the Infographic below to enlarge and unleash the future of emails:
The advent of 5G is a big reason OpenX has decided to move to Google Cloud Platform, says OpenX CEO Timothy Cadogan. “When consumers start to move to 5G on their phones and have a very rapid experience, the advertising experience needs to be incredibly compelling,” says Cadogan. “We wanted to make sure that we could run on infrastructure there. That’s why we wanted to move to the public cloud.”
“Marketing has evolved significantly over recent years, and the old way of operating is no longer sustainable,” said Cadogan. “As we look at the programmatic market today, we see a sector that has experienced massive growth and adoption, but at the same time has stalled in its ability to deliver real innovation for marketers and publishers. We believe it is time to take a completely fresh look at the market and place a major bet on building the infrastructure necessary to drive the next wave of innovation.”
The company says that prior to 2019, almost one-quarter of the OpenX tech workforce was dedicated to maintaining legacy infrastructure. They say that the transition to Google Cloud Platform will free resources to focus on new growth areas for the company, such as people-based marketing, video, and CTV.
“Both OpenX and Google Cloud are dedicated to helping customers achieve their goals with cutting-edge technology,” says Chris Klayko, Managing Director, Americas, Google Cloud. “This collaboration will allow for continued innovation leveraging both OpenX’s Exchange Platform and Google Cloud’s commitment to performance, collaboration, and big data optimization at scale.”
Timothy Cadogan, CEO of OpenX, discussed why OpenX is moving its platform to Google Cloud Platform on Bloomberg Technology:
We Process Over a Trillion Transactions a Day
We run one of the largest advertising exchanges which means we process over a trillion transactions a day. The volume that we’re working with is huge. As we started to think about all of the new innovation we want to bring to the market over the next couple of years we realized that’s going to require even more computing power. We also need that computing power to be extremely efficient.
We started to map out a path to move to the public cloud, which is Google Cloud Platform (GCP) or Amazon (AWS). We really wanted to focus on a system that would give us an incredible amount of scale and enable us to innovate at a rate that would really make a difference in the industry. We didn’t want to have to continue to work on a lot of the maintenance of our own infrastructure that we had to do with our own servers.
An example of the importance of this is moving to 5G. When consumers start to move to 5G on their phones and have a very rapid experience, the advertising experience needs to be incredibly compelling. We wanted to make sure that we could run on infrastructure there. That’s why we wanted to move to the public cloud.
With Google, what you have is really the largest advertising infrastructure in the world and they do a lot of the foundational work that we can build on top of.
Digital marketing pioneer Adobe has really been on a tear says Adobe President and CEO, Shantanu Narayen. In May Adobe acquired commerce cloud platform Magento for $1.68 billion and in September of this year, they acquired Marketo, a leading B2B marketing automation company, for $4.75 billion.
Previous to these acquisitions Adobe has primarily been a B2C focused company, but now Adobe is excited by the opportunity to help enterprises around the world engage digitally with their customers.
Shantanu Narayen, Adobe President, and CEO discussed how they are helping businesses to transform in a recent interview (watch below):
Adobe Has Really Been on a Tear
Adobe has really been on a tear and we have two big growth initiatives. We are empowering people to create, which has been the heritage and history of the company, and we are enabling businesses to transform.
The key imperative, whether you are a government, educational institution, or an enterprise is to engage digitally with your customers across every screen and mobile device. Adobe pioneered digital marketing as a category. What we now have is the ability for enterprises to create content, to measure the efficacy of that content, and to acquire customers.
Digital Experience Opportunity is North of $60 Billion
With Magento and Marketo we extended in two very significant ways. With Magento, we now make every experience to be shoppable and complete the last mile of actually doing the commerce part of it. With Marketo, we extend from B2C companies, which is where the focus primarily was, to B2B companies. It’s an exciting time for Adobe.
We think the available opportunity for Adobe just in the digital experience category is well north of $60 billion. When you think about it, whether you are a financial institution that is offering financial services directly digitally, whether you’re a travel or automotive, whether you’re hospitality, the imperative for everybody, including in the media business, is to engage with their customers directly.
Adobe Enabling Enterprises to Engage with Their Customers
Adobe always pioneered the aspects of creating that content and now we bring content and data together. It’s a market we pioneered and we are the clear leaders. While there are others looking at that same opportunity we think that we will continue to innovate at a pace that will keep us distant from the competition.
I think what Amazon has done very effectively is demonstrate the benefits of digital engagement with their particular customers. What we do is we enable that on behalf of every other enterprise who wants to create that engagement with their customers. We give them the tools and the platform. We have a tremendous ecosystem of partners that enables them to do that.
Whether you are a sports franchise, an airline, or a bank you want to create that digital presence. We don’t view ourselves as competitive with Amazon, we view ourselves as enabling all these other enterprises to create that engagement with their customers.
Security and Data Privacy are Core Competencies of Adobe
Security and data privacy are definitely core competencies that Adobe has invested in very heavily. On the data privacy part, we do it in two ways. We have millions of customers that engage with us on the creative cloud and the document cloud and keeping that data and being transparent about how we use that data is something that is front and center for us.
On the other side, we enable all of these enterprises that are our customers to understand what are the new regulations. Whether that be GDPR in Europe or something else, we help companies understand how they can engage in a transparent way while keeping the data secure.
It’s one of those areas that we have invested very heavily from a research and development point of view and we have to constantly stay ahead of what’s happening with regulatory environments around the world. We were compliant with GDPR right in time for the May 25th rollout here in Europe.
We have to be circumspect as to what the rules and regulations are, but I think good sense will prevail in all of these particular cases because when you have boundaries that are down and when you have unfettered access to markets that’s what I think will continue to drive innovation and technology in the global economy.
Customers and Citizens Have the Imperative to Deal Digitally
At the macro level, the first thing we all have to remember is that digital is the gale wind in this trend where you cannot put the genie back in the bottle. Customers and citizens, billions all around the world, have the imperative to deal digitally with any business that they are dealing with.
I think it is incumbent on companies like Adobe to help them to do that. Help the citizens to get the engaging experiences that they want and to help the enterprises to deliver that.
Shantanu Narayen, Adobe CEO, recently discussed on CNBC about how Adobe is working to actually create a brand new industry focused on digital engagement and customer experience management. I thought this was interesting in that this makes Adobe a CRM company competing with the likes of Salesforce, rather than what most people think when they hear the name Adobe, a company providing creative, marketing and document solutions.
Much of this new focus will rely on their AI solution, platform Adobe Sensei, which you can read more about here.
Narayen’s expands on Adobe’s intent to be a CRM leader in the excerpts below:
We really believe that what’s happening is that every enterprise wants to in real time engage with customers. When you think about what CRM used to be, CRM was more about a record that was in a relational database. That is not as important as what you do with that customer information and how you make action out of it.
That’s where the Adobe and Microsoft partnership is so valuable because together with what they have done with Azure and the ability for people to process the data at the pace at which they want and what Adobe has done. We enable people to attract customers to your platform. We allow you to engage it. We think we’re actually creating a brand new category and industry which is all about digital engagement and customer experience management, far more critical than what a record might store.
We continue to think that content and data and how content and data come together is really where this magic happens. You’ve walked into a retail store you’re accessing an application on a mobile device and it’s all about what’s the right content that’s being delivered based on the intelligence.
I think it’s a dramatically different approach that Adobe has pioneered and I think it’s companies like Adobe and Microsoft and SAP who actually see this vision for what’s happening in the world.
Adobe has now integrated their artificial intelligence platform Adobe Sensei into Photoshop and most of their creative products. “Adobe Sensei is an AI and machine learning platform that deeply understands how our users work and delivers a lot of simple workflow that makes that magical moment happens in any of our applications,” noted Abhay Parasnis, CTO & EVP at Adobe. “What makes Sensei so unique is that Adobe is the only company in the industry that can marry art of content and creative expression and science of delight on a massive scale.”
“The key areas we focus on are content intelligence, computational creativity, and the experience which is related to understanding events related to how content is delivered,” commented Scott Prevost, VP Engineering of Adobe Sensei and Search in an Adobe explanation of the product.
“If I can go all the way from how I create content in the creative tool and then have the ability to personalize it at scale to Adobe Experience Cloud, then have the ability to measure it through analytics and feed the measurement back into the creative workflow, saying these designs work better, that actually is the holy grail in what customers tell us they want,” says Parasnis.
Shantanu Narayen, Adobe CEO, recently commented on CNBC about how this is helping to improve the Adobe customer experience:
On the creativity side, everybody fears the blank page, so if AI can start to infer what people want to do in terms of using either Photoshop or one of our creative products and when you can speak to the computer and it understands and infers what you want to do and makes our products and tools more accessible, that’s a huge win. Then you can attract a tremendous amount of customers.
At the other end of the spectrum, when you have millions of customers hitting your website, the AI that we have on the Digital Experience Cloud being able to infer intelligence from the trillions of transactions and ensure that you get the right offer that was meant for you in real time, that’s something that humans cannot do.
Those are two really good examples at different ends of the spectrum of how AI enables our customers to do more with our technology.
With the inspirational mantra “Make Experience Your Business” and the goal of reshaping digital marketing for enterprises, Adobe announced the launch of their re-invented marketing cloud Adobe Experience Cloud at Adobe Summit 2017 this week.
“At Adobe, we make digital memorable, and today at Adobe Summit, we planted the flag for the next generation of innovation in experiences with our announcement of the Adobe Experience Cloud. Together with Adobe Creative Cloud and Adobe Document Cloud, Adobe provides enterprises everything they need to deliver exceptional customer experiences.”
“Adobe Experience Cloud” will bring together the company’s current marketing, advertising, analytics services into a package that the company says is broadly applicable across many segments of technology buyers.
“Four or five years ago, the chief marketing officer was underserved,” Brad Rencher, Executive VP and GM of Digital Marketing Adobe, recently told Fortune. “What’s happened since then is the principles of digital marketing, the need for real-time action, for data, for great content, for personalization for mobile apps in the store and in the car has gone way beyond the marketing department.”
Back then, the need to create content and get it to the right people in a timely fashion via the right channel was something that maybe 30% of a company’s execs had to worry about. Now that percentage is more like 90%, said Rencher. That means the sort of software Adobe offers, like its Analytics Cloud for gauging interest in web content, could be used across many departments. Analytics Cloud is based on Adobe’s $1.8 billion acquisition of Omniture in 2009.
By integrating all of Adobe’s Marketing tools and solutions in the Marketing, Analytics, and Advertising Clouds, with Creative and Document Clouds, Adobe’s Experience Cloud aims to help enterprises be much better “experience businesses“.
eBay announced new browsing modules for shoppers, leverage its structured data better and help users surface listings with savings, best-selling products, etc. The modules include “shop by brand” options and other ways to look at category pages without using keyword searches.
“Many users want to click to browse through items that they are interested in rather than rely on keyword searches,” said Dominique Bouchon, eBay’s Director of Search Front-End Product Management. “If we only surface a long list of listings, we miss the opportunity to surface the most interesting products and listings. We now have an algorithm that can instantly and intelligently surface them to our users.”
A new “save on” module is populated with best-priced listings via an algorithm that leverages the structured data to instantly identify listings where the price is lower than trending prices.
A “best selling” module surfaces relevant products rather than just listings. It can take a product category, such as digital cameras or guitars and surface the most popular models.
“Notably, the ‘Shop by’ guidance module at the top of many of our new results pages offer a ‘guided tour’ type of experience,” eBay says. “It helps navigate our very large selection of items by highlighting the key aspects we’ve learned that most people use to drill down from tens of thousands of results to the most relevant results.”
The company says one goal of the modules is to better serve users coming to eBay from Google results. The new experience will provide these visitors with better guidance on products.
The company says it has more browse module and search news in the pipeline for the coming months, so stay tuned for that.
Earlier this week, eBay made improvements for users searching for product identifiers. Last week, it revealed its big Spring Seller Update, which has a lot of changes for sellers.
Adobe made a handful of announcements related to predictive marketing and real-time customer engagement to grow its digital marketing business, which it says surpassed $1 billion in revenue in 2013.
First, Adobe announced Marketing Cloud Exchange, a new core service in Adobe Marketing Cloud. This is a new marketplace for pre-built integrations and apps between Adobe solutions and third-party technologies such as Google DDM, Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Tableau. It integrates additional data sources, and enhances the master marketing profile, Adobe says, adding that Exchange is moving from beta to general availability this week, and hosts more than 150 apps.
Next, Adobe announced new capabilities for Adobe Analytics. These include a live stream of event data, including real-time data from Adobe Target, Adobe Social and Adobe Media Optimizer, as well as predictive analytics, a unified segment builder, mobile app analytics, and support for Apple iBeacon.
“The Adobe Marketing Cloud is the most integrated set of marketing solutions, and it all centers on industry-leading analytics that is second to none,” said Bill Ingram, vice president of Adobe Social and Adobe Analytics, Adobe. “Today’s news takes the power of Adobe Analytics to a new level, with predictive capabilities and mobile functionality that ensure marketers can maximize both impact and revenue.”
Then, Adobe announced a new release of Adobe Media Optimizer, which includes next-gen predictive modeling algorithms, unified campaign analysis, extended audience reach, real-time campaign management, and retail advertising optimization.
Finally, the company announced Communities for Learning as part of Adobe Experience Manager. This is described as a new SaaS offering for creating social communities designed around social learning and field/channel enablement, “providing a simple way for marketers and subject matter experts to publish educational content to a community, facilitate knowledge exchange, and measure results.”
Adobe shared these stats about its digital marketing business: 460 billion dynamic campaign assets delivered annually; 18 trillion transaction annually; 2 trillion mobile analytics transactions annually; 27 Petabytes of data managed annually; 2/3 of Fortune 50 companies use the Adobe Marketing Cloud including: 17 of top 20 internet retailers; 5 of top 5 global auto manufacturers; 5 of top 5 media companies; 9 of top 10 commercial banks; 5 of top 5 North American airlines.
Adobe announced the launch of a major update to Creative Cloud today.
“Packed with new features, this Creative Cloud release reimagines the creative process through a set of ‘CC’ desktop applications and sophisticated cross-device collaboration and publishing capabilities,” a spokesperson for Adobe tells WebProNews. “Additionally, Behance, the online creative community, is now integrated with Creative Cloud, so customers can showcase work, get feedback on projects and gain global exposure.”
“We’ve added a ton of new innovation to all our CC desktop apps like Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. These apps include new features that increase productivity, streamline the effort to build mobile content and showcase some stunning new imaging and video science. And in addition to the traditional areas of innovation these apps are now connected to the powerful publishing and community features integral to the Creative Cloud experience,” said David Wadhwani, senior vice president and general manager, Digital Media, Adobe. “And with even more great updates coming to Creative Cloud throughout the year, we can’t wait to see the incredible work our customers are going to deliver.”
Core features of the offering include: a new desktop app, Behance integration, the ability to store, share and collaborate between the desktop cloud and mobile devices, and the ability to publish personalized portfolio sites.
Adobe has also launched Create Now, which the company calls “a celebration of creativity”. It’s a program that will showcase collaborative art projects using Adobe tools.
