Top 30 News Moments Marking 2024
A quick recap of the noteworthy news moments of 2024’s customer experience (CX) and martech landscape across customer engagement, content creation, artificial intelligence, advertising, brand safety, and more.
If we had to label it, 2024 could very well be called the year of acquisitions. The most traditional businesses have stepped up the way they leverage technology, and newer brands are leading the way in offering the best of what technology can do for us.
Back in 2023, martech experts predicted that genAI would be at the forefront of all marketing functions, which undoubtedly, has been proven true. At this juncture, however, it is critical to examine if there is enough governance. Amidst the regulatory evolution, a gap has emerged between regulation and the current state of technology and tools for monitoring and controlling AI systems.
Advanced AI is now being weaponised for ad fraud. In fact, 42% of all digital traffic consists of bots, and a staggering 65% of these bots are malicious and made from sophisticated, AI-powered fraudsters designed to exploit every loophole in the digital ecosystem. Brand reputations are at risk. AI also happens to be the shield against these scams. Martech vendors are working to create AI protection layers to protect businesses against ad fraud.
A lot has happened in 2024. After a protracted four-year tragic tale filled with repeated delays, Google reversed its decision to deprecate third party cookies. While some marketers took the news well, others are still wary. After all the years of preparing for the cookieless world, marketers are certain their data must flow in from sources besides third party data.
Amidst all this chaos is every marketer, preparing yet again, for what’s next. What will 2025 look like for advertisers? Will first party data be the answer to their worries? Will transparency be the key to brand success in 2025? Martechvibe presents a recap of the top news moments of 2024.
Martech Advancements Leading the Industry
Adobe GenStudio for Performance Marketing is a new generative AI-first application that empowers brands and agencies to accelerate the delivery of global advertising and marketing campaigns. It addresses one of the biggest challenges facing businesses today, where the need for highly personalised, on-brand and performant content is outstripping available resources.
2. Braze Introduced the Braze Data Platform
Braze announced the launch of the Braze Data Platform, a comprehensive, composable set of data capabilities and partner integrations designed to streamline data unification, activation, and distribution, empowering marketers to create memorable, relevant customer engagements.
3. Sitecore Launched ‘Sitecore Stream’
Sitecore announced the launch of ‘Sitecore Stream,’ which leverages secure, brand-aware AI, enabling enterprise marketing teams to boost productivity and growth. The platform leverages geneAI to simplify marketing workflows and enhance productivity through orchestration, content intelligence, and automated assistance.
New Norms in Customer Communication & Insights
4. Verint Announced CX/EX Scoring Bot
Verint announced the addition of a new CX/EX Scoring Bot running in the Verint Open Platform. This unique bot provides critical real-time insights instead of lagging indicators provided by customer and employee surveys. It goes beyond genAI and uses unique, proprietary AI models to provide unparalleled insight into customer experience, agent satisfaction and the emotional connection between customers and agents.
Flipkart introduced a new insights platform called Flipkart IRIS (Insights and Research Intelligence System). It is designed to provide brands with in-depth intelligence on customer behavior. The sophisticated tool aims to help brands improve their performance on Flipkart by delivering actionable insights, promoting growth, and supporting informed decision-making.
Zendesk announced the launch of ‘Relay,’ a new app that offers proactive messaging for companies using WhatsApp and SMS. Relay allows companies to proactively connect with customers at scale using outbound messages in WhatsApp and to manage all those conversations natively in Zendesk.
7. InMoment Launched AI-Powered Journey Insights Tool
InMoment announced the launch of AI Journey Insights, an industry-first platform feature that transforms how enterprises understand and optimise their customer journeys. The solution addresses a critical challenge in customer experience management: bridging the gap between channel-based and journey-based customer insights.
Acquisitions to Take Note of
8. Omnicom Acquired Interpublic
The new company will deliver end-to-end services across media, precision marketing, CRM, data, digital commerce, advertising, healthcare, public relations and branding.
With Frame AI’s capabilities, HubSpot will accelerate its ability to unify structured and unstructured data across the customer journey at scale. This will empower go-to-market teams to transform conversations into actionable intelligence.
10. Hootsuite Acquired Talkwalker
Social media manager Hootsuite acquired Luxembourg company Talkwalker. The latter develops consumer intelligence and deep listening tech that enables brands to drive business impact and revenue. It listens to the millions of visible conversations happening every minute across social and digital channels, helping brands understand what consumers want.
11. Cisco Acquired Splunk
https://www.splunk.com/en_us/newsroom/press-releases/2024/cisco-completes-acquisition-of-splunk.html
Cisco and Splunk will bring together global developer and partner communities with extensive experience extending security, observability, and data platform capabilities with pre-packaged applications and solutions for customers.
Innovation in the Content Creation Landscape
12. TikTok Rolled Out Symphony Creative Studio
Symphony Creative Studio is an AI-powered video-generation tool that can generate a video in minutes from minimal user input. Advertisers can turn their product information or URL into a video, add a digital avatar to narrate their video script, or localise existing videos into new languages using translation and dubbing capabilities.
13. Getty Images Integrated Premium Creative Content for Tiktok Advertisers \\\
Getty Images announced an integration with TikTok to meet the diverse creative needs of marketers and advertisers. The integration allows advertisers and businesses direct access to Getty Images’ vast library of creative imagery and video content through TikTok’s AI-powered video generation tool, Symphony Creative Studio.
14. WPP, Roblox Partnered for Immersive Media, Gaming
WPP and its media investment company, GroupM, joined the official Roblox Partner Program as an agency partner to work directly with Roblox, shaping the future of the brand ecosystem on the platform and setting new standards for 3D environments and immersive media.
AI on The Roll
15. Google Cloud Introduced Google Agentspace
Google Cloud introduced Google Agentspace, which helps employees connect with enterprise expertise through AI agents. These agents combine Gemini’s reasoning capabilities, Google’s search tools, and enterprise data, regardless of location. Google Agentspace helps employees complete tasks like planning, research, content creation, and execution using a single prompt.
16. Salesforce Unveiled Agentforce
Salesforce unveiled ‘Agentforce,’ a platform of autonomous artificial intelligence (AI) agents for efficiency in driving sales, marketing, and commerce. It allows companies to boost their workforce while assisting employees in their tasks. Unlike AI tools that depend on human requests, ‘Agentforce’ operates autonomously.
Amazon unveiled Rufus, a new AI-powered shopping assistant, aimed at transforming the online shopping experience for its customers. Rufus is designed to assist users in navigating Amazon’s extensive product catalogue and making informed purchasing decisions. It is trained on Amazon’s vast product database and information sourced from the web, allowing it to provide helpful responses to a variety of customer queries.
18. Sprinklr Launched Digital Twins for AI Chatbots
Sprinklr Digital Twin, powered by Sprinklr AI+, is designed to enable companies to build and deploy autonomous and intelligent AI applications that can mirror and enhance the capabilities of customer-facing teams. A Sprinklr Digital Twin can make decisions, plan actions, design workflows, and execute tasks at scale with speed and efficiency.
19. SAP Emarsys Announced AI Product Finder
SAP Emarsys announced its AI Product Finder, a new tool that revolutionises how brands recommend products and personalise their customer experiences. The Finder enables an intuitive search of a brand’s extensive product catalogue, allowing marketers and retailers to quickly locate and incorporate the most suitable products into their campaigns
20. Alibaba Unveiled Conversational Sourcing Engine
Alibaba International’s new sourcing engine is focused on B2B ecommerce. It synthesizes vast quantities of information, interprets sourcing needs using natural language processing, matches buyers with products and suppliers with unprecedented accuracy, and provides advanced tools for seamless sourcing decision-making.
Partnerships that Furthered GenAI Adoption
21. SAP and NVIDIA Partnered to Accelerate GenAI Adoption
SAP and NVIDIA announced a partnership expansion focused on accelerating enterprise customers’ ability to harness the transformative power of data and genAI across SAP’s portfolio of cloud solutions and applications. SAP will use NVIDIA’s generative AI foundry service to fine-tune LLMs for domain-specific scenarios and deploy applications with new NVIDIA NIM™ microservices.
22. Accenture Partnered with Adobe to Offer Industry-Specific GenAI Solutions
Accenture partnered with Adobe with an aim to help enterprises create content at scale and alter their content supply chains by leveraging Adobe Firefly, Adobe’s family of creative genAI models. Accenture has formed a partnership with Adobe to jointly develop industry-specific solutions. They intend to help enterprises create content at scale and alter their content supply chains by leveraging Adobe Firefly, Adobe’s family of creative generative AI models.
23. Publicis Sapient Partnered with Google Cloud
Publicis Sapient announced a global partnership with Google Cloud to rapidly increase adoption of genAI and scale Google’s technology to enterprise customers. The former will create a dedicated Google Cloud business unit to address demand for Google’s AI technology, with dedicated resources to help customers successfully plan, deploy, and manage genAI projects.
Advertising, Brand Safety Form Priorities
24. IAS Partnered with Reddit, Meta, YouTube and Snap
Integral Ad Science partnered with Reddit for AI-Driven Measurement for Advertisers, Meta for Optimisation Solution for Advertisers, YouTube for offering misinformation brand safety and suitability reporting, and Snap for providing an AI-powered total media quality brand safety and suitability measurement tool for advertisers.
25. DoubleVerify Launched GenAI Website Avoidance & Detection Solution
The offering helps advertisers navigate the risks posed by low-quality, AI-generated content and protect their brand reputation online. Powered by proprietary detection technology that combines AI-driven analysis with human expertise, Double Verify’s genAI solution ensures precision in identifying and categorising low-quality content.
26. Spotify Launches Its Own Ad Exchange
Known internally as Spotify Ad Exchange or SAX, the ad exchange will allow Spotify to capture more ad revenue from small and medium-sized businesses and make it easier for existing clients, including big brands, to spend more efficiently with the platform.
27. Nexxen Launched ‘Deal Marketplace’ for Premium Video, TV and Display
Nexxen launched ‘Deal Marketplace,’ With a centralised interface, Deal Marketplace is built to enable advertisers to better discover, visualise and activate preferred deals across connected TV (CTV), online video (OLV) and display, reducing overall time spent planning and executing campaigns.
28. TikTok Unveiled Performance Advertising Solutions
TikTok revealed new advertising solutions designed to help businesses achieve better results. Its new solutions include automated performance tools, additional measurement capabilities, and privacy technologies. They aim to help brands unlock the potential of TikTok.
29. Google Launched Confidential Matching, Ad Intents, Performance Planner
Over the year, Google unveiled ‘confidential matching,’ a new way to allow advertisers to securely connect their first-party data for measurement and audience solutions; ‘ad intents,’ that places links into existing text on a webpage which can launch into Google Search; and advanced “Performance Planner” plans, that included tailored strategies for YouTube campaigns, focusing on demand gen for both Action and Awareness goals.
30. AppsFlyer Unveiled Advanced AI Layer for Fraud Protection
AppsFlyer launched an AI enhancement layer on top of its Protect360 fraud prevention solution. Designed to address the growing challenges posed by increasingly sophisticated fraud tactics, the new AI layer leverages multiple machine learning models to deliver unmatched fraud detection and deterrence capabilities — offering customers greater protection, accuracy, and real-time fraud mitigation.
