According to a study by Twilio, 39% of UK consumers revealed they would prefer to never encounter nudge marketing and sales tactics, which includes last chance to buy’ notifications and countdown clocks.

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Some 70% said that they do not trust the authenticity of nudge tactics, with 65% of Brits revealing they would actively boycott brands who use such tactics.

Meanwhile, 39% of those surveyed said they felt frustrated when a brand uses this tactic with 22% stating they felt tricked and 13% saying they felt panicked.

Twilio Customer Engagement Expert, Sam Richardson, said: “There’s a huge difference between sharing useful offers, promotions, and reminders, and then applying unwanted pressure. It’s important for brands to listen to what consumers are saying here.

“Having access to first-party data, in real-time, can help brands to deliver highly personalised customer interactions – in their preferred format and on their preferred channel. It will also give brands the power to foresee when follow-ups and reminders are likely to strike the wrong or right chord.”

Richardson added: “For example, if a customer is already in touch with a customer service complaint, promotional emails are unlikely to resonate. There’s a significant opportunity for brands to get this right and take us into a new era of respectful marketing practices.”

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Twilio aims to use the acquisition to deliver a unified view of the customer journey for businesses, helping them to break down data silos and make their customer engagement more personalised. Segment will become a division of Twilio and continue to be led by Segment CEO Peter Reinhardt, reporting to Jeff Lawson, Co-founder and CEO of Twilio.

“Nearly every company is focused on acquiring, retaining and growing their customer relationships through digital engagement,” said Lawson. “However, the biggest impediment to great digital engagement are the data silos that prevent companies from truly understanding their customers. With the addition of Segment, Twilios Customer Engagement Platform now enables companies to both understand their customer, and engage with them digitally — the combination is key to building great digital experiences.”

Reinhardt added, “By bringing Twilio and Segment together, we will help businesses build a foundation of actionable insights critical to engaging with customers based on their needs and preferences to deliver a positive, seamless and effective customer experience.”

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Index hires first CMO and CCO in Goode and Breslav
Lori Goode and Jessica Breslav have joined advertising marketplace Index Exchange as Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Customer Officer, respectively.

Goode was most recently at Amazon Advertising, where she spent five years as its global Head of Marketing and Training. She brings more than 15 years of experience in the digital advertising space, including marketing leadership roles at Facebook and Microsoft. Goode will be based out of Index’s New York City office.

“Index has consistently built solutions that support publishers, advertisers, and ultimately consumers — allowing publishers to thrive while delivering efficient, quality inventory for brands,” said Goode. “I could not be more excited to join a team so committed to driving business growth for publishers and marketers alike, and I look forward to helping propel the brand forward as Index moves into this next phase of growth.“

Breslav comes from Criteo, serving most recently as Executive Managing Director for the Americas, where she saw the company through an IPO. She will be based out of Index’s Boston office, which opened earlier this year.

“Index’s status as a leader in the global programmatic ecosystem is reflective of its commitment to running one of the cleanest and most efficient ad exchanges in the space,” said Breslav. “I am proud to join a team that has continued to show a strong and sustainable approach to driving growth, and I look forward to helping Index double down on that commitment.”

Index has also promoted Will Doherty from Executive Vice President of Marketplace Development to Chief of Marketplace Development.

Banderas Coffinet named brand partnerships GM at Group Nine
Group Nine Media, one of the biggest mobile video publishers in the US, has appointed Sylvia Banderas Coffinet at General Manager of Multicultural Brand Partnerships and Marketing.  Reporting to Chief Revenue Officer Geoff Schiller, she will lead strategic development of the digital media holding company’s multicultural business needs, marketplace positioning, and branded content best practices, as well as spearhead relationships with multicultural agencies and advertisers to connect brand partners with Group Nine’s audience.

Banderas Coffinet has more than 15 years of media and publishing experience. She most recently served as Publisher, Chief Brand and Revenue Officer at Hello and Hola Media Inc., where she developed and led the strategic vision, content planning, revenue and profitability growth plan, while optimising the business operations of HOLA! USA. Banderas Coffinet served as National Advertising Director and Executive Beauty Director at People en Español, part of Time Inc. She has also held revenue generating roles at Glamour and Latina.

“Nearly 40 per cent of Group Nine’s massive US reach is multicultural and represents the country’s diverse millennial population,” said Banderas Coffinet. “Group Nine understands that there is not a one size fits all narrative for its audience and recognises that multiculturalism done well is mainstream done right. Its diverse, authentic and optimistic storytelling naturally attracts both hyper-engaged consumers and brand partners who are looking to nurture their own diversity initiatives across its platforms.”

Uberall chooses Phelps to direct sales
Toby Phelps has been hired as Director of Enterprise Sales at location marketing technology company Uberall. He will be developing and optimising Uberall’s enterprise sales strategy across the UK and the Nordics, driving team performance, and expanding its footprint in those regions.

Phelps brings over 20 years of experience in sales and SaaS. Prior to joining Uberall, he held senior roles at companies like Hitwise and Experian, where he led go-to-market strategy and growth.

“I’m incredibly excited to have the opportunity to be part of Uberall’s growth journey,” Phelps said. “Uberall’s solution stands out from the crowd, and I look forward to joining Uberall’s forward-thinking, forward-driven team, and its top-notch local partners, in accelerating Uberall’s brand pre-eminence and business expansion.”

Cho and Hoppe arrive at Captiv8
Captiv8, an influencer marketing platform, has added Saeyoung Cho and Stephanie Hoppe to its leadership team as Head of Strategic Partnerships and Head of European Operations respectively.

Cho will focus on strengthening industry partnerships and leading customer growth with enterprise customers. She brings a decade of experience working across paid, owned, and earned media to build a social-first vision with Fortune 500 brands. Prior to joining Captiv8, Cho was a Director at Horizon Media.

“Over the last five years, as both a customer and a branded context expert, Ive had the opportunity to see Captiv8 evolve into one of the strongest leaders in the influencer marketing ecosystem by placing forward-thinking strategic bets on influencer data ahead of the competition. I could not be more thrilled to partner with the entire team,” said Cho.

Hoppe will lead strategy and direction for Captiv8s European operations which includes expansion into the UK, Germany, France, Switzerland, Italy, Austria, and the Netherlands. She previously led business development at Relatable.

“Prior to joining Captiv8, my biggest frustration in working with some of the worlds most inspirational brands was the poor quality of the data that underpinned otherwise brilliant creative strategies. As influencer marketing matured to become an essential part of brands media budgets – the data that agencies were able to provide to clients didnt. Captiv8 marries human creativity with excellent data insights – whether you choose us as a full service agency or leverage our platform as a self-serve dashboard. Im excited to build on Captiv8s existing success stories,” said Hoppe.

Twilio welcomes Brazeau as CTO
Jeremiah Brazeau has been chosen as Chief Technology Officer by cloud communications platform Twilio, which recently announced it would be acquiring customer data platform Segment for $3.2bn. Reporting to Chief Product Officer Chee Chew, he will be responsible for leading Twilio’s technology strategy and roadmap.

Prior to Twilio, Brazeau was a Senior Vice President and distinguished architect at Salesforce, where he led a team of engineers and software architects to deliver highly scalable and secure SaaS solutions.? Before that, he was also a Principal Engineer at Amazon Robotics, where he pioneered the notion of robotics in the cloud.

“Twilio’s mission to fuel the future of customer engagement is so important, especially now in the time of COVID-19 where people are disconnected physically,” said Brazeau. “I believe Twilio is well-positioned to drive connectivity between individuals, customers, and companies. I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to drive and accelerate the technology roadmap that enables Twilio to continue to connect people – a necessity for the world in these challenging times.”

Snow joins Extreme Reach to direct product marketing
Extreme Reach (ER), an asset management solution for TV and video ads, has announced Michael Snow as its Director of Product Marketing. He will work with the leadership team to drive the strategic vision for expanding AdBridges – ER’s cloud platform – creative asset management capabilities for the companys client portfolio of leading brands. He will also collaborate closely with the sales, marketing and product development teams.

Snow brings over 20 years of experience in the digital asset management industry, at companies including Interwoven, Oracle, and OpenText, where he specialized in customer experience, digital experience and rich media management.

“Extreme Reach is a true breath of fresh air – the company has the size, dynamic expert team, and history with an established customer base to create tremendous opportunities in the industry and its rapid development process enables a responsiveness to customer feedback that is exceptional,” said Snow. “Im excited to join a company with such an incredible product line and Im looking forward to working alongside this fantastic team to create something truly unbeatable to help our clients.”

Verb looks to Lilly for client services direction
Ben Lilly has been appointed as Director of Client Services at Verb Brands, a luxury digital marketing agency. Reporting to Founder Chris Donnelly, he will be responsible for driving strategic growth for Verb’s portfolio of luxury and premium brands, including The Maybourne Hotel Group, Bugatti, Creed Fragrances, and Grosvenor London.

Lilly was previously Client Partner at digital marketing agency iCrossing, before which he was Client Director at Digitas LBI.

“Verb is, simply, the leading luxury digital agency, and I couldn’t be more delighted to join Chris and his team. Yet digital never sleeps, and luxury is having to undergo rapid transformation in a much-changed marketplace in 2020,” Lilly said. “I’m looking forward to working with Verb’s creative, data and media teams to bring a stepped change to performance of some of the biggest names in luxury. The combination of performance marketing and creativity is a potent force and it’s an exciting time to be joining.”

Webb takes charge of digital at Lab
Lab Group, a collection of digital marketing, technology, and creative services agencies, has hired Matt Webb as Group Head of Digital. He will be responsible for innovation and digital services across all of four of its agencies – with a particular focus on digital agency Riverr – and will oversee the development of high-quality enterprise digital services, while also facilitating and inspiring innovative thinking.

Webb has more than 20 years’ experience in C-level technology roles at large digital agencies and most recently was Europe Chief Technology Officer at Valtech, where he oversaw major client initiatives and built its connected experience offering. Prior to that, he held positions at JWT, HeathWallace, and Mirum. Webb is also the founder of innovation consultancy Maker Unleashed.

“I’m super excited to be joining LAB Group at such an important stage in its evolution,” said Webb. “I’ve been really impressed by the group’s depth of expertise in behavioural science and the fascinating projects they’re involved in. I’m very much looking forward to getting stuck into what I love doing – leading, thinking, making and innovating.”

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Twilio plans to use the addition of the customer data platform (CDP) to help businesses to better understand their customers through a single, unified view. Segment will become a division of Twilio.

“Data silos destroy great customer experiences,” said Jeff Lawson, Co-founder and CEO of Twilio. “Segment lets developers and companies break down those silos and build a complete picture of their customer. Combined with Twilios Customer Engagement Platform, we can create more personalised, timely and impactful engagement across customer service, marketing, analytics, product and sales. We are thrilled to welcome Segment to the Twilio team.”

Segment, founded in 2012, employs over 550 people and is used by more than 20,000 businesses, including Fox, Gap, Peloton, and Levi’s, to help manage their customer data.

The company raised $175m in a Series D funding round led by Accel, Google Ventures (GV), and Meritech Capital in April 2019, taking its total funding to over $280m.

“Together, Twilio and Segment have an incredible opportunity to build the customer engagement platform of the future,” said Peter Reinhardt, Segment’s Co-founder and CEO. “We created Segment to help businesses set themselves apart in the digital age and deliver rich, connected customer experiences built on high-quality data. By joining forces and applying our customer data platform to Twilio’s engagement cloud, we’ll be able to make the entire customer experience seamless from end-to-end.”

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The deal, first reported by Forbes, citing sources, has not yet been finalised but is expected to be at least partially based on Twilio stock. Segment is also known to have been open to offers of acquisition recently.

Segment, founded in 2012, is used by more than 20,000 businesses, including Fox, Gap, Peloton, and Levi’s, to help manage their customer data. It employs over 550 people. It’s not yet known what the acquisition will mean for these employees or for the company’s Co-founders: Peter Reinhardt, Ian Storm Taylor, Calvin French-Owen, and Ilya Volodarsky.

In April 2019, the company raised $175m in a Series D funding round led by Accel, Google Ventures (GV), and Meritech Capital, taking its total funding to over $280m.

Twilio’s expected big money capture of Segment come almost two years after it acquired email marketing platform SendGrid for around $3bn – a fee that leaped from $2bn upon closure of the deal.

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Be My Eyes

Across the globe, an estimated 253m people have a visual impairment that affects their daily activities and can make them reliant on friends and family. Be My Eyes wants to bring visual assistance to blind and low-vision people everywhere through the power of communication. In just a few seconds, a user can connect with a volunteer or a representative from one of the companies listed on the Be My Eyes platform.

By pointing their phone’s camera toward an object, the user can enable the volunteer to describe or assess the situation and provide assistance. The goal is to provide the independence that users want by helping with everyday tasks and pivotal life moments, from reading information on a packet of food to the results of a pregnancy test.

Be My Eyes launched its app for iPhone and Android devices in 2015. Visually impaired people are able to use a smartphone via accessibility features that provide a synthetic speech and touch-based interface on iPhones and Android devices. The user requests help via the app and is connected to a volunteer or a partner company representative that speaks the same language within one minute, with 90 per cent of connections being made within 30 seconds.

Specialized Help, a customer support platform within Be My Eyes, connects users to a partner company rather than a volunteer, enabling them to contact an official company representative to provide assistance regarding their products or services.

The app was an immediate success, quickly racking up 10,000 volunteers and 1,000 visually impaired users. As the Be My Eyes user base grew in the following years, however, this scale threatened to create lags in connection time, creating a significant problem for users.

Be My Eyes had initially sourced video connectivity from multiple providers, but determined that Twilio Programmable Video offered faster connections with higher quality and greater stability. Since migrating to Twilio, Be My Eyes has reduced connection times by more than 50 per cent.

“Relying on friends and family for everyday tasks can be taxing on relationships and prevent people with visual impairments from achieving true independence,” said Be My Eyes chief commercial officer, Alexander Hauerslev Jensen. “Be My Eyes is a Twilio-powered community support platform that solves a visually impaired person’s problem in a fraction of the time that it would take via audio. When you’re asking for help, a little bit of time can feel like an eternity. Every second we can shave off wait times means more trust, more engagement, and a stronger bond in our community. A 50 per cent reduction in connection time can mean a world of difference for the user and the Twilio platform enables us to achieve this.”

Be My Eyes now connects 178,000 blind and low-vision people with more than 3m sighted volunteers to companies such as Microsoft, Google, Lloyds Banking Group, P&G and others for visual assistance through a live video call. Be My Eyes is available globally, spanning 150 countries and 185 languages, all with free and unlimited 24-hour access.

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With the acquisition, Twilio promises to offer a platform to manage all important communication channels, including voice, messaging, video, and email; scalability and reliability to support growing businesses; and the ability to deliver personalised messaging based on the customers’ preferred form of communications.

“Effective customer engagement is a strategic imperative for every company. With SendGrid now a part of Twilio, our goal is to provide a complete platform for every form of customer engagement,” said Jeff Lawson, Twilio co-founder and CEO. “Through our mutual developer-first approach, we empower the builders of the world to create magical customer experiences unique to every interaction.”

SendGrid has become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Twilio, becoming Twilio SendGrid. Its CEO, Sameer Dholakia, will continue to lead the firm, reporting to Lawson.

“Together, we serve more than 140,000 active customer accounts and power more than 600bn annualised interactions each year. We have a shared vision, a shared model and shared values that will set us up for success,” said Dholakia. “As we join forces today, I’m more confident than ever that we can accelerate our vision of creating one unquestioned platform of choice for developers and companies around the world and help them transform the way they engage with their customers.”

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According to Twilio, adding SendGrid email API platform its cloud communications platform will drive value to their customers by offering one platform to cover all of their communication channels.

As a result of the transaction, SendGrid will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Twilio with its common stock become Twilio stock.

“Increasingly, our customers are asking us to solve all of their strategic communications challenges – regardless of channel. Email is a vital communications channel for companies around the world, and so it was important to us to include this capability in our platform,” said Jeff Lawson, Twilios co-founder and chief executive officer. “The two companies share the same vision, the same model, and the same values. We believe this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to bring together the two leading developer-focused communications platforms to create the unquestioned platform of choice for all companies looking to transform their customer engagement.”

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Twilio describes the program as “API-first, developer-first”, with a partner success team focused on supporting consulting and technology organisations as they partner with the firm to innovate for their customers.

The partner program is part of Twilios ongoing go-to-market efforts, and the firm is hoping it will fuel its next stage of growth as it takes on a $1.45 trillion (£1.1 trillion) market.

“Twilios unique API-first cloud platform is tailor-made to support an ecosystem of partners that are differentiated by the innovations they deliver for their customers,” said Ron Huddleston, chief partners officer at Twilio. “With Twilio Build, we believe we are laying the foundation for a whole new partner ecosystem that will accelerate Twilio, our partners, and most importantly, our customers.”

Among that launch partners are Perficient, Silicon Valley Software Group, DVELP, Blacc Spot and Nethram from the consulting side, and Ytica, Voicebase, IBM Watson, Zendesk and WhitePagesPro from the tech side.

“Communications plays a critical role in every organisations digital transformation initiative,” said John Rauschenberger, director of enterprise software products at Perficient. “By partnering with Twilio, who sits at the ideal intersection between communications and the cloud, we have the flexibility to create innovative offerings for our customers in ways that were never before possible.”

Twilio Build offers two levels of partnership, Registered and Gold, with both levels able to access the programs certification program, early access program, digital marketplace and support.

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Twilios cloud-based software is used in apps including Whatsapp, Uber and Airbnb to power text, voice and video messaging, and the news could lead to improved voice calls and perhaps even the introduction of video chats to these services.

The deal with the team behind the Kurento Open Source Project will see Twilio acquiring the proprietary WebRTC media processing technology to create cloud-based APIs for advanced video applications that can access real-time media processing. The technology will give app developers the ability to analyse, transform, augment and store video and audio streams for a multitude of uses, all through a simple API.

The Kurento team will also join the company to lead the integration of the technology, and develop further advanced video features for web and mobile apps. The Kurento Media Server will by integrated into Twilios Programmable Video service.

The new capabilities will enable developers to address the more advanced needs of enterprise and large-scale consumer video applications, as well as next-generation video apps that deal with technologies including augmented reality, computer vision and the Internet of Things.

“When we started the Kurento Project, we wanted to create a powerful media processing engine built for the world of WebRTC,” said Luis Lopez, CEO and co-founder of the Kurento Project. “We knew it could only be successful if we delivered this capability as a cloud service and gave it to developers through a simple and well-built API.

“Twilio has one of the best sets of APIs and joining forces with their team enables us to complete this vision and bring our work to Twilios million-plus registered developer accounts.”

“Twilio and the team behind Kurento share a common vision of enabling developers through powerful platforms and straight-forward APIs,” said Jeff Lawson, CEO and co-founder of Twilio. “As Twilio takes another step on our mission to fuel the future of communications by enabling developers, were excited to join forces with the builders of Kurento to extend the uses of our video platform.”

As well as the acquisition, Twilio also announced it was introducing Voice Insights, an API accessible series of network and device metrics that will provide developers with the ability to monitor performance during WeBRTC calls, programmatically adjusting apps in response to varying conditions.

The service aims to improve caller experience, which can still be hampered by network congestion and underpowered devices, especially in areas with unpredictable internet connectivity.

Voice Insights will provide real-time call quality warnings, enabling developers to diagnose network and device problems and even display prescriptive actions to users, advising them to check connections or move to areas with better network coverage before they are cut off.

“With more than a billion minutes of WebRTC calls made through Twilio, we have learned a lot about network and device variances that affect call quality,” said Patrick Malatack, vice president of product management at Twilio. “With Voice Insights, we are giving developers the tools to build better experiences for their customers.”

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