Conversica provides artificial-intelligence-powered sales assistants that converse with prospects on routine matters like setting up appointments, so human sales people can do more important things. They don’t call themselves a chatbot so I guess I shouldn’t either. The company just raised $34 million, bringing its total funding since 2013 to $56 million.
SAP announced acquisition of Abakus, which uses a “patented game theory-based attribution technology” to estimate the incremental impact of marketing efforts. It will be part of SAP’s Hybris Marketing Cloud, which already builds a single customer view and executes omnichannel marketing programs. Attribution has been a hot topic recently: you’ll recall we wrote about Visual IQ on 12/13 and Proof on 12/6.
Visual IQ ingests Web and offline audiences, builds individual-level contact histories, and uses them for marketing attribution and media optimization. It announced that four marketing agencies (360i, KBS, MullenLowe Mediahub and The Media Kitchen) have become its first certified alliance partners. The system can generate optimized media plans but not individual-level segments.
T-Mobile will allow advertisers to target more than 20,000 screens in 11,000 store locations. That’s a lot of screens, but how much foot traffic does the average T-Mobile store get? It’s also linking up with streaming media company Plex as a CTV partner.