Customer Experience (CX) is in vogue, as Google hits for CX confirm, which have risen from 80 million in 2011 to over a billion in 2018, apart from the fact that CX has been mentioned in many studies as a top management issue, even though companies are still struggling with it. Nowadays, it is obviously not the price-performance ratio that is decisive, but the best price-experience ratio in a price range, and people no longer speak of digital transformation, but digitization in the sense of optimal integration of the digital and analog worlds.

We just started to imagine what artificial intelligence (AI) can do to transform the experience for both marketers and consumers with its impressive versatility. Adobe just released its online shopping predictions for the 2018 holiday season, Retail Unwrapped, making use of its artificial intelligence and machine learning framework, to identify retail insights from trillions of data points that flow through Adobe Analytics and Magento Commerce Cloud, part of Adobe Experience Cloud.

The fact of having the World Wide Web around for 30 years now - and Google for 20 years - deserves taking a closer look at the future of search engine advertising.

For dealers, the product search and displaying shopping ads for performance purposes are particularly lucrative, but good for image management via display marketing and remarketing as well, while search engines attract with unusual and cost-effective targeting options. The possibilities to reach target groups and campaign goals are almost limitless, making it therefore quite challenging to keep up with the trends.

SolarWinds, a leading provider of powerful and affordable IT management software, announced the availability of machine learning-enabled database anomaly detection and an automated management API in the latest version of Database Performance Analyzer (DPA). The company also introduced a broad refresh of its IT operations management portfolio, collectively designed to improve support for monitoring critical IT services and extend support for monitoring private cloud and converged infrastructures.

Qualtrics, a leader in experience management, announced a series of innovations that will continue to dramatically accelerate the customer experience (CX) industry with a fundamentally different approach: with Qualtrics Customer Experience™, now known as Qualtrics CustomerXM™, brands can build programs that are more personal and engage customers on their own terms, proactively surface insights and help activate an entire organization around CX.

When Hootsuite was born back in November of 2008, four-year-old Facebook had 100 million users (2.27 billion today) and new kid on the block Twitter had just 6 million (336 million today). The world was without Instagram (more than 1 billion users today) as it wouldn’t exist for another two years, and Snapchat (300+ million users today) wouldn’t come on the scene for another three.

As many reports reveal, the festive e-commerce market in Southeast Asia is worth billions of dollars, rewarding those brands willing to digitally reinvent themselves constantly and matching consumer demands and expectations steadily. Or as Meltwater describes it in one of their recent reports, “the common thread between the winning brands – whether that is Lazada, Amazon or Shopee – lies in their understanding of consumers and willingness to provide the best experience through price, value, quality and service.”

Many 16 to 23-year-olds don’t seem to be driven to stand out as a personality from the masses in the context of their social media appearances. On the contrary, the so-called "Generation Z" seems to be surprisingly homogeneous: as far as aesthetics and poses are concerned, they are more likely to submit to the valid norms and rules that receive the most approval from the social media community.

As you can imagine, the digital disruption in sales stirs up existential fears, even among long-established distributors, since intelligent sales support in the form of software, apps and artificial intelligence are often not in place. The traditional methods of conducting sales negotiations need a fresh push as well this year, considering that analogue and digital communication will at best converge to a 360-degree dialogue competence. So, expect the winners of disruption in distribution to be companies and vendors that recognize this development potential and acquire new strategies.

Hong Bao Media launched a blended learning course for the marketing community to help them cut time and cost when producing video content.

High-quality visual product content is widely accepted as an increasingly critical element of an effective e-commerce merchandising strategy. Brands and retailers adapting to a “digital first” world must produce high-quality visual product content at scale to engage with their customers across many channels and platforms. The good news are, that Bright River, a global leader in end-to-end visual product content solutions for e-commerce, just announced its integration partnership with Capture Integration’s ShotFlow, offering more scalability to photo studios serving the e-commerce industry.

Customers nowadays expect more from their online store than just standard suggestions on the latest bestsellers or the cheapest items. Whoever wants to increase sales in e-commerce must meet the expectations and tastes of the customers - ideally fulfilling their wishes before they could even express them. However, this only works if the recommendations include comprehensive information such as the previous buying behavior and previous search queries, and thus become relevant for the customer. Pseudo-personalized emails, incoherent advertising, and randomly chosen "You might like it" links are more harmful than doing any good. If the personalized recommendation is successful, online retailers can improve customer satisfaction, achieve a higher conversion rate, and increase sales.

Although the death of Snapchat has been predicted many times by now, in fact right after its listing at the stock exchange where is was considered overvalued, the company proves us once again wrong and shows that there is life in the old dog yet.

Tata Communications Transformation Services (TCTS), a partner of choice for the world’s leading Communication Service Providers (CSPs), and Zeetta Networks, a leading network slicing and splicing company, announced a global partnership agreement to facilitate early adoption of technologies like 5G and network slicing within the ICT space.