Oracle has acquired cloud content marketing platform Compendium for an undisclosed sum.
Oracle, which bought marketing automation company Eloqua for $871 million last December, has since formalized that deal into the Oracle Eloqua Marketing Cloud and has plans to improve “top-of-the-funnel” customer engagement with its acquisition of Compendium, according to the company.
These moves are rivaled by Salesforce.com, which acquired email marketing company ExactTarget for $2.5 billion this summer, and Adobe, which bought marketing and campaign-management company Neolane for $600 million this June.
The Compendium deal is about the “process, governance and workflow of content,” said Rebecca Lieb, digital advertising and media analyst at Altimeter Group. She referenced Adobe’s advances in bridging the gap between Creative Cloud and Marketing Cloud content.
“It’s not just written content, but audio, video, images and the editorial calendar,” she added. “It’s very interesting and very smart on Oracle’s part. Increasingly, marketers are realizing that content is the foundational element of all marketing, whether it’s paid, earned or owned.”
The Eloqua acquisition gave Oracle the ability to strengthen inbound marketing abilities, enabling companies to attract leads and prospects through content and to align that content with the right personas. In order to create and expedite on that content, the workflow element is essential, Lieb said.
Content is a critical player in the area of native advertising, but scale can bring challenges. The need to create “modular” content that spans (and keeps its context) across channels is paramount for marketers. One of the pillars Compendium focused on was channel distribution – or delivering content to targeted audiences on blogs, websites, social media and email.
“Over time, if Eloqua had continued on its own [apart from Oracle] these are things Eloqua would have made acquisitions of,” said Ray Wang, founder and chairman of Constellation Research. “I think what [Oracle] is figuring out is, ‘What things should we buy now?’ and ‘What things should we buy later?’ On a long-term basis, they will be competing more and more with Adobe.”
The Compendium management team and employees are expected to join Oracle “to continue their focus facilitating excellence in marketing,” the company said.
