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This week on AdExchanger Talks, Gabe Rogol, CEO of B2B marketing platform Demandbase, gives an update on his company and the account-based marketing (ABM) trend.

ABM tracks closely with programmatic advertising. Both disciplines emerged about 12 years ago with the promise to reduce marketing waste by targeting only desired audiences or prospects. Programmatic took off like a rocket, while ABM’s growth has been more gradual.

For the uninitiated, here is Rogol’s definition of ABM: “It is about identifying the accounts that are important across sales, marketing and other customer-facing teams; segmenting those accounts in a common way across the business; orchestrating actions for those accounts; measuring them in a way that marketing and sales agree to and then acting on those audiences.”

ABM can be seen as the next category of B2B marketing technology that followed marketing automation, a category led by Marketo, HubSpot, Eloqua and other platforms.

“Marketing automation coalesced a set of technologies around nurturing through email,” Rogol says. “For ABM, what’s confusing is it’s both a bunch of different technologies – point solutions that are coalescing into platforms – and techniques.”

“This will force B2B companies to be better with the signal that they have,” he says. “Maybe having a little bit of scarcity effect will be a forcing function for marketing to work more closely with data science teams, with sales teams, with customer success teams. You can have infinite data but if it’s not operationalized across teams, there’s no B2B result.”