Nearly a year after launching a collaboration and productivity platform for marketers, Shift unveiled its Open Marketing Cloud, a suite of social promotions, media buying, community management, and analytics applications available through partnerships with 12 tech companies.
The Open Marketing Cloud brings together apps from the following firms: Aggregate Knowledge (media intelligence platform), Convertro (conversion-tracking), Curalate (Pinterest and Instagram analytics provider), Expion (social media management platform), Fan Appz (social media marketing personalization), Moontoast (social media ad creation), Offerpop (social media marketing campaign provider), Optimal Analytics (Facebook advertising and analytics provider), The Trade Desk (media buying platform), and GraphEffect (social ad management and analytics).
Shift’s new Marketing Cloud pits it directly against the cloud-based marketing suites of larger enterprises like Salesforce.com and Adobe. According to Shift CEO James Borow, his company has an edge by being “nimble and quick.”
“Salesforce and Adobe’s marketing clouds are both closed networks that only offer products they’ve built or acquired. Technology is moving too fast for them to keep up,” Borow told AdExchanger. “What we want to do is offer greater flexibility to marketers through these partnerships.”
Shift’s collaboration platform is available for free and the apps in the Open Marketing Cloud are priced on an a la carte basis. Users who are already clients of the respective apps can import their accounts into Shift and Shift collects a percentage of the revenue app developers earn from new users that sign up through the platform.
Based in Santa Monica, Calif., Shift has 65 employees and $14 million in financing from venture capital firms. The company rebranded from its former company name GraphEffect last fall. It is one of 12 Facebook Strategic Preferred Marketing Developers and one of five Twitter Ads API Partners. Borow declined to say how many customers Shift currently has, but noted that its customers include American Express, Digitas, Toyota, Marriot, and RadioShack.
