Marketing Cloud

On Tuesday, Infillion launched fully agentic media execution platform built on MCP, marking a shift from the programmatic to the agentic era.

This year has been a series of highs and lows for Zeta Global. It acquired LiveIntent for $250 million – a high. And it was the subject of multiple withering short seller reports – a low. But CEO David Steinberg says he’s not sweating it.

Personalization – paired with effective measurement – has enabled marketers to see and understand results, ultimately driving them to spend more. Madan Sundararaju, vice president of the M&E sector at Capgemini Americas, writes on how traditional media platforms can adapt to these trends and increase their share of ad revenue.

Zeta Global filed its S-1 paperwork Monday. Zeta has not yet determined the number of shares it will offer or the price. Zeta – whose offering combines marketing tech, ad tech and data services – reported $368.1 million in 2020 revenue, a 20.3% increase from the year before. Adjusted EBITDA was $39.6 million, up 62.7% […]

“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Martin Kihn, senior vice president of marketing strategy, Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Martin will present “The Cookieless Web And The Future Of The DMP” at AdExchanger’s Industry Preview conference, being held […]

The marketing cloud landscape has taken big steps into advertising technology and media buying, as with Oracle’s recent acquisitions of Moat and Grapeshot or Adobe’s deal for the video DSP TubeMogul. But Salesforce defies that trend. The company has deferred to partners to provide online advertising. And while rival clouds contend for new data sources, […]

There was a time when the yogurt company Chobani had to track its digital marketing activity vendor by vendor. But last October, it put out an RFP to consolidate its activity with a marketing cloud. “One of the benefits with a marketing cloud is it gives us a holistic picture of all of our digital […]

In his previous gig, Cision CEO Kevin Akeroyd oversaw $6 billion worth of acquisitions as GM of the Oracle Marketing Cloud. Now he has a similar vision for earned media. Since Akeroyd’s appointment as Cision’s chief in 2016, he’s spearheaded several acquisitions and shepherded the now-public company through a $2.4 billion merger with investment firm […]

As the governing body for professional surfers globally, the World Surf League (WSL) promotes the sport to both casual fans and diehards. But just a few years ago, the WSL – at the time called the Association for Surfing Professionals – lacked a cohesive marketing strategy, and campaigns for different surf events were heavily siloed. […]

Lotame has hired a new CRO as the independent, 10-year-old data management platform seeks to compete in a category increasingly dominated by marketing clouds. The company’s new revenue chief, Eric Marterella, spent the past five years leading global enterprise sales for social media marketing platform Sprinklr. His responsibilities at Lotame will include managing global client […]

Nearly 20-year-old photo-sharing brand Shutterfly “probably shouldn’t have made it” in a modern mobile world – and that’s the company’s CMO talking. But despite competing with Apple, Google and Facebook, and needing to match new consumer behavior, Shutterfly’s revenue is up. The early “web 1.0 ecommerce company,” as chief marketing exec John Boris referred to it, […]

SAP acquired Gigya for $350 million in September for its consumer identity management solution. The deal, which just closed, will help SAP extend its cross-platform identifier – the SAP Hybris Profile – to new channels like over-the-top TV and social. It also gives SAP more clout to help companies manage their opt-ins amid looming privacy […]

As the global COO of Merkle, Michael Komasinski keeps the proverbial engines running both internally and in the agency’s services business. After joining Merkle in 2015 from his post as COO of Razorfish North America, Komasinski helped drive 30% revenue growth across the business in 2016. Komasinski also was largely responsible for leading the integration […]

As Gartner analyst Martin Kihn recently predicted, the big enterprise marketing clouds are beginning to pursue divergent product strategies with clear points of distinction. While Salesforce heralds its CRM data and hooks into other categories like sales and commerce, Adobe’s differentiator is creative with growing emphasis on digital experience. In the case of Oracle, which […]

Mapp Digital, the Marlin Equity-backed holding company housing the remnants of Teradata’s marketing tech stack, wants to take some business from the larger marketing clouds. One way it hopes to get there is by attracting upper mid-market and enterprise buyers like KFC and Infiniti that are looking for a modular marketing cloud with managed services […]

Zeta Global, a provider of cloud-based CRM and email marketing services, has acquired Boomtrain, a machine-learning marketing technology startup that works primarily with retailers and media companies. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Boomtrain previously raised almost $15 million, and headcount was down 8% in the first six months of 2017, according to LinkedIn […]

Oracle Data Cloud has become a big business driver for Oracle’s CX Cloud Suite, which includes software for marketing, sales, commerce, social and customer service. In the past 18 months, Data Cloud has also become a big acquirer, with deals for Moat, Crosswise and AddThis. And it has a strong presence even in announcements about […]

As EVP of performance marketing for Interpublic Group’s MRM//McCann, it’s in Subu Desaraju’s purview to crack marketing cloud complexities in client deployments. Adobe, Oracle, Salesforce, IBM and Nielsen all built marketing clouds via acquisition, but with these ongoing investments come challenges around data interoperability and overall efficiency across their stacks. Although a number of platforms […]

Frontier Airlines is on a quest to facilitate direct customer relationships. To do that, it’s turned to Qubit to build a personalization engine from scratch. While site personalization and cross-channel communications used to be more of a “nice to have” for brands, it’s now table stakes for airlines like Frontier. “For a lot of customers, […]

Marketing automation is designed to push out messages, but it hasn’t always been great at incorporating pricing or product information. Datalogix vet Rob Holland recognized that reality when he served as an EVP at the Oracle Data Cloud – and he just jumped to ecommerce marketing startup Bluecore last week to help solve that problem […]

Like its competitors, IBM is acquiring and building a video stack. Instead of focusing on media execution, however, IBM is using Watson and data analytics to improve the relevancy of video content, ads and delivery models. “In ad-supported video, how do you make ultra-targeted ads tailored down to the individual for customer acquisition?” said David Mowrey, […]

Video ad platform Innovid will integrate with marketing clouds from IBM, Adobe and Oracle, the companies said Tuesday, allowing video and TV planners to use CRM data to inform video ads served by Innovid. Conversely, those marketing cloud customers can apply intent data from their mobile, desktop and OTT video campaigns to their broader marketing […]

Adobe’s $540 million acquisition of TubeMogul this week was a bet on more automation and addressability in TV. In addition, the deal gives Adobe Marketing Cloud – which is known for its strength in site analytics and creative – the ability to do more cross-screen media execution. TubeMogul has shown consistent growth quarter after quarter, following […]

Salesforce wants to “democratize” the development of artificial intelligence (AI) applications. That is, making AI available to as many business users as possible. Consequently, it’s baked an AI system called Einstein into the Salesforce platform – such that its capabilities are available across its various clouds, including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud and Marketing Cloud. “AI […]

Salesforce dropped $2.8 billion on ecommerce platform Demandware on Wednesday, which will underpin the creation of Salesforce’s latest business line: Commerce Cloud. The deal catapults Salesforce into the ecommerce space – a tech category largely dominated by enterprise competitors like SAP/hybris and IBM/WebSphere, though Salesforce first dabbled in ecommerce in 2012, when it acquired site […]

Nielsen predominantly partnered with big marketing clouds à la Adobe to date – until now. The measurement giant on Tuesday rolled out the Nielsen Marketing Cloud, which is is the company’s first major attempt to unify various homegrown and acquired assets into a single platform for media owners and advertisers. A number of food and […]

IBM’s hire of AOL’s former president Bob Lord as its chief digital officer naturally begs the question: What will it mean for IBM’s collection of marketing applications? After all, Lord helped architect AOL’s transition into an ad tech platform – which eventually led to its acquisition by Verizon. But while Lord’s duties at IBM will […]

Christopher Wong is VP of strategy and product management for IBM Commerce Marketing Solutions. He will discuss IBM’s digital marketing strategy at the upcoming Industry Preview 2016 conference in January. The old adage of “If you build it, they will come” has been replaced with newer notions around “empathy mapping” and anticipating customer needs prior […]

While many tech companies are entering the marketing cloud business, Teradata is saying sayonara. Although it acquired Dutch data management platform FLXOne in October and shortly after rolled out an Integrated Marketing Cloud, Teradata revealed late last week it would sell its marketing applications line of business to focus on its data and analytics offering. […]

IBM is pushing deeper into the cloud and paid media. Big Blue on Thursday launched the IBM Universal Behavior Exchange (UBX), a platform that unifies marketing tech acquisitions including Unica campaign management, Silverpop marketing automation, Coremetrics analytics and Xtify mobile personalization. It also named 25 UBX partners, including a handful of ad tech players like […]