Salesforce on Tuesday introduced Salesforce Customer 360, a unified customer ID that connects profile data across its Sales, Services, Commerce and Marketing cloud product suites. “There are so many ways for a person to engage with a brand nowadays and a certain level of control has been lost behind these layers of technology and media,” […]
What’s the point of integrating data sources if you can’t activate on them? That’s the rationale behind the Salesforce Ventures-led $23.8 million Series E investment in SessionM, announced Monday. SessionM helps companies consolidate first- and third-party data sources and activate them around the customer journey. While it has elements of a customer data platform, its […]
Salesforce has signed an agreement to acquire Datorama, a marketing tech company whose platform connects and consolidates data from different sources, the companies said Monday. The deal is anticipated to close Q3. Terms were not disclosed, though the publication CTech said the offer is for $800 million. “With one unified view of data and insights, […]
When IPG acquired Acxiom’s managed services group, Marketing Solutions (AMS), for $2.3 billion last week, it marked the end of a five- months-long strategic review of the business – and the start of the next big sales review process with LiveRamp. Acxiom already had opened a strategic review of LiveRamp but was intent on selling […]
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, […]
Teamwork makes the dream work. At least, that could be the new Salesforce mantra for a suite of cross-cloud integrations and partnerships launched this week as Salesforce tries to separate itself from other leading marketing cloud companies. With so much competition and jargon in the cloud marketing technology space, it can be hard to differentiate, […]
Despite broad concerns about the viability of online media and advertising, M&A in the sector is heating up thanks to the growth of ecommerce and commerce-based media solutions, like Apple’s purchase of digital subscription service Next Issue Media for an undisclosed amount. The total number of deals in media, marketing and technology dropped by 7% […]
Salesforce’s data management platform (DMP) continues the strong ascent it began last quarter, according to Advertiser Perceptions’ Q4 Programmatic Intelligence report, and has moved closer to catching Oracle. Oracle DMP, despite leading in marketer use and intent, lags behind in the selection factors relevant to marketers. Advertiser Perceptions Chief Strategy Officer Kevin Mannion noted that Oracle inherited […]
In recent years, enterprise giants like Salesforce, Oracle, IBM and Adobe monopolized M&A activity as each marketing cloud raced to buy their way into ad tech. That tide has turned. These days, strategic acquisitions are more about expanding access to content, audiences and new means of distribution. Just look to media company team-ups like Disney-21st […]
Welcome to AdExchanger Talks, a podcast focused on data-driven marketing. Subscribe here. Jonathan Suarez-Davis will speak at AdExchanger’s upcoming Industry Preview conference on Jan. 17-18. In the wake of several big acquisitions, Salesforce Marketing Cloud has surpassed $1 billion in annual revenue. In this week’s episode we talk with its chief strategy officer, Jon Suarez-Davis, who joined the […]
Want to tap News Corp.’s first-party data to target ads across all of its properties? As of Tuesday, you can, thanks to the release of News IQ, which is a managed service (for now) ad platform owned and operated by News Corp. News IQ unifies inventory from publications as varied as The Wall Street Journal, […]
Oracle DMP has always had a comfortably high perch in terms of advertiser recognition and adoption. And make no mistake – it still does. But Salesforce DMP has reached some pretty high branches in the year since the Krux acquisition, according to Advertiser Perceptions’ Q3 Programmatic Intelligence Report, released Wednesday. The findings come from a […]
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 […]
Salesforce has set up a market of second-party data so advertisers can buy data directly from publishers. The subscription-based Salesforce Data Studio, which debuted on Wednesday, evolved out of the product Krux Link, a data-sharing platform Salesforce inherited when it bought the data management platform Krux. Salesforce’s goal is to give advertisers more validated data […]
If you’re an organization in dire need of digital transformation, who ya gonna call? While an enterprise software company might not initially come to mind, that’s exactly who brands like Coca-Cola and Philips turned to. For Hollywood studio 20th Century Fox Film, it’s moved from primarily a B2B company focused on partners like broadcasters, retailers, […]
Marketers spend a lot of time and money testing their digital campaigns across channels, creative formats and audience targets. Marketing research and development platform Quantifi aims to ease that strain by automating the process. The company launched on Tuesday with $2 million from a number of strategic investors including High Alpha Capital, a VC firm […]
Keary Phillips spearheaded the tech stack behind Allstate’s programmatic in-house strategy. Now he’s at it again at Angie’s List – the digital reviews site for local service providers he joined as senior director of digital marketing last August. Although Angie’s List was founded in the mid-’90s during the peak of web 1.0 portals, ironically it […]
This is the second of three stories in a mini-series on how artificial intelligence is affecting the work that agencies do. The next installment will publish on Friday. Read the first story about Xaxis. As marketer interest in artificial Intelligence (AI) grows, Publicis.Sapient sees opportunity to provide guidance. It has a dedicated unit that provides AI-related advice […]
In his second week as Marketo’s CEO, Steve Lucas walked away from his first board meeting with a mandate from investors to hire 50 developers, add 100 more salespeople and to “go fast.” Marketo’s first order of business was to re-engineer its marketing automation software from the ground up – a continuing overhaul that includes […]
Bitly was known as the de facto Twitter link shortener back in 2008. As that business commoditized – and Twitter, Google and other platforms released their own versions – Bitly recognized its real value was in the data exhaust left behind by its links. That spurred the enterprise platform Bitly OneView, a tool it launched […]
Lauren Nemeth, former head of sales for AppNexus, has joined Turn as chief revenue officer. She arrives from a stint at Pinterest-owned mobile search engine URX, and will oversee sales, client services and consulting. Prior to her role at AppNexus, she helped build Google’s programmatic business alongside Bruce Falck, Turn’s CEO. “We’re selling a complicated, […]
Tailoring individual messages to someone based on past behavior is easier said than done, since media and creative usually operate independently. Spongecell wants to fix some of the issues stymying dynamic creative optimization (DCO) at scale in the programmatic space, and has raised a $10.5 million growth round in combined debt and equity financing from […]
Artificial intelligence (AI) is surging in ad/mar tech land. Or resurging, depending on how good your memory is. IBM continues to push Watson, and, in the run-up to their respective conferences, Salesforce and Oracle talked up their own AI initiatives. Also, Google, Facebook, IBM, Microsoft and Amazon banded together to create best practices around […]
The Marketing Cloud keynote address at Dreamforce included a phrase never before uttered publicly by a Salesforce exec: “You can’t be a marketing cloud without a DMP.” That was SVP and chief product officer Bryan Wade, speaking to around 3,200 Marketing Cloud partners and clients about Salesforce’s intent to acquire Krux. “Think of us as […]
Now that Salesforce has agreed to buy Krux for an estimated $700 million, which standalone data management platforms are left? And is there still a market for independent DMPs, given the trend toward integrated marketing tech stacks and the high cost of maintaining data infrastructure? To answer those questions, it’s important first to define terms, […]
Forget ecom platform Demandware and data management platform Krux. Investors only want to know why in the world Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has any interest in Twitter. The pounding Salesforce’s stock has taken since Benioff expressed interest certainly reflects their skepticism. So while the little blue bird hasn’t been an explicit presence in this year’s annual […]
Change isn’t easy. Just ask Farmers Insurance Group CMO Michael Linton and CIO Ron Guerrier. About three or four years ago, the company had a dismal digital presence. Its Net Promoter Score, which ranks customer loyalty from -100 to 100, was in the gutter at -30 and its website bounce rate was about 40%. “Our […]
Salesforce has shifted back into gear on ad tech M&A after a three-year quiet period. The company will snap up data management platform Krux in a move that could bring its marketing stack into closer parity with its archrival Oracle. The acquisition’s price tag is $700 million, a number that will put smiles on the faces […]
Demandware has officially ascended into the clouds. The ecommerce platform that Salesforce bought for $2.8 billion in June became Commerce Cloud Tuesday, and will gradually retire the Demandware brand. Next step: integration. While that process won’t be entirely onerous – Demandware and Salesforce Marketing Cloud clients have “significant overlap,” said Commerce Cloud marketing SVP Elana Anderson – there […]
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 […]
