Salesforce has named CRM technology pioneer Bob Stutz as CEO of its Marketing Cloud, replacing outgoing CEO Scott McCorkle. McCorkle, a soft-spoken and well-liked exec, has for the past two years driven the marketing tech bus at Salesforce, a bus that has arguably been stuck in a fast idle since the company paid $2.5 billion […]
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 […]
Marketing automation giant Marketo has been snapped up by a private equity buyer in a deal that values it among the top ad and marketing tech investments ever. Vista Equity Partners, which took a majority investment in agency billing and workflow software Mediaocean last June, agreed to acquire Marketo in a $1.79 billion all-cash deal. Upon […]
After decades of specializing in hardware and on-premise servers, IBM is emphasizing its new-wave agency IBM Interactive Experience (IBM iX), a mashup of design, systems integration, analytics and the Internet of Things, with billings in the billions. IBM iX made three digital, design and brand agency acquisitions in a single week this winter when it snapped […]
More marketers are adopting data-driven tactics by blending their own first-party data with third-party sources. Financial services, for example, is undergoing major digital disruption, and banks are looking to translate direct-to-consumer marketing tactics to business constituents. Capital One seeks to reach small and medium-sized merchants nationwide through its small-business division and does so using Salesforce […]
When Google rolled out its CRM matching program Customer Match last fall, it seemed to follow in the footsteps of Facebook’s Custom Audiences, which launched in 2012. But Google’s strategic partnership with Salesforce, revealed Tuesday at the latter’s annual Connections conference in Atlanta, Georgia, boosts both companies’ ability to make identity-based matches based on CRM and […]
Randy Wootton will speak about advertiser perceptions on April 14 at AdExchanger’s PROGRAMMATIC.IO conference in San Francisco. The past couple of years have been a tumultuous adolescence for ad tech, and perhaps no single company embodies the growing pains as neatly as Rocket Fuel, with its near-solo public spotlight, its dispute over margin transparency and the rough […]
Over two years, a lot has changed for online contact lens seller 1-800 Contacts. “In 2013, we didn’t even have a mobile app,” said its VP of digital commerce, Justin Olson. Contrast that with 2015: “Seventeen percent of our total orders came through the app and about 20-25% of orders come through mobile web.” Olson, […]
Some of Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s new products, rolled out Wednesday, seem to mimic the capabilities of a data management platform (DMP) – software historically absent from the stack. Salesforce’s Predictive Scores and Predictive Audiences are designed to help marketers segment and target prospects and known consumers with more speed and granularity. Those two tools fall […]
The marketing clouds were heavy with ad tech this week. On Wednesday, Adobe uncorked its self-serve programmatic platform. On Thursday, MediaMath and Oracle hooked up. And of course, Salesforce is concluding its annual Dreamforce blowout, where Scott McCorkle, CEO of its Marketing Cloud, laid out to AdExchanger how the CRM giant thinks about ad tech. […]
At Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce celebration, Rick Ruskin, who heads marketing and product management for General Motors’ OnStar service, sits in a parked Buick that’s serving as a makeshift conference room. He points to his phone, where there are offers from Best Buy and Audiobooks.com. “These two spots here are like Google AdWords, where people are […]
The technological problem with the Internet of Things (IoT) is that various connected devices, household appliances and vehicles all have different operating systems with different communication or data collection methods. This means they can’t talk to each other because they don’t speak the same language. “Information isn’t valuable without an infrastructure to make it actionable […]
Kahuna, a mobile marketing automation startup going against Adobe, Oracle and Salesforce.com, revealed Wednesday it had raised $45 million in Series B funding. The round, led by Tenaya Capital, Sequoia and SoftTech, will be used for product development and to expand Kahuna’s team of 80. Kahuna’s clients like Dollar Shave Club, Overstock.com, The Weather Channel […]
For Hootsuite, it used to be all about text links on Twitter. Not so, anymore. The early Twitter client on Tuesday revealed native support for Instagram. So now, users can promote content on Instagram as well as across previously supported platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google pages. It also introduced recently link-to-buy functionality within […]
LiveFyre revealed Thursday it had raised $32 million in strategic investments from Salesforce Ventures and Adobe as part of a Series D round, in addition to $15 million in C2 financing in 2014. LiveFyre, which started out as a commenting platform, now markets itself as a hub of user-generated content for brands and publishers. The […]
Forrester Research crowned Adobe Marketing Cloud in its first-ever ranking of enterprise marketing software suites – informally called “marketing clouds.” The report, compiled by analysts Cory Munchbach and Rusty Warner and released Tuesday, encompassed eight vendors (Adobe, Salesforce.com, SAS, Teradata, IBM, Oracle, SAP and Marketo). Munchbach and Warner interviewed three clients from each vendor and tallied […]
Memo to marketing industry observers waiting for ad tech to merge with marketing tech: It’s probably safe to go make popcorn, as this could take a while. It’s been a year since Salesforce.com acquired ExactTarget. On Thursday, the company hosted a press event in San Francisco to commemorate the deal’s anniversary, using the occasion to […]
A recent article by New York Times media columnist David Carr revealed a radical publishing technology catching on in news media companies everywhere: email newsletters. Carr wrote that email is a marketing tool many people tend to forget about. But, he argued, email is the most consistent and useful medium for advertising. Email and search drive […]
When ad tech company IgnitionOne acquired data-management platform (DMP) Knotice, did it become a marketing cloud? CEO Will Margiloff would say the company was one even before. In the most literal sense, he’s right: “We decided back in 2011, well before anyone talked about marketing clouds, that you need to integrate the disparate pieces of […]
Oracle hosted a “launch event” Wednesday to introduce its Marketing Cloud, though the fact that Oracle has a suite is about as newsworthy as the world’s roundness. The enterprise software giant has been using that particular nomenclature since it acquired marketing automation solution Eloqua in December 2012. Oracle’s Marketing Cloud has several components. In addition to Eloqua, there’s social […]
Salesforce.com reported 37% revenue growth in Q4, to $1.15 billion, driven in part by the $2.5 billion July 2013 acquisition of ExactTarget. Its full year revenue was $4.07 billion, up 33% year-over-year. ExactTarget is the lynchpin of ExactTarget Marketing Cloud, which competes with analogous stacks fielded by Adobe and Oracle. Specifically, ExactTarget contributed $96 million in […]
The first Forrester Wave on lead-to-revenue management (L2RM) automation solutions released Tuesday singled out Oracle’s Eloqua and the still independent Marketo as marketplace leaders catering to large enterprises. As defined by Forrester, L2RM is essentially B2B marketing automation. Additionally, Act-On and Salesfusion were champions among solutions designed for small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). The report […]
Speaking in New York today, far from the frenzied CES crowd in Las Vegas, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff heralded what he perceives as a shift from an “anonymous, B2C world to one of one-to-one marketing where the consumer has opted in.” Benioff told a gathering of partners, customers, media and analysts on Wednesday that Salesforce.com’s […]
Last year we asked a handful of senior execs at platform companies to answer the question, “What will happen next year in marketing and advertising that hasn’t happened before?” This year we invited some of those contributors to evaluate their earlier forecasts and update them for 2014. The below is from Michael Lazerow, chief marketing […]
You can’t throw a 23-year-old media buyer without hitting a software “cloud.” One of the precocious contenders in this bunch, social-centric SHIFT, has raised $6 million to support an expansion of its Open Marketing Cloud into Europe. The investment, led by DN Capital, brings its total financing to $14 million. The company’s 29-year-old CEO, James […]
The value that Salesforce.com’s solutions bring to marketers, customer experience managers, and sales staff is well-established. But what can Salesforce.com offer for online advertisers? Within the various acquired companies that constitute Salesforce.com’s ExactTarget Marketing Cloud — recently integrated with the Salesforce1 platform — is Social.com. Social.com was made possible when social media commerce company Buddy Media […]
Among the recurring themes Wednesday at Dreamforce in San Francisco was the need to develop customer-centric experiences that are both channel-agnostic and measurable. Online job finder CareerBuilder and CPG giant Unilever were among the major brands that took turns on stage and dished about their digital priorities, best practices and thoughts around their marketing investments. […]
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer remained relatively unfazed onstage Tuesday at the Dreamforce conference as a pack of protesters disrupted an otherwise smooth Q&A session with Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff. Despite the larger-than-life mural of Mayer’s mug and echoing shouts protesting her seat on Walmart’s board of directors, the fireside chat between the two CEOs covered […]
As throngs of conference-goers flocked to downtown San Francisco for this week’s Dreamforce show, enterprise platform company Salesforce.com posted its Q3 earnings, citing 36% growth year-over-year to $1.08 billion in revenue. Of that total, $81 million was attributed to the Salesforce.com ExactTarget Marketing Cloud, according to Salesforce.com CFO Graham Smith, a figure that was “stronger” […]
Twitter’s acquisition of mobile ad exchange MoPub came within two weeks of its acquisition of social TV analytics Trendrr and the wide release of lead-generation cards. These staccato moves, according to one Twitter Ads API partner company, are exactly what Twitter needs to counter Facebook’s aggressive pipeline of ad products. “They’re doing a nice job […]
