Salesforce.com has partnered with offline audience-targeting specialist Datalogix.
Salesforce.com’s clients now have access to what Datalogix claims is an offline audience data set that represents $1 trillion in spend.
Eric Kirby, Datalogix’s chief product officer, told AdExchanger the data provider’s offline reach enables Salesforce.com’s CRM clients to supplement their CRM databases with new prospects “by tapping into our database of consumer spending behavior to build ‘spend-alike’ audiences who mirror the buying behaviors of brands’ best customers.” In other words, the ability to do lookalike modeling.
This deal is a particularly important one for Salesforce.com, which recently watched Oracle snap up data exchange and data-management platform BlueKai. IBM recently bought email marketing and marketing automation provider Silverpop. While Salesforce.com has made its share of marketing acquisitions (its Marketing Cloud suite, for instance, was built by technologies from ExactTarget, Buddy Media and Radian6), questions remain around its paid media strategy.
Salesforce.com’s paid media capabilities primarily center around social advertising via Social.com and its Active Audiences tool, designed to allow agencies and brands to scale first-party data sets for targeted Facebook campaigns. The Datalogix partnership extends those data sets substantially.
Gerry Bavaro, chief strategy officer for Omnicom Group agency Resolution Media – a beneficiary of the Datalogix-Salesforce.com partnership – said the combination was a necessity for the enterprise technology giant.
“(This deal) gives (Salesforce.com) much better match rates integrated right within their platform to not only target existing customers and understand their purchase behavior, but understand behaviors beyond what’s sitting in their customer database,” he said. These behaviors might include a brand’s most prolific purchasers or other unique attributes.
This deal is also interesting when compared with recent M&A deals. Datalogix recently acquired shopper marketing company Spire and Dunnhumby, owned by British grocer Tesco, announced its intent to acquire digital advertising and retargeting tech company Sociomantic. This illustrates the importance of the point-of-sale (POS) and loyalty card database to online advertisers and vice versa.
“The main reason is the effectiveness of consumer data providers like Datalogix and their match rate vs. cookie data,” Bavaro said. “Nothing beats first-party email lists where you know who your customers are, matched with Facebook … (but then) the ability to measure (and extend) those one-to-one audiences offline, you’re utilizing very deep purchase behavior that’s not cookie-based.”
Bavaro referenced a CPG client campaign in which Resolution tapped the Salesforce.com ExactTarget Marketing Cloud coupled with Datalogix to extend the reach of first-party shopper data with category purchase data:
“We started with a benchmark before we ran a targeted Facebook campaign (using Salesforce.com and Datalogix) and we measured it knowing there was an exposed, one-to-one audience we targeted with a very specific product on Facebook. … When we added it all up, we saw the campaign added 8% incremental lift across (geo-) targeted areas of the country where we wanted to drive traffic.”
Although Datalogix’s relationship with ExactTarget dates back a couple of years, Salesforce.com’s recent launch of Social.com has the data provider ramping up ties to Salesforce.com’s developing Marketing Cloud. “Our focus is on how easily we can enable our audience targeting and measurement solutions for Salesforce.com clients across display, video, mobile and social, including Facebook,” Datalogix’s Kirby said.
