Salesforce expanded integrations between its marketing cloud platform and Datorama, the customer data platform it acquired for $800 million last year, the company announced Wednesday at AdExchanger’s Industry Preview in New York City.
The new features allow Datorama customers to centralize marketing data from email and social media campaigns for analytics or ad campaign management. For instance, a brand could establish a frequency cap or set acquisition costs across Google, Facebook, Twitter and email campaigns, said Jay Wilder, Datorama’s director of product marketing.
Salesforce won’t buy media – the brand or agency using Datorama must still integrate with a DSP or trade desk – but it will enable marketers to pause and start campaigns or adjust creative from a single hub, Wilder said.
“Marketers approach Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn as distinct channels but need a centralized place to visualize or activate audiences and content,” he said.
The Dentsu agency iProspect has worked with Datorama for more than four years, largely to improve campaign reporting by decreasing manual Excel spreadsheet work, said Morten Bruhn Højsgaard, managing director of its Denmark operations. In the past year iProspect developed new analytics after warehousing all of its client data with Datorama and creating API-based tools for reporting.
Bruhn said the new Datorama products let iProspect work more closely with its brand clients, since audiences and campaign data that were previously wrangled from many channels and data sources into Powerpoint slides are now housed in one dashboard.
“It was a strong fit with the API connectors we’d been developing internally, and we’re fortunate Datorama is now with Salesforce, which shares that open API mentality,” he said.
Bruhn said before Salesforce acquired Datorama, some iProspect clients were skeptical of investing so much time and data on a startup customer data platform. It was still an early venture capital bet and could have been snapped up by another holding company or a less compatible mar tech giant.
And Salesforce has big plans for bringing Datorama even more deeply into its cloud suite. Datorama will add new data sources, like first-party CRM data, and new media platforms to its current roster, which includes Google, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Wilder said sophisticated brands have already used Datorama’s new developer tools to integrate The Trade Desk and other buying platforms into its hub.
Eventually Datorama will cease to be a standalone business, said Bobby Jania, Salesforce’s VP of product marketing. Instead, it will function as the connection and API services offered by Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
“It’s only six months in,” Jania said, “but our vision for Datorama in the future is for it to be delivered as the way Salesforce Marketing Cloud natively connects other types of data.”
