Home Online Advertising Salesforce Marketing Cloud CEO Stutz On Data, Paid Media And The “Passing Fad” Of The CDP

Salesforce Marketing Cloud CEO Stutz On Data, Paid Media And The “Passing Fad” Of The CDP

SHARE:

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, Salesforce positions itself as perennial integrator.

“For us, it’s more broadly about engagement between our customer and their consumers,” said Bob Stutz, CEO of Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

AdExchanger spoke to Stutz about his growth plans for the cloud marketing business – and how Salesforce differentiates itself from a competitive field of cloud tech giants.

AdExchanger: How do you go to market these days with the marketing cloud? And how has that changed?

BOB STUTZ: We’ve always talked about it as a consolidated solution. At the end of the day, companies have to do sales, to do ecommerce, any mix of B2B or consumer business. The collaboration across clouds is central to everything we’re doing.

In any company, there are multiple integrations with different systems, and that’s an opportunity. The key is to tie stuff together.

With MuleSoft, there’s an added element with this great way to bring in other third-party data or disparate sources.

And we’ve seen a shift in situations where previously, we were dealing with the CMO, and now that’s often moved up to the CEO. There are things like customer acquisition, retention for companies with users or contract deals, ecommerce, prospecting, where it’s not just the CMO anymore.

Is the end state a single, consolidated cloud offering?

It is ultimately the Salesforce cloud. But we have to respect that customers work with others, and we have to be part of integrated systems.

Subscribe

AdExchanger Daily

Get our editors’ roundup delivered to your inbox every weekday.

It makes sense to have the Marketing Cloud in a mar tech landscape where companies have hundreds or more than 1,000 applications running in their marketing departments and you have to integrate with pretty much everyone.

It’s about what problems they need to solve, not just going in to sell six different clouds.

Where does paid media fit in for you?

It’s a partner aspect for us.

If you look at what our DMP does today, we have relationships with publishers that allow data to be brought in similarly to an Oracle Data Cloud. But on the DSP side of the house, it’s an ecosystem, not a product.

Other marketing cloud companies are taking on data assets and measurement, and Salesforce seems to have more of a partner-integrator approach there too. Are there data assets in your future?

On one hand, we have Data Studio, a second-party tool for customers to share data in an anonymous way. Like how Warner Bros. had a movie about boxing and could go to HBO and share segments on weekly boxing viewers to help enrich its audience. Some publisher data is available in that way too.

But it is like paid media, where we’re probably connecting or sending data to another company.

It sounds like a CDP. What do you think of that category?

Frankly, I think that’s mostly marketing. We have all the pieces of a CDP, but really, what is that?

I think it’s a passing fad. Or really more of a temporary state as people are looking beyond a DMP, the connection to a CRM and evolving to mobile. It’s what people are doing already.

What I think you’ll see in a couple years is that many of the three-letter acronyms will go away and these things will blend together in a more seamless way. If you look at enterprises today, there are still a lot of siloes: customer service, sales, marketing, distribution, commerce. You can connect the data and collaborate, but it takes a lot of work to do that. But that’s the direction.

Must Read

HUMAN Expands Its IVT Detection Tool Kit With A New Product For Advertisers, Not Platforms

HUMAN has recently started complementing its bid request analysis by analyzing the time between when a bot clicks an ad and when the landing page loads. Now it’s offering the solution to individual advertisers.

Index Exchange Launches A Data Marketplace For Sell-Side Curation

Through Index Exchange’s data vendor marketplace, curators gain access to third-party data sets without needing their own integrations.

Can Publishers Trust The Trade Desk’s New Wrapper?

TTD says OpenAds is not just a reaction to Prebid’s TID change, but a new model for fairer, more transparent ad auctions. So what does the DSP need to do to get publishers to adopt its new auction wrapper?

Privacy! Commerce! Connected TV! Read all about it. Subscribe to AdExchanger Newsletters

Scott Spencer’s New Startup Wants To Help Users Monetize Their Online Advertising Data

What happens when an ad tech developer partners with a cybersecurity expert to start a new company? You end up with a consumer product that is both a privacy software service and a programmatic advertising ID.

Former FTC commissioner Alvaro Bedoya speaks to AdExchanger Managing Editor Allison Schiff at Programmatic IO NY 2025.

Advertisers Probably Shouldn’t Target Teens At All, Cautions Former FTC Commissioner

Alvaro Bedoya shared his qualms with digital advertising’s more controversial targeting tactics and how kids use gen AI and social media.

Wall Street Turned Against Ad Tech – But May Learn To Love It Again

What can pureplay ad tech companies do to clean up their rep on the Street?