L’Oréal, owner of 28 beauty lines including Garnier, Maybelline and Lancôme, knows consumers are increasingly multibrand shoppers. For years, it segmented customers simply as L’Oreal Paris shoppers or Maybelline brand loyalists. But new ecommerce channels create an abundance of choice, which makes consumers inherently less loyal. “For the past 20 years, each brand did what […]
Salesforce.com wants marketers to know its paid media pitch extends well beyond the confines of social media now. On Wednesday, it revealed buyers can now activate CRM data for ad buys across mobile web, video, display and apps through a wave of new Active Audiences API partners: LiveRamp, LiveIntent, Neustar, Krux and Viant. Although Salesforce.com […]
Percolate, which has been compared to social publishing platforms like Buddy Media, has raised $40 million to take on enterprise marketing cloud acquirers and standalone social point solutions. The Series C round, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, brings Percolate’s total funding to $74.5 million. It raised $24 million in Series B last spring, which the company’s co-founder, James Gross, said is […]
Marketing automation, long defined as a B2B lead-gen system, is making its way into B2C territory. One of the most common complaints about standard marketing automation systems is that they’re simply too old or unable to sync data in real-time. But Salesforce.com’s Pardot and Marketo are all updating to compete effectively in a cross-channel media environment. […]
There’s an understandable fascination with the rat-a-tat deal-making in marketing technology circles, but transformation of the marketing discipline will only come as Fortune 1000 CMOs embrace these changes. Extend your time horizon a few years, and this industry’s evolution is fundamentally a head game. For more on this, AdExchanger asked senior execs from two leading “marketing cloud” companies […]
LinkedIn has plans to make marketing leads “more quantifiable, and attributable” across the Web and through a company’s own sales channels, and in a year’s time will enable a much deeper view of conversions. “If you have a tool that can import all of your prospects to a LinkedIn tool, why wouldn’t you want to […]
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 […]
Besides its analytics announcement, Salesforce.com turned up the volume on mobility and its future in the wearables market during the Dreamforce conference. As if on cue, rapper Will.i.am paraded onstage Wednesday evening with a group of engineers where he revealed “PULS,” a smart wrist band he developed via fashion and technology firm i.am+, a business […]
Salesforce.com revealed Wave Analytics Cloud this week at its Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, the latest patch – alongside marketing, sales and customer service – in the tech giant’s quilt. Speaking to more than 100,000 registrants (some were virtual), Salesforce.com’s chairman and CEO Marc Benioff called the analytics offering “revolutionary” and swiped at analytics competitors. […]
Cloud CRM stalwart Salesforce.com and agency holding company Omnicom Group are extending their love affair. The companies on Tuesday revealed a CRM data-sharing initiative (they’re calling it a customer engagement platform) extending across Omnicom. This means Salesforce.com will pipe data from email, sales transactions, call center/service requests and mobile data into Annalect’s data-management platform. Previous […]
The participants in a new race to snap up social marketing technology companies aren’t the usual enterprise software suspects. In the latest wave of consolidation, Facebook Strategic Preferred Marketing Developers (PMD) are buying each other. Search and social software company Kenshoo this week moved in on Adquant, a social ads platform specializing in mobile apps […]
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 […]
Why did Singapore Telecommunications’ ad tech subsidiary Amobee buy Adconion and Kontera for a combined $385 million? For Amobee CEO Mark Strecker, it was a matter of moving Amobee’s focus from mobile advertising to digital advertising. And the company needed Kontera’s technological assets and Adconion’s business organization to accomplish that. Once integrated, Amobee will have […]
Is Bitly quietly becoming a platform company? The link cruncher rolled out Tuesday the Bitly Certified Partner Program with inaugural partners Percolate, Spredfast, Buffer, Sprinklr, IFTTT, Dynamic Signal and EveryoneSocial. “We’re focused on platform integrations to support owned, earned and paid campaigns with Bitly’s tools and audience data,” said Jennifer Hanser, the company’s newly-hired senior […]
Story updated with comments from Jay MacDonald of Digital Capital Advisors Salesforce.com’s ExactTarget Marketing Cloud has lost its fourth C-level exec since the CRM giant acquired the marketing tech company last June. ExactTarget CEO and co-founder Scott Dorsey is exiting the company this summer (following former CMO Tim Kopp, CFO Steve Collins and Chief Administrative Officer […]
Salesforce.com reported fiscal first-quarter 2015 revenue of $1.23 billion, up 37% year over year at 11 cents per share. This beat analyst estimates of $1.21 billion at 10 cents per share. (Earnings release) Salesforce.com added significant head count – more than 900 – to its employee base this quarter. This was up 38% year over […]
As if taking a cue from tech counterparts uniting their point solutions onto a single platform (like Salesforce1, Neustar’s PlatformOne and AOL’s ONE), enterprise giant IBM Tuesday rolled out IBM “ExperienceOne,” a cloud and on-premise tech portfolio that is a culmination of its acquisitions and services. These include Sterling Commerce, DemandTec, Tealeaf, Unica and Xtify. It will be […]
Salesforce.com released Tuesday the Radian6 + Buddy Media Social Studio, indicating new life for a string of social acquisitions the company has made in recent years. “For the first time, you can listen, publish content, and track it through to results all as part of a stack that also includes email, Web, and mobile,” said […]
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 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 […]
Call 2011 and 2012 the first wave of social CRM, when companies like Salesforce.com and Oracle snapped up social media analytics and marketing companies. Little more than one year later, all signs point toward paid media becoming a part of the enterprise social stack with more M&A and partnerships likely to come. Although CRM, in […]
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 […]
Oracle’s planned acquisition of data exchange and solutions provider BlueKai pushes Oracle deeper into marketing tech. Like its peers IBM and SAP, Oracle had prioritized business departments like supply chain, finance and HR above media buying and digital marketing. And rather than building a marketing and ad stack from scratch in order to clinch CMO […]
Enterprise social media management company Sprinklr has acquired social data analytics and services firm Dachis Group for an undisclosed sum, the latest venture from Razorfish’s cofounder and former CEO Jeff Dachis. As a combined entity, Sprinklr, founded in 2009, and Dachis Group will employ 300 with offices in New York, London, and Austin, and serve […]
Bizo, a maker of B2B digital media and marketing solutions, is betting on the growing importance of paid media to marketing tech. After citing Q4 gross revenue of $12.4 million and a $50 million annual run rate with media costs that average in the 35-40% range, Bizo’s CEO Russ Glass said Bizo for Marketing Automation, […]
As the boundaries between enterprise marketing technology and the ad stack continue to blur, digital marketers demand systems that “do more.” With first-party datasets that sit close to the consumer – these often include purchase and interaction histories – CRM data is especially attractive to digital advertisers. Conversely, access to broader demand signals and third-party […]
Marketers looking to account for offline campaign spend are up against a similar challenge as digital advertisers: attribution. Because the measure of success for offline activity is often contingent upon transactional data or the point-of-sale record, more weight is typically assigned to lower-funnel factors such as sales uplift. At the same time, marketers in the […]
Cross-channel marketing software company Responsys has entered into an agreement to be bought by Oracle for a total sum of $1.5 billion, the companies announced Friday. Responsys, which has a customer base of 450 companies, of which many are direct-to-consumer brands like LEGO, Nordstrom, Whole Foods and MetLife, will be integrated into the Oracle Marketing Cloud and […]
As enterprise technology companies race to make their respective suites the digital marketer’s platform of choice, building or acquiring to fill product portfolio holes becomes near protocol. Global German software giant SAP, which recorded $5.4 billion in revenue last quarter, is no different – the company’s been active on the commerce (Hybris) and advanced analytics […]
Enterprise software companies are racing to soak up marketers’ budgets by building out their marketing suites with acquisitions, partnerships and new products. Those players include Adobe, Salesforce.com, Oracle and IBM. As the year comes to a close, here’s a snapshot look at these companies’ marketing stacks and some of the gaps that each company has […]
