If you’re interested in reading the 2018 edition of the ‘Rise Of The Digital Marketing Suite’ you can find it here.
As a refresher to our digital marketing series titled ‘Rise of the Digital Marketing Suite’, we recently posted a market update for the 2018 edition. We laid out key M&A events amongst the large key players Adobe, Salesforce, Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft. In this post, we provide some updates on the relevant new digital marketing products from our key players.
1. Microsoft Partners with Adobe and Releases Organic Marketing Product in Dynamics 365. In November 2017, Microsoft integrated Dynamics 365 with Adobe’s Marketing Cloud’s content management solution (Adobe Experience Manager). Microsoft stated that goal this integration was to offer companies the ability to transform how their sales and marketing organizations can collaborate and ultimately personalize brand experiences for their customers. At the time this was big as it was Dynamics 365 first marketing offering since its release in 2016. However, this past spring, Microsoft finally released their own marketing product: Dynamics 365 for Marketing. The new product offers various solutions ranging from running multichannel marketing campaigns to tracking and improving marketing performance. In a press release, Microsoft mentioned that they are committed to their strategic partnership with Adobe and will still offer the Adobe Marketing Cloud to firms that require a more high-volume type of digital marketing solution.
2. Oracle Makes Additions To Marketing Analytics Platform And Creates An SMS Public Aggregator Network (SPAN). Towards the end of 2015 Oracle added quite a few innovations to the Oracle Marketing Cloud by introducing new mobile, data, content and reporting capabilities. Then in 2017, Oracle integrated their marketing cloud with their LinkedIn Campaign Manager to help companies in their lead generation. More recently, the firm added two new products to their marketing analytics platform. The first product is Oracle Infinity. Oracle Infinity is a data analytics platform for capturing, processing, storing and interrogating unlimited datasets for companies to get insights from customer data. The second product is Oracle CX Audience, which is a solution for large-scale audience segmentation and audience analytics. Oracle also recently launched SPAN as part of their marketing cloud helping their customers have an easier time setting up their mobile marketing campaigns.
3. IBM Releases Watson Marketing Insights and Collaborates with LiveRamp to Enable Weather-Based Marketing. For those who read our Q1 2015 ‘Rise Of The Digital Marketing Suite’ Report, you might remember we mentioned IBM as one of the players who did not move towards the cloud. Since that report a lot has changed for IBM. In August 2015, they released the IBM Marketing Cloud, which is now called IBM Watson Campaign Automation. Later in April 2017, IBM added their marketing prowess in the hands of Watson, releasing IBM Watson Marketing Insights. The product offers companies a more cognitive approach to customer analytics. In other news, with the purchase of The Weather Company IBM partnered with LiveRamp to add WeatherFX to their marketing cloud. WeatherFX uses weather data and intelligence to understand how the weather might impact consumer behavior and also personalize communication with customers.
4. Salesforce Introduces Einstein Account-Based Marketing and Marketing Cloud Lightning. In May 2016, Salesforce released the Marketing Cloud Lightning, with a goal of allowing marketers to improve customer experience. In 2017 Salesforce released Einstein Account-Based Marketing. The new product gives Salesforce’s B2B customers the ability to connect their sales and marketing services. Outside of product releases, since our last report Salesforce made some innovations to the digital advertising aspect of their marketing cloud. In a press release Salesforce mentioned that with this innovation their marketing cloud allows companies to utilize customer data and signals from potential customers to deliver the right message at the right time on any channel.
5. Adobe Does Not Add Any New Products To Marketing Cloud As They Focus On Strengthening Their Current Offerings. Since our last report, Adobe launched their Experience Cloud which includes their marketing cloud. However, on the marketing cloud front, there wasn’t much noise. In 2016 they integrated Adobe Primetime with the Adobe Marketing Cloud to help companies in the media space launch “direct-to-consumer services.” Otherwise Adobe just made some innovations to their email marketing and content management solutions.
6. Theme for Independents Has Been Market Consolidation. Many of the independents we mentioned in previous editions of the ‘Rise Of The Digital Marketing Suite’ have been sold to the bigger players in the space. Starting with Webtrends, they sold their Infinity asset to Oracle and now are basically dead. Asterdata sold to Teradata and is now part of their Analytics platform. Vocus-Cision bought Visible Technologies, adding a social marketing aspect to the PR-tech companies’ offerings. As mentioned in the previous market update post, Demandware was purchased by Salesforce and is currently part of their marketing cloud. Lastly, DoubleClick was sold thereby helping Google join the digital marketing space.
7. Google Releases Their Own Marketing Cloud With The Google Marketing Platform. Just recently in July, with the combination of DoubleClick Digital Marketing and Google 360 Analytics, Google joins the big five with their own cloud. In a blog post, Google stated that their marketing cloud will help deliver more relevant and effective marketing, while ensuring that you respect your customers’ privacy and give them control over their data. As the Google Marketing Platform is extremely new, only time will tell how they will compete with the larger players. However, they have a very good head start with the combination of DoubleClick and Google 360 Analytics. With that, we definitely see them succeeding in the near future.
That’s it for key product updates. As more and more types of customer data become available, we expect to see many new innovations to the digital marketing space for years to come amongst our big players.
If you liked “Rise of the Digital Marketing Suite – 2018 Key Product Updates” and want to read more content from the Bowery Capital Team, check out other relevant posts from the Bowery Capital Blog. Special thanks to Nour Jedidi for his contribution and work on this post.
