It’s a fair bet if you’re in media, a media agency,ad agency, direct, design or even a digital agency, you care as much about the revolution with the marketing cloud as how the pistons in your car slam up and down (or sideways). And that’s why you’re getting slammed now and about to get slammed some more.
Marketers, meanwhile, are either all over it or know they’ve got to be. And it explains why the traditional ad market is so anaemic – personalised, highly targetted communications and product development across a dizzying array of platforms from CRM to email to mobile to websites to apps to social to content platforms and data and analytics – plus some – are sucking up more attention and budget from brands.
It’s not that traditional advertising is rooted – it’s not. It’s really important, but it’s first base. Brand owners know they have to find ways to stitch together their traditional paid communications with all the other channels and touchpoints they have with customers and potential customers. And they’ve got to know which ones are working and why.
Moreover, they know that such a torrent of channels and the individual customisation of customer needs and wants has to be more automated. The volume and complexity is just too great without machine processing power and, yes, the algorithms.
Hence the big movers in cloud-based marketing automation such as Salesforce, Adobe, Oracle, IBM and HP are racing to integrate everything to do with marketing, channels, customer service, sales, data insights, analytics, communities and content in integrated platform offers.
Remember the long integration debate we’ve had around communications service providers? Bundling up ad agencies with media planning, direct marketing, online advertising, brand and product-led websites – and now social and search
– in a one-stop shop faced off against specialist best-in-breed providers.
Well, the same thing is going on with all marketing, sales, digital, e-commerce, data and analytics efforts within organisations.
Market complexity and the wildly pro-digital consumer make the idea of simplification for marketers rather appetising – and even necessary.
But, interestingly, the debate rages on about whether these big integration players are better than using specialist best-in-breed providers across fragmented territories. It certainly makes sense for small-and-medium-sized enterprises which don’t have the resources to bend and connect legacy systems with lots of bit-part players. But at the big end of town, it’s a little more of an open debate. What we are seeing, though, is these big integrated cloud players opening their platforms to specialists.
And what we’re also seeing is the late – but nonetheless critical – moves from the big marketing services firms such as Omnicom and Publicis striking deals with marketing cloud players. Publicis did so a few weeks back with the reinvented Adobe suite and, likewise, Omnicom with Salesforce. They’re non-exclusive deals, but it does see the various agency networks within those comms giants starting to sell-in cloud platforms to their clients. That’s typically been the territory of the system integrators such as Accenture and so on. More of that is to come from the comms holding companies.
Last week Salesforce staged its typically impressive and grand sell to the world with a new tagline “The Customer Success Platform”. It plays right into the new zeitgeist for marketing – once solely the gatekeeper for marketing communications. Marketers are increasingly taking ownership of the customer inside organisations in all its manifestations – sales, customer service, communities, customer data and analytics, communications, e-commerce. It’s a herculean remit, which will leave traditional agencies and media companies eating dust if they don’t figure out how they contribute to a bigger marketing worldview.
Last week Salesforce unveiled its new, broader, offer with six platforms or “clouds”: Sales, Service, Marketing, Communities, Analytics and Platforms. All of them talk to each other, although, to be fair, most of Salesforce’s existing clients don’t use all of them. Yet. But when legendary artists such as Will.I.Am and Neil Young get on stage to talk up how they’re using Salesforce to underpin their start-up ventures – along with Coca-Cola and a long-line- up of others – it’s time. Time to get your head in
the cloud.
This article first appeared in 16 October print edition.
Have something to say on this? Share your views in the comments section below. Or if you have a news story or tip-off, drop us a line at adnews@yaffa.com.au
Sign up to the AdNews newsletter, like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter for breaking stories and campaigns throughout the day. Need a job? Visit adnewsjobs.com.au.
Have something to say on this? Share your views in the comments section below. Or if you have a news story or tip-off, drop us a line at adnews@yaffa.com.au
Sign up to the AdNews newsletter, like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter for breaking stories and campaigns throughout the day.