Marketing Software

It was a big week for marketing technology. Salesforce agreed to acquire ExactTarget (which had acquired marketing automation vendor Pardot less than a year ago) for a whopping $2.5 billion. Given that ExactTarget was at ~$356 million revenue yearly run-rate as of last quarter, that’s roughly a 7X multiple on revenue. Congratulations to all the folks at ExactTarget — a well-deserved outcome for Scott Dorsey and his team. They’ve been pioneering marketing technology for 13 …

Salesforce and ExactTarget: a good combo, but not the end game of marketing technology Continue Reading »

The Jordan, Edmiston Group, Inc. (JEGI) investment bank released their report of 2012 M&A deals in media, information, marketing, and technology sectors last week. Overall, the number of deals and the total value of deals were way up — a 50% increase in the number of deals and a 43% increase in total value over 2011. A few highlights worth calling attention to: The sector with the largest number of deals and the highest total …

Marketing services and technology M&A increased 67% in 2012 Continue Reading »

Wow, this certainly tops off a spectacular year in the marketing technology space: yesterday, Eloqua announced that it was being acquired by Oracle for $871 million. Reflecting on this last night, five thoughts came to mind: Thought #1: Congratulations First, big congratulations to Joe Payne, Steven Woods, and the rest of the Eloqua team! I’ve been a big fan of Steven’s thinking around digital body language for many years. They’ve done an amazing job of …

5 thoughts on Oracle’s acquisition of Eloqua for $871 million Continue Reading »

There’s been a lot of furor over the years about Nate Silver’s FiveThrityEight blog for predicting the outcome of U.S. elections using more math than mouth. His critics usually include those who disagree with the predicted outcomes of his models and those who make their living crafting, um, less analytical narratives for the heated horse races of American politics. (You can read a brief history of FiveThrityEight and its controversies on Wikipedia. As noted elsewhere, …

The “marketing technologist” of U.S. elections Continue Reading »

“Marketing automation” as the label for a major — if slightly amorphous — category of modern marketing software appears to be here to stay. Three recent points on the curve: The acquisition of Pardot by ExactTarget, labeled as a marketing automation deal. The IPO of Eloqua earlier this year, again labeled as a marketing automation offering. A recent IDC report that includes marketing automation as an explicit budget allocation. The latter is perhaps the most …

Whatever it is, we’re calling it “marketing automation” Continue Reading »

Do you think computers and software could run marketing as well as humans? Or better? Skeptics and humanists — which describes my leanings on this subject, even though I’m a technologist by trade — may reflexively answer “no.” The complex organizational and psychological facets of marketing — a discipline renown for creativity and imagination — seems like it would defy the purely mechanical capabilities of computation. That’s true today. But if you doubt the potential …

Will your next marketing manager be a bot? Continue Reading »