Marketing Software

Memo to Microsoft: Marketing. Marketing. Marketing.

Dear Steve Ballmer — I have three words for you. Marketing. Marketing. Marketing. No, not Microsoft’s own marketing — although that’s a related topic. The “marketing” that Microsoft must urgently pay attention to is marketing as a software-driven business function. It is the hottest growing market in enterprise and SMB software alike. And its future […]

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Digital Marketing Transit Map

Gartner’s mind-blowing digital marketing transit map

In the competition for the best visualization of the kaleidescopic marketing technology space — other entries include my marketing technology landscape from last year and the marketing technology LUMAscape from last month — I’d say Gartner has just jumped into the lead with their new digital marketing transit map. Their high-level map is visualized around

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

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

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Service Providers in the EMM Stack

The blurring of agencies, software vendors, and IT shops

The Jordan Edmiston Group, Inc. (JEGI), a leading investment bank in the marketing and media space, recently released a new report on the enterprise marketing management (EMM) stack. They start by noting that from 2010-2012, four companies (“The Big Four”) have invested over $20 billion in marketing technology M&A: Adobe, IBM, Oracle, and Salesforce. But

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3 Epicenters of Marketing Innovation

3 epicenters of innovation in modern marketing

Here’s another way to visualize the relationship between big data and the other innovations happening in the marketing department. I propose that there are three epicenters of innovation in modern marketing: The first is customer communications and the revolution brought about by social media. Marketing communications has, rather quickly, moved from being a one-way broadcast

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

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

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