Whether you call it marketing automation, campaign management or the marketing cloud, about $5 billion has been spent across six major acquisitions in under three years. $4 billion has been spent in just the last seven months. The latest acquisition was Adobe’s announcement last week that it will acquire Paris-based Neolane for $600 million. Here is a timeline of the acquisitions:
- $480 million: IBM acquires Unica (Aug 2010)
- $525 million: Teradata acquires Aprimo (Dec 2010)
- $871 million: Oracle acquires Eloqua (Dec 2012)
- $2500 million: Salesforce acquires ExactTarget/Pardot (June 2013)
- $600 million: Adobe acquires Neolane (June 2013)
“Big data” is an abused term, but it is a key enabler of the transition we’re experiencing. The digital interactions between companies and their customers can now be cost-effectively gathered, analyzed, understood and acted on in real-time. This change was first felt in B2B digital marketing, where the number of customer contacts was relatively small and the value per contact was high. Salesforce, Eloqua and Marketo are a few of the companies that started addressing this market.
B2C engagement and marketing automation happens on an entirely different scale. Instead of tens of thousands of contacts, there are tens of millions – or more. Effective engagement is not on a truly individual level, but to segments or micro-segments of consumers. The trick is to deliver the right messages to the right segments at the right time. Unica, ExactTarget and Neolane are a few of the notable companies in this market.
This need and capability for analytics-driven marketing contributed to $5 billion of consolidation of primarily web-based analytics and marketing providers. But consumers now have phones and tablets instead of PCs. In fact, Mary Meeker’s 2013 Internet Trends report shows that tablet shipments surpassed PCs and notebooks in Q4 of 2012. And within mobile, the most valuable mobile engagement is happening via apps.
At Localytics, we’re clearly believers in this next evolution of digital marketing. Last year we launched the first analytics-driven in-app messaging solution so app owners can engage their customers with tailored campaigns in real time and within the app experience. Over the next few months we’ll launch new capabilities also focused on helping app developers and marketers build more engaging and successful applications.
We’re excited about this evolution toward marketing automation for mobile apps as marketing spend again migrates to where the consumers are, and we hope you’ll join us.