Nick Martin's Marketing Pages

Teradata gobbles Aprimo to top marketing services leaderboard

Late last month, Teradata Corporation (NYSE: TDC), the world’s largest company solely focused on data warehousing and business analytics, announced the signing of a definitive agreement to acquire Aprimo.

. . . And that, my friends, is how to start the New Year with a BANG!

Seriously, though, I see this planned merger as significant on many different levels –not the least of which is that it underscores

• the need for integrated marketing software and

• the growing focus on overall marketing performance

Today, marketing defines the brand. It differentiates the business. It delivers sustainable revenue growth. And now, more than ever before, companies increasingly rely on information technologies to help achieve these goals. Combining Teradata’s powerful analytics with Aprimo’s innovative marketing will empower clients to integrate, streamline and continuously accelerate profitable growth.

via blogs.forbes.com

So says Lisa Arthur, Aprimo's CMO.

As core marketing services offered by providers (MSPs) become more commoditised, the perceived value rises in being able to pull it all together across production, planning, set up and execution.

That's a value chain that incumbents are ill positioned to deliver upon...for now. They simply don't have the mind-boggling strength in depth around customer analytics that Teradata has, nor the capability to configure content for multichannel delivery, nor a deep understanding of marketing resource management, nor the taxonomy skills to optimise across media.

As I've mentioned before, over reliance on a marketing execution platform (aka campaign management) to integrate marketing channels is plain wrong. It overcomplicates process, forces unnatural workflows that cost time and resources, and demands marketing organisations chuck out many existing components and reinvest body and soul...yet again. 

These guys, on the other hand, look like they are exceptionally well positioned to pull it all together: a space worth watching.

 

Banks Wriggle On Hook Of Basle III

The Financial Times reports today that 'economic growth in the eurozone, the US and Japan would be cut by 3 per cent between now and 2015 if current proposals to force banks to hold more capital and liquid assets go forward unchanged, the world’s leading banking industry group warned Thursday.

As a result, 9.7m fewer jobs would be created in those areas over the period, according to an impact assessment issued by the Institute for International Finance at a meeting in Vienna.

The industry group is pushing hard for the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision to water down or at least delay implementation of the proposals, which are slated to be voted on later this year.

According to the IIF, the eurozone would feel the largest impact from the new Basel proposals with growth cut 0.9 percentage points per year, resulting in a cumulative reduction in gross domestic product of $920bn or 4.3 per cent by 2015. The US would see a cumulative reduction of 2.6 per cent ($951bn) and Japan would see a 1.9 per cent cut ($130bn). The group did not look at the impact on the UK or Switzerland.

“There is a price for making the banking system safer and more stable, and that price will inevitably be borne by the real economy. The challenge is to strike the right balance, to get the maximum benefit for the minimum negative impact,” said Peter Sands, chief executive of Standard Chartered and chairman of the IIF committee on effective regulation.'

The fears relate to money supply. If banks cannot leverage their equity base, called Core Tier 1 Capital, to lend money (increasing the risk-weighted & assessed assets on their balance sheet) then they shift focus from lending to shrinking their balance sheets.

This is already happening, both in respect of commercial and consumer lending, and Basle III rules will make it worse. At what point will banks also have to write down more of the value of their assets (since many will have dropped in value in the last 2 years)?

What's worrying is if in background The Institute of International Finance (IIF) is genuinely fearful for some of its members, squeezed by the likely need to write down assets anyway, and by the added requirement to get to a equity to asset ratio that is more demanding than currently. It is the resulting solvency concerns that are really very serious. 

All this means less investment lending from banks, which in turn means that money supply will continue to be squeezed, and therefore growth is likely to remain subdued until banks' balance sheets are repaired.

Since state spending has run its course, it can no longer afford to continue to prop up GDP growth via employment and other initiatives. We have seen very clearly this last month that governments that do not show a real appetite for reining in their runaway deficits will get hammered by the markets. Their is in effect no choice other than fiscal restraint.

Consumer spending is unlikely to pick up the baton soon, and statistics showing consumers are paying down debt faster than ever, is probably counting banks' cutting down their loan books and defaulters. Of course, whilst interest rates remain historically low no one is in screaming pain, but that would change with any creeping inflationary pressures.

Whether this means that a double dip, takes the form of another fall in GDP in certain countries or prolonged subdued overall economic activity (what commentators are calling a lost economic decade) remains to be seen. 

On the positive side the WSJ has reported a Federal Reserve statistic that nonfinancial companies had socked away $1.84 trillion in cash and other liquid assets as of the end of March, up 26% from a year earlier and the largest-ever increase in records going back to 1952. Cash made up about 7% of all company assets, including factories and financial investments, the highest level since 1963. 

In today's world, cash is most definitely king. The vogue of leveraged organisations belong to a not-so- distant past. Anything that can reduce operational costs is therefore more attractive than ever. Combine that with the sea-change in consumer and buyer behaviours and the corresponding commercial need to engage with markets quite differently than in the past to sustain and defend a customer base, and you can see why companies are attracted to innovative solutions that improve marketing operational performance and outcomes.

There is undoubtedly money to invest, whether in the form of companies cash reserves, venture capital, or private capital; just not in the things we've always done the way we've always done them.

Customer Management Trucks

Apple CEO Steve Jobs recently made a comparison between PCs and trucks, vehicles that once dominated the car market in the US, but which got killed by smaller cars as the US consumer got real.

In an article in the WSJ, Mr. Jobs said computers, including Apple’s own Macintosh, won’t go away, just as trucks didn’t disappear. But he suggested that sleeker portable products such as his company’s iPhone and iPad would be the equivalent of cars—offering touchscreen Website browsing, droves of applications and other features not found on PCs that run Microsoft Windows.

Arch rival Microsoft reacted negatively to the pronouncement, after all laptop shipments are still showing double digit growth rates. Yet Jobs is simply facing up to the reality of a changing world.

And so to the analogy: in business, we have witnessed just as profound a change in the challenges that confront CMOs in the face of the mind-blowing explosion of online and interactive channels; increasingly important social media with the potential to become as significant a source of demand as Search; in short the most radical market-led upheaval we’ve ever experienced.

You’d wonder whether the same tools and platforms proposed by marketing services providers that promised tremendous business improvements just a few years ago might be struggling to make an impact in today’s shifting landscape. You’d be right to.

Forrester, in a report entitled Campaign Management Needs a Reboot (April 2009) highlighted how platforms were struggling to keep up with business change: 

Today the notion of campaigns extends beyond traditional communication channels to include emerging and inbound channels like mobile, Web sites, landing pages, and social networks. Campaign management applications struggle to keep up with the design, management, and reporting needs of these channels. But an explosion of channels is only one of the many challenges that threaten the relevance of campaign management solutions. Campaign management tools also struggle to:

·       Improve cross-channel customer interaction. 

·       Make sense of the social phenomenon.

·       Lack defined processes and methodologies to use social insights to improve marketing campaigns.

·       Marketing campaigns no longer have finite start and stop dates. 

·       Social media channels and customer conversations.

·       Lower the learning curve associated with technology adoption...As one direct marketer said, “The complexity of the system makes it hard for our distributed stakeholders to build and execute campaigns and increases dependence on our small group of power users.” 

Forrester’s perspective is that there are too many different platforms that make it hard to integrate, leading to missed business opportunities, poor customer experiences, and inefficient program execution.

Whilst I agree with the analysis, I disagree on this conclusion. On the one hand, multiple marketing execution platforms tend to make it harder to integrate and measure the vast range of engagement activity that marketing has to deploy across. On the other hand the solution isn’t to create one meta marketing platform. Software rarely shines when it’s asked to do many tasks in one. Marketing users hate ‘integrated’ platforms that attempt to do everything, because they’re hard to use, overly complicated and tend to be too rigid. 

Specialisation is the name of the game. Solutions for lead generation that work on demand pull principles are a totally different proposition to campaign managers that are designed for push marketing applications. 

In the world of multi-channel integrate marketing, the execution platforms can be managed in house, outsourced or rented - in the form of SaaS or cloud computing. Frankly, it doesn’t matter in principle. What matters more in practise is which platform suits the business needs best, and complies with their policies in regard to security, control, strategic and privacy imperatives.

But how to integrate effectively, in order to deliver the vital operational improvements whilst allowing the organic and fluid nature of marketing communications to follow its customer-led path of least resistance?

The answer lies not in embedding rules engines, data management et al into campaign management and other marketing execution tools. That’s yesterday’s model and simply reflects the established order: one of channel specific siloed organisational structures where marketing teams are responsible for online, for direct mail, for contact centres and so on. 

What's needed is a much broader marketing biosphere, which comprises 3 key areas:

1. Data management, analysis and rules definition

• Design of the data model, single customer view creation, activity data, semantic web data.
• Analysis and segmentation
• Rules engine

2. Marketing Activity Management

• Document processing
• Digital asset management
• Marketing workflow automation
• Resource management/ web-based utilities

3. Marketing execution

• Campaign managers
• Email/ SMS platforms
• Networked lead generation deployment & settlement platforms
• Online advertising network platforms
• Social network solutions
• etc.

The centre of gravity in creating a truly effective, flexible, adaptable customer communications management environment lies in getting the first two areas correctly architected. Herein lies the solution to true multi-channel integration, an approach that can be orchestrated manageably.

 

It means that wherever the media explosion takes us, however many new and unpredictable IP enabled channels open up, the means to be able to simply integrate them exists; using the right data, content, channels, technology and people.

 

More specialisation around execution, not less, is likely to win out. Fees associated with those platforms will continue to fall, as users pay for what they actually need and use, safe in the knowledge that their marketing biosphere is in place, ready to meet with every fresh challenge. 

Marketing in the cloud

Marketers should have their heads in the cloud.

If you haven't read The Big Switch by Nicholas Carr yet, you need to add it to your list. Cloud computing — that is, computing infrastructure that is based somewhere out on the Internet, rather than installed on hardware locked in your company's IT center — is becoming real. Fast.

Combined with the maturity of web-based software-as-a-service offerings, the strong gravitational pull of social media sites where marketers now work beyond the borders of their company's sandbox, and the widespread proliferation of web services and mash-up APIs, the cloud has become marketing's new IT platform.

For marketers, this is a terrific opportunity (a) to re-calibrate the relationship between marketing and technology and (b) to expand your capabilities in the "new marketing" environment, where the pace of innovation in online marketing channels and methods continues to accelerate.

I think of "computing in the cloud" for marketing in fairly broad terms — more broadly than the technical definition of cloud computing — and divide it into four buckets:

1. Web sites where you are a participant or sponsor, particularly social media communities. These are sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Xing, MySpace, Yahoo! Groups, Digg, del.icio.us, Twine, etc. This isn't what most tech people think of when they talk about cloud computing, but from a marketer's perspective, these are important services out on the Internet that you must plug into to do your job. Your audience is in the cloud, and you have to go in there after them. The IT aspects, however, reside outside of your control.

2. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications. These are applications that you access through your web browser, are hosted on a server farm by a third-party, for which you have zero operational involvement. Some are free, such as Google Analytics, but many are provided on a subscription basis, such as Salesforce.com. Pay only for as much as you need for as long as you need. There are a plethora of SaaS applications for marketers available today, with more coming online every month — if you have a favorite that I've missed in my "for instance" below, please add it in the comments:

• customer relationship management (ex: Salesforce.com);
• landing page management (ex: LiveBall — disclaimer, my firm);
• surveys and questionnaires (ex: SurveyMonkey);
• email marketing management (ex: ExactTarget);
• web site analytics (ex: Google Analytics);
• marketing resource management (ex: MarketingCentral);
• blogging platforms (ex: Typepad);
• lead nurturing (ex: Marketo);
• digital asset management (ex: Celum Imagine);
• search marketing management (ex: SearchIgnite);
• project management (ex: AtTask);
• web conferencing and webinars (ex: WebEx);

Click here to read the rest of this excellent piece from Scott Brinker's Chief Marketing Technologist blog.

via www.chiefmartec.com

Nick Martin: A truly great introduction to Marketing in The Cloud from Scott Brinker...or the future of marketing services. He's quite brilliant!

One significant challenge remains how to glue together several marketing components, which is why Salesforce's apps exchange is so compelling, acting as it does like an apps bus/ backbone for a myriad of third party Software as a Service (SaaS) applications. Nonetheless, as long as database integrity is far from ideally managed - and so often seriously compromised - there will remain questions around the feasibility of integrating web components into a Cloud based set of marketing processes. That's where marketing utilities come in, to glue bespoke solutions together made up of numerous application components around database integrity, quality and real time customer information management. More thoughts on this coming soon...