Marketing Software

My friends, marketing software has officially become Big Business. Last Friday, IBM announced its acquisition of enterprise marketing software company Unica for $480 million. Combined with their August 2 acquisition of web analytics leader Coremetrics (for an undisclosed metric ton) and their May 24 announcement to acquire Sterling Commerce (for $1.4 billion) — along with its own WebSphere web application software — IBM has quite quickly assembled a premier enterprise marketing management (EMM) software portfolio. …

Adobe, IBM and the big business of marketing software Continue Reading »

To say that there are a lot of marketing technology companies out there is a major understatement. To help picture the scale of this expanding universe, here’s just a sample of the players in the field: These are merely a fraction of the firms offering marketing automation, web analytics, campaign management, conversion optimization, email marketing, bid management, keyword research, attribution management, behavioral targeting, digital asset management, marketing resource management, social media monitoring — and I’ve …

A perfect storm for marketing technology Continue Reading »

Yesterday, I had lunch with Dharmesh Shah, co-founder and CTO of Hubspot and a friend of mine from MIT. Since we both run software-as-a-service (SaaS) start-ups in the marketing space, I always enjoy catching up with him because, even though we’re pursuing different product visions, there’s a lot of overlap in the challenges and opportunities we face in the market. One of the observations that struck me in our latest discussion is how different software …

The greenfield of marketing software Continue Reading »

As a shorter and more light-hearted post for the holiday weekend, here are five truisms about technology in the marketing world that I’ve found as good rules of thumb — somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but not entirely: 1. The Great Paradox Software developers are usually bad at creative marketing. Creative marketers are usually bad at software development. Excellent digital marketing requires both. 2. The Shoemaker’s Children? If you’re considering buying online marketing software or services from a …

5 marketing technology truisms Continue Reading »

A couple of major trends in software development — in particular, open source collaboration and the design of social network/user-generated content platforms — may provide useful insight for the future of marketing management. After all, the increasing number of marketing channels and the increasing granularity of initiatives in them combine to form ultra-large-scale marketing environments that share similar properties to ultra-large-scale (ULS) software systems. It’s not coincidental that many of the leading web sites whose …

Ultra-large-scale marketing operations Continue Reading »

Two powerful and parallel trends are underway in marketing. First, marketing is becoming more human. This is the social media revolution. Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn groups, etc., are thriving with real dialogues, between real people in organizations and real constituents in the market. This pushes marketing as a whole to be more real — customers aren’t abstract models on a whiteboard, but splendidly diverse individuals with emotions, opinions, and microphones. What used to be a …

Marketing more human, more computerized Continue Reading »

Ever since reading that article in The New York Times about Wall Street-like data analysis being applied to Madison Avenue marketing — what I would call computational marketing, as a nod to computational finance — I’ve been searching for more stories about that idea. It turned into a bit of a nomenclature expedition. Computational Marketing A search for “computational marketing” in Google brings back ~1,000 results, with the first page being dominated by a single …

In search of computational marketing Continue Reading »

This past Sunday in The New York Times, there was an interesting article talking about the elevation of data and number crunching in advertising: Put Ad on Web. Count Clicks. Revise. Written mostly from the perspective of ad agencies, advertising is portrayed as undergoing a seismic shift from Mad Men to a mixed mission with equal parts creatives and finance quants (Mad Money?). “Where the data guys were once an afterthought in a marketing presentation, …

Madison Avenue + Wall Street = Computational Marketing Continue Reading »

I recently saw the movie Jurassic Park again. It’s about an island of cloned dinosaurs, intended as a kind of zoo and amusement park, that spirals out of control during a pre-opening inspection. Spiraling out of control is a euphemism for having ravenous pre-historic creatures devouring everyone in sight. (Remind anyone of their last budget meeting?) It made me think of marketing automation. One of the characters is a mathematician who specializes in chaos theory, …

Marketing automation and Jurassic Park Continue Reading »

It never ceases to amaze me how much there is to learn out there. Okay, there’s obviously an infinite amount of stuff to learn. But even if you carve out just the choicest subset of what’s most interesting and relevant to your passions in work and life, there’s still many lifetimes worth of potential learning in front of each of us. Some people may get depressed or bored with that. I actually get turned on. …

Pursuing computer science for marketing at Harvard Continue Reading »