Adobe To Buy Marketo

TechCrunch reported late yesterday that Adobe is buying marketing automation company Marketo for $4.75 billion:

“The acquisition of Marketo  widens Adobe’s lead in customer experience across B2C and B2B and puts Adobe Experience Cloud at the heart of all marketing,” Brad Rencher, executive vice president and general manager, Digital Experience at Adobe said in a statement.

Adobe’s press release had this to say about the deal:

Adobe (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Marketo, the market-leading cloud platform for B2B marketing engagement, for $4.75 billion, subject to customary purchase price adjustments. With nearly 5,000 customers, Marketo brings together planning, engagement and measurement capabilities into an integrated B2B marketing platform. Adding Marketo’s engagement platform to Adobe Experience Cloud will enable Adobe to offer an unrivaled set of solutions for delivering transformative customer experiences across industries and companies of all sizes.

Marketo’s platform is feature-rich and cloud-native with significant opportunities for integration across Adobe Experience Cloud. Enterprises of all sizes across industries rely on Marketo’s marketing applications to drive engagement and customer loyalty. Marketo’s ecosystem includes over 500 partners and an engaged marketing community with over 65,000 members.

This acquisition brings together the richness of Adobe Experience Cloud analytics, content, personalization, advertising and commerce capabilities with Marketo’s lead management and account-based marketing technology to provide B2B companies with the ability to create, manage and execute marketing engagement at scale.

And why marketeers should care, according to Marketing Land:

Adobe’s Creative Cloud services has long been part of the marketing industry standard for creating and managing media-rich assets. Now with the addition of Marketo’s B2B marketing automation platform, Adobe will be able to deliver a full-scale marketing solution, allowing marketers — and their marketing technology teams — to unify costs within a single layer of their martech stack.

Not So Super Ads

This is the first time in years where the actual football game, the reason for the Super Bowl, steadily outperformed that of the TV commercials.

What is supposed to be a high peak for marketeers everywhere fell flat on its face in this year’s roster of ads, with agencies and clients taking few, if any, real chances and offering us the same old boring work we can pretty much see the rest of the year.

Sure, there were a couple of exceptions — the Tide media blitz was clever, and Jeff Bezos’s Alexa losing her voice was funny — but overall, it seemed as if Madison Avenue had decided to phone it all in this year.

Perhaps after a year of constant presidential Tweeting and daily new churn about Russia investigations and ill-fated memos, the agencies were just too tired to do much else.

Then again, it was a huge missed opportunity, to make something of this moment, perhaps to even acknowledge in a celebrated manner that the grand moment of TV advertising has probably had its place in the sun and is ebbing into the twilight of marketing history, replaced by data- (and lest we forget, bot-) driven marketing, with creativity taking a back seat to results.

We are firmly ensconced in a performance-driven economy, and marketers are going to increasingly demand performance-driven results.

Me, I just miss Socks the Puppet. 

And helluva football game!

Go Danica

You probably know her best for her star turn in the infamous GoDaddy TV spots (particularly during the SuperBowl).

But newly-adapted Sprint Cup Series driver Danica Patrick got known this past weekend for her need for speed, surpassing even longtime Nascar guru Jeff Gordon for the pole position in this weekend’s Daytona 500.

Danica’s No. 10 Chevrolet SS turned in a lap at 196.434 miles per hour, enough to put Patrick in the pole spot for Nascar’s most prestigious race. Considering that the U.S. television ratings for the Daytona 500 have been the highest for any auto race during the year since 1995, one might wonder if a marketing conspiracy was afoot.

Actually, the timing couldn’t be more perfect. Nascar just changed its marketing firm, dumping Jump Company in St. Louis for the very same firm IBM hired to lead its marketing renaissance in 1993, Ogilvy and Mather. 

New York Times advertising columnist Stuart Elliott explains it all in a column timestamped yesterday, the gist of which explains that Ogilvy and Mather is going to bring the drivers front and center in the new initiative.

First, they’ll be featured in a series of TV ads that “presents drivers in larger-than-life poses,” and also encourages drivers to aggressively contact fans and followers in the social media.

This is definitely not my redneck uncle’s tobacco-chewing, Budweiser-sipping Nascar.

Many moons ago, circa 1999, I tried to convince my own marketing amigos in IBM’s advertising organization that we should be all over Nascar. They laughed me out of the room — we go in more for golf and tennis, and to just keep things fresh and intellectually challenging, every once and again some chess and Jeopardy! 

But I knew then, as so many do now, that Nascar races were excellent venues for CEOs to conduct business, many of whom would fly in and out for Nascar races, and that the sport of Nascar was poised for a significant uptick in popularity as its reach stretched beyond Bubba-dom.

Just as importantly, the amount of data that the cars and races generated was, to my view, a virtual feast for sponsorship by an information technology company, especially one like ours that specializes in database and business analytics technologies.

And so, it seems, the time for more technology in stock car racing is ripe.

Forget for a moment Danica Patrick’s partnership with domain registrar GoDaddy.

Nascar CEO Brian France just recently announced in a CNN interview that the organization is seeking sponsorship from tech companies like Apple or Facebook or Google, explaining that adding technology will help make Nascar more relevant to a new generation of fans.

And the technology angle apparently isn’t limited to only car sponsorships. In an awkward but fascinating demo at this year’s CES keynote address, Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs explained how an app created by Omnigon Communications would offer Nascar fans customized viewing across multiple smartphones, tablets, and TVs powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon processor.

He brought Nascar driver Brad Keselowski onstage to help demo the new app, and if you can get past their awkward presentation in the video below, you can actually start to see they might be onto something here in terms of what I would call “real-time sports customization.”

As for this coming Sunday’s Daytona 500, the smart money would suggest Danica Patrick doesn’t have good odds for pulling off a checkered flag, even with the pole position.  She’s a Sprint Cup rookie and has some formidable competition (including “co-poler” and three-time Daytona victor, Jeff Gordon).

But as Patrick herself said in interviews earlier this week, her gender ought not be the issue. 

“I was brought up to be the fastest driver,” Patrick explained, “not the fastest girl.”

That being said, Nascar, and Madison Avenue, may very well be the ones most cheering Patrick on at the finish line for Daytona this weekend.

Because a victory by a female rookie in the sport’s top annual competition might just be the thing that convinces a whole new generation of fans, both male and female, to pay more attention to Nascar throughout the rest of the year.

Live @ IBM Smarter Commerce Global Summit Orlando: Outdoor Products Maker Husqvarna On “The Partnership Of Equals” Between Marketing And IT

One of the highlights of attending any of IBM’s events like the Smarter Commerce Global Summit in Orlando, Florida, last week is the opportunity to meet with and speak with IBM customers.

John Marchiodona, VP of marketing, and Simon Howard, head of IT for the Americas, at Husqvarna, are two prime examples.

John and Simon are the poster children for marketing and IT coming together to create new capabilities and opportunities for their customers, in their case for a 300+ year-old commercial concern that now focuses on outdoor products, including chainsaws, lawnmowers, and the like.

John and Simon explained in the interview Scott and I conducted with them how new digital opportunities, particularly in the social space, have required them to come together earlier and more often to map out new requirements and capabilities for better serving their clients.

As they explained, “Technology is becoming more and more a requirement for everybody,” and a good example of the fruits of their labor was a new social media section of the Husqvarna site that contained videos demonstrating the safe and productive use of their products.

As they explained in our discussion, theirs’ (marketing and IT) is a “partnership of equals,” and that to fulfill on the new digital demands of their consumers, “they have to have the necessary platforms in place to do what they want to do.”

Live @ IBM Smarter Commerce Global Summit Orlando: The CMO Club’s Pete Krainik On The CMO Agenda

Pete Krainik is the co-founder of The CMO Club, and brings over 30 years of experience in marketing, sales, IT, and product management within the consumer goods, high tech, digital and software industries.

Earlier this year, the Gartner Group informed us they were projecting that by the year 2017, chief marketing officers would be spending more on information technology than the CIO.

Yes, that turned a few heads, at IBM and elsewhere in the industry.

But Pete Krainik, the co-founder of the CMO Club, an organization which brings CMOs together in an environment “of openness and contribution that enables them to become better at what they do” explained during our interview in Orlando that CMOs face challenges bigger than simply better embracing IT.

Most CMOs are expected to lead the growth agendas of their organizations, Pete suggested, and yet many don’t feel they have the needed credibility or are not viewed with the same authority as other C-level execs.

Moreover, many are still wrestling with the rapid advent of social media, and the need to provide more aggressive outreach and enablement of their key advocates. As Pete explained, “Advocates have juice,” and yet so many organizations are struggling as to how to most effectively create and foster relationships with their brand advocates.

We discussed these issues, as well as the powerful narrative emerging around IBM’s Smarter Commerce play, in a fun and engaging discussion.

Getting Ready For Smarter Commerce

Happy Thursday.

We’re getting down to the wire for the IBM Smarter Commerce Global Summit, taking place in Orlando, Florida in the second half of next week.

Scott Laningham and I have been working hard preparing for all the interviews we’ll be conducting (and trying to find a hotel room!).

Seats are going fast.  That’s not Turbo marketing speak.  They’re literally going fast.  But, I’m sure we’ll be able to make room for you if you still wish to register!

In terms of the speakers and attendees, I’ll just say this: It’s an esteemed and distinguished group of folks.

I’ve been doing research on all my interviewees, and I’ve been very impressed with the caliber of their backgrounds, experiences, and accomplishments.

Not that I’m surprised, mind you…it IS an IBM sponsored event.

Now, what do I think you’re going to hear about if you do attend (or, via the social stream, in case you don’t).

Simply put, I think there are a few overarching themes I’ve been surmising from my research.

First, marketing is changing dramatically. Lower entry costs through the cloud and pervasive broadband and wireless, combined with social media and the emerging mobile extensions via tablets and smartphones, means you can (and should?) reach out and touch and communicate with your customers early and often.

But if you do so with a fragmented and uncoordinated approach, don’t be surprised when you read the hate Tweets two minutes after the hour.

Second, brand still matters…maybe more than ever. Think about the notable brands of the world.  Some of my faves: BMW, Titleist, Coca-Cola…

The quality of the product or service still matters, sure. But the brand isn’t just about what you say…it’s about what you DO, and how your brand responds to all those new stimuli.

Third, if you really want to know what’s going on with your customers and the marketplace — and, to distinguish yourself from your competition — you have to know what’s going on out there, again, early and often.

You have to know what’s going on from the broadest market level, to the category level, to the product level, to the influencers who shape the market conversation around your products and services.

That means having the means, methodologies, and talent in place to take advantage of increasingly real-time analytics.

So, a quick recap: Synchronicity, Constant Awareness and Communication With Your Constituents, and Market Understanding.

If you’re joining us down in Orlando next week, you’ll hear from world-class experts on these topics and many more.

If you can’t make it, be sure to follow the conference hashtag (#ibmscgs), along with #smarter commerce, to hear about all the new technology, best practices, industry perspectives and visionary thinking that can help you optimize your business.

I look forward to seeing you there!

Live @ IBM Smarter Commerce Global Summit Madrid: IBM VP Maria Winans On Smarter Commerce Marketing

Maria Winans, IBM vice president, Industry Solutions Group, has helped champion IBM’s marketing strategy for its “Smarter Commerce” initiative, and has been instrumental in leading IBM’s efforts to reach beyond the traditional IT audience and into the “C-suite,” including most recently, to chief marketing officers.

Scott Laningham and I spoke to a number of IBM execs, partners, and subject matter experts at the IBM Smarter Commerce Global Summit this week, one of whom has been a key driver for IBM’s events catering to business executives.

Maria Winans is a vice president with IBM Software’s Industry Solutions group, and spent countless hours leading a team that prepared for the Madrid Summit, among others.

Maria and her team are laser-focused on helping take IBM software solutions to market by industry, centering their energy on a number of key verticals, including the retail and banking industries, among others.

Maria discussed a number of important issues in our conversation, including the trend towards communicating more with the “line-of-business” customer set, and the requisite changes that that is driving in IBM’s go-to-market efforts.

Live @ IBM Smarter Commerce Global Summit Madrid: OgilvyOne Chairman & CEO Brian Fetherstonhaugh Speaks About The CMO Hotseat

Brian Fetherstonhaugh, as the chairman and CEO of OgilvyOne Worldwide, has a unique vantage point on how brands are built, how corporate cultures are created, and what happens as the world goes digital. In the course of the past 25 years, Brian has worked hands-on with many of the world’s leading brands including, IBM, American Express, Cisco, Coca-Cola, Motorola, Unilever, Nestlé, Kodak, and Yahoo! Today, Brian leads OgilvyOne Worldwide, the interactive marketing and consulting arm of the Ogilvy Group. With more than 4,000 staff in 50 countries, OgilvyOne is at the forefront of the digital revolution. In 2007 and 2009, the Forrester Report ranked Ogilvy as a leading U.S. interactive agency.

OgilvyOne Worldwide Chairman and CEO Brian Fetherstonhaugh started our Q&A today here at the IBM Smarter Commerce Global Summit in Madrid by revealing who his favorite character on the 1960s-era AMC show about advertising, “Mad Men,” was.  Drum roll, please….It’s…JOAN.

Mainly, Brian explained, because Joan “gets things done.”

We then turned our discussion to the vast evolution IBM’s own marketing culture has endured the past two decades, and the opportunities and challenges presented by the changing marketing landscape for CMOs, whose tenures these days last an average 27 months.

Brian also discussed other key issues facing chief marketing officers during this time of great change, including the need for CMOs to focus on new talents and skills development. Before he jetted off to another city somewhere in the world, Brian left the IBM Smarter Commerce Global Summit, and you, with some valuable marketing advice.

And when you watch the video, never mind the Spanish waiter who entered the frame for just a moment: He was simply doing what we wish to see companies everywhere do best, servicing their customers!

Happy Float, Facebook

Happy IPO day, Facebook.

I’m not an “insider” of any sorts, so I won’t be gaining from any of the early Facebook IPO action.  I’m on the fence as to whether or not I might try to buy some “FB” shares on the open market through my Schwab account…not because I’m not interested in owning any Facebook stock, but because like a lot of investors, I want it to be a conscious, responsible investment, and one never knows what’s going to happen on IPO days.

But know this: I’m very bullish on Facebook, both its past and its future.  I’ve never seen an Internet property bring so many people together from so many different places in the world, across economic and social strata, and keep them coming back.

If you’re as bullish, but not ready to gamble on IPO day, you might give some thought to investing in the Facebook “pick and shovel” plays.

Stand back, look at the Facebook ecosystem, and rather than place all your bets on the Facebook IPO “come” line, instead spread some bets across the board and benefit from all the other players who stand to benefit from Facebook’s continued growth and adoption around the world.

The Zyngas, whose gaming ecosystem helped the Facebook tribe spread around the world.  The Dachis Corps and Buddy Medias, which are helping make the Facebook platform work well for marketers (and focusing well beyond the social graph ads that GM announced it would abandon earlier this week).

And, to be sure, hundreds of others.

Regardless of whether or not you’re a Facebook fan, and heaven knows sentiment about them can run to the extremes, if you’re a good Western capitalist, you have to be excited.

This is the classic American success story, where young kid has great idea, develops that idea in his dorm room and later small house in Silicon Valley, and eventually changes the world.

And make no mistake about that: Facebook has forever changed the world.

Just ask the folks in Egypt, or Tunisia, or Russia, or any other locale or organization that has benefited from the lower center of gravity Facebook has created that makes organizing in mass quantities as simple as a few clicks.

There is a good reason that Facebook is NOT available in China — fear of transparency and open communications.

If it were available, China would be a very different place than it is today, and it makes me thankful that the kind of open innovation and entrepreneurialism we have here in the U.S. is still alive and well.

And that, in the end, may well be the most important reason for celebrating Facebook’s entry into the public markets.

Big ideas can still have big impacts, and Silicon Valley (and, more broadly, the United States) is one of those places in the world that you can find the capital, the talent, and the political and regulatory playing field  to make those big ideas a reality.

Happy IPO day, Facebook.

IBM Global Chief Marketing Officer Study: From Prime Time To Real Time

As a marketer for IBM who specializes in the digital realm, I was excited to hear about the pending IBM 2011 Global Chief Marketing Officer study, a study of more than 1,700 chief marketing officers from 64 countries and 19 industries, and couldn’t wait to see the results.

The wait is over.

Today, IBM released the results of this important study, one that reveals that the majority of the world’s top marketing executives recognize there’s a critical and permanent shift occurring in the way they engage with their customers, but who also question whether their marketing organizations are prepared to manage the change.

Click to enlarge. The vast majority of CMOs surveyed in the IBM 2011 CMO Study indicated that they are underprepared to manage the impact of key changes in the marketing arena.

Some other initial headlines: The study reveals that the measures used to evaluate marketing are changing. Nearly two-thirds of CMOs think return on marketing investment will be the primary measure of the marketing function’s effectiveness by 2015.

But even among the most successful enterprises, half of all CMOs feel insufficiently prepared to provide hard numbers.

Most of these executives — responsible for the integrated marketing of their organization’s products, services and brand reputations –- say they lack significant influence in key areas such as product development, pricing and selection of sales channels.

The IBM study found that only 26 percent of CMOs are tracking blogs, 42 percent are tracking third party reviews and 48 percent are tracking consumer reviews to help shape their marketing strategies.

“The inflection point created by social media represents a permanent change in the nature of customer relationships,” said Carolyn Heller Baird, CRM research lead for the IBM Institute for Business Value and the global director of the study.  “Approximately 90 percent of all the real-time information being created today is unstructured data. CMO’s who successfully harness this new source of insight will be in  a strong position to increase revenues, reinvent their customer relationships and build new brand value.”

An Ever-Changing Marketing Landscape, An Empowered Consumer

Customers are sharing their experiences widely online, giving them more control and influence over brands.

This shift in the balance of power from organizations to their customers requires new marketing approaches, tools and skills in order to stay competitive.  CMOs are aware of this changing landscape, but are struggling to respond.  Four out of five CMOs expect that they will have to make fundamental changes to traditional methods of brand and product marketing.

Baird likened marketers who underestimate the impact of social media to those who were slow to view the Internet as a new and powerful platform for commerce.

Like the rise of e-business more than a decade ago, the radical embrace of social media by all customer demographic categories represents an opportunity for marketers to drive increased revenue, brand value and to reinvent the nature of the relationship between enterprises and the buyers of their offerings.  Marketers who establish a culture receptive to deriving insight from social media will be far better prepared to anticipate future shifts in markets and technology.

As someone who has been intimately involved in helping IBM make a successful transition into providing enhanced social intelligence for marketers here inside Big Blue, this is music to my ears.

While CMOs identify customer intimacy as a top priority, and recognize the impact of real-time data supplementing traditional methods of channel marketing and gathering market feedback, most CMOs say they remain mired in 20th century approaches.

Eighty-percent or more of the CMOs surveyed are still focusing primarily on traditional sources of information such as market research and competitive benchmarking, and 68 percent rely on sales campaign analysis to make strategic decisions.

Click to enlarge. CMOs surveyed in the study indicated they are overwhelmingly underprepared for the data explosion and recognize need to invest in and integrate technology and analytics.

Managing the Four Challenges

Collectively, the study findings point to four key challenges that CMOs everywhere are confronting. The explosion of data, social media, channel and device choices and shifting demographics will be pervasive, universal game changers for their marketing organizations over the next three to five years.  But a large majority of CMOs feel unprepared to manage their impact.

• Data explosion:  Every day we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data – so much that 90 percent of the world’s data today has been created in the last two years alone.  The increasing volume, variety and velocity of data available from new digital sources like social networks, in addition to traditional sources such as sales data and market research, tops the list of CMO challenges.  The difficulty is how to analyze these vast quantities of data to extract the meaningful insights, and use them effectively to improve products, services and the customer experience.
• Social platforms:  Social media enables anyone to become a publisher, broadcaster and critic.  Facebook has more than 750 million active users, with the average user posting 90 pieces of content a month.  Twitter users send about 140 million tweets a day.  And YouTube’s 490 million users upload more video content in a 60-day period than the three major U.S. television networks created in 60 years.  Marketers are using social platforms to communicate – with 56 percent of CMOs viewing social media as a key engagement channel – but they still struggle with capturing valuable customer insight from the unstructured data that customers and potential customers produce.
• Channel and device choices:  The growing number of new marketing channels and devices, from smart phones to tablets, is quickly becoming a priority for CMOs.  Mobile commerce is expected to reach $31 billion by 2016, representing a compound annual growth rate of 39 percent from 2011 to 2016.  Meanwhile, the tablet market is expected to reach nearly 70 million units worldwide by the end of this year, growing to 294 million units by 2015.
• Shifting demographics:  New global markets and the influx of younger generations with different patterns of information access and consumption are changing the face of the marketplace.  In India, as one example, the middle class is expected to soar from roughly 5 percent of the population to more than 40 percent in the next two decades.  Marketers who have historically focused on affluent Indian consumers must adapt their strategies to market to this emerging middle class.  In the United States, marketing executives must respond to the aging baby boomer generation and growing Hispanic population.

Lack of Influence

Today’s CMOs have to cover more ground than ever before.  They have to manage more data from disparate sources, understand and engage with more empowered customers, adopt and adapt to more sophisticated tools and technologies – while being more financially accountable to their organizations.

Click to enlarge. CMOs surveyed believe that they can expand their personal influence by shifting to new capabilities that focus on technology, social media and ROI.

In fact, 63 percent of CMOs believe return on investment (ROI) on marketing spend will be the most important measure of their success by 2015.  However, only 44 percent feel fully prepared to be held accountable for marketing ROI.

Most CMOs have not traditionally been expected to provide hard financial evidence of their ROI.

But given the current economic volatility and pressure to be profitable, organizations can no longer afford to write a blank check for their marketing initiatives. CMOs recognize they now need to quantify the value they bring to the business, be it from investing in advertising, new technologies or any other activity.

This increasing emphasis on ROI also reflects the scrutiny the marketing function is currently attracting, itself a reflection of the function’s growing prominence.  Today’s CMOs are in much the same position as chief financial officers (CFOs) were a decade ago, when their role was evolving from guardian of the purse strings to strategic business adviser.

If CMOs are to be held responsible for the marketing returns they deliver, they must also have significant influence over all “Four Ps”: promotion, products, place and price.  The study found that this is often not the case.

CMOs say they exert a strong influence over promotional activities such as advertising, external communications and social media initiatives.  But, in general, they play a smaller role in shaping the other three Ps.  Less than half of the CMOs surveyed have much sway over key parts of the pricing process, and less than half have much impact on new product development or channel selection.

To meet these new challenges, CMOs must boost their own digital, technological and financial proficiency –- but many seem surprisingly reticent in this respect.  When asked which attributes they will need to be personally successful over the next three to five years, only 28 percent said technological competence, 25 percent said social media expertise and 16 percent said financial acumen.

About the Global CMO Study

The 2011 IBM Global Chief Marketing Officer Study is IBM’s first study of CMOs — and the fifteenth in the ongoing series of C-suite Studies developed by the IBM Institute for Business Value.

Between February and June 2011, IBM met face to face with 1,734 CMOs in 19 industries and 64 countries to better understand their goals and the challenges they confront.  The respondents came from a wide variety of organizations, ranging from 48 of the top 100 brands listed in the 2010 Interbrand rankings to enterprises with a primarily local profile.

Click here to register and receive your copy of the IBM 2011 Global Chief Marketing Officer study.