“It’s rare that companies can effectively bridge marketing tech and ad tech,” says Gerry Bavaro, a Web performance veteran of Omnicom and Digitas who’s now SVP of strategy at Merkle. That gap in the marketing tech ecosystem, Bavaro says, is one that Merkle and Oracle are attempting to fill with the partnership they announced this week.
Merkle, a company with deep roots in the direct and data businesses, has grown into a sizable digital agency handling more than $1 billion in media spend annually. It’s that segment of the operation that’s joining with Oracle’s marketing cloud to lend hands-on expertise to clients in their utilization of Eloqua, Responsys, BlueKai, and Maximizer.
“We’ve had a tremendous amount of demand from clients saying, ‘We need experts specific to these platforms to leverage them in a way that we get the most value from them,’” Bavaro says. “Merkle and Oracle both saw this as a great opportunity. Clients normally have to go to three or four companies to get the consultation on strategy, do the deployment, and then work all the levers. Together, we can do all this through Oracle Marketing Cloud.”
The MerkleONE “people-based” marketing solution will serve as a key conduit for Merkle and Oracle users wanting to take advantage of this added service. Its aim is more relevant and direct targeting by enhancement of a company’s first-party data with third-party sources. Merkle claims to have data on more than 250 million consumers.
