Every week, The Hub rounds up who’s winning and who’s losing in the marketing tech world. Here’s who made this week’s selection:
WINNERS
Adobe
Forrester didn’t declare a leader, but in its first Wave Report on Digital Experience Delivery platforms (i.e. Marketing Clouds) Forrester named Adobe a “Strong Performer,” rating it ahead of IBM, Salesforce, Oracle, HP and Sitecore. This confirmed our earlier analysis of the marketing cloud wars, where we too declared Adobe to be ahead of the game, if not the outright winner.
Huge revenues, huge profits and an all time stock high were the highlights of Facebook’s Q2 2014 earnings call. The company’s come a long, long way since its disastrous IPO and it continues to prove naysayers wrong by exponentially growing its ad business and continuing to acquire some of the popular and innovative startups in the tech space. Here’s everything marketers need to know from Facebook’s latest earnings report.
Oracle
It was a big week for Oracle as it launched its Oracle Data Cloud on Monday, and its Eloqua marketing automation platform was named a leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for CRM lead management. The news came on the back of the first Interact conference for its marketing cloud, where it announced several new integrations and product features that gave it enough confidence to openly take shots at Adobe and Salesforce.
LOSERS
Experian Marketing Services
Experian had the misfortune of launching its Experian Marketing Suite only two days after Oracle launched its Data Cloud. The problem? The two products are pretty similiar in what they claim to do, which is create a central repository of customer information that hosts information taken from multiple digital sources.
While Experian powers the repository through a combination of its own data and real-time inputs, Oracle is powered by BlueKai, a well known data platform that contains data from not just Experian, but a whole list of other third party customer data sources. Plus, with all the hype surrounding Oracle’s launch, Experian’s news was underwhelming to say the least.
Marketing vendors
A new survey conducted by Brand Republic and Ruder Finn found that marketing technology vendors simply weren’t great at communicating with the very marketers they were trying to sell their stuff too. Common complaints include too much jargon not understanding marketing goals and selling to the wrong audience (the CIO instead of the CMO crowd.)
Salesforce
Surprise surprise, Salesforce wasn’t the first company to come up with the name “Social Studio” for its social marketing platform. The trouble is, a competitor got there first. Social media marketing platform Strongview is now suing Salesforce for trademark infringement, claiming it was the rights to the name “Social Studio,” since it named its social platform first.
