Welcome to the Age of the Customer, where consumers are more skeptical than ever and traditional marketing campaigns are on their way to becoming obsolete. As such disruptive channels as social media and mobile devices drive the shift from passive brand consumption to active brand engagement, the number of touchpoints between consumers and brands continues to grow, and so do consumer expectations. Increasingly, customers are becoming wary of textbook campaigns and superficial personalization, opting instead to do business with brands that can deliver customized experiences and facilitate meaningful interactions across all relevant channels. 

“Consumers don’t trust your ads. There’s no advantage in campaigns when your competitors are just as skilled at the campaign game as you are. While you know how to tune campaigns to help you hit your numbers, they’re no longer sufficient,” Carlton Doty, an analyst at Forrester Research, says. Only 22 percent of consumers trust emails from companies or brands, and just 13 percent trust ads on Web sites, his research suggests. Consumers are constantly interacting with brands’ channels outside of deliberate campaigns, Doty asserts, and to stay relevant, companies must harness the data gathered through these interactions to build a context marketing engine. This is a new approach to marketing that Doty’s recent research defines as “a brand--specific platform that exploits customer context to deliver utility and guide the customer into the next best interaction.” 

The context marketing engine is a powerful approach, according to Doty, because it bridges the gap between marketing and customer experience, delivers utility to customers, and provides a constant incentive to engage. The engine also enables “customer-managed” relationships, Doty explains, alluding to a deliberately inverted approach to customer relationship management. For consumers, the concept of “channels” is irrelevant, Forrester’s Cory Munchbach says, explaining Doty’s play on words. Typically, the choice to interact with a brand through a certain channel or devices is based primarily on convenience, personal preference, or coincidence—as a result, marketers need to stop thinking of channels as siloed avenues for marketing campaigns and focus on the customer-first perspective. 

“In the past, marketers have tried to create campaigns tailored for specific channels, but that kind of thinking drives outbound marketing, not rich, back-and-forth interactions. Now customers have positioned themselves to be more active in their brand experiences, and it’s no longer just about the channels. It’s about the customer, and how that customer is interacting with that particular channel,” Munchbach says. “This is why the idea of context marketing is so crucial.” 

But building a truly omnichannel context marketing engine is no easy feat, and requires that brands be prepared to not only thoroughly reorganize their marketing processes to jump-start the interaction cycle, but also strategically adapt their enterprise marketing technology portfolios to reflect the omnichannel needs of their customers. Nevertheless, there is no secret formula. At the core of every omnichannel success story, analysts agree, are two technologies: first, a solution that enables the delivery of rich, context--based content—a combination of a campaign management solution and execution platform, in traditional terms—and second, a solid big data analytics solution with deep-reaching capabilities. Few vendors, if any, excel equally in both areas. Still, when it comes to the two fundamentals of omnichannel marketing, clear leaders emerge on each front. 

Experian’s Marketing Services offerings, for example, feature a robust campaign management solution, Gartner analyst Julie Hopkins suggests. The company’s cross-channel marketing platform was the “first tool to combine campaign management with an execution platform,” Jeff Hassemer, senior vice president of global product strategy for Experian Marketing Services, says. And, unlike comparable cross-channel solutions, where campaign assets are managed in separate systems or across channel-specific vendors, Experian Marketing Services’ platform provides a central location for marketers to plan, manage, execute, and optimize all of their campaigns across different channels, according to Hassemer.

“We built systems around various channels, rather than attempting to address new channel needs with existing solutions,” he says. The latter creates siloed channel campaigns and brand experiences that are not consistent or streamlined. “Often,” he adds, “companies try to bolt together additional solutions to deliver a more holistic marketing platform, but it simply doesn’t work that way.”

Oracle Responsys, Hassemer argues, has a topnotch email marketing functionality, but had to “bolt on” social and mobile marketing solutions. IBM’s offerings suffer from a similar issue. “With Unica [Campaign], IBM was able to offer a customer management tool, but was still lacking on execution. That’s why they bought Silverpop [a marketing automation provider, in April 2014],” he says. A common sentiment among analysts, this critique of the gaps in solutions offered by some of the biggest names in marketing isn’t falling on deaf ears. As vendors race to deliver the most comprehensive offerings, the competition is quickly escalating to a full-on marketing cloud war.

The War of the Marketing Clouds 

Though not a “groundbreaking concept,” marketing clouds are becoming an increasingly appealing premise because of their deepening integrations and growing breadth of capabilities, Sahir Anand, analyst at EKN Research, says. For prominent vendors such as Salesforce.com and Oracle, the marketing cloud tends to be the result of a series of acquisitions, which means that several best-of-breed solutions are consolidated into a cohesive, all-in-one solution equipped with all of the tools that marketers may need. 

“The top marketing clouds that are out there now have the potential to help overcome many of the challenges associated with the campaign management and execution side of the omnichannel problem, because the vendors that offer them have already brought together the different solutions you’ll need, and they try, for the most part, to take care of integration,” Anand says. 

Salesforce.com was among the first to assemble its marketing cloud, acquiring ExactTarget in 2013 to round out its suite, but others have followed suit. Adobe, for example, has recently asserted itself as a marketing technology leader, Hopkins says, mostly thanks to the “impressive platform” that its digital marketing cloud offers for omnichannel marketing. 

In June 2013, Adobe acquired Neolane, a marketing technology provider praised for its campaign management capability, and for the next several months worked to build its marketing cloud around six solutions—Adobe Analytics, Adobe Target, Adobe Social, Adobe Media Optimizer, Adobe Experience Manager, and Adobe Campaign. A reincarnation of Neolane technology improved by Adobe’s ease-of-use functionality, Campaign is arguably Adobe’s strongest feature, and is the one that makes the company a force to be reckoned with when it comes to building new-age omnichannel campaigns. 

“Adobe Campaign enables marketers to plan and execute [omnichannel] campaigns from a single environment and market to customers individually based on a centralized, real-time customer profile, which consists of purchasing behavior, loyalty information, and other data points,” Mathieu Hannouz, senior product marketing manager for Adobe Campaign, explains. 

Additionally, Hannouz says, Adobe Campaign can optimize campaigns by drawing in information from other solutions on Adobe’s marketing cloud. Using Adobe Social, for example, marketers can create social campaigns and track their performance alongside other campaigns, while Adobe Experience Manager can help ensure that campaigns are consistent across channels and result in streamlined—not redundant or disparate—brand experiences. 

Typically, customers that use Adobe Campaign for omnichannel outreach start with an email campaign, “the most logical point of origin for most omnichannel endeavors,” Hopkins says. After winning the NHL Stanley Cup in 2012, the Los Angeles Kings, for example, turned to Adobe to gain a better, more complete view of their fans and integrate multiple data streams including transactional data, campaign responses, social media activity, and other Web behaviors. 

Using Adobe Campaign, the Kings and Adobe partner FanOne Marketing worked together to design and execute marketing campaigns, including a holiday pack email offer. For this campaign, the Kings’ strategy was to automatically segment individuals who exhibited certain behaviors for a series of follow-up messages. “This is where context-based content wins out over traditional campaigns,” Hannouz explains. “Rather than sending the same three emails to the same group of customers, the Adobe Campaign technology can pick up on certain behaviors on various channels, like the e-commerce site, and respond to those behaviors specifically,” he adds. 

The solution eliminates redundant messaging to customers who are clearly not going to make a purchase, and sends targeted, personalized messages to customers who exhibited a behavior that shows interest, such as placing the holiday ticket pack in their online shopping cart, for example. In the series of three emails, the second email doubled the revenue of the first, while the third email generated the highest return per email sent. Within two months of the deployment, the franchise drew in roughly $70,000 in revenue from the campaign. 

With a solid email strategy in place, the Kings organization turned its attention to another channel—the microsite—to drive online season ticket renewals. The Kings’ marketing team built a personalized URL and microsite for each existing season ticket holder, and promoted the feature through email outreach, promising savings and benefits along with other exclusive content. Following the implementation, renewals jumped by 10 percent. Again, context plays a pivotal role in this campaign, Hannouz maintains. “It’s not just bombarding customers with offers—it’s determining who the most loyal customers are, and giving them this special opportunity,” he says. 

Adobe has helped the Kings organization integrate social media outreach into its omnichannel campaign as well. For example, the team recently launched a Twitter contest, sending followers a direct message detailing the prizes and encouraging them to enter after completing a registration form that asked for their names, email addresses, and Twitter handles. “The Twitter campaign generated a six to seven percent response rate, netting hundreds of new contacts in our database,” Aaron LeValley, director of CRM for the team, said in a statement issued by Adobe. “The key is that we were able to identify anonymous followers, make them marketable via other channels, and start assigning them value,” he said. 

There’s more: According to Hannouz, Adobe is one of few vendors that can harness offline data and merge it with online data quickly and effectively enough to launch large-scale, real-time campaigns. “When you buy a ticket to a game online, chances are we’ve got your email address. Once that ticket is scanned at the venue, we then have the capability to email customers and give them special offers on their mobile devices. We could send a coupon for merchandise, promote the beer available in the VIP room, or encourage them to Tweet with a certain hashtag,” Hannouz says. “That is context-based content, and that is how you deliver an omnichannel experience,” he adds.  

Though Adobe’s solution is turning some industry heads with its “rich, well integrated collection of new tools,” Adobe is still “missing many pieces of the puzzle,” Paul Greenberg, president of The 56 Group, suggests. The company doesn’t, for example, offer loyalty and advocacy marketing solutions to match those of Oracle, and though Adobe Campaign has powerful email marketing tools, Adobe doesn’t have a standalone email marketing solution like Salesforce.com’s ExactTarget, he says. With all the buzz around Adobe, comparisons were bound to be made, and it was only a matter of time before Oracle and Salesforce.com made moves of their own as well.

At the time this article was written, Oracle had just officially unveiled its marketing cloud, a new platform made up of marketing solutions the company has acquired over the past few years, including Responsys, Eloqua, Compendium, and, most recently, BlueKai. As the four solutions come together, Oracle aims to become the “number one enterprise marketing cloud, built for marketers and delivered to any audience,” according to Oracle president Mark Hurd, who introduced the platform.

With the solutions fully integrated, the cloud offering would enable marketers to leverage BlueKai’s data platform to deliver personalized customer journeys through cross-channel marketing, turn content from a tactical necessity into a strategic asset through content marketing, and harness real value from social media by analyzing sentiment and engaging in real time, Hurd explained. The marketing cloud would also enable marketers to analyze their campaigns with far-reaching marketing analytics and extend their ecosystems through the AppCloud and Data Marketplace. “It’s a little too early to tell, but it seems like Oracle is getting very close to being channel agnostic and delivering a good omnichannel option,” Anand says. 

Things are rumbling over at Salesforce.com as well. The company announced key updates to the social products offered in its ExactTarget Marketing Cloud, launching the Radian6 Buddy Media Social Studio, a new set of social media tools for marketers that promises to strengthen omnichannel campaigns through improved collaboration and stronger integrations with third-party partners.

“We’ll have to wait and see how these changes stack up, but it’s clear that the marketing technology is there for all these guys. But that is not enough,” Anand says. As companies work to determine the best marketing technology for the context marketing engine at the center of their omnichannel platform, the other half of the equation to consider is analytics.

The Big Players in Big Data

To accelerate innovation, Doty urges marketers to utilize the analytics tools available, but not in the way that they’re used to. While most marketers use analytics after a campaign to analyze engagement and use the insight they gain to improve upcoming outreach, in a contextual marketing engine, marketers have to apply analytics “on the fly” to deliver “outstanding real-time experiences,” according to Doty.Strong data intelligence solutions with descriptive and predictive capabilities are crucial for driving segmentation and helping companies harness key customer and lead insight, Hopkins agrees, but while marketing cloud giants Oracle, Salesforce.com, and Adobe have “good analytics tools in place,” few compare to the breadth that IBM has to offer. 

Since 2005, IBM has invested more than $24 billion in its analytics solutions through acquisitions as well as research and development initiatives, including a $1 billion investment in its new IBM Watson Group for analytics and big data in January 2014. “We’ve got digital analytics and predictive analytics—a full set of technologies including i2, SPSS, SRD, Q1 Labs, Cognos, and SoftLayer capabilities,” Jay Henderson, global strategy director at IBM, says, citing the company’s extensive list of business intelligence and performance management offerings. “It’s the full spectrum of predictive, prescriptive, and descriptive tools,” he adds.

Though analysts agree that IBM has one of the most comprehensive analytics solutions currently available, enterprise data warehouse company Teradata has been making major waves in the space as well, according to Hopkins. 

In April 2014, the company introduced QueryGrid, a data-access layer capable of running several simultaneous modes of analysis across multiple databases, including Hadoop. The QueryGrid offers two-way, Infiniband connectivity between data sources, and can run in-depth, multipart analyses on data where it resides. After identifying a segment of high-value customers in the Teradata database, for example, that subset of customers can be entered into Hadoop to evaluate their sentiments through social media interactions and determine the most at-risk customers. That customer subset can subsequently be entered into Asterdata (a data analysis and visualization tool that Teradata claimed through a 2011 acquisition), where graph analysis can pinpoint the most influential customers, ultimately creating a list of high-value, influential players at risk who can be targeted with a re--engagement campaign. But Teradata has more to offer than analytics. 

As IBM works to build up and integrate the campaign management and execution aspect of its omnichannel platform through proprietary development and acquisitions of companies such as Silverpop, Teradata already has a rebuttal prepared—its Real Time Interaction Manager and Customer Interaction Manager solutions. Hertz, named the top U.S. rental car company for two years in a row by Zagat, used these tools to develop a data architecture capable of meeting the needs of the $10.5 billion company and launch wide-scale multichannel campaigns, Deb Woods, director of product management at Teradata, explains. 

Hertz started small with its Teradata implementation, utilizing the Real Time Interaction Manager to include customized messages on customers’ rental receipts to let them know if their drivers’ license or credit cards were about to expire. “This was a big deal for our Gold customers, because if their [credit card] expires, they’d have to go to the counter before they could pick up their car,” Greg Palk, manager of CRM applications at Hertz, said in a company statement. 

Using Teradata technology, Hertz also launched its popular Carfirmation feature, a tool that generates an email immediately after a customer’s plane lands with the location and type of car the customer is about to pick up. “You can also change the car or upgrade it at the same time, and avoid the line at the counter,” Woods explains. Moving past email alone, Teradata’s Customer Interaction Manager enables Hertz to share channel-specific messages and offers through call center agents, counter terminals, handheld devices, and the Hertz Web site, depending on recipient preferences. And, Palk adds, if a customer opens a message but doesn’t respond to the offer, the Real Time Interaction Manager can “step in” and send a follow-up SMS or MMS message. At any given point, Hertz is able to send an average of 56,000 unique offers and as many as 80,000 during peak times, Woods shares. 

With compelling solutions on both the marketing execution and big data analytics fronts, analysts agree that a truly omnichannel marketing strategy is no longer just a pipe dream. While finding an off-the-shelf solution to address the omnichannel question from both the context-based content delivery and big data analytics standpoints—and do so as effectively as best-of-breed companies have been able to—may be a far-off goal, the road to omnichannel success is paved with major milestones, many of which can already be achieved. 

“The technology on both sides is already there,” Anand reiterates, “but technology alone can’t get you from zero to omnichannel. It’s going to take a lot of commitment on the part of the vendors to deliver deep, powerful integrations, but perhaps even more commitment on the part of their customers to make organizational and cultural changes that will foster an omnichannel mindset.” 

Associate Editor Maria Minsker can be reached at mminsker@infotoday.com.