4 Marketing Tech Trends To Watch in 2014

I'm not a big fan of year-end summaries and forecasts, mostly because I produce summaries and forecasts all year round.  But I pulled together a few thoughts last week in response to a request, only to discover I had misunderstood what was wanted.  Rather than let my precious wisdom go to waste*, I'll share below what I think will be most important marketing technology trends of 2014. 

Customer Data Platforms mature.  Marketers will have an increasing number of ways to build consolidated, multi-source customer databases without waiting for help from their IT departments. Systems that build such databases for specialized purposes such as lead enhancement, cross-channel campaign management, retention programs, and advertising audience management will increasingly provide more value to their clients by exposing the databases to other execution systems. As a result, the distinction between the customer database and execution systems will become more evident and companies will be able to succeed by offering either data or execution exclusively.

Digital advertising and customer marketing converge.  Data management platforms, which store semi-anonymous cookies for online ad networks, will converge with conventional customer databases, which store profiles tied to actual identities. The advantage will be marketing programs that span both channels, delivering personally targeted information via display advertising and simplifying personalized marketing on mobile platforms that don’t support conventional cookies. The unification of these previously separate data sets will allow more careful orchestration of customer treatments across all channels, increasing the effectiveness of all marketing contacts.

Predictive analytics finally take center stage.  More accessible customer data and broader opportunities to deliver personalized messages will support the long-expected mass deployment of automated predictive analytics tools. These will be part of a centralized customer management architecture that uses them to deliver the best message to each customer during each interaction in every channel where a customer can be recognized. Increasingly automated testing will allow incremental optimization despite constant changes in customer interests, product availability, creative executions, and offers.

The privacy dog won’t bark. Consumers will continue to allow marketers to track their behaviors, even if they become slightly more discreet about the personal information they post directly on social networks like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Efforts to limit such tracking through government regulations will not result in significant limitations, at least in the United States.



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*Yes, that's a Dr. Strangelove reference.

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NICE Buys Causata to Extend Its Customer Experience Management Position

So, there I was around 7:30 Eastern time this morning, sending out reminder notices to vendors I need to interview for an upcoming report on Customer Data Platforms. I received an immediate response from the Kevin Nix of Causata, offering to talk that very morning. This seemed a bit odd – Causata is based in San Francisco, so it was 4:30 a.m. local time and most people need more notice to schedule a call. But I had Things To Do, so I didn't give it much thought. Then, at the end of another call, a participant casually mentioned that Causata had just been purchased by Israel-based NICE Systems.  At first I was struck by the coincidence, and then realized what had happened: Nix was up because he had been talking to the folks in Israel, and he replied because he wanted to discuss his acquisition, not my report. [Insert image of deflating self-importance].

Sure enough, when I did dial in, I was treated to a prepared briefing on why NICE had made the deal.

There’s really nothing wrong with that. NICE is little-known in marketing circles, although I had bumped into them previously when they bought decision management vendor eGlue in 2010. But NICE is a major player in contact center systems, with nearly $1 billion revenue and $2.5 billion stock market capitalization. So I was pleased to connect with them directly and learn a bit more.

The briefing itself was interesting too. It turns out that while NICE still sells primarily to contact center managers, it is working hard to expand to clients in marketing, sales, compliance (it bought Actimize in 2007) and other areas related to customer experience. Its interest in Causata related to all  that, and in particular to that fact that Causata can capture Web interactions in real time and present them with related recommendations to contact center agents and other systems. This pumped me back up a bit, since it can be read as validation of the Customer Data Platform concept that I’ve been developing, which is about exactly this need to make customer data easily available across platforms. In fact, Causata was the original example I used to introduce the idea.

But enough about me, at least for the moment. The idea of NICE expanding to become an all-channel, all-department customer experience vendor immediately raises the question of how they’ll compete with all those other omni-everythings approaching from digital marketing (Adobe), B2B CRM (Salesforce.com), and general enterprise systems (Oracle, SAP, IBM). The contact center world has actually been a font of decision management systems, most notably Chordiant (now part of Pegasystems) and Infor Epiphany. So it’s certainly possible that they will be another source of competitors converging on the market for integrated customer experience management solutions. Like the CRM and Web content management vendors, the contact center firms start from a strong customer and financial base, making them formidable contenderss in what will surely be a long battle for high stakes.

I haven’t formed a solid opinion yet on how NICE in particular or contact center vendors in general are likely to fare in this new arena. But they are definitely something to factor into future assessments.

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Silverpop Announces Universal Behaviors to Provide Better Cross Channel Customer Experience

At their annual Amplify conference last week, Silverpop unveiled the culmination of a two year project that conveniently matches the Customer Data Platform (CDP) concept I’ve been describing for the past month. While the timing is just coincidental, Silverpop’s Universal Behaviors provide more evidence that a new breed of system is emerging.

Silverpop’s new features load customer behaviors from all sources into a central database, match identities to create a unified customer view, and make the resulting information available for real-time, automated interactions across all channels. The central database and cross-channel treatments are two of the three capabilities I’ve defined for a Customer Data Platform. Silverpop falls short on the third CDP function, which is integrated predictive modeling.  But it has partners who fill that gap.

Many CDPs have been quietly maturing for several years.  Silverpop's two-year gestation cycle is a good example.  I can't say precisely why so many are emerging more or less simultaneously, but suspect a combination of business conditions and ever-more-urgent marketer needs.  The long-term drivers are clear: more marketing channels make customer attention harder to attract, spread behavior across different media, and require coordinated contacts across channels. As a result, marketers need a unified customer database, unified campaigns, and way to deliver messages across whatever channels customers use now or in the future. This is what they get from a CDP.

It’s less surprising to see another CDP system than to see it coming from Silverpop.  After all, Silverpop’s twin heritages in B2C email and B2B marketing automation both use simple data models: flat lists for email and basic lead/contact/account tables for B2B marketing automation. Both types of systems traditionally merge customer data using only email address.  Neither build a company's primary marketing database or shares data with external systems. So its quite unexpected to see Silverpop ingest data from any source, cross-reference any set of individual identifiers, offer access to the data, and send messages for delivery by other systems.

So how do Universal Behaviors work?  Each Behavior is first defined in Silverpop with a fixed set of attributes. Source systems then capture Behaviors and post them via an API to Silverpop.  They are stored in MongoDB, a “NoSQL” database that supports high input volumes and multiple record structures.  This is another departure for Silverpop, which uses the Oracle database in its core systems.

Behaviors include whatever customer identifiers the source system can provide: email address, cookie ID, phone number, account number, etc. Silverpop uses matches from external systems to link all identifiers associated with an individual: for example, a Web transaction might include cookie ID and email address, while an email could contain email address and account number.  Silverpop could later take a Behavior with any one of those identifiers and associate it with the same individual.  But there are limits to Silverpop's customer integration powers: it doesn’t do “fuzzy” matching to merge similar identifiers or import third-party reference databases that contain such links.  I'm beginning to see those capabilities are specialties that are not necessarily core features of a CDP because they're best purchased from third party vendors.

The initial release of Universal Behaviors, set for July, will support predefined Behaviors from ArgyleSocial social listening, Webtrends Web site behaviors, Digby location-based marketing, Invodo video, and several as-yet unannounced vendors, as well as Silverpop’s own location-based and SMS offerings. It will later add more partners, provide a system development kit (SDK) for mobile apps, and eventually allow any company to build its own connectors.

Once Universal Behaviors are loaded into Silverpop, they become available within the system for queries, program triggers, rules within programs, dynamic content, personalization, scoring, and analysis – pretty much anything that could be done with standard Silverpop data.  Program outputs such as messages and lists can be pushed in real time to external systems to manage interactions.

Silverpop has also created native integrations with Adobe and Episerver Web content management systems.  These let those systems submit a visitor ID to Silverpop and receive Silverpop data to use in dynamic content and personalization. Connectors for other CMSs will be added as clients request them. Clients could also write their own integrations using a published Silverpop API or use tags to display Silverpop-generated content on any Web page. Currently, CMSs can access selected customer attributes but not the Universal Behavior database itself.  Silverpop plans to provide full data access in the future.

The mobile app SDK will go even further, allowing apps to execute Silverpop functions such as adding a customer to a program or sending an email.  This is in addition to the standard features of submitting Universal Behaviors, reading Silverpop data, and rendering Silverpop-generated content.

The critical point in all this is that Silverpop will integrate other customer-facing systems instead of only executing interactions itself.  The integration includes sending data to Silverpop, reading data within Silverpop, and receiving Silverpop marketing treatments.  In other words, the role of Silverpop shifts from delivering customer treatments to helping other systems find the best treatments to deliver. Of course, Silverpop still retains its original execution capabilities for email and some other channels.  But it’s perfectly conceivable that a client could hook the new Silverpop features to someone else's email delivery system (not that anyone at Silverpop mentioned the possibility).

This separation between a central data-and-decision platform and multiple independent execution systems is the core concept underlying the Customer Data Platform. I’m increasingly convinced it is the only way that marketers will be able to keep up with ever-expanding channels and customer expectations.  By developing a structure that fits the CDP model, Silverpop has responded to a pressing client need and established itself in an important new category.

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ExactTarget and Eloqua Stake Their Claim To Centralized Customer Management

You probably saw ExactTarget’s June 13 announcement of its strategic partnership with Marketo and Eloqua’s June 21 announcement of its new AppCloud marketplace for connectors with other systems. So did I. But it took a little while to connect with the vendors to get the details, so I’m only now ready to write about them.

Both announcements shared a theme of integration between core marketing platforms and other marketing systems. That Eloqua sees itself as the center of a marketing infrastructure isn’t surprising, although it does show how far we've traveled from the once-common view of marketing automation as an auxiliary to the sales automation “system of record”. ExactTarget’s aspiration to a central role was less expected, since its original and still primary business is email delivery. But ExactTarget has added mobile, Web pages, and social in recent years. They've been pulling these together with an “Interactive Marketing Hub” in beta since last September, which is now used by 500 of their 4,000 clients. The IMH, as we cognoscenti call it, combines ExactTarget's email, mobile, Web pages, Web visitor tracking, and social media with external touchpoints as well as Salesforce.com and Microsoft CRM.

The IMH sports a slick user interface with a very nice dashboard showing real-time updates of summary statistics for each channel. It also provides a central marketing calendar of campaigns across the channels. The underlying database can be simple lists, as in traditional email system, or a proper multi-table structure acting as the primary marketing database. As Captain Planet used to say, The Power Is Yours.

It’s perfectly sensible for ExactTarget to move in this direction, since it otherwise risks being pushed to the unprofitable edges of the marketing world as a commodity email engine. In fact, the real head-scratcher was why ExactTarget would deal with Marketo if it had ambitions to occupy the same central turf. (Marketo’s motivation is obvious: to gain broader distribution.)

ExactTarget’s answer was refreshingly honest: IMH lacks key B2B marketing automation features including lead scoring, advanced segmentation, and multi-step campaigns. The campaign engine will be improved before IMH's official launch this September, but other specialized B2B features probably won’t be added. ExactTarget also sees Marketo as the first of many partner applications for IMH, further clarifying that they see it in the central position.

Eloqua’s AppCloud is obviously modeled on Salesforce.com’s AppExchange and other application stores. The goal is for third parties to extend the value of a core platform by building tools that enhance it. In Eloqua’s case, most of the initial applications are connectors with other systems for Webinars, social communities, messaging and data acquisition. These will be joined over time by apps that add functionality within Eloqua itself. The AppCloud is an extension of Eloqua’s earlier Cloud Connector initiative, which provides APIs for external systems to access Eloqua data and functions. Basically, AppCloud makes it easier to find and deploy those connectors.

I did ask Eloqua how AppCloud relates to its Revenue Performance Management positioning. This felt like a pretty clever question until I later saw it was addressed in the AppCloud press release. Oh well. The answer came smoothly enough: AppCloud makes it easier to gather the activity data needed for Revenue Performance Management analysis. That makes sense, although AppCloud implies a more active integration with external systems than simply reporting against them.

Both the ExactTarget and Eloqua announcements reflect a strategy of positioning their products as a company’s primary customer management system. If you recall my post last week on Adobe and Oracle announcements, those firms also wanted to place themselves at the center of the customer management universe. So does pretty much everyone else.

Obviously they all can’t win this game. At the end of the day, I’d still put my money on the big CRM systems as the logical central repository for customer data. But I do believe that many auxiliary systems will continue to feed data to the central system and somehow coordinate treatment decisions with it. Connectors created to service ExactTarget, Eloqua, and others will make it easier to integrate the peripheral systems with whichever product ends up in the middle. So it’s all good.

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Kynetx Lets Marketers Customize User Experience Across Web Sites

Summary: Kynetx lets marketers enhance and coordinate user experience across multiple Web sites. It’s so different from site-based Web personalization that the possibilities can be hard to grasp. But I think they’re substantial.

The classic view of online anonymity is the 1993 New Yorker cartoon, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” Today, we realize that our online identities are not as private as they then seemed. But from a marketer’s viewpoint, it’s still maddeningly difficult to recognize online visitors and interact with them as individuals.

The challenge is usually focused on the marketer’s own Web site: when people visit, how can I identify them? But, ideally, marketers would track their customers across all Web sites and interject themselves when appropriate. Ad networks already do this to some extent, using third party cookies to coordinate the messages shown to each individual on different sites. But this doesn’t help marketers who want an active role in managing the user’s experience.

Kynetx offers a more powerful alternative. It installs a browser extension that can send data to an externally-hosted rules engine which returns JavaScript snippets that enhance the current Web page. The data describes the rules to execute and the current context, such as the Web page being viewed. It could potentially include personal information the user has chosen to share, although current Kynetx applications do not.

A concrete example would surely help. One Kynetx application is downloaded by members of the AAA automobile club. When users do a search on Google or other major sites, the application calls the Kynetx rules engine which checks a list of vendors who offer AAA discounts and flags them within the search results. No personal data is shared, yet AAA’s marketers deliver a customized experience that reminds members of their benefits and supports AAA’s partners.

Kynetx applications can also move data from one Web site to another, for example by capturing data and using it fill in a form or execute an API call.

The underlying technology for most Kynetx applications includes “Information Cards”, an open standard for digital identity management supported by Microsoft, Oracle, Google, PayPal and others. The general idea is that people can have different “cards” with different information for different purposes, allowing them to control (and, presumably, minimize) the amount of information they provide in each context. See the Information Card Foundation Web site for details.

In the case of Kynetx, Information Cards also minimize user effort, since the Kynetx browser extension must be installed only once, and then new applications can be added simply by loading a new Information Card. All the heavy lifting is done by the Kynetx rules engine, which resides on a central server accessed over the Internet. In addition to reducing the burden on the user’s computer, this makes updates easy since any changes are made on the server and go into effect without being deployed to user systems.

Development effort is further reduced because each Kynetx application runs on major browsers and operating systems without customization. Rules are written in a Kynetx-developed language with special features for context management. I was particularly pleased to see support for A/B tests, including facilities to randomly select different actions, capture success or failure, and report on results. Applications can run on personal computers, smartphones, or any other Web-enabled device.

Marketers who don’t want to use Information Cards can distribute applications through other “endpoints” including browser toolbars, cookies, wireless proxy servers (for example, in a coffee shop), or bookmarklets http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bookmarklet . All that’s required is something that can identify a user, capture permissions, and call the Kynetx server.

Kynetx was founded in 2007 and currently is used in more than 700 applications from about 250 developers. Although the company does some application development, its primary business is selling execution on its platform, at rates from $.24 to $1.60 per thousand ruleset evaluations.

I’m frankly intrigued by the possibilities of Kynetx, which seems to open a direct channel onto users’ desktops, bypassing traditional Web advertising. It does require a preexisting relationship with the user, but gaining user permission is fast becoming a condition for most online interactions. Kynetx makes it easier to gain this permission by offering something of value in return. Even more important, it should help marketers to strengthen existing relationships by repeatedly demonstrating value after an application is installed.

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