Browsing all articles from December, 2011
Dec
12




 





IBM Expands Cloud Based Analytics for Smarter Commerce

I think it’s neat to see how companies are getting together in a consortium, if you will through IBM’s Coremetrics product.  Collectively, they allow any client that opts-into the program to view the aggregate averages within their industry.  Summary information is now being picked up in the press as an indication of how Black Friday went.  Pretty cool if you don’t have to share your information.  And that’s where the IBM Acquisition of DemandTek comes into play.

A sample dashboard from DemandTec

So this type of thinking helps companies competing in the digital marketplace to adapt to changes in consumer demands as they occur.  Companies that can quickly and effectively adjust their price points and product mixes in response to ever-shifting customer buying patterns will have a key competitive advantage in the era of mobile and social networks.

That’s why IBM’s acquisition of DemandTec this past Thursday will make the  Smarter Commerce initiative even more valuable to retailers and manufacturers of packaged consumer goods.  The San Mateo, California based DemandTec develops cloud-based analytics software that allows businesses to examine consumer buying data mined from both online and in-store sales.  DemandTec customers can use that information to quickly and accurately identify consumer trends, helping  them make better price, promotion, and assortment decisions.  And because DemandTec’s software is cloud-based, retailers and manufacturers can collaborate to make time-sensitive business decisions instantaneously.

A sample Coremetrics Dashboard

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Dec
1




 





Adobe acquires Efficient Frontier

A thunderclap just rolled across the world of web marketing.

Less than an hour ago Adobe announced the acquisition of Efficient Frontier, the absolute gold standard in paid advertising bid management.
Efficient Frontier is the industry leading bid management system due to the fact that is uses modern portfolio theory algorithms to actively manage paid advertising campaigns.  This is the kind of mathematical wizardy that is used on a daily basis by the titans of finance to manage automated bids and sales of stock.  Literally trillions of dollars are managed on the back of this kind of technology, and now Adobe has brought it into the fold of the Omniture Marketing Suite.
Efficient Frontier will be married with Omniture’s already powerful SearchCenter to create a PPC management system that is quite frankly leaps and bounds past any other solution currently 0n the market.   And as a part of the Marketing Suite, all of these capabilities will automatically integrate into the reporting and tools across the system – all in all, the only way to describe the upcoming behemoth that is Efficient Frontier + SearchCenter is “untouchable.”

What this means for digital marketers is that they will be able to use the top bidding engine in the industry on top of the top analytics tool in the industry to manage their paid media spend.  Having the ability to use a PPC bidding engine to make adjustments to keywords, ads, the ability to optimize your PPC prices dynamically, to the minute and having that data linked to your actual web sales is a huge step forward in the industry.  The rules for measuring and optimizing your Return on Ad Spend have changed.  This acquisition confirm what we’ve been saying for years about the need for bidding platforms to integrate with analytics platforms.  The acquisition is a game changer.

Adobe’s continued aggressive pursuit of the leaders in online marketing realm is truly remarkable.  This year alone they have acquired Auditude, Demdex, and now Efficient Frontier.  Its a good time to be an Omniture user, and looks like it will continue to be for a long while to come.

 

 

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