The week’s winner for most-hyped deal in ad tech: IBM‘s acquisition of Atlanta-based marketing automation company Silverpop for a reported $250 million. Once integrated, Silverpop will improve the IBM platform’s ability to maintain unique, context-sensitive customer profiles for personalized marketing campaigns on e-mail, social, and other digital channels.
Here’s what the industry and the media had to say:
Ron Miller @ TechCrunch Silverpop specializes in e-mail and marketing automation
Silverpop gives IBM a cloud-based marketing personalization tool that promises to provide users with a way to understand their customers better and offer more personalized experiences based on what they know. For instance, if you know that your customer is an early adopter or a person who holds back, you can tailor your messages accordingly, rather than trying to fashion the same generic message to everyone in a one-size-fits-all approach.
Ray Wang, principal of Constellation Research, quoted @ ZDNet
While IBM has an army of assets in play for marketing, the reality is that you need mass personalization at scale to deliver on relevancy and context. Silverpop brings this and their ability to effectively keep identities in context regardless of how that individual is engaging inside a brand and potentially with other brands.
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Bard Darrow @ GigaOm
The idea behind this deal — and several others in this arena — is that marketers have money to spend on IT and they want to move from what IBM’s VP of enterprise marketing Kevin Bishop calls the “spray and pray model” to more directed, personalized product pitches.
Doug Henschen @ Information Week
Atlanta-based Silverpop has 8,000 customers in more than 50 countries, including high-profile Mazda, Stonyfield Farm, and Advanced Micro Devices. The deal is clearly a response to Oracle’s recent $1.5 billion acquisition of Responsys and to Salesforce.com’s $2.5 billion purchase of ExactTarget in 2013.
Christopher Heine @ Adweek
Silverpop’s reported price tag clearly suggests it is smaller than those firms [Responsys and ExactTarget], but it calls Santander, Texas Instruments, Mazda, Honda, Condé Nast and Carfax clients. There are other small fish in this sector available, namely Hubspot and Act-on. But there’s actually a big one left swimming out there should IBM, Oracle, Adobe, Salesforce or SAP make a bid: Marketo. Gartner has projected the software maker to be worth $22 billion by next year. … If Marketo does join the consolidation movement, it will not come cheap.
Alex Kantrowitz @ Advertising Age
The addition of a true marketing-automation platform should heat up IBM’s competition with the other big players. That escalating competition can be nervewracking for marketers using those marketing-automation systems. The shrinking number of independent platforms means they will need to rely on larger entities to be good stewards of the tech (not to mention data) and less competition could lead to rising prices.
