Marketing clouds are now a big part of industry-specific IT services.
Miami, Florida, USA - June 1, 2015: Selection of brand name groceries. In full view are SPAM meat, ... More Libby's Viena sausages, Pompeian Olive Oil, Heinz brand Tomato Ketchup, Bubble Bee Tuna, Tostitos Salsa, Chez Boyardee Spaghetti and meat balls. Other products are partially visible in the background.This is a collection of some of the basic staples found in many American kitchens. Other brands includes Kirkland, Quaker Oats, Pomi,Aunt Jemima, Kraft,Hunt's,and International delight.
That's just marketing. It's a term that many of us use to dismiss a promotion, suggestion or statement of some kind that we feel is overly fabricated and potentially flaky, without any attachment to real world realities. Now that cloud computing has diversified to offer dedicated service bundles to industry-specific use cases, the technology industry has popularized the notion of human resources clouds, financial clouds, healthcare clouds and just about every other workplace function-specific cloud all the way through to marketing clouds.
But is this just marketing?
A basic vanilla cloud consists of compute power, storage, data analytics functions, AI services and management controls to enable system administrators and architects to configure its use and direct its state of being at any one time.
An industry-specific cloud is an extension of this basic model, but is more likely to have its own custom-aligned data model to treat information according to a specific regulatory approach or framework. With its own access and user identity policy, an industry-specific cloud is engineered to offer the 'burstability' needed to increase and decrease its capacity in line with the type of workloads likely to be present in the industry it works in i.e. a tourism cloud might be more seasonably balanced than a retail cloud and so on.
A marketing cloud is therefore optimized for marketing-specific activities and can be thought of as a more 'opinionated' technology with its own operational constraints, amplifications and abstraction layers. While you could (in theory) use a marketing cloud to drive a financial services application, it would be akin to cleaning your clothes in the dishwasher.
'In effect, industry cloud platforms turn a cloud platform into a business platform, enabling an existing technology innovation tool to also serve as a business innovation tool,' said Gregor Petri, VP analyst at Gartner. 'They do so not as predefined, one-off, vertical SaaS solutions, but rather as modular, composable platforms supported by a catalog of industry-specific packaged business capabilities.'
Well-known for driving marketing cloud services are Adobe, Salesforce, SAP and Oracle. Also in this space, usual suspects include HubSpot, WebEngage and Braze (both more aligned to customer engagement, but still a marketing cloud tool) and also CleverTap, MoEngage and Iterable, with its emphasis on cross-channel marketing communications.
According to AI communications company RingCentral, 'With a marketing cloud, [users] can also use event-driven triggers to set specific responses to customer actions in motion. For example, should customers sign up for a loyalty scheme, marketing clouds can then send each one of them automatic thank-you messages via push notifications.'
Developments in this market in recent times include work by data cloud company Snowflake and data-driven marketing company Acxiom focused on providing what the firms call an 'AI-powered marketing data infrastructure' for brands to use in marketing campaigns. Snowflake highlights its privacy and security features here, which means this direct integration eliminates the need to move first-party data.
Really important to marketing people, first-party data is defined as data resources that sit within the customer itself. This is (often sensitive or personal, or both) information detailing the interactions that a company has through its own communication channels that covers buyer demographics, purchase (and unfulfilled order) history. It may also extend to website click analytics and more unstructured forms of information, such as email engagement and phone call records with customer service agents.
Denise Persson, chief marketing officer at Snowflake points to Acxiom's status as the connected data and technology foundation of Interpublic Group of Companies. Interact, IPG's integrated platform for brand marketing. She suggests that this development is a key part of an AI-powered marketing approach today. 'Brands can automatically optimize campaigns, predict performance and generate personalized content by leveraging Interact's AI features, powered by Snowflake Cortex, unlocking a new level of AI-driven marketing transformation,' said Persson and team.
According to database and analytics software company Teradata, using an industry cloud in the vein of a marketing cloud, enterprises with lots of data in legacy systems can more readily get value from it. Industry cloud solutions can be customized for those specific systems, simplifying the cloud migration process and the eventual creation of data analytics from a sea of information.
Teradata further states that industry clouds (marketing, manufacturing, healthcare, financial or otherwise) are particularly suited to more easily ingesting industry-particular sources and then sending their data to the schema best aligned with the industry's applicable regulations and best practices. The company says that they're also better-suited to piping that data to specialized applications and machine learning and analytics engines, in order for it to be able to deliver clearer analytics to its intended 'data consumers' or into other data products.
'Today's customers expect hyper-personalized experiences, but many brands fall short because marketing teams are stretched too thin. The way that companies and their customers interact is being reshaped (and the bar for customer experience) continues to rise, so it's imperative that marketers rethink their strategies to meet this demand. Marketing Cloud Next uses Agentforce [Salesforce's agentic AI platform] to empower marketing teams with AI agents that can handle tasks and deliver two-way conversations with customers at scale. This gives marketers the time they need to focus on high-impact initiatives and cultivate deeper customer relationships that were previously out of reach,' said Kimen Warner SVP of personalization & marketing intelligence at Salesforce, when questioned directly on this topic.
Balaji Balasubramanian, president, SAP CX, also has views on this subject and explains that 'most marketing clouds operate in isolation' from the core enterprise data and applications. That means they need complex integrations to align customer engagement with business operations. Ever the brand-man, Balasubramanian offers a proposition to claim that SAP Emarsys 'takes a different approach' because it's built to work natively with SAP data models and applications. This he says allows marketing to 'operate in sync' with the whole business suite i.e. sales, service, commerce, HR supply chain and finance.
'This approach gives our customers and ecosystem partners structured workflows and curated reference models based on real marketing use cases (from loyalty orchestration to lifecycle automation) without the overhead of custom builds,' said Balasubramanian. 'Critically for enterprises operating in regulated markets, this enables us to respect data governance frameworks. Customer data can be processed and activated where it lives, supporting GDPR compliance and data residency requirements without needing to route through external tools or environments.'
What comes next in the marketing cloud space then? Well, you don't need to be a marketing guru to work this one out… it's market-specific marketing software services.
Food and beverage data intelligence platform Tastewise is gaining momentum as a company providing services for food and drink brands. The company says that this is because brands face surging ingredient prices, shrinking shelf space and growing pressure to keep pace with consumers. By tracking what it calls 'trillions of real-time food signals' to automate marketing and sales execution across the F&B industry, the company is works across both the retail and foodservice sectors.
These are not just marketing cloud services, these are food and beverage marketing cloud services. According to Alon Chen, CEO and co-founder of Tastewise, F&B companies face a perfect storm from factors including margin pressure, retail space and global volatility. He notes that Tastewise supports 80% of the world's top food and beverage companies, including Mars, Campbell's and Kraft-Heinz.'
'At Kraft-Heinz, a deep understanding of rapidly evolving consumer needs and trends, fueled by data-driven insights, is critical,' said Peter Hall, Kraft-Heinz president of away-from-home division, North America. 'Tastewise's generative AI accelerates our execution speed, enabling us to proactively anticipate and deliver relevant innovations that consistently satisfy both our business goals and what consumers want.'
To answer the question then, are marketing clouds 'just' marketing?
The answer appears to be no; they have a range of service capabilities and data functionalities that they share with other industry-specific clouds. It's also yes, they are just marketing-aligned service layers, which even the most cynical marcoms-averse person might think is a good thing, because it means the brands you do like will be more adept when iterating with you. Check your email, you may have a special offer.
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