A Review of the Top 20 Acquisitions in the Marketing Technology Landscape

A Review of the Top 20 Acquisitions in the Marketing Technology Landscape

MarTech Series Reviews the Top 20 Acquisitions of 2018 That Disrupted the Technology Landscape

We begin the New Year with a round-up of the top 20 MarTech acquisitions in 2018. The article is part of the research that intends to shed light on the most-read MarTech topics focused on funding, acquisitions and product launches that were in demand in 2018. While one of the biggest acquisitions of 2018 was IBM acquiring Red-Hat, here are the rest that we found to be disruptive.

Cision Completes Acquisition of PRIME Research

Cision, a leading PR Tech firm, acquired PRIME Research in January last year. The acquisition was important for Cision to bolster their media measurement, professional services, and Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning capabilities.

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Cost of Acquisition: Undisclosed

We got in touch with Connected Work Analysts at Frost & Sullivan to obtain commentary on the acquisitions of 2018. They said, ”As a team, we seem to agree that there is no point in trying to establish which acquisition was the largest in $$ value. Instead, we believe acquisitions must be evaluated based on their impact on the industry. We also seem to have reached a consensus that Cisco’s acquisition of BroadSoft was the most impactful acquisition in the UC/UCaaS space in 2018.”

SAP to Acquire Callidus Software Inc., Will Offer Comprehensive “Front Office” Suite

Callidus Software’s Lead to Money Suite combined with SAP’s cutting-edge consumer engagement platform is the perfect mix to emerge as industry’s leading CRM. No surprises then that SAP thought it was a great idea to acquire Callidus Cloud.

Cost of Acquisition: $2.4 billion

Townsquare Announces Acquisition Of Trenton, NJ Radio Stations

Acquisitions seem Townsquare’s forte as it continued acquiring in 2018. America’s third-largest AM-FM radio provider, the company has 320 radio stations in 66 markets. Townsquare originally started from radio and has since diversified its business into media.

Cost of Acquisition: $17 million

Also Read: SourceLink Completes Acquisition Of Path Interactive, A Leading Digital Marketing Agency

Salesforce-MuleSoft Deal: The Dynamic Shift in Marketing Cloud Equation

MarTech leader Salesforce decided to acquire Mulesoft to give a newer dimension to its product portfolio. Mulesoft has a unique attribute of associating enterprise data with it. Hence, the software can handle integrations of all components of an enterprise environment in a single system. Mulesoft’s clients were able to leverage these capabilities on disparate devices and software.

Cost of Acquisition: $6.5 billion

STRATACACHE Announces Acquisition of X2O Media from Barco

STRATACACHE acquired X2O from Barco Media in March 2018. The acquisition is crucial for STRATACACHE, the company being a leading digital engagement brand. X2O gets two things done for STRATACACHE — gets cash-cows as clients and enhances their interactive digital engagement capabilities.

Cost of Acquisition: Undisclosed

West Corporation Closes Landmark Acquisition of Nasdaq’s Public Relations and Digital Media Businesses

West Corporation’s acquisition of Nasdaq’s business ingests additional horsepower in the company’s already well-established technology-enabled services suite. Nasdaq’s business unit that has been acquired consists of Digital Media & Public Relations. This will significantly increase West’s outreach and consumer base.

Cost of Acquisition: $335 million

Infosys Completes Acquisition of Award-Winning Creative and Consumer Insight Agency, WONGDOODY

Infosys, one of the biggest names in consulting, technology and services of the future acquired WONGDOODY in May last year. WONGDOODY is a creative agency that also works in the consumer insights space. With studios in Seattle and Los Angles, WONGDOODY brings to Infosys, creative talent and deep marketing and brand engagement expertise.

Cost of Acquisition: $75 million

Impartner Continues Rapid Expansion of Channel Management Technology Portfolio with Announcement of New Acquisition

Impartner is perhaps the biggest brand when it comes to Partner Relationship Management. In June last year, it acquired Tremolo Software in an attempt to optimize brand engagement for its customers. Tremolo specializes in NewsOnDemand (automated newsletters) and SocialOnDemand (Social Content Syndication for vendor’s partner).

Cost of Acquisition: Undisclosed

Microsoft To Acquire GitHub For $7.5 Billion

Microsoft’s acquisition of GitHub opens a plethora of opportunities for almost 30 million developers. GitHub is the go-to platform for the developer community to train and educate themselves on the entire paradigm of coding. Microsoft’s benefit — the company has always had a developer first attitude.

Cost of Acquisition: Well, $7.5 billion

Adobe Completes Acquisition of Magento Commerce

One of the two big acquisitions of Adobe in 2018, Adobe’s acquisition of Magento integrates the latter’s Commerce Cloud into Adobe’s capabilities. With this, Adobe has been able to deliver a single, end-to-end digital experience platform.

Cost of Acquisition: $1.68 billion

Plantronics Completes Acquisition of Polycom

Plantronics acquired Polycom in July last year in its efforts to boost its capabilities in the Unified Communications and Collaboration Marketing Technology landscape. With the acquisition, Plantronics managed to focus on several aspects pertaining to human-technology exchange.

Cost of Acquisition: $2 billion

Also Read: RingCentral Announces Definitive Agreement to Acquire Connect First to Expand its Customer Engagement Portfolio

Gannett Completes Acquisition of WordStream

Gannett, the futuristic media company acquired WordStream in July 2018 — Wordstream is a SaaS solution for optimizing digital marketing services campaigns. The acquisition enabled Gannett to go light years ahead in its pursuit to accelerate digital transformation for every sector that it caters to.

Cost of Acquisition: $150 million

Forrester Adds Muscle to its CX Delivery Capabilities with New Acquisitions

July 2018 also saw Forrester making a couple of acquisitions so that the company can better its Customer Experience (CX) capabilities. Forrester acquired the following two brands –

  1. FeedbackNow — The company develops monitoring software to measure and enhance CX
  2. GlimpzIt — Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Provider

Cost of Acquisition: Undisclosed

George Colony
George Colony

“We work with business and technology leaders to develop customer-obsessed strategies and operations that drive growth,” said George Colony, CEO, Forrester.

Why Forrester and SiriusDecisions? Forrester provides the strategy needed to be successful in the age of the customer; SiriusDecisions provides the operational excellence. The combined unique value can be summarized in a simple statement:

You can read his full commentary here.

Workday Completes Acquisition of Adaptive Insights

Workday’s acquisition of Adaptive Insights in August 2018 successfully groomed the former’s itinerary of products. Adaptive Insights developed solutions that facilitate easier business planning. Workday, being a leader in Finance and Human Resource capabilities for the enterprise, leveraged Adaptive Insight to refine and sharpen its products.

Cost of Acquisition: $1.55 billion  

Amobee Completes Acquisition of Videology, Expands Advanced TV and Video Advertising Capabilities

Amobee’s acquisition of Videology’s assets helped the former equip itself with advanced TV and video advertising abilities. Amobee now has access to sophisticated data-driven linear-TV planning tools for its connected TV and digital video solutions.

Also Read: Integrate Acquires Listenloop and Widens Its Demand Generation Offerings

Cost of Acquisition: $101 million  

Kim Perell
Kim Perell

We spoke to Kim Perell, CEO, AMOBEE, to inquire about the state of the company’s acquisition of Videology. She said, “While television remains the largest single channel for advertising spend, the TV industry is transforming through the nascent stages of TV and video convergence for both viewers and advertisers. We saw an enormous opportunity with the acquisition of Videology,which had established its pedigree as the market-leading technology for video and linear TV. With consumers now moving seamlessly from screen to screen, from channel to channel, the incorporation of the Videology technology within the Amobee platform means that we are now able to provide best-in-class advertising solutions that drive results for our clients across the entire spectrum of media channels, seamlessly joining TV and digital planning, execution and reporting within a single interface.

Further, the strategic addition of Videology to our suite means that Amobee can work with progressive broadcasters to meet the goals of marketers more efficiently, with sophisticated audience-based planning technology and yield optimization solutions.

The net result of the acquisition is that Amobee is now in a pre-eminent position to capture the global digital marketing opportunity brought about by the ongoing convergence of TV and digital.”

Deloitte’s Acquisition of Magnetic’s Business Platform Enables New Capabilities for Deloitte

Deloitte announced that it will be acquiring Magnetic Media Inc’s Artificial Intelligence-powered business platform. This move clearly indicated Deloitte’s increased focus in the areas of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Audience Data Analytics. This strategic acquisition helped Deloitte accelerate smarter and faster development of its Digital Experience Services platform.

Cost of Acquisition: Undisclosed

SiriusXM’ Acquisition of Pandora Creates the Largest Audio Entertainment Enterprise Globally

SiriusXM acquired Pandora in this third quarter of 2018, automatically transforming the company as the leader in the subscription radio domain. This is because SiriusXM, prior to the acquisition was only a vendor for in-car-radio. After the acquisition, the company could penetrate in other Radio Marketing Technology landscapes such as home radio, mobile radio, etc. Pandora was/is the largest US audio streaming platform.

Cost of Acquisition: $3.5 billion

Adobe to Buy Marketo; Leaps Ahead in the B2B Engagement Economy with this $4.75 Billion Acquisition

Adobe’s second-biggest acquisition after Magento, Marketo’s buyout ensured that Adobe infused some of the best B2B marketing technology techniques in its offering. Thanks to the Magento-Marketo acquisition, Adobe is now light years ahead of its competition. Not to mention that Magento-Marketo capabilities join extremely superior technologies such as Adobe Experience Cloud and Sensei AI.

Cost of Acquisition: $4.75 billion

SAP SE to Acquire Qualtrics International Inc., Sees Experience Management as the Future of Business

SAP’s technology engages with 77% of transactions worldwide. Combine that with Qualtrics’ experience data and you have the biggest platform to accelerate the XM category. This is a divine combination of Experience Data mixing with Operational Data to create an end-to-end global platform, at scale. We have yet to experience the force of this acquisition. But we will be on the lookout for the same.

Cost of Acquisition: $8 billion

Forrester To Acquire B2B Sales Research Firm, SiriusDecisions

Forrester is one of the most credible brands when it comes to businesses looking out for well-researched reports. SiriusDecisions has its niche in B2B research and the subsequent advice. Forrester acquiring SiriusDecisions helps the former expand in size and offer further innovative and customized solutions to its large clientele.

Cost of Acquisition: $245 million

We are concluding by mentioning our final two — Outreach’s acquisition of Sales Hacker and Claritas’ acquisition of Barometrics and completing our list.

Recommended Read: Campaign Monitor Expands into Enterprise Email Market with Acquisitions of Sailthru and Liveclicker

That was our review of the top 20 acquisitions in the Marketing Technology landscape for 2018. What do you think? Let us know at news@martechseries.com.

Decoding Conversant's Mesobase, MarTech's First Customer and Prospect Relationship Management (CPRM) Platform

Decoding Conversant’s Mesobase, MarTech’s First Customer and Prospect Relationship Management (CPRM) Platform

All CMOs are driven to achieve the 3Es of marketing — Efficiency, Efficacy, and Engagement. Marketing Technology landscape has swelled to over 6000+ to actually allow CMOs get closer to their goals and increase marketing efficiency in a measurable manner. Today, marketing and sales teams have an unprecedented access to their customers and prospects, including their anonymous activity with you and across the web.

Recently, Conversant announced a powerful Marketing & Analytics Platform, Mesobase, to further empower marketing teams to deliver highly relevant campaigns to single anonymous identity. We spoke to Ric Elert, President, Conversant about the creation of Mesobase.

Recommended: TechBytes with Todd Grossman, CEO Americas at Talkwalker

Tell us about your role at Conversant and the team/technology you handle.

As President, I manage Conversant’s business operations, not including our sales team, and guide our corporate and product strategies. I simultaneously lead the engineering team at Epsilon. The goal in assuming these dual roles was to complete the interoperability and interaction of all Epsilon and Conversant technologies. Customers don’t differentiate between messages received through online and offline channels, meaning our clients need an all-encompassing connection or communication path with cross-device continuity. My position helps ensure we have that.

Recommended: What a Growth-Focused MarTech Acquisition Looks Like?

What’s Mesobase and how does it help businesses build customer relations?

Mesobase is the industry’s first self-service Customer and Prospect Relationship Management (CPRM) platform.

We see brands that execute campaigns across different channels but have difficulty determining what’s driving revenue. Clients often have fragmented data on their customers, so they are unable to look at customers in a holistic way. And clients’ prospect data, if they have it, is often outdated demographic data. That’s where Mesobase comes in.

Must Read: Adobe Audience Manager Adds Data Explorer to Build Powerful …

Mesobase provides clients direct access and visibility into their customer and prospect data, with the ability to analyze, build audiences, activate and measure attribution.

Clients can create their own models to gather person-level insights and performance metrics that are more robust than those available in a marketing cloud, DMP or CDP. They can then take those models and run campaigns with us or another third-party partner. It takes the busy work out of marketing by reducing the time needed to shuffle through data and instead lets clients spend that time focusing on the performance end of marketing.

Recommended: Dun & Bradstreet Named A Leader Among B2B Marketing Data …

Why did you choose to build a marketing and analytics platform in a tech-heavy ecosystem? How does Mesobase link to your other technologies for various channels and format?

We developed Mesobase because our clients requested it. Clients are frustrated with the lack of transparency from their digital marketing partners, especially the walled gardens. They want to understand how systems work and be able to see their real-time data.

In our case, they want to know how our system is so efficient in communicating with their customers and prospects. They wanted to see what we could see, so we built Mesobase on top of our CORE Platform to offer a client-specific view of customers and prospects in a live environment.

At the same time, we want clients to go in and use it without locking them into something rigid so we pre-built connectors to ensure Mesobase integrates with all Epsilon and Conversant technologies as well as hundreds of other offline and online marketing partners. This connection allows clients to activate the audiences they created in Mesobase with us or with their preferred marketing partner.

Mesobase is an open book that delivers a level of transparency and control clients can’t get anywhere else.

Could you elaborate further on how segment-based communications are moving to journey-based and trigger-moment-inspired outreach?

The biggest problem with segmentation is that people are incorrectly included or excluded from segments. There is a great degree of inefficiency in working with segments. When you don’t know who you need to speak to, you can easily end up with wasted media spend. Over time, the focus on segmentation shifted to personalization. The first goal of personalization is to look at your data in a person-centric view across channels and devices. It’s what we give clients in Mesobase.

How does Conversant deliver cross-industry benefits to modern businesses? Which sectors in the industry are best-placed to leverage Mesobase and why?

All companies need to develop stronger, more personal relationships with their customers, especially in today’s ultra-competitive environment.

Mesobase helps clients understand their customers and prospects at a deeper level. We’ve found that companies with deep, ongoing relationships with their customers and an established ability to measure outcomes (transactions) are most interested in Mesobase, regardless of vertical.

Once clients understand their customers and prospects, we pride ourselves on our ability to accurately reach individuals at scale and help clients test their theories. Even companies that build a decent database and can analyze customers are still plagued by the ability to recognize and reach their customers and see the impact of those interactions. Mesobase provides all that.

What does your product/ marketing roadmap for Mesobase look for 2018-2022? Are you planning to add any technology partners to increase adoption rate?

The key to increasing the adoption rate of Mesobase isn’t about adding technology partners but instead adding data sources that help further describe an individual in real time. Our analysis and experience indicate that brands need to communicate with customers when they show intent to take an action.

Read More: New Research Links Email Engagement to Customer-Experience …

Mesobase provides access to intent data and empowers clients to quickly react to those intentions on any channel, regardless of what platform they’re using to deliver media. Our roadmap also includes providing more attribution and marketing mix planning. In doing so, Mesobase would allow clients to do these analyses by an individual for the first time.

What are your thoughts on AI/ML and the scope of IoT in completely revolutionizing Digital Reinventions for omnichannel businesses?

Machine learning enables us to understand and learn from the ongoing interactions people have with brands and then fine tune those reactions in real time. It’s like two people having a conversation.

Whether a brand is trying to sell a high-dollar item occasionally or a low-price item regularly, machine learning can adjust the conversation based on past experience. Ultimately, machine learning allows for efficient communication with a higher rate of return.

You still see a lot of marketing initiatives that follow a similar pattern: Run a program. Stop. Run a program. Stop. These programs are not only disjointed for customers but fail to provide any value to marketers.

Thank You, Ric, for chatting with us about Mesobase! 

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