Earlier this week, Oracle announced that it will be acquiring data management platform BlueKai. The deal is rumored to be worth $400 million. BlueKai is the latest in a slew of purchases the IT giant has made in its quest for marketing cloud supremacy. It acquired B2C marketing platform Responsys in December 2013 for $1.5 billion, marketing automation platform Eloqua for $810 million in February 2012 and social marketing platform Virtrue for $300 million in May 2012.
With the addition of BlueKai, Oracle completes a formidable lineup of digital marketing solutions, and crucially, it plugs a major Big Data gap in its offerings. BlueKai doesn’t just help marketers target customers in their own databases, it gives them access to valuable third-party consumer data. With access to more than 700 million profiles, Bluekai claims to be the world’s largest third-party data marketplace.
BlueKai will give Oracle customers the kind of audience segmenting and targeting capabilities that Adobe Target and Analytics provide in its marketing cloud. However, while Adobe’s marketing automation tools are categorized by the type of content/channel (web experience, social, rich media etc.,) Oracle’s are done by the type of customer, which is B2C for Responsys and B2B for Eloqua. This means the deployment of analytics is much more CRM focused rather than pure marketing or advertising.
By integrating BlueKai with its Responsys and Eloqua marketing automation platforms, Oracle says it will give its customers the ability to personalize online, offline and mobile marketing campaigns, targeting a wide variety of consumer segments. It will, in theory, enable even better targeting for consumers across several different channels, including email, web, social, mobile and other content hubs. In short, use Eloqua and Responsys to create and run the campaign, use data from BlueKai to make sure the right parts of the campaign target the right kind of customer.
