It’s another shot fired in the marketing cloud wars, as Oracle beefs up its social media advertising offerings with valuable external partnerships.
Oracle announced today that it will partner with three leading social media marketing platforms Kenshoo, Nanigans and SHIFT, to offer paid media solutions to its marketing cloud customers. This means that instead of creating or acquiring a social advertising solution of its own, Oracle will adopt an open API strategy that will allow integration of its social cloud with external platforms to deliver social media ads.
“Through our open API strategy, we can work with leaders in the business and provide our customers a choice in their social advertising technology options,” says Meg Bear, group vice president, Oracle Social Cloud. “Kenshoo, Nanigans and SHIFT have the industry’s premier and comprehensive advertising solutions and represent some of the biggest brands and organizations worldwide.”
By integrating its social products with Kenshoo, Nanigans and SHIFT, Oracle is plugging another hole in its integrated marketing solutions, continuing on the path that saw it acquire multi-channel B2C marketing platform Responsys in December and customer analytics firm BlueKai last month. Oracle’s current social offering is its Social Relationship Management, which has social media listening, management and internal communications components. With these partnerships, Oracle can now offer the missing social advertising component and compete directly with marketing cloud rivals Adobe and Salesforce, who both have dedicated social advertising platforms of their own (Adobe Social and Social.com respectively.)
Bear says it made sense for Oracle to go for an open API strategy instead of building its own advertising software, since that hadn’t been its historical strength. “We’re not particularly built for the advertising strategy, so it makes sense for us to partner with companies who are experts in that area,” says Bear. “This strategic approach signals our belief in the power of an open API strategy, and we believe this is the best solution to meet our customers’ needs to leverage performance-based, data-driven, targeted advertising at scale.”
Kenshoo, SHIFT and Nanigan’s are all leading social marketing platforms, so allowing integrations with them gives Oracle’s marketing cloud a big selling point for customers, especially for those who want to be flexible in the platforms they use. For now, Oracle is content to help customers integrate their current platforms to work with it, rather than forcing them to buy all the solutions from it in one integrated marketing cloud.
Another incentive for customers would be access to the social media analytics each platform provides, with the promise of its integration across Oracle’s other platforms, especially on the CRM and service side. However, it’s still too early to evaluate how well this integration will take place, which is what gives this software offering real value.
