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IS THE MARKETING CLOUD?

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Table of Contents

3 Introduction

4 First Things First, What is The Cloud?

5 Origins of the Marketing Cloud

6 The Cold War Cloud7 The Business Cloud8 The Consumer Cloud9 The Marketing Cloud

10 Elements of the Marketing Cloud

11 The Hub: One Cloud to Rule Them All

15 Grey Skies: Marketers’ 4 Cloud-Induced Pain Points

16 Complexity and Integration17 Security18 A Tricky Relationship

Between IT and Marketing19 The Cookie/Mobile

Device Problem

20 Glossary

3 / WTF IS THE MARKETING CLOUD?

DIGIDAY

In 1999, the Wachowski brothers debuted what was to become a seminal science

fiction classic of the Internet age: The Matrix. In it, our hero Neo is invited to look

beyond the collective conscious into the film’s titular stream of 1s and 0s. And while

humanity’s life force isn’t being harvested by a mind-altering supercomputer, marketers

can be forgiven for thinking we’re headed that way.

In the 21st century, humanity’s most prolific effluvia is data. Our buying preferences,

our Internet search histories, our playlists, family photos, and friend networks are all

translated into 1s and 0s. And that data is being deposited, skimmed and otherwise

collected in “The Cloud.”

For marketers, it is a treasure trove at once inspiring and terrifying. For legacy software

companies and data management platforms, helping marketers put that trove to use is

the biggest business opportunity of this age. They’re calling it “The Marketing Cloud.”

So what is the cloud? WTF is the marketing cloud? And how do the two fit together?

Digiday created the WTF series to parse murky digital concepts just like these.

To paraphrase Morpheus: Take the red pill, and we’ll show you how deep the rabbit

hole goes.

Introduction


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AppleAWSFacebookGoogleIBMMicroso�

Maiden, NCForest City, NC

Santa Clara, CA

San Francisco, CA

Cupertino, CA

Reno, NV

Quilicura, Chile

Lenoir, NC

Council Buffs, IA

Altoona, IADes Moines, IA

Lockport, NY

Chicago, IL

The Dalles, ORUmatilla, OR

Prineville, ORAstoria, OR

Newark, CA

Mayes County, OK

Arlington, VANorthern, VA

Changhua County, Taiwan

Hamina, Finland

Amsterdam, Netherlands

Lulea, Sweden

UKLondon, UK

St Ghislain, Belgium

Eemshaven, Netherlands

Frankfurt, GermanyGermanyFrance

Sao Paolo, Brazil

Dublin, Ireland

Hong Kong

Tokyo, JapanOsaka, Japan

Saitama, Japan

Singapore

Sydney, AustraliaNew South Wales, Australia

Berkeley County, SCDallas, TX

West Jordan, Utah

Quincy, WASeattle, WA

San Antonio, TXAustin, TX

Houston, TX

Douglas County, GA

OracleRackspaceSalesforceYahoo!

Let’s start with what the cloud isn’t. It isn’t an ephemeral atmo-

sphere of data. It doesn’t shift in the air. It doesn’t look like a

dinosaur or an elephant or, weirdly, your Aunt Barbara.

It is a global network of data centers constructed by some of the

most powerful Internet companies of our time. It has a terrestrial

home, many in fact, in places like The Dalles, Ore. (Google),

Santa Clara, Calif. (Facebook), Maiden, N.C. (Apple), Ashburn,

Va. (Amazon).

Below is a (very) incomplete map of the major player’s centers

around the world.

First Things First, What is The Cloud?

CLOUD

Origins of the Marketing CloudUnlike Athena, the ancient Greek goddess of data—er, wisdom—the cloud didn’t spring whole from Zeus’ head. It developed over time and in different ways for different users.



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During the Cold War, key military and government data centers were spread across

the U.S., largely unconnected to one another. Any enemy attack that wiped out

any computer bunker would take all of that site’s data with it. To prevent such a

catastrophe, the US Defense Department launched its ARPANET, a computer network

that ensured data could be shared between sites. The packet-switching technology

the U.S. government used in 1967 laid the foundation for all network computing and

the Internet itself.

The Cold War CloudORIGINS OF THE MARKETING CLOUD


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Meanwhile, hardware manufacturers like IBM, GE and Honeywell were churning out

giant mainframe computers, fondly referred to as “big iron,” for the business needs

of corporations. These powerful machines allowed businesses “crunch” swaths of

data, making many projects that required huge amounts of computation feasible for

the first time.

But they were incredibly expensive. Smaller businesses responded by running

direct lines to machines owned by the manufacturers, universities and other third

parties and “renting” computing time. This “hardware as a service” model could be

seen as an early entry into the cloud concept—tapping into computing power as if it

was a utility.

Moving into the PC age, packet-switching network technologies derived from

ARPANET made computer resource sharing even more common and cost-effective.

First, in-house terminals gave workers access to central computer processing units,

usually located in a cooled room below ground. Later, those spaces were converted

to in-house server rooms that powered internal networks running software by Micro-

soft, Adobe and Salesforce, among others.

But that didn’t last long. Servers, like mainframes, are expensive. And once the

Internet bloomed, those software companies found that by building their own

server farms, they could free up hardware budgets and instead sell many more

subscriptions by running their software over remote computing networks—aka,

the cloud.

The Business CloudORIGINS OF THE MARKETING CLOUD


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Unsurprisingly, consumers were quick to embrace the cloud. While businesses

utilized “private,” purely proprietary clouds to solve organizational problems,

consumers called on the “public” cloud, comprised of generally free services.

Dropbox, Google Drive and Amazon Cloud Drive allow consumers to store and

share files through the cloud, while Apple’s iCloud ensures that all of your devices’

files are synced with a cloud-based account. Some of these companies operate the

largest server farms in the world.

Other consumer cloud-based services, from Spotify to Netflix, have helped to create

a digital economy of instant gratification. And along the way, the cloud has created

reams of behavioral data giving marketers penetrating insight into the consumers

who use them.

The Consumer CloudORIGINS OF THE MARKETING CLOUD


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The web is now flooded with a ton of useful data and intelligence, and marketers

quickly hungered for ways to use it to sharpen their campaigns’ effectiveness.

Marketing cloud services, many from the legacy software companies themselves,

sought to give companies the ability to draw on a diverse array of production and

data analytics tools without dealing with their maintenance or overhead costs.

They aim to deliver in a few main areas: uniting first- and third-party data to flesh

out complete audience profiles; streamlining workflow and fostering collaboration

between teams by making resources more widely available; firing off messages to

the right places in the right sequence to achieve maximum effect across email, social

and other channels; and providing the opportunity for unified metrics and analysis

across engagements.

The interconnected nature of these steps in the process gave an advantage to

services that could be holistically coordinated or integrated into larger platforms.

Cloud-based marketing “hubs” have become very attractive.

The surge in data available to marketers, not to mention a boost in consumers going

mobile, has quickened the adoption of marketing cloud services.

The Marketing CloudORIGINS OF THE MARKETING CLOUD

CLOUD

Elements of the Marketing Cloud



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The Hub: One Cloud to Rule Them All

ELEMENTS OF THE MARKETING CLOUD

As marketing solutions migrate fast to the cloud, the rush to get a piece of the action is

shifting into hyperdrive. Smelling money, legacy software giants like Oracle, Salesforce,

and IBM have in recent years pulled off a number of acquisitions of estimable smaller

cloud-based marketing tech outfits.

Each giant’s goal? To put together the One True Cloud Marketing Hub, the model that

will encompass all necessary cloud marketing solutions and serve as the marketing-tech

alpha and omega for the new generation of marketers that will subscribe to its services.

Other big guys are taking different routes towards the same goal of hegemony. SAP, for

instance, has partnered with Adobe to sell the latter’s marketing cloud in conjunction with

certain SAP solutions.

Problem is, much like the ad tech industry before it, these providers have created deep

market confusion with their wide array of offerings, infinitely branded plug-ins and

promises of subtle, shaded advantage. Moreover, not all hubs are equally good fits for

every organization. Some are diversified software providers with roots in sales manage-

ment (Salesforce) or creative applications (Adobe). Some are independent, mid-size

players offering a digital suite of solutions (IgnitionOne). Others are programmatic ad

tech companies offering DMP solutions (Turn, MediaMath). Still others are true mar-tech

providers (HubSpot, Marketo).

It helps, we hope, to divide these hubs into their four essential elements. Let’s count ‘em

up, adhering to the order in which marketers would tend to encounter them during their

progress (or should we say their “journey”?) through a campaign. Buckle up, here we go.


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Workflow and collaboration

Here’s where you get your CMSs and your project management and collaboration

tools, some of which people in other industries use, not just marketing types. But

marketing creatives specifically use file-sharing tools to put together their copy, or

cloud-based editing solutions to create video. Meanwhile, strategists and salesmen

are tracking financial outlays across various departments, receiving real-time views of

how much money they’ve spent and how much is still available. Everything’s flowing

like cream now: your whole marketing team’s enthused about life’s possibilities due

to the blessings that these solutions are showering down on their deserving heads.

Everything’s set for the next step, so it’s good that the marketing clouds contains a lot

of solutions one can use for…

Analyzing consumer data

Here’s where you’ll find plug-in predictive targeting solutions, which will help you

aggregate first-, second-, and third-party data so you can figure out whom to market

your brand to on the basis of people’s previous web behavior, not to mention

demographics. Or audience extension solutions, to find other potential customers

with the same particular traits as your target demographic. Or customer conquesting

solutions, which will help you straight-up steal other people’s customers in the

closest thing to high seas buccaneering that any of us, at least, will ever get up to in

this lifetime. There’s more solutions where these came from, and by the time you put

down that bagel a couple more will have proliferated, since every ambitious young

programmer out there with dreams of a fat Silicon Valley payday knows that finding

the next Big Data-crunching solution is the way to go.

Orchestrating campaigns

Ruling the roost here are programmatic ad solutions, but you’ll also find other

useful beasts lurking in this section. Look, there are some solutions for sequencing,

frequencing, and exposure – in other words, for figuring out in what order, how

often and for how long your ads should run, in the interests of saving money. And

take a peek over there, at the dynamic creative optimization solutions that will help

you change ads in real time so that they better appeal to the viewer on the basis of

what you know about her. Or look over in that corner, yonder, at the SEO solutions

and the tools that will help you whip up social marketing elements like sweepstakes

campaigns and social polls, not to mention landing pages that will corral your

desired audience.

Measuring results

The solutions that fall under this grouping help you figure out whether your campaign

hit its daily benchmarks; learn which of your marketing channels are firing the most

effectively (maybe you want to take money away from mobile and throw it at social,

for example); or study broad, financial metrics (what did we sell, and to whom, and

how much did they buy?). How did your various channels stack up against each

other? Is it time to maybe adjust your allocation of resources? Bottom line: is the

client going to be happy? (See also: Are you still employed?)

So that’s it. A business environment filled with ambitious start-ups and that’s starting

to move towards consolidation, and a marketing cloud with an easy-to-suss quadri-

partite structure. Like a barbershop quartet. Or the horsemen of the apocalypse.

ELEMENTS OF THE MARKETING CLOUD

DEFINING DATA MANAGEMENTIn the eye of the storm of marketing clouds sit your

customers and their data. Your customers don’t care

about clouds or stacks or silos. What they want is

consistency of experience – for you to show them

that you know them in the right context during each

moment they interact with your brand.

When it comes to the technology to support such

interactions, contradictory descriptions and claims

have caused some real headaches for buyers. Lack

of clear understanding of terms only adds to the

overall frustration. Most technology companies truly

want to make it easier for marketers to engage with

and convert specific audiences and individuals. Be

aware, though, that just because they can ingest

point-solution data into their platform does not

mean that the data is actionable and can be properly

leveraged for use across different systems or mined

for insights.

THE DIFFERENT FLAVORS AND DEFINITIONS OF CLOUD-BASED DMPSBasic DMPs

A basic data management platform (DMP)

in its most simple form can take data

from one point solution and combine it

with data from another. This blending of

digital marketing data seems good on

the surface, but be aware that custom

applications may be required in order to

support broader use. Make sure that the

solution to fixing today’s most basic needs

does not hinder future expansion as your

marketing organization evolves.

Media DMPs Media DMPs have roots in display media.

These were initially created to support

online behavioral advertising and real-

time bidding markets for online display

ads. Today they feature capabilities such

as portfolio optimization, predictive

and attribution modeling and data

visualization. Because the customer

journey typically begins with an online

search or exposure to an ad, the ability

to capture and use this behavioral data

to influence later-stage interactions is

becoming increasingly valuable. Because

the customer journey does not begin at

acquisition, advanced marketing solutions

should include media capabilities to

support a consistent end-to-end customer

lifecycle experience.

CRM DMPs CRM DMPs have roots in customer

relationship database management

and the fields-based data that supports

sales interactions. While CRM data is

extremely valuable for personalized

marketing and can be imported into

most DMP systems, the DMP technology

should also account for unknown

consumers who engage with the brand.

Marketers relying on CRM-based

DMPs lack the ability to connect an

individual consumer’s data from known

interactions with data from that person’s

anonymous interactions. CRM data can

be imported into most DMPs, but this

does not necessarily guarantee that the

data will flow freely to influence steps of

future interaction.

Clouds

Cloud refers to applications, services or

resources available to specified users on

demand via the web. Cloud anything is a

network concept, allowing companies to

increase capacity, scale and functionality

as needed without having to commit to

potentially expensive infrastructure. A

marketing cloud is an assembled set of

marketing solutions accessible online.

Some marketing clouds have gained

expansive feature sets due in part to

various mergers and acquisitions of

disparate technologies with the goal

of eventual integration into a single

seamless offering. Prior to investment,

be sure to dig deep into demonstrations

regarding the functionality of key

components and integrations, especially

those most important to your business.

Marketing Hubs

A true data management system

(referred to as a digital marketing hub

or cloud) provides standardized access

to universal audience profile data,

content, workflow elements, messaging

and common analytics. The goal is

the coordination and optimization of

marketing campaigns across multiple

channels to engage consumers in

a more personal and relevant way.

This can be done both manually and

programmatically, using unified data

available for both online and offline

tactics. Marketers need to look for a

system that provides a single source of

truth to better engage people across

the customer journey – from initial

search ad to final purchase and loyalty

marketing. Systems typically include a

bundle of native marketing applications

and capabilities as well as an open

architecture through which other point

solutions and partners can integrate.

Before there was a marketing cloud,

there was IgnitionOne, providing

cloud-based integrated marketing

technology to its clients long before

most clouds gained their fluff. Since

2004, we’ve offered smarter solutions

for performance-based marketers

to better engage their customers

throughout the complete customer

lifecycle. For true data management,

website personalization, mobile,

search, programmatic display,

reporting and analytics, email, social

– including a flexible architecture for

the integration of additional solutions

– count on the software, service and

expertise of IgnitionOne to remove

the complexity so you can do more

with your data, faster.

Cloud? Hub? DMP? No matter what

you call it, we’re here to help.

Get in touch:

[email protected]


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Grey Skies: Marketers’ 4 Cloud-Induced Pain PointsLike everything in this imperfect world, the marketing cloud, whatever its benefits, brings certain challenges. Let’s discuss.



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A recent IDC report indicates that over 1,000 vendors are currently pumping

marketing tech solutions out into a mostly unconsolidated marketplace. Expect more.

Way more. As marketing becomes ever more mind-warpingly data intensive, and as

the ability to aggregate information begins to separate the industry’s winners from its

losers, programmatic solutions will become even more crucial. Embrace them –

or die.

But ask yourself the question: Are all your company’s cloud-based solutions actu-

ally going to work together, especially if various departments acquired them in the

absence of a CIO’s unifying vision? Integration remains a significant challenge in the

cloud tech world. Adam Heimlich, head of programmatic at Horizon Media, says

the integrating tech that everyone’s relying on “is not that standardized. Companies

change their APIs all the time and screw up ongoing integrations. The tech world just

isn’t quite built for always-on APIs among dozens of big companies.” Or dozens of

small companies, for that matter.

Heimlich adds that another significant issue has to do with the internal cultures

at companies. “People are in favor of ‘integration’ in theory but generally against

sharing their work or letting others play in their sandbox.”

Complexity and Integration

GREY SKIES: MARKETERS’ 4 CLOUD-INDUCED PAIN POINTS


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Entrusting crucial information to an amorphous entity with a name that actually

connotes impermanence (don’t clouds... evaporate?) isn’t a natural fit. But security

might be a bit of a red herring at this point. Computing simply is moving to the web,

period. There simply will be security issues, just like there always have been. (Your

old IT system, connected as it ultimately was to the Web, wasn’t “safe” either.) At the

same time, cloud providers simply will go to great lengths to solve them, because,

business-wise, they’ll be screwed if they don’t.

Anyway, a rational cost/benefit analysis indicates that the “security issues” associated

with the cloud can be overblown. Things are more complicated than they appear.

“While the cloud model comes with risks,” says space150 CTO Marc Jensen, “the

benefits are huge. Before the days of the cloud, many organizations would be their

own security ‘experts’ and would have a range of success or failure with this. Security

is something to be taken seriously, and hiring experts, cloud or not, is critical. The

move to the cloud has eliminated the temptation for people to be their own experts.”

Another way to put it is that when you use cloud services you’re outsourcing your

security function to companies like Google, Amazon, and Apple – outfits rumored to

know a thing or two about computing.

Then too, the cloud is making possible positive changes to security protocols on

the tech side. Jensen cites Google’s transition from a “trusted perimeter” security

model to a model based on your device and your identity. The problem with perim-

eter models, he says, “is that once you’re in the network, you’re really in. The Sony

hack last year was a good example of this; getting into the network opened access

to everything. As our mobile devices are adding things like biometric ID, they are

getting increasingly secure.” He adds, “The cloud has enabled this approach. It

would have been impossible before this.”

SecurityGREY SKIES: MARKETERS’ 4 CLOUD-INDUCED PAIN POINTS


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One issue here, says Domani Studios CTO Evan Stark, is “the speed at which

marketers wish to move versus the requirements and standards that IT needs to facili-

tate, which take more time.”

Another issue is that in the cloud era most anyone can start working behind the

backs of the IT department. Creative types dabbling in tech – great idea, right?

The burgeoning bring-your-own-device movement is a subset of this issue. “BYOD

happened so fast that it caught many companies and IT departments off guard,” says

space150 CTO Jenkins. “When you have really restrictive IT policies, and people

need to get things done, you see a lot of people using the tools they know best.”

But the cloud era has also opened up new avenues for tech/marketing collaboration.

“Digital marketing’s first iteration was to take a traditional marketing output, like a

brochure, a static image, or a 30-second video, and place it in a digital environment

(a website, a banner ad, a pre-roll video),” says Craig Key, SVP of Media at space150.

“This meant that the creative aspect still lived wholly inside of marketing’s sphere,

while the delivery was up to the technologist. One barely cared about the other, and

there wasn’t much need for them to work together.”

No more. In the new age of “smart” campaigns, Key says, “creative can take advan-

tage of technology to inform and enhance the work. What kind of device is the user

on? What time of day is it? Where are they? What’s their history with the brand or its

products? These types of data points make marketing work better/smarter/harder,

but also require the CMO and CIO to work hand-in hand.” An example of such hand-

in-hand work, Key says, is the creation of a company data management platform,

which “becomes the ‘cloud’ to store all aspects of a business’ data so that it can be

accessed in real time to deliver more meaningful and relevant messages that are

tailored to the individual user rather than a broad segmentation of customers.”

A Tricky Relationship Between IT and Marketing



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The no-cookies-on-mobile problem is a perennial one, and one that’s not specifi-

cally associated with the transition to the cloud. But the cloud era is going to inflect

how marketers approach that problem.

The fact is, people are spending more and more time using apps on their devices.

“Look into the future,” says space150’s Jensen. “The experiences we seek just work

better in apps, and while people will use the web when they need to, they strongly

prefer the speed of apps on mobile devices.” But since there’s no app equivalent to

cookies, marketers’ traditional methods of tracking consumers are showing dimin-

ishing returns. Marketing’s response will include tracking consumers using not the

sorts of profiles that cookies can enable, but rather consumers’ own real identities.

This will require data-crunching on a heroic scale, and of a sort that today’s cloud-

based solutions can increasingly deliver.

Facebook, with its tremendous (and vaguely terrifying) access to first-party infor-

mation is an example of a company that’s making a go of it on this new frontier, but

it’s not alone. “The companies that are have strong ties to identity are monetizing

well,” says Jensen, “while networks that rely on a less personal or more anonymous

system of identity are not monetizing as well.” He adds, “Cookies are a problem on

mobile, so we need to move on.” The cloud era, with its explosion of new tech-

nology, could help marketers do that.

The Cookie/Mobile Device Problem


ABCGlossary



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That to which marketers subject the absolutely stupefying amounts of consumer information to which they have access in the Big Data digital era. Vendors are falling over themselves to sell marketers the analytics solutions that will help them deal with that data: sift through it, sort it, segment it, make conclusions about consumer behavior and preferences from it.

A set of standards, routines and protocols that explain how a platform or software handles its data. APIs are typically opened up by a large company to encourage third parties to integrate with them. In the marketing cloud, APIs allow marketers to layer on functionalities such as marketing automation, analytics and targeting that they may need to conduct business.

Modeling of how to assign credit for sales and conversions in a sales path. Some models assign credit for a sale to the last ad that the buyer clicked on during his or her path towards a purchase. Others apportion credit in different ways. Attribution modeling remains an inexact science, a fact that marketers don’t like at all.

This IT policy allows employees to access data hosted in the cloud from any of their personal devices, usually in accordance with restrictions that vary by company. (No sensitive data, for example, or no data storage on devices.) BYOD allows for a more mobile workforce, while saving companies the cost of purchasing company-issued laptops and smartphones for every employee.

The CMO has the customer data. The CIO has the expertise in building out the large programs needed to generate insights. It seems like a natural partnership, but it’s often a hard sell. Why? CMOs are spenders, tasked with generating excitement about a brand. CIOs are savers, tasked with improving processes, managing systems and supporting users in a way that drives down costs. Their working together to dig into data will ultimately drive growth, but to get there, they’ll need to agree on some key purchases, including, maybe, marketing cloud services.

If you’ve gotten this far and you still don’t know, start over. Just kidding. It’s a network of servers connected in such a way to allow centralized data storage and access. Also referred to as “cloud computing.”

Everything required for cloud computing – the whole kit and caboodle, as our grandmother used to say. You’ve got your front end platform (like a mobile device or laptop), your back end platforms (your servers and storage capacity), your cloud-based delivery, and your network (like the Internet). That’s it? Yep. That’s it.

This one comes in two flavors, positive and negative. A positive cloud burst is when a cloud handles more traffic or a computing surge. A negative cloud burst is when it doesn’t.

CIO/CMO partnership

Appliance program interface (API)

Attribution modeling

BYOD

Cloud

Cloud architecture

Cloud burst

A–ClAnalytics

GLOSSARY


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Cl–CrCollectively, the technologies and manufacturers that serve as the backbone for all cloud products and services. A cloud enabler is what lets an organization build and use cloud solutions.

A typically fast and easy to use computer operating system that doesn’t run conventional PC software, but loads all its applications from the Web. Confusingly, “cloud operating system” can also refer to the infrastructure necessary for setting up cloud computing services. In that second sense, it’s close in meaning to “platform as a service.”

Security in cloud computing. Wait, you knew that. The point is that cloud security is going to be become more crucial, and an even bigger growth industry, as more and more data inevitably moves to the cloud. Needless to say, the well-pub-licized cloud data breaches of recent years haven’t helped assuage anxiety on this front. Still, try to relax. Really smart people are working on this.

There is such a thing as too much support. While large corporations might love providing huge amounts of processing through their fixed-fee cloud services, this can be overkill for small businesses. Consumption-based pricing paired with elasticity (see p. 24) allows these smaller parties to pay only for what they use. Very cost-effective.

A network of servers (or server farms) strategically located to enable quick upload of web pages, files and other content. The closer the user geographically to the server, the faster her upload times. CDNs are particularly important for publishers and platforms with global reach as today’s users have become accustomed to instant access to everything all the time.

System software in Mac’s OS X and iOS that contains funda-mental systems services necessary for apps that function on higher levels.

Customer relationship management. The management of a company’s relationships with its current and potential customers. CRM often involves using tech solutions to handle sales, marketing, customer service, and technical support functions. Companies like Salesforce make those various solutions and offer them to customers on a SaaS basis.

“Attribution” is what marketers call the process of keeping track of a consumer’s behavior as he or she potentially approaches a purchase. Cross-channel attribution is keeping track of a consumer’s behavior across both online and offline channels. The point: influence that behavior. Drive a sale.

Cloud security

Consumption-based pricing model

Cross-channel attribution

CRM

Content delivery network

Core service layer

Cloud enabler

Cloud operating system

GLOSSARY


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Cr–DaThe ability to serve targeted advertising to consumers across multiple digital devices – and a technological challenge at the moment. The problem is that if you use, say, three different digital devices during a day, adver-tisers are reading you as three different people. That can result in waste, as an advertiser might be paying to send you an ad that you’ve already seen twice today. It can also make it hard for marketers to provide you with a pleasantly seamless experience across your devices. And it creates difficulties with attribution. Say you see an ad on your work laptop and, in response, start to order the product in question. Then you get distracted. Then you leave the office and finally order the product on your mobile. Good for you, but the ad you originally saw on your laptop doesn’t get credit for the click-through. And jeez, that’s more than a little sad.

It’s summer. Your apartment’s air conditioner is down for the count. Where do you go? A data center, of course. These expansive climate-controlled caverns, often of industrial proportions, house rows of computers, many of which power applications or serve data to cloud-based initiatives.

The process of detecting corrupt or inaccurate records in a collection of data and then either correcting or removing them.

The process of combining data present in different sources and providing users with a unified view of it so that they can derive knowledge from it. Sounds simple, but it’s actually a super-complex field of endeavor that’s relevant in every situation in which human beings have to make conclusions on the basis of oceans’ worth of information coming at them from lots of different sources.

A piece of software that sucks up, sorts and houses infor-mation, and spits it out in a way that’s useful for marketers, publishers and other businesses. Marketers use DMPs to manage cookie IDs and other consumer profile information and to generate audience segments, which are subsequently used to target specific users with online ads, email and other personalized web experiences. It’s all about better under-standing your customer information.

The discipline concerned with the extraction of knowledge from data. A huge field, one that overlaps with computer science (not to mention other fields) and one that’s getting hipper in this tech-driven age of Big Data. If your kid announces a burning desire to be a data scientist, pour your-self a drink. She could well make a bundle in Silicon Valley. You’ve done well.

A subset of data analytics that involves grouping zillions of pieces of data into segments on the basis of which you can make conclusions.

Data centers

Cross-device targeting

Data cleansing

Data integration

GLOSSARY

Data management platform

Data science

Data segmentation


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Da–FrDo your eyes glaze over whenever you glance at an Excel worksheet? Do even the most neatly labeled tables spur you on to quickly turn the page of a report or memo? Well, the abundance of graphs, charts and diagrams on content and web dashboards today implies that you’re not alone. Why dump numbers when you can visually depict trends and relationships? A picture’s worth a thousand data points.

The process of the collection, annotation, cataloging, storage, retrieval and distribution of digital assets, such as videos or text files or photographs or other images or, for that matter, most anything else.

A package of software to enable digital marketing, in all its multi-faceted glory. Both mar-tech giants (IBM, Oracle, Salesforce) and more niche-y vendors (Marketo, Conversant) sell them on a cloud-based software-as-a-service basis. Lots of companies might not need all the elements in a suite, but no worries: they’ll buy individual point solutions or component suite parts instead.

Most business processes don’t fire at a constant rate. At any point, you might be using your computing power to process consumer information requests, serve multiple dynamic web experiences to different segments or manage your email campaigns. Cloud computing accounts for these changing needs by providing appropriate levels of data, processing and application support for what you’re doing at all times.

Post-PRISM, we’re all pretty on-edge about who touches our data. Partners who operate in the cloud take this concern seri-ously by using protection: scrambling your data, exchanging keys, etc. A growing priority for consumers, encryption is a must-have for cloud services today.

Marketing theory-speak for the progression of steps that a consumer takes in considering, purchasing, using, and main-taining loyalty to a product.

Corporations are people, too. And like people, they need their own software. Most of this software is back-end oriented, calling for coordination between tasks executed at many different employee and consumer PCs: payment processing, CRM management, collaboration platform support, etc. Many of these services are bundled together and offered through the cloud, providing all the benefits of SaaS.

An ungainly and actually relatively obscure marketing term of art that refers to the business of figuring out how often and for how long an ad should run, in the interests of efficient use of resources. Not all that different from “sequencing,” really. So you might just say “sequencing” and be done with it. The English language will thank you for it.

Digital asset management

Data visualization

Elasticity

End to end customer lifecycle

Enterprise software

Digital marketing suite

Encryption

GLOSSARY

Frequencing


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Fu–MaNot that thing you might have used in college to channel Old Milwaukee down your throat. Rather the purchase funnel, a marketing model for visualizing how a consumer progresses down a narrowing path from awareness of a product (the top of the funnel); through opinion, consideration and preference (mid-funnel); and towards the eventual purchase of that product (the bottom of the funnel). Bonus fact: In Ireland, a funnel – a real funnel, not the purchase one – is also known as a tundish. Write that down. You never know.

Remember the days when running an app on your computer meant entering line after line of text into your console? Probably not. We live in the age of GUIs, visual interfaces that allow users to point and click (or tap) their way to productivity. If you’re still not sure, ask yourself this: Do you have to type out a file path or do you just click on a folder? If it’s the latter, you’re using a GUI.

One of the three categories of cloud computing tech-nology, along with software as a service (SaaS) and plat-form as a service (PaaS). In an IaaS model a provider hosts servers, storage and other infrastructure components. It also handles tasks like system maintenance and backup. All your company has to do is sign up and use the stuff.

That branch of computer science that deals with all issues related to the control of information about users on computer networks. The point is make computing as secure and efficient as possible. Inasmuch as IdM is preoccupied with information safety it obviously has particular relevance for digital marketing, personal data-intensive field that it is.

The process of blocking from your system connections from undesirable Internet protocol addresses (the identifying “addresses” that all computer devices carry) in the interests of security. On a personal level, you might block the IP of the creep who keeps leaving obnoxious messages on your blog. On the macro level, companies might block from their systems servers associated with dodgy hacker-ish activity.

Key performance indicator. A measurable value that a company uses to verify whether it’s achieving its business goals. Your department didn’t hit its KPIs this month? You are fired, sir.

Ford’s vision of a one-product-fits-all economy collapsed long ago, but the one-message-fits-all approach to marketing survived it. Finally, marketers are accepting that different consumers are looking for very different things (at different times) from the same product. From the benefit highlighted to the creative chosen, a single product can be marketed in many different ways. Creating and serving all of these ad versions is a project for the cloud.

Funnel

Graphical user interface

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)

Identity management (IdM)

IP restriction

KPI

GLOSSARY

Market fragmentation


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Ma–PaThe computerization of marketing, in short. The term encompasses a range of activity, from data analysis to workflow automation to the “programmatic” – that is, computerized – buying of ad space.

An application that uses, combines and aggregates data or functionality from more than one source to create a new service. The idea is that combining applications into one will help to present data in a more useful and usable way. The classic example is a Google Maps page of a city overlaid with markers indicating where, say, all the best French restaurants are. These applications are usually hosted in the cloud.

The software layer that lies between the operating system and applications on each side of a distributed computing system in a network, facilitating their inte-gration. Known as “software glue,” it typically supports complex, distributed business software applications.

Today’s marketers are fighting the war for consumers across desktop, mobile, social and beyond. Campaigns require more coordination than ever before, and MCCM is a way to centralize all message distribution and sequencing using a cloud-based platform.

A type of marketing that recognizes that consumers engage with brands across lots of different platforms and that strives to overcome the challenges associated with that fact. See the entry for “Cross-channel attribution” for an explanation of what those challenges look like. (They look gnarly.)

A vision of the cloud that’s broadly inspired by open source principles and that has as its goal fostering flexibility, interop-erability and compatibility in cloud use. The open cloud movement is a response to fears that, as cloud use burgeons, the cloud will be hampered by problems like IP restrictions, vendor lock-ins and the inability to access and move data freely across functions and brands.

A set of open source software tools for building and managing cloud computing platforms for public and private clouds. Originally developed by NASA, it’s managed by the non-profit OpenStack foundation and collaborated on by more than 200 companies. Developers use it mainly as an infrastructure as service, or IaaS.

The pricing model inherent to cloud computing, according to which you pay only for those services that you use. The analogy is with how you pay for utilities. You pay only for that water that you consume, without having to go buy yourself your own reservoir. (Although, come to think of it, that would be kind of cool.) Also known as pay and go, pay per usage, pay per use and pay as you use.

Marketing automation

GLOSSARY

Omnichannel

Open cloud

OpenStack

Pay as you goMulti-channel campaign management (MCCM)

Mash-up

Middleware


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Just like the name says: your own personal cloud, powered by a little cloud drive that you perch up on the shelf not far from your computer. A personal cloud gives you the convenience of cloud computing – you can access the data that you store on it via any one of your devices, for example – without the headaches that the public cloud brings, such as subscription fees, security fears, and lack of control over your data. But, if, say, a house fire or natural disaster damages your personal server, your data’s in trouble.

A solution that solves one particular problem in an organi-zation, with no regard to the context in which that problem exists. Because a point solution pays no attention to context, it can ultimately create new problems. A point solution stands in distinction to a suite or platform of solutions.

The process of establishing the proportions of assets to be held in an investment portfolio in order to ensure the highest possible rate of return.

The use of statistics to predict outcomes, either in the future or in the past (the latter would be useful if you were a detective trying to get to the bottom of an unsolved crime, for example).

A custom cloud built by the very company that aims to use it. In such a case a corporation is actually itself building the hard-ware and network it needs to host its data, possibly giving it more control and security. But it’s time consuming and expen-sive and, in the end, employees are probably going to go rogue and use YouSendIt anyway. Are we right, employees?

The use of software to buy and deploy digital advertising, as opposed to the traditional ad-buying process, which involves RFPs, human negotiations and manual insertion orders. It’s using machines to buy ads, basically. The scale of programmatic is mindboggling: at stake are trillions of digital ad impressions worth billions of dollars, and they’re often being auctioned off in real-time transactions.

Online resources like software or data storage that are provided to the public via the Internet. Public clouds are essentially infrastructure as a service provided by huge companies with the means to build and run huge computer networks—Amazon, Google and Facebook, but also Dropbox, Box and others. These are the clouds that give CIOs such headaches--employees dumping sensitive infor-mation into public clouds may mean they are vulnerable to data breaches. On the other hand, by tapping into pre-ex-isting infrastructure, CIOs can invest instead in developing the apps that work best for their businesses.

Especially for large companies, buying, installing and managing software packages on hundreds, sometimes thousands of computers is an enterprise in itself. Cloud computing offers an alternative: software as a service. The company pays for access to a server farm running the desired application, and all (qualified and connected) employees can easily run the software on their PCs. Beats waiting for an update.

Public cloud

Pe–SaGLOSSARY

SaaS

Programmatic advertising

Private cloud

Predictive modeling

Portfolio optimization

Point solution

Personal cloud


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The ability of a system or network to handle an increased workload, or its ability to grow larger to handle that load. You’ll also hear marketers talk of the need to do things “at scale” – that is, on a large scale. You might even hear them use the verb “to scale,” as in, “We need to scale this campaign, fast.” Don’t let them psych you out: they just mean they need to make it bigger.

Distributing digital content in sequential form in order to lead a consumer progressively along a path from one node to another. You might first send the consumer an email, for example, then follow that up with a sponsored article, then hit him with a display ad, and so on. The final stop on this “journey” is ideally a sale.

A large collection of computer servers collected in one place and powering an enterprise’s information systems. Basically, a massive room filled to the gills with lots of massive computers — and massively well-air-conditioned.

What it sounds like: there’s been a glitch at your cloud services provider and your cloud’s gone down. Cloud-using companies need to assess the risks of blackouts and make contingency plans for when they do occur. They might, for example, back up key data in another location or arrange for their systems to undergo “graceful degradation” – that is, to maintain basic functionality even though they’ve taken a hideous beating.

Maybe you’d sleep better at night knowing that your budget isn’t about to take a hit if a huge data-intensive project comes out of nowhere. This pricing model allows you to pay one flat fee regularly in exchange for continuous use of cloud services and support. The subscription option is most useful for businesses that expect to use a lot of data. Otherwise, you risk overpaying.

UX, or user personalization, is a buzzword referring to a person’s behaviors, attitudes, and emotions about using a particular product, system, or service. To that extent, it’s rele-vant to for marketers. UX personalization refers to the process by which marketing can create advertising and branding experiences that appeal to individual people.

An economics term that refers to a situation in which your business is so dependent on the services or products that a particular provider offers that the costs of switching to another provider would be exorbitant.

A cloud that’s designed in particular for a certain industry or application (that is, for a “vertical” in tech jargon). Such a cloud will offer functions that are particularly useful for that industry. The marketing cloud is an example of a vertical cloud. Another example is the health care cloud.

Service blackout

Sc–VGLOSSARY

Subscription-based pricing model

UX personalization

Vertical cloud

Vendor lock-in

Sequencing

Server farm

Scalability


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