Salesforce.com "Doubles Down" on Marketing

NEW YORK—Salesforce.com has declared a strategy to "double down" on marketing.

That was a key statement made today at cloud vendor Salesforce.com's Salesforce Live event at Radio City Music Hall in New York City. Vivek Kundra, executive vice president of emerging markets for Salesforce.com, noted during a keynote presentation that the company's renewed focus on marketing solutions was "exactly why we acquired ExactTarget," a cloud-based digital and social marketing platform the company paid $2.5 billion for in a deal expected to close in July.

One of the predominant announcements that came today was of the move by global marketing and advertising holding company Omnicom Group's media services division, Omnicom Media Group, to deploy Salesforce.com Marketing Cloud across its agency network for social marketing efforts, serving some 5,000 clients. Specifically, Omnicom's global marketing technology division, Annalect, will provide the marketing services. Omnicom's portfolio of companies includes such ad heavyweights as BBDO Worldwide and DDB Worldwide.

Salesforce.com's acquisition of ExactTarget rounded out the Marketing Cloud by bringing email marketing and campaign capabilities to the social listening and publishing afforded by Radian6 and Buddy Media, as well as the social advertising functionality on the Social.com end. On a call with CRM, Michael Lazerow, chief marketing officer for Marketing Cloud, said that ExactTarget was the missing piece of the marketing puzzle that "we needed to add to deliver this next-generation customer platform."

Using Social.com and Marketing Cloud, Pepsi, an Omnicom Group client, is able to tap into social media trending topics for its Iconic Summer campaign, a promotion run in conjunction with the CMA Music Festival to bring fans closer to their favorite artists digitally and at event venues across the country.

Social.com allows an Omnicom ad agency manager, for instance, to combine "social and CRM information to [improve] targeting" and to monitor social promotions and their resonance, according to Fergus Griffin, senior vice president of solutions and product marketing for Salesforce.com.

Along with Salesforce.com's development for Marketing Cloud come enhancements to the Chatter collaboration tool. "The next journey is sales and how you think about selling as a team sport," Kundra noted. Salesforce.com today introduced a Chatter Publisher feature for users to take business actions right within the enterprise collaboration feed.