During yesterday’s Eloqua Experience keynote, company CEO Joe Payne ran through a long list of new additions to its marketing automation platform. Judging from the audience response, however, the company’s just-announced display ad platform, AdFocus, clearly stands out.
During yesterday’s Eloqua Experience keynote, company CEO Joe Payne ran through a long list of new additions to its marketing automation platform. Judging from the audience response, however, the company’s just-announced display ad platform, AdFocus, clearly stands out.
AdFocus does something that most B2B marketing automation platforms don’t yet do: It gives marketers a way to create, target and manage personalized display ads from within the same platform they use to manage their email, social and content marketing campaigns.
(For more coverage from Eloqua Experience 2012, see our feature article in this week’s Demand Gen Report.)
According to Eloqua, AdFocus will support features such as the capability to display ads based upon a prospect’s lead score or nurturing phase, based on data already available through the Eloqua marketing automation platform. Display ads can also be targeted as existing customers, offering them with upsell or cross-sell opportunities.
An existing major player in the B2B ad-targeting space, Demandbase, also plays a major role in enhancing Eloqua’s AdFocus capabilities. Demandbase, which last month announced its online ad-targeting service for the B2B market, can provide additionalaccount-level targeting data via its Real Time Identification Service. Demandbase can also provide integrated ad-buying and placement services, allowing marketing managers to perform virtually the entire ad creation, targeting and placement process from within the Eloqua platform.
A second partner, Bizo, also plays a major role in the AdFocus launch, providing lead- or prospect-level targeting functionality that is similar to what Demandbase provides with its account-level targeting.
An existing Eloqua customer, DocuSign, is currently working with a beta version of a combined AdFocus/DemandBase solution. “Display advertising is an important channel for DocuSign and our marketing team is working closely with Eloqua’s AdFocus and Demandbase to improve the way we reach key accounts through display ads,” said Meagen Eisenberg, Vice President of Demand Generation, DocuSign. “Combining truly targeted paid media together with our other marketing activities provides us with a deeper view into our potential buyer.”
According to Eloqua, the company expects AdFocus to be generally available in the company’s Winter 2013 platform release.
