Ogilvy, Pluris, and Unica create an interesting alliance

With the recently announced alliance between Ogilvy North America, interactive marketing software company Unica, and marketing database provider Pluris, we can expect powerful new solutions that will feature sophisticated digital marketing and customer data integration.

Even marketers with modest resource sets are painfully aware of the importance of collecting and managing the huge amounts of data available through today’s technology-driven digital marketing programs.  While this alliance may indeed be more suitable for those with larger budgets, their alliance is one that should grab the attention of all.

When savvy marketers align the right technology with the right programs, the learning and the overall performance of campaigns is exponentially improved over the methods of even a few short years ago.  The joining/bundling of these resources certainly makes great sense.  Marketing decisions are made quicker and lead to greater success by virtue of technology. 

Perhaps marketers of any scale and budget can cobble together (not in a bad way) similar services from disparate service providers and get, if not seamlessly, a similar solution set?  Just a thought for those who may not think they can afford to partner with these powerhouse organizations.  But it's worth a call to check...these days we never know!

About Ogilvy North America

Ogilvy North America, is the largest unit of The Ogilvy Group agency network, a subsidiary of WPP Group plc (Nasdaq: WPPGY). It has offices in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Detroit, Durham, Minneapolis, Denver, and throughout Canada. Ogilvy North America brings together all the capabilities of the Ogilvy network to provide integrated marketing solutions to the agency's clients. It includes Ogilvy & Mather Advertising, OgilvyEntertainment, OgilvyOne, OgilvyInteractive, Neo@Ogilvy, Ogilvy Healthworld, Ogilvy Public Relations and OgilvyAction.  Visit www.ogilvy.com.

About Pluris

Pluris enables marketers to optimize the value of each consumer touch resulting in higher conversion on sales, marketing, and service interactions. Utilizing next-generation data and analytical platforms, Pluris helps marketers to better understand their customers, generate key insights from their behavior, and deliver the most appropriate offer across traditional and interactive messaging channels. From its offices in Framingham, MA and Greenwood Village, CO, Pluris has built a solid track record of improving marketing productivity for large organizations with hundreds of users across multiple locations and lines of business. For additional information, please contact Pluris at 508-663-1095 or visit www.plurisinc.com.

About Unica

Unica Corporation (Nasdaq: UNCA) is a leading global provider of enterprise marketing management (EMM) software and services. The most comprehensive EMM suite on the market today, Unica's Affinium(R) software streamlines the entire marketing process from analysis and planning to project management, execution and measurement. More than 800 companies worldwide depend on Unica for their enterprise marketing management solution. Unica is headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts with offices around the globe. For more information, visit www.unica.com.

Comments

[Alden Cushman]

Hello Steve,

So, this alliance provides a new twist on the old agency solution. In this case new program execution technology is provided by Pluris and Unica, though the underlying value of thier services are a little more ongoing in nature than the traditional agency solution. Granted that some of the segmentation and targeting process can be better, Pluris and Unica offer a lot of ongoing data and program optimization and tracking which a client will only really recognize if they establish an ongoing realtionship with the three partner alliance. In that case, it would be much more like outsourcing a rather significant part of your internal marketing function which actually quite a few organizations are contemplating in this era of extreme belt tightening. The challenge is how do you truly differentiate your company and its products and services if you rely increasingly on industry standard services (such as provided by this alliance) that can be purchased by any of your competitors? If you are one of the first to sign up and benefit than there is some differentiation, but that will wear away rather quickly once others jump on board and receive the same benefit. Who do you think will benefit most from this type of alliance?
Alden Cushman
SiriusDecisions

[Steven Gollob]

Hi Alden:

You make some good points. In my view, one of the over arching side effects, here, is the increased awareness of the critical importance of good data management and analytical tool adoption across the marketing organization. It also highlights the growing popularity of "Marketing Superplatforms".

I think the earliest beneficiaries of this alliance (or any aggregated offering delivered through a huge agency model) will be to the existing clients as well as those clients who may be using the "traditional" agency services of an Ogilvy but may have been driving an in-house analytics set and either a home-grown or off-the-shelf EMM platform. Just a fancy of saying that it's the basic idea of "one stop shop", I suppose.

I also see a strong positive follow-on accelerating effect for smaller...and perhaps more precisely focused (segment wise) ISV's and service providers in the same space as Pluris and/or Unica. It's an nice adoption success story at which the smaller players may point to illustrate the accepted need for such products/services for marketers.

Thanks again, Alden!

Steve
www.upshotinstitute.com