Playing Peacemaker in the ‘Game of Clouds’

In HBO’s uber popular drama series “Game of Thrones,” a major plot line revolves around the “War of the Five Kings” – an ongoing war between five powerful families over who shall sit atop the iron throne of power.

In digital marketing, we have another type of battle brewing – call it the “Game of Clouds,” in which technology giants such as Adobe, IBM and others are fighting for the hearts and minds (and dollars) of marketers with a growing suite of cloud marketing applications.

This cloud battle has now been well documented, most recently by Andrew Jones, an analyst for the Altimeter Group, who lists Adobe, Salesforce, Oracle and IBM as the premier marketing clouds. We would add Microsoft and Google to this list of “power marketing clouds,” but there are several others on the move as well – Marketo, for example, recently announced an expanded suite of products.

So why the cloud building boom? Each vendor is vying to become the de facto hub for enterprise digital marketing. Customers, meanwhile, can benefit by leveraging one vendor for their many needs. In addition, marketing clouds offer the potential to drive more profitable cross-channel customer interactions.

But the “Game of the Clouds” is messy, leaving customers confused and on edge as to which marketing cloud is the best.

Fortunately, they no longer have to worry about picking one cloud over the other. Through Tealium, marketers can build their own cloud from the best pieces of the digital marketing ecosystem, whether its entire marketing clouds or best-of-breed point solutions.

Here are the benefits of building your own cloud with Tealium:

• Choice – One of the limitations of a marketing cloud is that its breadth of functionality is ultimately limited. No matter how many solutions they build or buy, they can’t possibly cover all of your digital marketing needs. With Tealium tag management, you can pick and choose at will – leverage enterprise analytics and testing from Adobe, email marketing from Salesforce.com, search marketing from Google, and a whole raft of point solutions in between. With Tealium, you can easily connect these cloud programs via a foundational ‘data layer’ – just as if they were from a single marketing cloud. Only, it’s your cloud. Tealium has hundreds of major global enterprises, representing thousands of top brands, already leveraging this unique approach.

• Power – One of the benefits of an integrated cloud stack is the ability to connect the customer journey across channels, and drive more profitable interactions. With a marketing cloud, the ability to easily share customer profiles across applications is limited to the number of solutions under its control. Although many marketing clouds say they integrate with any solution, they don’t support a wide range of potentially competitive vendors. Tealium, on the other hand, offers a vendor-neutral platform (think Switzerland) to sync your best-of-breed cloud applications, enabling you to connect a much broader set of applications and data to help drive more meaningful cross-channel engagements. At Tealium, we call this unified marketing. Our customers refer to it as the ‘holy grail’ of marketing.

Although we don’t know how the “War of the Five Kings” turns out in HBO’s hit drama (I’m waiting breathlessly), we can hope the “Game of Clouds” has taken a peaceful turn with the emergence of Tealium and unified marketing as an easy way to maximize your marketing cloud investments.

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Bonus: Read more from Constellation Research Analyst Dr. Natalie Petouhoff about how Tealium’s unique, vendor-neutral approach is impacting the ‘cloud wars.’