Welcome to the Acoustic Marketing Cloud

Welcome to the Acoustic Marketing Cloud. There have been reverberations around the marketing industry with the announcement of Centerbridge completing its acquisition of select IBM Watson Marketing portfolio products, including Campaign Automation (formerly Silverpop), Media Optimizer, Tealeaf CX and Universal Behaviour Exchange. The new organisation is to be called Acoustic, though it remains to be seen what brands may pop up within this newly formed real estate for these key product sets. What is clear is that nothing will change overnight, and it will be a reassuring ‘business as usual’ for clients and partners in the Watson space for many months to come.

The key takeaway though is the new organisation’s positioning, which is actually very interesting indeed. From the original 4th April 2019 press release, this innocuous sounding line gives great insight into what is to come: “Centerbridge intends to form a standalone company that will deliver a modern, comprehensive portfolio of solutions to meet the CMO’s biggest challenges across marketing and advertising”. This tells us that Acoustic is positioning itself to sit astride the worlds of Martech and Adtech, where traditional cloud products tend to service one or the other. Within the portfolio of Acoustic is Campaign, IBMs formidable digital marketing communications platform, and a soon to be announced paid media solution.

It’s not hard to see why either; a deep two-way integration between the two products could see significant benefits in aligning DSP/DMP programmatic advertising with outbound activity (e.g. email and app push), both in terms of additional reach and cost savings. When you add to that the unlimited data connectivity options that come with UBX, now called Acoustic Exchange, with the web application monitoring capabilities of Tealeaf CX, now called Experience Analytics, an interestingly broad and compelling proposition starts to emerge.

“Acoustic is filling a major void in the industry as a true platform that’s entirely devoted to the marketer. As an independent company, our goal is to bring back a personal approach to the art of marketing by investing in products that work together across the entire marketing ecosystem to help enhance creativity and truly move people,” said Mark Simpson, Acoustic’s Chief Executive Officer.

However things end up, I think we can say for sure, Acoustic is going to be a platform to watch in the coming year.

For more information about how Purple Square could help you maximise your marketing spend, get in touch today!