Tipping point for data in marketing

IBM are good at business intelligence and on Friday they decided that showing us reports on the performance of our marketing campaigns wasn't enough when the acquired Unica for $480m

If you are into the whole marketing automation thing you will know that Unica’s software predicts customer preferences and likelihood to purchase. Then it designs marketing campaigns based on that data. The software also monitors the effectiveness of ad campaigns.

The great thing about this for me is that marketing is becoming much more adaptive these days, we collect feedback on the behaviour of our customers in real time and feed them into a database of intentions so we can act on them. Deals like IBM-Unica really highlight that data is future of marketing and will more and more prevalent.

If you are still reading.... the CEO of Unica, Yuchun Lee, was one of the MIT students involved in the blackjack card-counting teams depicted in the book “Bringing Down the House” and the movie “21.” with Kevin Spacey