With ATS London and dmexco just around the corner and ‘bridging worlds’ on the bill, Ian Woolley, GM EMEA at Ensighten (pictured) predicts that one of the key discussion points at, and following, the London and Cologne conferences will be open marketing platforms versus closed marketing suites.

It won’t have failed to escape the attention of dmexco attendees that Adobe, Oracle, Google, and Facebook have been on a tech spending spree during the past few years; and one that would even make the eyes of chairmen at the Premiership’s top-spending football clubs water. Adobe, the Goliath of marketing technology, has bought Neolane, Omniture, and Efficient Frontier, to name a few, in a bid to build out its marketing cloud. Oracle has been no different, most recently acquiring Maxymiser, which will sit alongside Eloqua, Compendium, Responsys, and BlueKai in order to offer a full suite of marketing tech to businesses.

It’s the cloud-based equivalent of the football transfer window, where your favourite team may bag that 30-goal-a-season striker you’ve been dreaming of, but could also end up with a journeyman full-back as panic sets in with the clock ticking on deadline day. As a football fan, you renew your season ticket and take your seat in the stands; but, while the new striker has you on your feet in every match, the defender is hardly worth turning up for.

We expect large scale enterprise tech companies such as Salesforce, Oracle, and IBM to begin the drive to acquire significant players in the ad tech space in an attempt at putting together a winning marketing team. In turn, the big enterprise companies offer marketers a 'suite' of tools, made up from different acquired players across marketing technology categories, such as analytics, personalisation, email marketing, and many more. Unfortunately, this limits marketers’ options and negatively impacts a brand's ROI. What happens is that marketers buy into these suites to leverage an analytics solution that works for them, and are then tied into using the suite’s personalisation tool that actually doesn’t work best for them at all.

As talk at dmexco turns to bridging worlds, it strikes me that it’s important for the ad tech industry to achieve a sense of collaboration for itself, as well as for its clients, by operating open marketing platforms that allow us to truly work together. Given today’s rapid pace of innovation by nimble companies, effective cross-channel marketing undoubtedly requires tools that are specific to different marketing disciplines; as the right tech for social media, customer relationship management, managing web tags, or analytics is likely to come from different providers. Hence the need for a neutral, non-biased, open solution that’s more focused on addressing the client's needs. Brands will also be looking for different specialities and making different choices depending on a variety of variables, such as their business objectives, where their data is housed and what channel is used most popular within their customer base. The empowerment that comes with making their own choices about which vendors to swap in and out, dependent on performance, means that brands can gain significant leverage over any large enterprise vendor selling the suite, which translates to better negotiation and pricing for the brand.

Furthermore, with technology being as fluid as it is, and the scope of digital marketing being so vast, it’s impossible to expect a single vendor to offer the definitive solution. If we think about social media management, analytics, or retargeting – they are all such different disciplines, meaning in a closed suite you may find some of the tech is genuinely the best fit for your business, but you’ll also be stuck with weak links. In contrast, open marketing clouds are more like a fantasy football team, allowing brands to incorporate best-of-breed solutions and technologies that specific to a brand’s needs.

As an enterprise solution, with innovative clients like TUI, British Airways, Clarks, and John Lewis, we like to focus on what we do best, which is to help enterprise brands collect, own and act on their customer data across the consumer journey. In addition, we leverage the Ensighten Open Marketing Platform to integrate with all third-party marketing vendors across all channels and devices so that the marketing technology ecosystem can do what it does best and complement our offering. It seems like a better use of time than putting anything second-rate out into an already overcrowded market – but, more than that, it’s better for brands, which is something that will only see them increase their use of digital marketing technology to deliver better customer experiences. Surely that’s something we can all get behind?