In February 2016, ExchangeWire published a feature that analysed Gartner's latest Magic Quadrant for Digital Marketing Hubs. Four months later (May 2016), Gartner has just released its Magic Quadrant for Multichannel Campaign Management. 

In this feature, we aim to discover: Is there objectivity in Gartner's Magic Quadrants? What is the difference between a ‘Digital Marketing Hub’ and ‘Multichannel Campaign Management’? Does arbitrary categorisation help buyers? Seeing beyond ‘smoke and mirrors’, and what buyers should be focussing on as they navigate the extremely fragmented ad tech waters.

What is the difference between a ‘Digital Marketing Hub’ and ‘Multichannel Campaign Management’?

Not much.

Gartner defines ‘Digital Marketing Hub’ as:

“A digital marketing hub provides marketers and applications with standardised access to audience profile data, content, workflow elements, messaging, and common analytic functions for orchestrating and optimising multichannel campaigns, conversations, experiences, and data collection across online and offline channels, both manually and programmatically.

“It typically includes a bundle of native marketing applications and capabilities; but it is extensible through published services with which certified partners can integrate.”

‘Multichannel Campaign Management’ is defined as:

“The multichannel campaign management (MCCM) market comprises vendors that seek to orchestrate company communications and marketing offers to customer segments across channels, such as websites, mobile, social, direct mail, call centres and email.”

Whilst the language is different in the two reports, the requirements for entry are very similar: platforms should enable marketers to:

– Activate campaigns across audience segments

– Natively analyse multichannel campaign data

– Natively optimise across multiple channels

– Collect data across online and offline channels

We noticed that a number of behemoths appeared in both reports: Oracle, Adobe, Marketo, Salesforce, Experian, and IBM. However, there were a significant number of companies that appeared in the first report (Digital Marketing Hubs) that did not appear in the second report, despite meeting many of the criteria: Marin Software, MediaMath, Krux, Turn, RocketFuel, DataXu, Ignition One, and Neustar.

Gar Smyth, VP marketing and sales enablement from DataXu said: “Both reports, MCCM and DMH, cover essentially the same category – marketing automation solutions that attempt to unify the customer experience across multiple channels. What’s new is the realisation that programmatic advertising technology capabilities are now being included in the multichannel marketing tech stack. Traditionally, multichannel tools employed by marketers have been mostly focused lower in the marketing funnel and unify communication to known individuals. Programmatic advertising allows marketers to find and engage unknown prospects at a person-by-person level and convert them to known individuals, unifying upper- and lower-funnel tactics.”

We invited MediaMath, Turn, IgnitionOne, RocketFuel, Neustar, Marin Software, and Sizmek to comment – a few did not reply, most declined, and many told us they didn’t want to comment because they feared that doing so would harm their relationship with Gartner and might impact their position in future MQs. This speaks volumes about how much control and influence Gartner has over the evaluation of ad tech solutions.

Does arbitrary categorisation help buyers?

In short – no. The reality is, no two ad tech buyers have the exact same requirements; therefore, creating arbitrary categories is not going to help fuel informed decision making.

Marketers’ ad tech requirements vary based on: integration of CRM, marketing and sales data, tag management, and strategy. Requirements may span several of Gartner’s Magic Quadrants; if a buyer knows this and refers to, let’s say, the DMH MQ and the MCCM MQ, they may end up under the impression that only the companies that appear in both reports meet their requirements.

Continually placing Oracle, Adobe, Salesforce, etc. in the ‘Leader’ category and leaving smaller players in the ‘Niche Player’ category is not helpful

Appearing in a Gartner MQ is not simple. There is an associated cost, not to mention the time and resource allocation that is needed to complete the (seemingly endless) questions about features, roadmap, clients, revenue, etc.

It’s no coincidence that the companies that appear in both reports are those with massive marketing budgets and resources.

We counted eight companies that appeared in the first MQ of the year (DMH), but not the second (MCCM), despite meeting the majority of requirements for inclusion in the second report.

What should ad tech buyers focus on?

When looking to partner with an ad tech vendor, it is important to clearly establish the business goals – think beyond marketing: What is the business trying to achieve? Customer retention? Customer acquisition? A single customer view? Brand awareness? Revenue? Then think about how to achieve those objectives and work out the dependencies.

Identification of step one is crucial, as is successful implementation of step one.

It is helpful to bring in all potential vendors early on and explain the business objectives and goals and the plan to achieve those goals. Any vendor that tries to steer the conversation in a different direction is not the right kind of partner – vendors that do this are looking out for themselves and prioritising their own revenue and success. Choose vendors that take the time to listen and understand your objectives and come up with a plan to support you in achieving those objectives, even if it means waiting a few months.