Campaign Management: What does Gartner's 2014 Magic Quadrant say?

A few weeks ago (on May 21 to be precise), Gartner published the latest version of its Magic Quadrant dedicated to "Multichannel Campaign Management". As some of the players present in France are represented, I'm going to give you a brief commentary on the subject.

First of all, what is the methodology? Gartner establishes its ranking based on questionnaires filled out by the solution vendors themselves and via interviews with their customers. The evaluation criteria are divided into two categories:

1. The ability to execute: functionality, sales process and pricing, market responsiveness, user experience, ...
2. The comprehensiveness of the vision: market understanding, marketing strategy, innovation, ...

This gives us a final classification according to 4 categories:

1. The leaders
2. The visionaries
3. The challengers
4. Niche players

Let's end this first part with Gartner's definition of "Multichannel Campaign Management":

"The processes of multi-channel campaign management enable companies to define, orchestrate and communicate offers, both inbound and outbound, to consumer segments through different channels, i.e. websites, mobile, social, paper mailing, call center and email."

As we can see, we are faced with solutions that are complex to deploy and that are aimed at a segment of advertisers with equally complex needs in terms of campaign management.

The players present on the French market

In the list of solutions, some players are well established in France. We will focus on some of them by comparing the current situation with the one of last year's report. We can always discuss the others in the comments :-).

Adobe (Leader)

Last year, Neolane and Adobe were already present (in the visionary category), but separately in the Gartner report. This year, following the acquisition of Neolane by Adobe, the two companies have merged and are now listed in the "Leader" category. It is probably this integration that has made Adobe gain ground, as Gartner emphasizes a solution that allows centralization of digital content management across numerous marketing tools.

Experian (Niche players)

Experian makes its first entry in the Magic Quadrant for Campaign Management. The report underlines the international presence of Experian and its integration with Experian's own data. On the negative side, Gartner mainly points out the poor graphical interface and too much focus on data, which could disappoint some users.

IBM (Leader)

IBM was at the top of the ranking last year, and that is where it is again this year. The American company is in a prime position because it covers all campaign management needs (not to mention integration with the IBM IT platform).

Salesforce / ExactTarget (Visionaries)

The acquisition of ExactTarget by Salesforce did not have much effect on the rankings, except that the ExactTarget name disappeared to make way for Salesforce. This year's report points to ExactTarget's very good growth and its move into B2B lead management. Nevertheless, it seems that most ExactTarget customers still consider ExactTarget as an email marketing solution rather than a multi-channel campaign management tool. A positioning that needs to be adjusted.

Selligent (Niche players)

Last year, Selligent made it into the Gartner rankings. One year later, the company is back in exactly the same position. The report points to a nice increase in sales via a partner network and also a nice breakthrough in B2B. However, the report highlights the risks associated with this strategy of deployment via partners. The risk is to exclude companies that do not want to go through an intermediary.

Teradata (Leaders)

Like last year, Teradata is present at the top of this ranking. The report points out the very high performance and functionality related to data management, especially the ability to create very complex segmentation models. However, the main caveat remains the lack of richness in the management of digital marketing campaigns.

Conclusions

As we can see, this market is extremely rich and there are huge differences between the solutions offered. The recent acquisitions in the email marketing industry have moved some borders. Let's also note a big absentee in this study: Microsoft. While its main competitors in the professional world are represented (Oracle, SAP, SAS, IBM, Salesforce, ...) it is the only player that has not yet invested in campaign management. To be continued in the coming months.

To access the full report, go here