As automated software solutions have taken off for everything from email marketing to digital advertising to customer relationship management, the business of marketing has shifted from mostly "guesswork" to a data operation in the cloud.
If Adobe's acquisition path and Oracle’s recent, significant enhancements to their marketing cloud operations are any indication, the automated marketing business is booming, driven by the rapidly growing digital environment.
Digital advertising —with its ability to serve up numbers and charts and graphs that showcase the customer acquisition process down to a decimal point — is increasingly where the money flows in terms of marketing budgets.