Contact: Scott Denne
IBM’s acquisitions of Unica and Silverpop basically bookended a series of deals earlier this decade when enterprise software vendors rushed for marketing applications to push to the CMO suite. That’s what makes today’s reach for digital ad agency Resource/Ammirati surprising: Big Blue shows that its strategy for winning the CMO is shifting toward services and away from software.
Resource/Ammirati is among the largest independent ad agencies to mix creative services with digital marketing. It will join IBM Interactive Experience, the digital marketing services unit that Big Blue created in 2014 by blending its existing digital agency with researchers from its customer experience lab. The addition of Resource/Ammirati brings additional digital marketing expertise and, more importantly, a creative ad agency that develops marketing strategies and ad campaigns across online and offline media, having developed TV campaigns for Labatt Breweries and Birchbox, built mobile apps for Sherwin-Williams and designed Procter & Gamble’s e-commerce platform.
In marketing software, IBM has a set of loosely related marketing apps and seems to have rightly recognized that being half-heartedly committed to building a full marketing stack isn’t going to win the day. In IT, where IBM’s strength lies, buyers have a standard set of needs and a standard set of hardware and applications to fill those needs. Marketing is more complex. New categories and channels of customer engagement appear all the time and the best marketers are constantly making adjustments and running tests to optimize performance. Building a software stack to keep up is challenging – services are more flexible.
IBM’s move into digital marketing and agency services lessens the competition with enterprise software firms, though it invites competition from other IT service providers as well as the incumbents in the CMO suite: large agency holding companies. For its part, the latter group has become more active in nabbing IT-related services. In just the past two days, we’ve seen a couple of ad agencies purchase mobile development shops (WPP’s acquisition of ArcTouch and St. Ives’ reach for The App Business). And let’s not forget Publicis Groupe’s $3.7bn pickup of Web development firm Sapient, among other deals with a technology flare.
While IBM has a massive services business beyond marketing, it hasn’t been a careful steward of those assets of late. Last quarter, continuing a trend from 2015, Big Blue’s services revenue declined 11%, a faster rate than its software business.
Jordan Edmiston Group advised Resource/Ammirati on its sale.
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