IBM And Facebook Announce Marketing Partnership

Personalized marketing that effectively targets the right person at the right time is a highly prized goal of advertising across the board. With this in mind, IBM and Facebook have announced a marketing partnership to make Facebook’s Custom Audience insights available to brands that use IBM’s Marketing Cloud applications to manage advertising campaigns.

Jay Henderson, director for IBM Commerce, explained that Facebook is the first company to join IBM’s THINKLab, where team members from the two companies can work with advertisers to focus their campaigns on personalized customer experiences.

“What really sets this apart is our marketing cloud and customer analytics capabilities,” said Henderson. “Over the past few years, IBM has invested $24 billion in analytics. This investment now includes our latest innovation, Journey Analytics. Now our clients, including some of the world’s largest banks, retailers and insurance companies, can apply these analytics to the reach of Facebook. This improved precision will drive more relevant advertisements to consumers on Facebook that ultimately create improved customer experience.”

For advertisers that use IBM’s Marketing Cloud applications, the value of this partnership will be combining the data that marketers have on customers, such as purchasing behavior, responses to email marketing campaigns and call center inquiries, with Facebook data including likes, comments and complaints. Therefore, IBM’s data analytics will allow marketers to communicate with more finely targeted audiences on Facebook.

IBM provided an example to illustrate how the companies’ combined capabilities could be utilized. A retailer could identify Facebook users that are interested in long-distance running, and could then deliver targeted deals based on the type of equipment that they’re interested in, as well as their location. This concept could certainly be applied to auto dealerships and businesses in other sectors as well.

“Our clients have urged us to bring Facebook into the equation because it is so important,” said Deepak Advani, general manager of IBM Commerce. “Facebook is where consumers spend a lot of their time.”

Facebook explains that its motive with this partnership is to make the ads on its network more useful for users. “For us, having better, more relevant ads for consumers is very, very important,” said Blake Chandlee, vice president of partnerships for Facebook. “We both want to connect people with brands. Our objectives are very much aligned.”

Certainly, IBM is hoping that this alliance will give marketers an additional reason to use its Marketing Cloud applications, as opposed to using competing solutions from Adobe, Marketo, Salesforce or others. In mid-April, Marketo announced a similar partnership with LinkedIn, with a focus on business-to-business lead generation.

When it comes to privacy concerns, Chandlee explained that while Facebook can identify users by their names and email addresses, this information is removed before data about consumer behavior and preferences are used for analysis. “Personal data never flows back and forth,” he said.