Marketing applications are lagging way behind

“Nearly every business application now has its equivalent offered over the internet”, Nicholas Carr, “The Big Switch”, page 72.

Except marketing most applications.

There is almost no application that you can not find online. You can find accounting applications online. You can find sales applications. You can find customer management systems. Word processing, spreadsheets and presentation software were once the domain of Microsoft Office. But now you can use Google Docs or a host of other competitors to accomplish the same tasks in a Cloud Computing environment. One of Google’s aims is to ride the trend of digital convergence (See the April 18th Blog) to overtake Microsoft Office.

How many marketing applications can you name that exist on the internet? How many are available for the advertiser to use? You can find email applications and basic tracking applications. In the last few years online tools such as Google’s Adwords and Yahoo’s Overture have made major impacts in online advertising. But what about traditional media buying? What about ad production, creative, media planning, asset management, ad research and everything else needed to create a message, communicate it to potential customers and track the results?

According to Peter Drucker, The “Father” of Management, there is nothing more important for a business than marketing -
“Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two--and only two--basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs. Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business."

If marketing is so important to a business, then why does it seem that the applications associated with marketing seem to be father behind than any other part of business?

There are many historical reasons and I would invite you to comment on them here. Without diluting the conversation too much, let me suggestion that one reason is that it wasn’t possible to imagine the scope of the entire process of marketing with limited systems that have access to limited information until recently. With the Cloud, this can change. Petrabytes of information exist out there on every customer, every ad and every creative piece ever created. This information is actually the basis of value for most “Internet” companies. Microsoft’s bid of $44.6 billion for Yahoo! was not for computers and software. It was for their information. By leveraging the information from MSN, Microsoft and then Yahoo!, they will be able to produce models that are an advertisers dream. Microsoft’s recent purchase of aQuantive for $6 billion in cash was with the sole purpose of maximizing the value of Microsoft’s information. By producing their own Cloud and systems, they are betting that they can target the right messages to the right people – the “Holy Grail” of marketing.

Google is certainly not laying down. It is reported that they recently opened a Cloud Computing center in Oregon that houses hundreds of thousands of computers to operate the Google Cloud dedicated to maximizing their information for the benefit of those who drive their revenue – advertisers.

This consolidation of information and power is a very real threat to the traditional brokers of power for advertising, the advertising agencies. Founder and Chairman of WPP, Sir Martin Sorrell, has been vocal about his companies friend and enemy (“frenemy”) status with Google. Every time Google opens Adwords to another media type, it steps on the toes of those who used to control this area. Google now does newspapers and radio. Can magazines, television, cable and outdoor be far behind?

Cloud computing is already changing the landscape of marketing. Companies that can adapt and take advantage of the power and cost advantages offered by companies like Google, Microsoft and MRG-International (My Company) will enable their businesses the competitive advantages mentioned in the previous blog: cost, power and intelligence,

Here’s our example of Cloud Computing for marketing.
MuseWorx, the Marketing Operating System is the first application of its kind designed to bring Cloud Computing to marketing applications. Hundreds of service providers are lining up to integrate their marketing applications into MuseWorx to give their customers the advantages of automated services. MuseWorx has no limits. It is expandable to any size and the supporting server farms are growing exponentially. MuseWorx is growing. Marketing Service Providers from every spectrum of advertising are plugging in their services for MuseWorx users…expanding the intelligence of the system. MuseWorx is global. Already it is used in 77 countries representing hundreds of thousands of committed users.

The scale at which MuseWorx is growing and reaching is the scale of the Cloud. Cloud Computing as a concept is not new. It is however timely. Marketing applications will catch up to other forms of business applications online. They may even pass them in significance soon.