Pivotal Sees 'Blurring Lines' In Marketing And Ad Tech For Salesforce.com, Facebook, Twitter

Pivotal commented Wednesday on the Salesforce.com, inc.

Active Audiences product and how it has blurred the "worlds of marketing tech and ad tech, contributing to growth of ad products" from Facebook Inc

and Twitter Inc

. According to analyst Brian Wieser, "Active Audiences can integrate a marketer's customer data from one of Salesforce.com's Sales or Service Cloud products, automating the importation of that data into Marketing Cloud tools which buy ad inventory from Facebook via its Custom Audiences product or from Twitter via its similar Tailored Audience product." Active Audiences allows marketers to target audiences based known email addresses or exclude those addresses from marketing efforts. Wieser noted that Custom Audiences had been popular for Facebook marketing and that while the total spending had been a small share, it illustrated "the blurring lines between marketing technology and advertising made more significant coming from Salesforce.com given their relative scale in this space." The analyst note suggested that the "elimination of process-based friction" made it more likely for larger budgets to be allocated for Facebook marketing with similar benefits for Twitter. Wieser concluded that Active Audiences would "introduce automation to a feature that would have been laborious and time-consuming" and would represent "a better-integrated overall offering from Salesforce.com." The analyst cited Facebook as the firm's "favorite internet-focused company" with a Buy rating and $106 price target. Salesforce.com was also rated Buy with an $82 price target while Twitter was rated Hold with a $51 price target.