News

A recent survey of chief marketing officers (CMOs) offers a mixed bag of predictions for the U.S. economy in general – and for the B2B market in particular.

First, the bad news: According to the Duke University Fuqua School of Business CMO Survey of 528 marketing executives, just 29% said they were optimistic about the state of the U.S. economy. That's down more than 34% percentage points from the previous survey in February, 2012.

The number of respondents who said they were pessimistic about the economy grew from 8.5% in February to 36% in the current survey, taken during July and August 2012.

Brainshark, a provider of online and mobile video presentations, recently announced a partnership with enterprise software vendor Blackboard Inc. The deal will integrate the Brainshark content creation tools with Blackboard Learn for Sales, the company's cloud-based learning management solution.

The Brainshark integration will allow Blackboard Learn for Sales users to add voiceovers, along with video clips, survey and test questions, and document attachments to PowerPoint decks and other attachments. Blackboard Learn for Sales users can use the integrated offering to create interactive online and mobile video presentations for corporate e-learning courses.

Marketing automation vendor Act-On Software, yesterday announced a new partner program titled Act-On Partner Exchange (APEX). The APEX program is designed to bring together Act-On customers and partners. The new offering provides is a new resource for its customers from diverse vertical marketing that can help enhance their online marketing, while offering its partners access to innovative companies.

"We've already seen an exponential increase in customers working with APEX partners," said Shawn Naggiar, Chief Revenue Officer, Act-On Software. "APEX has been designed to be a simple and effective program that encourages partners to easily join the Act-On ecosystem, and for customers to find products and services to optimize their marketing investment."

Sitecore, a Web content management and digital marketing software company, has announced the results to its recent marketing industry study: “The Multichannel Maturity Mandate.” The report, conducted with Forrester, includes responses from more than 270 marketing professionals across a wide range of industries and geographic regions.

The study indicates that senior level marketers need to adopt a multichannel customer engagement model to increase marketing performance, according to a company release. Most (77%) of marketers agree they will drive more sales and profit by evolving into an effective multichannel organization, while a smaller but significant number (35%) said they have lost business because they are not able to integrate customer interactions across digital, social, mobile and offline channels.

The wait is over: Marketing automation is now a publicly traded technology. Eloqua (Nasdaq: ELOQ) went public on August 2 – the first such firm to do so – issuing eight million shares at an opening price of $11.50 per share.

The company's stock price climbed as high as $15 during the first week of trading and at press time was trading near $13.92 a share.

The initial public offering (IPO) places Eloqua’s market capitalization at $368 million, or 4.4 times its sales of $85 million in the 12 months through June 2012, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The Wall Street Journal reported that Eloqua’s revenue increased 42% to $45 million this fiscal year, although the company reported a net loss of $5.5 million, compared with a loss of $3.5 million in the first half of the prior fiscal year.