Taking marketing from cost center to profit center #theCUBE #Oracle #DemandGen #MME16 #ModernMarketingExperience #SiliconANGLE by Marlene Den Bleyker | May 2, 2016 From the enterprise standpoint, traditional marketing has long been thought of as a function to aid sales. Today’s marketing departments are equipped to do much more with technology and are now the key to a company’s profitability. In an interview with Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during the Oracle Marketing Cloud: Modern Marketing Experience, James Mullarney, VP of global alliances and channels for Oracle Marketing Cloud & David Lewis, CEO of DemandGen International, Inc., discussed the latest marketing technology and where to get started. DemandGen is a consulting firm specializing in helping people with marketing technology. Lewis started the company nine years ago because he found that there needed to be a new breed of agency to specifically help companies with the use and adoption of marketing technology. He said, “I came from the client side … I was using Eloqua [a marketing automation product from Oracle] and spent three years building marketing at a company called Ellie Mae, and I saw just how phenomenal the tools were and said we should help people with these tools.” Success factors and early wins According to Lewis, most companies that invest in a marketing automation system are using some type of digital marketing email solution and doing what he calls “batching and blasting” campaigns without any direction. When they discover a platform like Eloqua and the marketing cloud, that mentality changes and they can see a way to do systemic marketing by nurturing, scoring and tightly aligning sales and marketing. “They see it as a tremendous evolution from where they are and where they need to get to, and that evolution, sometimes called a transformation, that’s the challenge,” he said. He continued by noting that if you don’t take the time to really align sales and marketing and take a platform like Eloqua and integrate it properly with the customer relationship management, you are not going to get full value out of it. Lewis feels the secret to success is really going “all in” and having a strategic vision of where you want to take your marketing. He sees many companies retooling and creating a digital experience for customers and prospects. The new profit center “My vision and hope is that … marketing is viewed as a profit center and never referred to as a cost center,” said Lewis. He believes that the marketing department’s function has evolved and changed. He expressed how marketing is now the center of the universe because it is demand generation, sales, commerce and engagement. “Marketing goes from the top of the funnel all the way down,” he said. “Marketing is having so much impact.” According to Mullarney, DemandGen is unique in its ability to help Oracle’s best customers navigate the complexity and finding ways to create the finite touchpoints using all the best parts of in the technology network. “They help the customer find the best fit and nicely integrate it all together,” he said.