• by Jess Nelson , July 31, 2017

Zeta Global is zeroing in on the Holy Grail of marketing: one-to-one personalization.

Zeta announced on Monday a strategic partnership with AppNexus to merge the latter’s programmatic advertising technology into ZetaHub, Zeta’s marketing cloud.

AppNexus’ cloud-based software optimizes programmatic online advertising, or the sale and purchase of digital ads. AppNexus benefits from the partnership through the ability to extend the company’s read with Zeta’s database of more than 350 million records.

The partnership helps position Zeta Global as a competitor with major marketing cloud companies like Salesforce, Adobe, and IBM, and the integration will also be made available to existing AppNexus clients. 

"In today's fragmented media supply landscape, it is critical that marketers have an integrated channel strategy in order to better connect with their audiences through more relevant, higher-impact marketing," states Brian O'Kelley, CEO, AppNexus.

Although many marketers specialize in specific channels, in today's multichannel environment marketers must look to people-based marketing in order to remain relevant, as opposed to solely channel-based marketing. 

The AppNexus and Zeta Global partnership is a jumping off-point for Zeta to begin delivering people-based communications across channels such as email, SMS, and digital ads. Zeta can take the CRM data and make it addressable into other channels.

For example, marketers could attempt to re-engage customers who have not been opening their emails with display ads. Zeta claims that the partnership will better sync email with display for more finite retargeting capabilities.

Soon Zeta Global’s email marketing capabilities will also be boosted with artificial intelligence.

Zeta recently acquired Boomtrain, a marketing personalization platform powered by artificial intelligence. Boomtrain was Zeta Global’s tenth acquisition in as many years, and came after the company raised $140 million in a Series F financing round in April 2017.