IBM’s Watson Marketing spinoff launches with agile strategy

Back in April, IBM’s Watson Marketing announced plans to spin off to form a standalone marketing company under the new ownership of New York-based private equity firm Centerbridge Partners.

The new company, which is still yet to be named, launched on Monday.  The company aims to deliver marketing automation, marketing analytics and content management solutions. 

In separating from IBM’s larger umbrella, Watson Marketing should be able to focus more keenly on its marketing customers’ needs.

“Marketers and advertisers are burdened with mediocre technology and disappointed that most of the promises MarTech and AdTech companies make aren’t kept,” CEO Mark Simpson wrote in a blog post. “They’re being asked to change the way they work to retro-fit to the tools they use, rather than the other way around. The difficulty of making sense of their data is made even tougher by consumers questioning if it should be available to marketers in the first place. We’ve leaned heavily into technology, but seem to be losing the inherent humanity needed to actually move people.” 

While positioning itself separately from its former parent, the new company also aims to adopt an agile approach to help drive its competition with other marketing cloud vendors – notably Adobe, Oracle and Salesforce.

“With over 1,000 people on day one, we’re far from a small company. And yet, we’re also able to be one of the nimblest and most responsive to industry changes of any other marketing cloud,” Simpson added. “We aren’t weighed down by unrelated businesses and large company structures like our competitors, but we have the experience and capabilities to match them and are able to focus 100% on the marketer.” 

Why we should care

In separating from IBM, the new Watson organization is able to move away from some of the antiquated processes of the legacy organizations, allowing it to adopt an agile growth strategy. As Simpson noted, it is not a small company, but launching with an agile-first mindset could play a key role in how the company evolves and maintains its competitive edge against other martech goliaths. 

More on the news

• The name of the newly-launched entity is slated to be announced later this month.
• The company plans to “double down” on AI by investing in an experienced team of data scientists
• IBM marketing and commerce solutions include Campaign Automation, Marketing Assistant, Media Optimizer, Customer Experience Analytics, Content Hub, Real-Time Personalization, Personalized Search, Universal Behavior Exchange, Intelligent Bidder, Price & Promotion Optimization and Payments Gateway.
• Centerbridge plans to establish a board of directors with deep marketing solution experience.

About The Author

Jennifer Cannon

Jennifer Videtta Cannon serves as Third Door Media's Senior Editor, covering topics from email marketing and analytics to CRM and project management. With over a decade of organizational digital marketing experience, she has overseen digital marketing operations for NHL franchises and held roles at tech companies including Salesforce, advising enterprise marketers on maximizing their martech capabilities. Jennifer formerly organized the Inbound Marketing Summit and holds a certificate in Digital Marketing Analytics from MIT Sloan School of Management.