• by Cory Treffiletti , Featured Contributor, July 13, 2011

There are clouds everywhere, but the future is really shiny and bright!  Documents are in the cloud, music is in the cloud, and most advertising technically resides in the cloud, if you examine the fact that ad serving basically represents one of the earliest cloud-based systems in use on the Web today.  With the forecast so cloudy, how can marketers evaluate this trend and put it to their own good use?

Think of the cloud as a marketing tool in two primary categories: marketing management and marketing execution.  There is a third opportunity for the cloud to become an ad vehicle, but that is a little ways off yet.

For marketing management, the cloud means those sharing and back-up systems that make it easier and more efficient to sell through, provide information on, and approve your marketing efforts.  It is not an end-product solution, but a tool for saving time - a benefit every marketer can appreciate. The cloud enables you to share documents quickly, and tools like YouSendIt and Cloud (for the Mac) make it uber-simple to post documents and send them to your colleagues. 

In the old days, files that were over 5MB became a problem for most email systems, and would clog up a recipient's inbox.  Nowadays these services allow you to send a URL to download a deck or creative, and review it wherever you are.  You can even go that extra step and use tools like Basecamp and DropBox to create virtual servers for sharing larger files, and even whole folders of content.  These dramatically improve the flow of communication, allowing anyone to access any document from anywhere (even your mobile device).  They make managing your marketing much easier.

Since more and more of media is becoming cloud-based, using it for marketing execution seems a natural next step.  The days of media buyers doing runs in @plan or Media Metrix, using those to develop excel-based media plans and create a reports, are going to be a thing of the past.  It is very feasible that in the next two years, all media planning, buying and execution will be cloud-based, as more and more agencies are creating DSPs and private exchanges.

The trend is certainly headed towards media automation, but whether or not it ends there, the truth is these Web-based systems are more efficient than the reams of paper that get wasted printing out presentations and recommendations.  It's a far cry from the old days of media planning, which included graph paper, tape, white-out and acetates. 

Media execution with ad exchanges is already cloud-based, and so are Google Ad-Words, Ad-Sense and a number of other self-serve systems. As more large publishers provide these solutions, more agency buyers are going to create their own "digital buying dashboards" for managing their buys and spitting our reports.  Doubleclick laid this groundwork, and many other solutions are coming to fill in the holes.  The cloud becomes a tool for execution that also serves to save time and give more control to the marketer.

There is an untapped B2B opportunity in the cloud, as well as a nascent B2C solution.  The tools I mentioned above may end up with a premium solution and a less expensive solution that could have marketing baked in.  It's not a foregone conclusion, but when you amass a large enough audience in a targeted category such as this, someone is going to want to reach those folks. 

The same goes for iCloud and the other new cloud-based music systems that are indeed consumer-facing.  Each of these represents a large-scale consumer environment. I will be surprised if Apple and Amazon don't eventually find ways to integrate ads or marketing into these platforms.   This will be where cloud-based marketing goes. Just give it some time.

As I said, every cloud has a silver lining.  This one is currently taking on more of a "golden" hue as VCs and marketers are seeing the immediate financial benefits, but this is only the beginning.