• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, March 7, 2014

Omnicom Media Group's Resolution Media has partnered with Salesforce.com to offer social services through the ExactTarget Marketing Cloud. The service, dubbed Current@Resolution, supports data-driven insights, rapid content planning and creation, paid amplification, and analytics.

It has become trendy for agencies to partner with traditional enterprise companies. First Oracle acquires BlueKai and makes friends with Kenshoo, Nanigans and SHIFT. Now Resolution and Salesforce have cozied up.

Gerry Bavaro, Resolution Media chief strategy officer, said that four challenges faced by marketers drove the agency to partner with Salesforce. They range from an abundance of data to disjointed media buys. "Clients have been telling us they need to understand and become more responsive to trends and conversations," he said.

Marketers understand that campaigns must remain agile with the ability to meet consumers online and offline in real-time, but they don't know how to accomplish the task. Brands that are swimming in data also don't know how to connect the information and turn it into content.

"Many marketers and media professionals wake up in the morning and arbitrarily create content they think consumers will like and share," Bavaro said. He said that when consumers don't, Resolution's clients realize it's because they don't use the data to determine whether they should use videos, text or images to target specific customers online, and whether to push it out through search, Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.

The third challenge points to real-time advertising and integration with traditional media like television spots. The fourth means a better understanding of paid, owned and earned media. Clients want to know if the campaigns improve sales and get better sharing rates -- more than they want to know the nifty, cool things Resolution can do with the data.

Resolution also developed a data management platform based on a partnership with an unnamed company that gives the agency the ability to understand the specific demographic profiles of individuals who engage with social content and connect that information with real-time data. It also allows the agency to bring in first-party client data and use it to target social content.