• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, July 16, 2014

Oracle has released an automated audience lookalike modeling feature in its marketing cloud offering with technology gained from the company's BlueKai acquisition. The feature works with data characteristics stored in the brand's management platform.

The initiative builds on Oracle's commitment to help CMOs and global marketing teams execute marketing campaigns that have a "measurable" impact on revenue. The latest multivariate audience modeling feature comes from Oracle's BlueKai acquisition.

John Stetic, group vice president of products for the Oracle Marketing Cloud at Oracle, said it would typically take a team of data scientists a weeks to come up with new audience segment ideas, but the tool automates that process. It lets brands reach potential customers through a variety of channels like search and display, he said.

BlueKai has a variety of third-party category data sets, such as travel and automotive.  The platform pulls characteristics into a data feed to create an audience segments. "It can create an audience of people in market for travel who have come to a Web site in the last 30 days," Stetic said. "The technology can take that audience and push it into other channels, uploaded in real time."

One of those channels, mobile, also got a lift through technology Oracle acquired earlier this year in Push IO, which manages billions of mobile notification messages sent by marketers, for its subsidiary, Responsys. The technology works with iBeacons. Changes in the technology means brands can integrate multiple types of campaigns. Steve Krause, group vice president of product management for the Oracle Marketing Cloud at Oracle, describes the shift as "cross-channel multistage" marketing for mobile.

While improvements in Push IO do not connect today with changes in those made for the marketing cloud lookalike audience segments, Krause said "we're looking in the future to make announcements about how some of the data integration pieces will work among BlueKai."