Deloitte acquires another martech agency

Deloitte has picked up another digital firm, this time building out its marketing technology skills and capabilities around the Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

Sydney-based Cinder Australia has been working with Deloitte for several years and will now become part of the consulting giant’s Customer Behaviour team. Co-founder and CEO, Miguel Leone, along with COO, Daniel Tinter, will join as directors, working with consulting partner and practice lead, Steve Hallam.The agency has a total of nine staff.

The deal comes hot on the heels of Deloitte’s acquisition of Kid Neon, a virtual reality, 3D and spatial modelling group just a week ago. It’s also just a month after the consulting giant purchased The Explainers, a digital communication firm that had been working closely with Deloitte Digital as well as large Australian organisations such as Westpac, IAG, AMP and the Human Rights Commission on better communicating their brand stories to internal stakeholders.

Cinder’s area of focus is marketing software implementation and integration, and the group claims it’s undertaken more than 500 marketing technology platform integrations and migrations in its time. The team specialises around Salesforce’s marketing proposition, but has also built out several proprietary platforms to enhance the platform.

These include Snapshot, a recovery solution that enables automated backup of content, campaigns and configuration items, ApreCart, to integrate cart abandonment processes with the Marketing Cloud, and Mobius, a platform for customer data acquisition via SMS, QR codes or NFC at point of sale.

Deloitte said it plans to continue offering these solutions as well as expand the portfolio based on customer demand.

The addition of Cinder’s team and implementation capabilities significantly bolsters Deloitte’s Salesforce relationship, broadening out its martech expertise and vendor relationships. It’s also the third transaction relating to the customer practice in the past nine months.

According to Hallam, marketing optimisation and campaign management services are one of the fastest growing areas of customer transformation in the Australian market.

“The challenge and opportunity for businesses is to integrate multiple technology platforms in a way that provides a customer with a personalised and consistent experience across all channels, and enhances their propensity to complete transactions in an efficient way. Cinder does this better than anybody else in our experience,” he said.

“The marketing optimisation capability offered by Cinder expands the offerings of our Customer Behaviour practice and further strengthens our strategic alliance with Salesforce.”

Leone saw Deloitte’s breadth of expertise as giving his team the opportunity to transition from offering platform enablement to complete digital transformations.

“In the age of the customer it has become critical that organisations drive better outcomes from their marketing resources,” Tintner added. “We can’t wait to really push the boundaries on how technology can be further used to enhance marketing performance.”

Deloitte’s list of acquisitions around customer engagement, digital and marketing technology is sizeable, and also includes social analytics adviser, Digivizer, technology integration shop, SixTree, spatial design and customer experience group, MashUp, Oracle implementer, Dataweave, and cloud infrastructure advisory firm, Cloud Solutions Group.

Follow CMO on Twitter: @CMOAustralia, take part in the CMO conversation on LinkedIn: CMO ANZ, join us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CMOAustralia, or check us out on Google+: google.com/+CmoAu