Demandbase Integrates Its WhoToo Acquisition So Marketers Can Target Departments Inside Companies

In September, B2B targeting company Demandbase acquired data provider WhoToo. Today, Demandbase announced a new B2B Data Cloud, whose main distinction from the company’s previous cloud-based data is that it integrates WhoToo so that marketers can regularly target departments within companies.

Demandbase specializes in account-based marketing that targets companies, utilizing its own database that identifies IP addresses employed by a given company. So if a user appears on a client company’s website from the IP address for the HR/financial management software provider Workday, Demandbase’s platform could target a display ad about, say, HR products or could help to personalize the website content toward Workday’s interests.

But now, CMO Peter Isaacson told me, Demandbase can utilize the integrated WhoToo data to determine that the visitor is from the IT department at Workday and can thus show the person an ad about servers, for example.

Demandbase is calling this new capability Job Function Targeting, although it’s actually the department that’s being targeted, not the actual job. Isaacson said the new title is intended to point out that the targeting can single out someone from Workday’s IT department, even though that person might be located in another business unit.

Although Demandbase could previously target departments within a company, Isaacson said that was an occasional occurrence and was based on “contextual” inferences. For instance, if a user with a Workday IP address showed up at a website selling servers, the inference might have been made that the tracked user was in the IT department at WorkDay. Now, Demandbase doesn’t need to rely on such good luck.

WhoToo contains tens of millions of email addresses, cookie data, clickstreams that show user paths, and info filled out by users in forms such as those required to obtain a free white paper. Client companies can also match this info to their own first-party customer data.

While some of this data is personally identifiable, Isaacson said that Demandbase is employing WhoToo for anonymous department- and company-based targeting.

Competitors for account-based targeting include Marketo, LinkedIn’s Bizo and EverString. But Demandbase prides itself on the quality of its self-built IP-to-company database, saying it is more accurate than other companies’ IP lookups in the fast-changing domain registry. And now it is adding department-level targeting to its resume.

The new B2B Data Cloud will be available by the end of the year.