Unica has just announced the planned acquisition of MarketingCentral, a Marketing Resource Management (MRM) tool that has been popular for it’s on-demand ease-of-use. MRM allows marketers to easily manage and share digital assets used in campaigns, such as images, logos, documents and other working files. MRM typically includes file sharing, work flow and review, and asset management functionality, and is an essential tool for agencies and marketing organizations.

Unica already has an MRM solution, called Affinium Plan as part of its Affinium Enterprise Marketing Management (EMM) suite. But Affinium Plan was built as an enterprise-class solution, targetting complex marketing organizations. MarketingCentral was built as a much simpler on-demand solution for agencies and small businesses to get up and running with MRM quickly. The acquisition will broaden Unica’s appeal to agencies and small businesses, providing an entry-point into EMM with significant scalability.

For MarketingCentral customers, which currently include New Balance, Philips Medical and Saatchi & Saatchi, the acquisition will mean access to a more sophisticated suite of marketing management tools. As agencies continue to expand their technology capabilities, this will become an important opportunity to grow marketing management services.

Unica acquired MarketingCentral for “$12.5 in cash and transaction-related costs”, meaning the actual valuation of MarketingCentral was somewhere south of $12.5 million.

I spent a day at Unica’s Marketing Innovation Summit in Las Vegas, where they announced a new addition to their Affinium suite of Enterprise Marketing Management applications. Affinium Insightâ„¢ is a cross-channel analytics application that allows marketers to create visualizations of selected sets of marketing data drawn from different sources. For example, retailers who market both online and brick-and-mortar stores might use Affinium Insight to aggregate campaign and sales data to analyze the relationship between online and offline shopping behavior. The idea is to provide a single view of the customer across all channels of engagement, rather than the current siloed views of customer behavior and campaign response confined to different marketing channels or different marketing roles.

As an upfront disclosure, I spent two months earlier this year as an unpaid guest blogger for Unica’s Marketing Consortium blog, focusing on trends in social media. I don’t have a business relationship with Unica, past or present, but I share some affinities with their marketing team based on similar interests in marketing and technology. They’re a smart group, and very savvy about business and marketing. They invited me to the sold-out show in Vegas, along with about 600 other marketers, analysts and customers. The conference was a mix of seminars, training sessions and case studies, with of course a strong emphasis on Unica’s broad suite of enterprise marketing tools.

Affinium Insight is an important addition to Unica’s current suite of campaign planning, management, automation and analytics solutions. Although the applications all function as standlone solutions, the Affinium suite as an integrated whole is envisioned as a “marketing system of record”, which unifies not only the view of the customer, but the operations of many disparate marketing roles, including executives, analysts, creatives and managers. Affinium Insight perhaps represents the most potent single point of integration, with its focus on drawing many streams of data into a single analytical view.

During a demo of Insight, a number of scenarios were presented that offer a compelling value proposition for cross-channel analytics, and for Insight’s visualization capabilities as well. The most interesting scenario imagined a retailer–say BestBuy–analyzing the shopping behavior of customers in the vicinity of a local brick-and-mortar store. By pulling in demographic, campaign and sales data, a marketer can easily explore the complex relationships between different types of marketing campaigns and their impact on shopping behavior. Which demographic groups shop online vs. in store? What’s the impact of an online campaign on local in-store sales? How far out from the local store do those patterns start to shift?

The implications for marketing operations are significant, and in some ways I felt like I was getting a glimpse into the future of marketing, at least from a tactical standpoint. The ability to overlay many complex layers of data in order to generate simple but holistic views of customer behavior and campaign effectiveness is tremendously powerful. When those insights begin to impact market development, I can’t imagine that it won’t offer a competitive advantage to early adopters.

The interface for Affinium Insight is the same as the rest of the Affinium suite, and the application integrates seamlessly with the other Affinium applications, allowing direct analysis of data, for example, from Affinium Campaign, Unica’s enterprise campaign automation solution. Data can be imported from other applications as well, including SQL. It’s a Web-based application that seems easy to navigate, with drag-and-drop convenience for creating data sets. However, the complexity of building effective and insightful datasets would take some training and practice, suggesting the potential perhaps for some out-of-the-box templates to help marketers get started. I imagine user groups and professional services partnerships can’t be far behind.