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Unica Launches Internet Marketing Alliance Program; Provides Customers Integrated Solutions for Managing and Measuring the Effectiveness of Multi-Channel Internet Marketing Campaigns

Posted on: Tuesday, 8 August 2006, 09:00 CDT

Unica(R) Corporation (Nasdaq:UNCA), a global provider of Enterprise Marketing Management (EMM) solutions, today announced the launch of its Internet Marketing Alliance Program. The alliance program will provide integrated internet marketing solutions based on Unica's industry-leading Affinium(R) Suite and best-of-breed internet marketing services. Customers of Unica and its alliance partners will benefit from unified reports that capture activity and results across channels, leading to improved decision making, budget allocation, targeting and messaging. Companies will be able to implement common customer segmentation and response and conversion metrics, as well as link online and offline behavior across channels, ultimately delivering a better customer experience and improved marketing results.

Founding members of Unica's Internet Marketing Alliance represent the leaders in the rapidly growing and increasingly important area of paid search marketing. New partners include 24/7 Real Media, Did-It, Efficient Frontier, and Performics.

According to Bill Gassman, Research Director, Data Integration and Business Intelligence, Gartner, Inc., "There is more value in associating a sequence of customer actions to a marketing event rather than just looking at the initial visit. For example, better accuracy, higher returns, and more accountability can be achieved by correlating search terms and cost information from search agency bid management tools with segment, granular actions and conversion data provided by web analytics tools that are part of a cross-channel marketing management program."

Members of the alliance will participate in an open two-way exchange of data using industry standards to seamlessly integrate information about search marketing activity and performance including search terms, costs, and ROI. This integration will enable marketers to view and access complete search marketing data through Unica's web analytics solution, Affinium NetInsight(TM), as well as enhance the efficacy of their search marketing with offline response data, customer value and segmentation information. Moving forward, Unica and its alliance partners will implement additional integration points to enable a single marketing desktop for planning, managing, executing and reporting on all internet marketing initiatives whether executed in-house or via best-of-breed service providers.

The alliance will provide unique benefits over existing internet marketing solutions including:

-- Accurate measurement on- and off-line: By tracking response and conversion data from across channels, the integrated solution will provide more complete measurement of the influence and return on investment of search and other online marketing initiatives. For example, it will automatically attribute relevant purchases of known visitors made via a call center, sales representative or store to the original search activity. This ability to measure the offline impact will enhance online search planning and strategies.

-- Unified reporting: Most marketers today must juggle multiple, disparate applications and reporting systems to estimate advertising spend and results and reconcile conflicting reports. Unica's integrated solution provides a unified view of the marketing data needed to effectively plan, execute and analyze branding, acquisition and retention programs.

-- Addressability: Traditionally, search marketing is not targeted by customer segment or multi-channel response attribution. By leveraging customer value and segment information managed by Affinium, search marketers can drive keyword strategies to acquire more high value customers and increase marketing spend effectiveness for each target segment.

-- Scalability and Flexibility: Most integrated search and web analytics solutions can't scale to meet the needs of high-volume search marketers. With Unica's internet marketing alliance, search marketers with thousands of keywords benefit from the expertise and scalability of best-of-breed search solutions without sacrificing integration with web analytics. In addition, they have the benefits of Unica's scalable analytics solution with the power to analyze hundreds of millions of page views, rapidly assess KPIs, and easily dig deeper with unique drill-anywhere(TM), trend-anything(TM) capabilities.

"The integration of Unica's web analytics solutions with our search engine marketing (SEM) will provide us with significant advantage in an increasingly competitive marketplace," said Ophir Prusak, IT Marketing Manager for Resperate.com, a customer of both Unica and 24/7 Real Media. "Having visibility into powerful customer and behavior-based segmentation has delivered critical ROI insights into referrer, ad group and keyword level performance for our website and facilitated better understanding of our extended sales cycle from initial search to final sale. In the future, we will use these integrated analytics to support our international search campaigns and demographic targeting, ultimately enabling us to acquire more customers with increased efficiency despite the rising complexity of the search market."

"With accelerating media fragmentation and increasingly multi-channel buying behavior, marketers are challenged to effectively allocate resources and measure the true impact of their marketing. Affinium's powerful cross-channel planning, execution and response attribution capabilities now make that possible," said Yuchun Lee, co-founder and CEO, Unica Corporation. "We are excited about the opportunities this alliance program brings to the market as we enhance the value of our marketing offerings with the expertise of best-of-breed internet marketing services to deliver a more effective approach to conducting and measuring marketing initiatives."

For more information on Unica's Enterprise Marketing Solutions and its Internet Marketing Alliance Program, please visit www.unica.com.

About Unica

Unica(R) Corporation is a leading global provider of Enterprise Marketing Management (EMM) software designed to help businesses increase their revenues and improve the efficiency and measurability of their marketing operations. Unica focuses exclusively on the needs of marketing organizations and its Affinium(R) software addresses the principal functions of EMM including marketing and customer analytics, demand generation and marketing resource management. More than 400 companies in a wide range of industries use Unica software to manage the complexities and processes of marketing and to facilitate the operations of a customer-centric business. Unica's customers include ABN AMRO, Capital One, Choice Hotels, Comcast, Lands' End, Nordstrom, Reader's Digest, Scotiabank and Vodafone. Unica has offices across the United States, including its corporate headquarters in Waltham, Massachusetts, as well offices in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Singapore and India. For more information, call 781-839-8000 or visit http://www.unica.com.

Copyright 2006 Unica Corporation. Unica, the Unica logo and Affinium are registered trademarks of Unica Corporation. All other product names, service marks, and trademarks mentioned herein are trademarks of their respective owners.

Forward-looking Statements

The information provided in this press release above contains forward-looking statements that relate to future events and future financial performance of Unica. These forward-looking statements are based upon Unica's historical performance and its current plans, estimates and expectations and are not a representation that such plans, estimates, or expectations will be achieved. These forward-looking statements represent Unica's expectations as of the date of this press announcement. Subsequent events may cause these expectations to change, and Unica disclaims any obligation to update or revise the forward-looking statements in the future. Matters subject to forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties, including volatility of our stock price due to the difficulty in predicting operating results and the long sales cycle for Unica's software; failure by Unica to develop new software products and enhance existing products; failure to retain key staff; failure by Unica to maintain historical maintenance renewal rates; the potential that the Unica software will not help customer streamline its processes or spend less time executing its marketing programs; and failure to properly protect Unica's proprietary rights and intellectual property. These and other factors listed in the Annual Report on Form 10K for the fiscal year ended September 30, 2005 under "Risk Factors" could cause Unica's performance or achievements to be materially different from those expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements.

Source: Business Wire

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