This week, we’re hosting more than 8,000 of the world’s smartest marketers in Indianapolis for our 8th annual digital marketing conference, Connections 2014. Over the course of the past eight years, we’ve seen enormous changes in digital marketing, and along with you—our customers—we’ve helped define the industry. Thank you for your partnership, friendship, and for always challenging us to do more.

The theme of the conference is “The Journey is the Reward”. This year’s event will highlight our incredible leap forward in that journey, showcasing more innovation, education, and entertainment than ever before. 

A key highlight for me personally has been working so closely with our incredibly smart and talented leadership team across salesforce.com and the ExactTarget Marketing Cloud, and we’re fortunate to be joined by many of them here in Indy this week. Our CEO Marc Benioff shared his vision for the future of our industry, highlighting six key revolutions that are driving what we call the Internet of Customers: 

1. Mobile Revolution: 5 billion smartphones by 2017

2. Connected Revolution: 75 billion connected products by 2020

3. 1:1 Revolution: 450 billion business events a day by 2020

4. Social Revolution: 2.3 billon social network users by 2017

5. Data Revolution: 1.5 billion terabytes data generated by business every year

6. App revolution: 140 billion mobile app downloads

What we hear from customers is that they need a platform to navigate these revolutions, a platform that brings together customer engagement across sales, service, marketing, community, analytics, and apps. 

That platform is the ExactTarget Marketing Cloud.  It is the platform for 1:1 customer journeys. What makes the Marketing Cloud special is how we put the customer journey at the center with a product called Journey Builder.

Journey Builder allows you to define your customer’s journey: that means capturing all the defining experiences as a customer interacts with your brand, and then delivering exactly the right content to your customers at each step of the journey, on any marketing channel.

Today there is a very important customer engagement channel we now need to focus on as part of the customer journey.  It’s really a super channel:  Your apps. This is urgent, because apps are the focal point for how customers connect in this amazingly new world. But when I’ve spoken with so many of you about your marketing, you often describe your apps as the most disconnected part of your digital strategy.

This must change. Today, we are excited to announce an incredible new innovation: Journey Builder for Apps.

With Journey Builder for Apps, you can put Journey Builder directly inside your apps. You can connect your apps to all of your other customer engagement channels.

Now, every app can take customers on a journey, not just take up space on a phone or tablet. Journey Builder for Apps connects customer journeys to apps, products and locations like never before—from driving downloads with personalized emails, mobile messages, or ads to building new customer relationships by communicating 1:1 in-app or through a connected device.

Make sure you watch the demo video of Journey Builder for Apps to see how it works:

However, we can’t do this alone. We’re thrilled to announce today a key strategic alliance between salesforce.com and Omnicom, one of the leading global advertising and marketing communications services companies. This new partnership marks our first-ever CRM alliance with a major holding company and together we are creating an integrated customer journey platform for Omnicom agencies to deliver highly personalized communications that connect the dots across all customer touch points. You can read more about the partnership here.

In addition to these ground-breaking announcements, our Chief Product Officer, Bryan Wade, will announce eight additional product innovations on Wednesday morning, including:

• Web & Mobile Analytics: Get real-time, actionable web and mobile analytics.

• Asset Management & Editors: Manage assets, review, and approval, and versions.

• Web & Mobile Pages: Publish HTML and HTML 5 to the Web, Social Pages, and Rich Push Notifications.

• Ad Targeting: Use your customer database to buy targeted ads on Facebook and Twitter.

• Social Publishing & Engagement: Listen, engage, publish and social customer care.

• Proximity Marketing: Use beacons to collect data and trigger real-time marketing.

• Group Messaging: Extend the customer journey on mobile messaging platforms like LINE and WeChat.

• Salesforce Integration: New integrations with Salesforce Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Community Cloud and Platform.

Again, thank you so much for your partnership and collaboration. The future is bright, and we couldn’t be more excited to kick off Connections 2014 today.

The journey is the reward.

-Scott. 

This post was originally published on the ExactTarget blog.