The Acoustic Marketing Platform: More Information

The challenges facing marketers today are complex. From dealing with dozens – even hundreds – of tools in the stack to navigating complex privacy regulations; being able to scale to meet growing customer demand; and finding ways to demonstrate that marketing is efficiently and effectively contributing to revenue and profit.

At Acoustic, we recognize those challenges, along with many others, and are building our platform to meet them head on. To make marketers more productive requires an integrated approach with an open architecture, user-centric design built around real workflows, high performance and scalability, and embedded AI capabilities that deliver measurable results. This is our vision for 2020 and beyond: The Acoustic Marketing Platform.

Acoustic will help you drive better business and marketing results through major investments in these areas (user-centric design, open ecosystem, performance, scalability, embedded AI) and through new product and services enhancements including AI-powered anomaly detection in automation programs, distributed marketing for franchises, business impact analytics for identifying user experience improvement ROI, and premium support.

Frequently Asked Questions

Acoustic is delivering strategic product enhancements throughout 2020:

  • A streamlined user experience across products, including updated branding, improved navigation, and a modern design
  • Platform upgrades supported by a cloud-native architecture, including a transition to a high-reliability, elastic hosting environment
  • Unified user management across Acoustic products, based on industry-standard single sign-on
  • A transition to standardized product URLs and Acoustic branding

These enhancements affect Acoustic Marketing Cloud products, including Campaign, Content, Digital Analytics, Exchange, Experience Analytics (Tealeaf), Journey Analytics, and Personalization.

Note: DemandTec & Payments products, as well as Experience Analytics (Tealeaf) On-Premises clients, are not impacted by these enhancements.

All product, architectural and technological investment is planned and made in context of our customers’ needs, including the major investments listed above. Benefits include:

  • Working faster and more easily across Acoustic products and your MarTech stack
  • Focusing on building the campaigns, content, and experiences that your customers expect
  • Using more advanced capabilities in a scalable, high-reliability environment – Acoustic will be able to deliver new and more sophisticated features with much greater flexibility and speed
  • Meeting peak performance and intricate data residency requirements via the most resilient, performant, cloud-native platform
  • Working more securely and in better alignment with your enterprise’s technology standards

Strategic enhancements will be rolled out progressively throughout 2020. Content, Experience Analytics, and Exchange customers will see new capabilities implemented as early as mid- to late-Q1 2020, while Digital Analytics, Journey Analytics, Personalization, and Campaign enhancements will continue through Q2 and Q3 2020.

Some enhancements, such as platform upgrades, will require no action or will have no immediate impact to you or your organization. Other enhancements, including user management and UX updates, will require user action or training. URL changes may require involvement from technical teams to update any relevant API or (S)FTP integrations.

Details will be added to this page in advance of each delivery. In addition, notifications will be sent to users’ system email addresses in advance of each delivery, including:

  • The details of the enhancement
  • When the enhancement will be delivered
  • Any necessary user actions or resources

Clients can also reach out to their designated Client Success Directors and Managers, Support, as well as Account Directors and Managers.

Infrastructure Upgrades Beginning in March 2020

ProductDate of AnnouncementAnnouncement
ContentFebruary 12, 2020

We will be performing infrastructure upgrades for Content customers during scheduled maintenance periods* in March. Your account will be upgraded during a single maintenance window.

  • Friday, March 6 12pm ET to Saturday, March 7 12pm ET
  • Friday, March 13 12pm ET to Saturday, March 14 12pm ET
  • Friday, March 20 12pm ET to Saturday, March 21 12pm ET
  • Friday, March 27 12pm ET to Saturday, March 28 12pm ET

*Actual upgrade times will coincide with off-peak hours for accounts by time zone, though no user impact is expected

During these times, live or already-published content will be unaffected. We also expect no impact to your ability to author content.

No action is needed by you or your organization in order for these infrastructure upgrades to be applied.

In conjunction with these upgrades, the Acoustic Content product datasheet has been updated.
CampaignFebruary 25, 2020

We will be performing infrastructure upgrades for Campaign customers during scheduled maintenance periods beginning in Q2 2020. Specific maintenance schedules will be shared in advance of the upgrades.

In conjunction with these upgrades, the Acoustic Campaign product datasheet has been updated.
Digital AnalyticsFebruary 25, 2020

We will be performing infrastructure upgrades for Digital Analytics customers during scheduled maintenance periods beginning in Q2 2020. Specific maintenance schedules will be shared in advance of the upgrades.

In conjunction with these upgrades, the Acoustic Digital Analytics product datasheet has been updated.
ExchangeFebruary 25, 2020

We will be performing infrastructure upgrades for Exchange customers in early Q2 2020. The specific maintenance schedule will be shared in advance of the upgrades.
Experience Analytics (Tealeaf)February 25, 2020

We will be performing infrastructure upgrades for Experience Analytics (Tealeaf) customers during scheduled maintenance periods beginning late March and continuing through May. The specific maintenance schedule will be shared in advance of the upgrades.

In conjunction with these upgrades, the Acoustic Experience Analytics (Tealeaf) product datasheet has been updated.
Journey AnalyticsFebruary 25, 2020

We will be performing infrastructure upgrades for Journey Analytics customers during scheduled maintenance periods beginning in Q2 2020. Specific maintenance schedules will be shared in advance of the upgrades.

In conjunction with these upgrades, the Acoustic Journey Analytics product datasheet has been updated.
PersonalizationFebruary 25, 2020

We will be performing infrastructure upgrades for Personalization customers during scheduled maintenance periods beginning in Q2 2020. Specific maintenance schedules will be shared in advance of the upgrades.

Transfer of Acoustic URLs to Acoustic-branded Domains Beginning in April 2020 (Announced February 25, 2020)

Beginning in April 2020, Acoustic will transfer URLs for all Acoustic products to Acoustic-branded domains. These changes primarily affect IBM-branded domains, such as customer-engagement.ibm.com and ibmmarketingcloud.com. This transfer includes domains for user interfaces, as well as domains for API integrations, SFTP connections, and software SDKs.

Details regarding this transfer and required actions can be found here.

Campaign FTP Users Must Transition to SFTP by May 15, 2020 (Announced February 25, 2020)

In keeping with our commitment to data security, U.S. Campaign users and automated processes connecting via non-secure FTP must begin connecting via Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) by May 15, 2020. Instructions on how to use SFTP can be found here.

All Digital Analytics Users to Convert to Latest Digital Analytics Version in Summer 2020 (Announced February 25, 2020)

This summer, all Digital Analytics customers will transition to the newest version of Acoustic Digital Analytics. Further details regarding the transition will be coming soon, but here’s a sneak peek of some of the work we’ll be completing in the meantime:

  • Dashboard capabilities, including Real Time Monitor and an Enterprise Dashboard roll up, flexible drag & drop capabilities, and custom views, modernized and integrated into your analytics workflow.
  • Intraday Reporting, across Top Line Metrics and select standard reports.
  • Invalid Tag Reports, to better understand which tags are impacting reporting.
  • Data Integrity Processing (DIP) to more easily validate online and offline orders.
  • Marketing Attribution Settings, with expanded attribution options like custom models and time decay.
  • Custom Metrics to allow you to create custom KPIs based on segments, filters or other events.
  • Benchmark Comparison integrated into reporting workflow for easy industry comparison.
  • Extended Data Download will enable a download of your report data from any standard report or flat list ad-hoc report exceeding 50,000 rows.

We’ll also be updating the interface based on user feedback to reflect a more user-friendly, holistic, Acoustic style.

As we transition from the existing versions of Digital Analytics into a more focused, modernized product, we’ll be making changes to some features and functionality. For example, the LiveView heatmap will be replaced by Overstat, a rich heatmapping capability from Tealeaf that features not only link and heat maps, but also accessibility maps, attention maps, and form analytics.

Follow along here for additional details.

Acoustic is actively working on these and other improvements and intends to make these available to you in our next major release in July 2020.

Stay tuned for more information in our upcoming monthly communications, where we’ll share more details on the new features and dates for enablement and training.