Oracle feeds its hunger for content marketing for Eloqua by buying Compendium

Entrepreneur Chris Baggott’s key business appears to be creating acquisition targets for big players. He cofounded e-mail and interactive marketing house ExactTarget, which Salesforce picked up for a tasty $2.5 billion in June. And today, Oracle announced it is buying content marketing provider Compendium for an undisclosed sum.

Baggott co-founded the Indianapolis-based Compendium and is its CEO. Oracle said it will integrate Compendium with its marketing automation unit, Eloqua, which it bought in December. Compendium is expected to keep its current partners and clients for at least the time being.

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‘Digital body language’

Content marketing is becoming a hot commodity, as marketers realize they need streams of something to offer those highly defined and targeted customers and leads beyond more product offers and upsales. Eloqua’s thing is to capture and understand what Baggott called in a statement “a prospect’s digital body language to help companies know each buyer’s demographics, behaviors and influencers,” and Compendium creates and optimizes delivery of stories, videos, blog posts and the like across channels.

Eloqua and Compendium are not exactly strangers, having announced an integration in June 2012 that enabled Compendium’s content to appear in Eloqua campaigns. Just as ExactTarget sits in the center of Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud, so Eloqua sits in the center of Oracle’s Marketing Cloud.

As might be expected from two companies with the same founder, ExactTarget used to be a Compendium customer. And now they’re each part of rival marketing/CRM forces, Salesforce and Oracle, which have had an on-again, off-again rivalry and kinda friendship.

Hmmmmm.