Why did Google sunset Wildfire?

Google recently announced that it is shutting down its social marketing platform wildfire as a standalone product. Read the press release here.

Wildfire was a good product. It was easily the most visually appealing platform of its kind when Google bought it in 2012 for $350 million. Although the platform was positioned as a Social marketing platform, the real power of the platform lied with the creation of apps and page management on social networks. Wildfire had one of the most exhaustive sources of beautiful templates that were used for creating pages and apps.

After Google bought it, over the next year and a half, they invested resources into multiple product and feature enhancements. The idea was to make it a fully functional Social marketing platform to compete with the likes of Buddy media & Radian6(Both Salesforce) , Sprinklr, Synthesios and Adobe Social. Because of that investment, wildfire can now do publication and moderation of posts and content, can run ads, monitor mentions along with page and app creation and management.

So why did Google decide to shut down the standalone version of Wildfire more than 2 years after it was acquired, in May 2014? The answer lies in this June 2013 post by Google's Doubleclick.
We know that it is difficult to estimate the ROI of Social if it is treated and evaluated in a silo. Marketers and technology providers have realized that Social is an additional channel of marketing and not an alternative one. And so Social platforms and social marketing will work best when they are tied up with other marketing efforts of the organization.

Doubleclick is being positioned as a complete digital advertising suite by Google which will encompass digital marketing activities and their measurement on Search, RTB and non-RTB display, Mobile and now Social. Various Google's products - DFA, Bid manager & DSP, Doubleclick Search, GTM and now Wildfire will form the entire suite of digital advertising solutions and measurement of digital marketing will be facilitated by Universal Analytics and Google Analytics Premium.

This integrated platform is named as Doubleclick Digital Marketing Platform or DDM. This move is on the lines of the rest of the industry wherein all big software giants like Adobe, Salesforce, IBM and Oracle have their stack of integrated marketing technology solutions. Gartner and Forrester also see the eventual destiny of a niche technology providing solution is to either get acquired and integrated with a bigger and more comprehensive marketing cloud solution or to not think of selling its solutions to the enterprise marketers.

In another post, we will compare how different marketing cloud solutions from Adobe, Google, Salesforce, IBM and Oracle stack up against each other.