The goal is to drive personalized campaigns, both on the social network and across other digital channels. IBM just signed another significant data partner, Facebook.

 In simple terms, the initial focus of the alliance is on combining data: it makes Facebook’s Custom Audience insights available to brands that use IBM’s Marketing Cloud to manage campaigns.

 IBM and Facebook began working together actively in January, when Advani was named to his current position after running some of IBM’s cloud services.

Facebook has a pretty basic motive: it wants the ads on Facebook to be more useful for members. “For us, having better, more relevant ads for consumers is very, very important,” said Blake Chandlee, vice president of partnerships for Facebook.

 For its part, IBM hopes the alliance will give marketers another reason to use IBM’s Marketing Cloud applications, rather than competitive solutions from the likes of Adobe, Marketo or Salesforce. Marketo announced a similar alliance with LinkedIn in mid-April, with an explicit focus on business-to-business lead generation.