Contact: Scott Denne
Adobe is extending its ambitions beyond the website. Having thrived in the first iteration of digital marketing, the vendor is turning its attention to the next one – where software has a role in all of a business’ customer interactions, not just those coming in through the homepage. It needs a wider set of software to capture that larger market opportunity and fend off old adversaries in web marketing, as well as new ones in segments such as mobile marketing, e-commerce software and customer service that are eyeing the same prize.
Today Adobe opens Summit, its annual marketing conference, with the theme of building customer experiences. It’s roughly the same theme as last year’s show, with the subtle shift that much of the content has a more instructional bent, whereas last year Adobe was more intent on convincing marketers that customer experience matters in the first place. In the intervening time, there’s been a correspondingly subtle shift in the company’s M&A strategy. Its most recent acquisition wasn’t just a bolt-on to sell into its existing sales channel like past deals. It was an attempt to open up a new path to market for its products.
Adobe entered digital marketing almost eight years ago with the $1.8bn purchase of website analytics company Omniture and followed that, according to 451 Research’s M&A KnowledgeBase, with $2bn worth of M&A that took its capabilities beyond the website, but always with an eye toward adding products that it could upsell to web-oriented digital marketers. In the last quarter, its marketing unit grew 26% year over year to $477m in revenue.
Its latest acquisition, TubeMogul, stands out not so much for its size ($540m) as for the fact that its video media-buying software is built for brand managers and TV media planners – a group with far different priorities than digital marketers, and access to larger budgets. The deal, along with Adobe’s messaging, show that it’s ready to start exploring purchases that will enable it to sell to marketers that don’t have a website-first bent and to other customer-facing parts of a business.
Increasing its appeal to mobile app developers and app-centric marketers would be a logical next step from Adobe’s roots in web marketing. Both mParticle and TUNE would serve as a cornerstone acquisition in that space – the latter for its breadth of mobile analytics and marketing tools, the former for its customer data platform that plugs into most mobile app tools. Adobe may also look to add to its e-commerce capabilities by reaching for a larger social media management product or even expanding into customer service software. Whatever its next move, Adobe seems intent on doing more these days than refreshing its website-based marketing business.