MUMBAI: Adobe extended a multi-year acquisition spree to build its digital marketing business today with the $600 million acquisition of Neolane , a French company that helps marketers manage their marketing across channels such as the Web, social networks, mobile, and point of sale.
The cash purchase further builds up what Adobe calls the Marketing Cloud, a set of services that help marketers manage their online advertising. Adobe, still better known for its iconic design and content creation and editing software such as PhotoShop, has made a big push in recent years to marry those products with the fast-growing area of online marketing. It bought Omniture in 2009, Day Software in 2010, Demdex and Auditude in 2011, and Efficient Frontier last year. Neolane will become Adobe‘s sixth digital marketing business unit.
The acquisition of the 12-year-old company essentially catapults Adobe from providing strictly digital marketing services to broader marketing, even offline channels such as direct mail and call centers, John Mellor, vice president of strategy and business development for Adobe‘s digital marketing business, said in an interview. For instance, a travel firm planning a summer getaway marketing campaign wants to start sending out direct mail in February, follow up by email and perhaps create a special website all as part of one campaign. "I don‘t want to walk into a CMO‘s office and just talk about digital marketing," says Mellor. "They don‘t think of it that way. People want to coordinate all this stuff together."
Brad Rencher, Adobe‘s senior vice president and general manager of digital marketing, further explained in a blog post about the acquisition:
This is a critical addition to our complete set of analytics, targeting, social, content management and media optimisation solutions. Neolane will integrate with our solutions to empower cross-channel and highly personalised campaign management across the web, email, social, mobile, point of sale, direct mail, call center and other emerging channels.
The combination of Adobe and Neolane will give customers richer customer profiles, greater activation of social and mobile data, better definition of highly valuable customer segments, and more sophisticated automation and execution platforms. Many customers already rely on both Adobe and Neolane and will benefit from further integration between the Adobe Marketing Cloud and Neolane‘s cross-channel capabilities.
The company‘s revenues rose 40 per cent last year, to $58 million. Adobe said it doesn‘t expect the addition to materially affect its revenue forecast this year.
