Adobe Systems announced a definitive agreement to acquire Efficient Frontier to bolster its position in the digital marketing and advertising space.
Adobe Systems announced an agreement to
acquire
Efficient Frontier, a leader in
multichannel ad buying and optimization, to boost its presence in the
advertising space.
Adobe
officials noted that the company's solutions are central to how digital
marketing and advertising is created, managed, executed, measured and
optimized. The acquisition of Efficient Frontier will enhance that. Adobe said
the acquisition is expected to close in the first quarter of the company's 2012
fiscal year pending regulatory approvals.
Early
in November, Adobe moved to restructure along two primary business lines:
digital media and digital marketing. The pending acquisition of Efficient
Frontier falls in line with the digital marketing piece.
Indeed,
the acquisition of Efficient Frontier will add multichannel ad campaign
forecasting, execution and optimization capabilities to Adobe's existing
Digital
Marketing Suite.
Along
with the suite, Adobe's digital marketing capabilities include a
data
management platform, a
video ad
management and monetization platform and an
enterprise
content management system. And Adobe will continue to build upon the
foundation of its independent ad buying and optimization platform for search,
social and display, enabling the company to offer a more complete suite of
capabilities to digital marketers, advertisers and publishers for reporting and
analytics, personalized experiences, multichannel campaign management and media
monetization. Adobe currently captures approximately 5 trillion digital
transactions per year for more than 5,000 customers, including many of the
world's largest advertisers, publishers and advertising agencies.
"With
the explosion in global Internet advertising, our customers need to know where,
when and how to spend their digital marketing dollars to get the greatest
return," said Brad Rencher, senior vice president and general manager of
Adobe's Digital Marketing Business, in a statement. "The addition of
Efficient Frontier will give our Digital Marketing Suite customers a leading
platform for turning ad spend into business impact."
"Adobe's
vision of digital marketing is perfectly aligned with the Efficient Frontier
approach-use data and intelligence to manage risk and drive ROI across a
growing number of digital channels," said David Karnstedt, president and CEO of
Efficient Frontier, in a statement. "Adobe customers will have greater insight
into how their social, search and display spend impact one another and how to
optimize their cross-channel campaigns."
Adobe
officials said Efficient Frontier will bring to Adobe a social ad buying
capability for Facebook, which leverages Efficient Frontier's optimization
algorithms to predict results and drive greater return on investment (ROI).
Additionally, a marketer can upload various creative elements into the
solution, and it will automatically generate ad combinations, the company said.
These capabilities will be integrated with the Facebook ad buying functionality
currently available with
Adobe
SearchCenter+.
The
acquisition also will bring a social marketing engagement platform, offering
customers tools and services to help them build, manage, monitor and measure
their brand presence across the social Web. Adobe will combine this social
engagement capability with
Adobe
SocialAnalytics, an analytics solution that moves beyond social monitoring
to tie social media to business results.
The
Adobe Digital Marketing Suite features a paid search management solution,
SearchCenter+. However, Efficient Frontier will extend this search capability
with a complementary search portfolio optimization system. These solutions will
be combined to create a search optimization solution that scales from midmarket
to the largest enterprises and agencies.
Efficient
Frontier also brings its experience in search optimization to display
advertising with a real-time bidding system to increase ad performance on major
display inventory sources, Adobe said. This bidding system uses Efficient
Frontier's algorithms, which will learn using site traffic and conversion data
from the Adobe Digital Marketing Suite, and will complement the Adobe Dynamic
Ad Targeting solution that dynamically generates display ads with personalized
messaging and offers.
The
integration of Efficient Frontier and Adobe Digital Marketing Suite
capabilities will give customers a more complete view of their display
advertising campaigns and provide a unified ad-to-site optimization system to
increase qualified clicks and conversion rates, Adobe said in a press release.
Moreover,
Adobe said the auction-based buying process for search, display and social
media puts marketers under pressure to decide what and where to bid. However,
Efficient Frontier takes the guesswork out of the process by using an
algorithmic approach to generate optimized bids and allocate budget across
digital channels for maximum ROI.
The
customizable algorithms are built on the marketer's historical performance data
from the search, display and social marketplaces as well as conversion data
from the marketer's Websites and offline sources. The Efficient Frontier
algorithms will benefit from the clickstream data and conversion metrics
captured by the Adobe Digital Marketing Suite. Thus, Adobe customers will be
able to develop predictive models and simulations that are highly accurate and
actionable.
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