Adobe expands digital marketing ecosystem at Adobe Summit 2016

Source: Adobe website.

At Adobe Summit, Adobe announced major advances to its global ecosystem.

Adobe's partner programme now includes over 3,000 agencies, system integrators, and technology partners as well as hundreds of thousands of developers.

“The growth of our partner ecosystem has been enormous,” said Abhay Parasnis, EVP and CTO at Adobe. “Partner Day at Adobe Summit is now our largest partner event of the year. We expect over 950 global solution partners to join us, over 40% more than last year.”

Customers are now activating over 1,000 new partner integrations with Adobe Marketing Cloud per quarter as they extend the reach of Adobe’s digital marketing solutions within their organisations. Over 1,100 customers rely on integrations into Adobe Analytics alone. For example, Adobe customers like American Express, Lenovo and Samsung license Dun & Bradstreet’s Audience Solutions data to improve their programmatic advertising and digital marketing efforts by better targeting B2B professionals through online advertising.

Dun & Bradstreet’s data helps Adobe customers identify and reach ideal prospects based on business intelligence such as business demographics, company size, industry and job function. Customers combine Dun & Bradstreet’s data with their own data to develop more comprehensive audience profiles, which are then used for ad targeting and website optimisation.

“With Dun & Bradstreet’s Audience Solutions data readily available in Adobe Marketing Cloud, B2B marketers can be assured they are targeting the right prospects online,” said Michael Bird, global head of sales and marketing, Dun & Bradstreet. “Through the Adobe Partner programme, we’re pleased to integrate across additional channels to further enable increased ROI to an even wider swath of marketers.”

The company also announced advancements to the Adobe Cloud Platform including Adobe I/O, a new unified developer portal with an expanded set of services that developers can access across all three Adobe clouds: the Adobe Marketing Cloud, Creative Cloud and Document Cloud. Advancements to the Adobe Cloud Platform include a comprehensive new programme for partners.

Updates to the Adobe Exchange, which hosts hundreds of apps and integrations such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM, DemandBase, Acxiom, and Brightedge, enable partners to further extend the functionality of Adobe Marketing Cloud. The expanded Adobe Exchange programme  offers go-to-market services that allow third parties to integrate their technologies with Adobe Marketing Cloud, Creative Cloud and Document Cloud. Over 250 technology partners now extend the functionality of Adobe’s digital marketing tools and showcase their solutions on Adobe Exchange, offering further personalisation, analytics, and content delivery options, as well as integrations with e-commerce, social media, and advertising systems.

A new, opt-in Partner Program in Exchange, provides support for business activities including enablement, marketing, and sales engagement. Inaugural Premier Partners in the program include Clicktale and Dun & Bradstreet.

Adobe I/O provides an expanded set of services and capabilities developers can access across all three clouds. The launch of the developer portal offers easy access to APIs, developer documentation and Adobe’s Creative and Mobile software development kits (SDKs). The portal will host developer tools for all Adobe Clouds, making it easy to extend their functionalities. Additionally, a new user interface and notifications for Adobe Marketing Cloud offer customers and partners improved workflows and collaboration functionality.

Adobe Summit also saw Adobe and comScore announced a global strategic partnership to provide new insights into the media consumption behaviours of digital audiences. This new partnership will deliver consistent, cross-device audience measurement of video and ad content, providing advanced insight into consumer viewing behaviors for better media planning and buying. Through this partnership, comScore is incorporating new Adobe Certified Metrics, standardised digital census data built on the Adobe Cloud Platform and powered by Adobe Analytics, into ComScore's Cross Media, Audience and Advertising Product Suites. In addition, Adobe will integrate comScore audience data, including demographics, for Adobe Marketing Cloud customers.

People are watching content on an increasingly broad variety of devices, making it challenging to reliably measure audiences, content and advertising engagement across all platforms. ComScore and Adobe have joined forces to provide seamless, census-based measurement of digital video content and ads for the most popular platforms, including TV, video on demand, smartphones, tablets, game consoles and over-the-top connected devices. 

“With the world’s largest brands, including ten of the ten largest media companies relying on Adobe Marketing Cloud, Adobe is at the center of audience measurement and in a unique position to help solve one of the industry’s greatest friction points,” said Jeremy Helfand, VP, Adobe Primetime. “This partnership will enable smarter buying and selling of advertising and establish the trust and credibility needed to support the convergence of linear and digital experiences.”

The collaboration between Adobe and comScore will provide marketers globally with trusted insights, including key metrics on the number of video starts, time spent watching and rate of ad engagement, to optimise their ad campaigns and more efficiently reach the right audiences across TV and digital. Media companies can leverage these enhanced insights to better forecast how content performs across platforms and particular audience segments. Additionally, agencies will be able to take advantage of the full potential of the massive amounts of data generated in the modern media world.

“ComScore is redefining cross-platform measurement to deliver the independent, trusted metrics that content owners and advertisers have long been asking for,“ said Serge Matta, CEO at comScore. “Massive, census-level data is critical to providing actionable and granular measurement across screens. This partnership with Adobe helps us to deliver even more precise insights to our clients about how, when and where consumers are interacting with content and ads. This will enable clients to make smarter buying decisions based not just on age and gender, but on advanced demographics.”

The integration of comScore’s audience information with Adobe Marketing Cloud will enable further optimisation of audience segments for targeted marketing campaigns, including email, video, display and search advertising. Adobe customers will also be able to forecast how well marketing content performs against specific audience segments.

"We know that consumers are watching TV on every screen and platform, and measurement is catching up to capture that activity, but it's still very complex,” said Colleen Fahey Rush, EVP and Chief Research Officer, Viacom Media Networks. “A partnership between comScore and Adobe – on the heels of Viacom’s own partnership with comScore – is a win for the entire industry because it opens up and evolves the use of advanced currencies.”

"Digital platforms are a key growth opportunity over the next decade and are already driving meaningful viewership for our services, including CBS All Access and CBSN,” said Marc DeBevoise, executive vice president and general manager, CBS Digital Media, CBS Interactive. “This partnership between comScore and Adobe gets the industry one step closer to unified cross-platform measurement, further validating the value of our audiences across screens and giving our advertisers the ability to deliver data-enhanced campaigns across devices.”

"Collaboration like this furthers our ability to harness the power of data and technology to build brands through a re-engineered media model that directly drives business growth,” added Kate Sirkin, EVP and Global Director, Audience and Measurement Solutions, Starcom MediaVest Group. “Specifically, enhancements to the tagging capabilities across the entire ecosystem ensure we attribute value to the full range of communications channels and data integration. This partnership also allows us to assess new audience segments based on attributes including people’s media and e-commerce behaviours.”

Adobe recently received industry awards from independent research firms, further emphasising industry recognition of its offerings. Adobe Analytics, the data and analytics backbone of Adobe Marketing Cloud, was recognised as a Leader in Customer Analytics Solutions by Forrester Research in The Forrester Wave: Customer Analytics Solutions, Q1 2016. 

Source: Forrester Wave via Adobe website.

Adobe was one of eleven companies Forrester reviewed, using 33 criteria to evaluate analytics vendors across current offerings, strategy and market presence. Adobe Analytics achieved the highest scores possible in 14 categories and sub-categories, and was named one of four Leaders.

“Adobe Analytics sits within the Adobe Marketing Cloud, giving marketers and customer insights (CI) pros a one- stop shop for data management, analysis and deployment of insights,” stated the Forrester report. “[Adobe Analytics] is specifically designed for marketers who lack a technical background but would like to surface actionable insights in their customer data. [That being said,] there is also an interface for data scientists who wish to build custom models then deploy them to the business user.”

The report also stated that the solution “is a good fit for brands looking to use customer analytics in real-time to drive digital marketing.”

“We believe our position in the Leader’s section of the Forrester Wave validates the work we’ve done to address today’s need for actionable data across the entire customer life cycle,” said Bill Ingram, VP of Adobe Analytics. “Customer analytics is a rapidly evolving field with an increasing number of stakeholders who need actionable insights from customer data. In our opinion, our ranking demonstrates Adobe Analytics’ ability to not only meet the needs of marketers and analysts, but also business users across an organisation.”

Adobe separately announced that it has been recognised by IDC as a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Marketing Cloud Platforms 2016 Vendor Assessment. Adobe had been among a group of vendors that IDC invited to participate in the independent report, which assessed the capability and strategy of nine leading marketing cloud platforms.

The IDC Marketscape report noted that “Adobe has world class marketing solutions that many will prefer over alternatives” and stated that “Adobe should be a strong consideration for medium and large enterprises that want to reduce the complexity and increase the performance of very large scale digital marketing infrastructures.”

"We’re pleased to have once again been positioned as a leader by a major industry analyst firm,” said Suresh Vittal, VP of strategy, Digital Marketing at Adobe. “Adobe Marketing Cloud is critical to enabling highly personalised and connected customer experiences across any marketing channel. The tight integration with Creative Cloud makes the activation of creative content a breeze.”

Interested?

Download a complimentary copy of The Forrester Wave: Customer Analytics Solutions, Q1 2016

Buy the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Marketing Cloud Platforms 2016 Vendor Assessment, February 2016 (doc #US41025715)

Read the TechTrade Asia blog posts of Adobe's announcements at the Adobe Summit and how Adobe is adding intelligence to its portfolio