You know an industry is consolidating when you start hearing the term "integration" all over the place. So it is with advertising technology, where companies from Google and Oracle to Salesforce and IBM have been emphasizing how they're integrating their many ad tech acquisitions into what they hope will be more coherent, less complex sets of products.
On Tuesday, it's Adobe turn. At its annual Summit for customers in Salt Lake City, it's announcing a number of new services intended to provide more integration among its six main marketing services, ranging from marketing campaign management to analytics, that it has collected under the name Marketing Cloud. Although rivals such as Google and Oracle might protest, Suresh Vittal, VP of Adobe's Marketing Cloud Strategy, said in an interview that the latest announcements mean it's "the most integrated, comprehensive set of marketing solutions."
In particular, Adobe is announcing several new features: a Master Marketing profile that enables customer data to be used to target consumers across marketing channels in real time, a Marketing Mix Planning service that helps companies plan their online and traditional ad spending together, and Shared Assets, a single place to store marketing creative materials that can be used in all of Adobe's Marketing Cloud products.
Adobe also is launching a series of mobile products and updated services to help marketers reach people on the mobile Web and apps. One new product, marketed as PhoneGap Enterprise to app developers and Adobe Experience Manager apps to marketers, makes it easier to build mobile apps for customers across various mobile platforms. Finally, Adobe said it would support Apple's iBeacon technology, which allows marketers to analyze where people are and what they're doing in an indoor location such as a store and target them based on that location.
The integration theme doesn't end there. Deloitte Digital, Epsilon, and Wunderman said they're integrating the Marketing Cloud into their own marketing systems. And SAP said it plans to resell the Marketing Cloud with two of its software suites.
All of this is intended to accelerate the growth of Adobe's digital marketing business, which passed $1 billion last year and grew 24% in Adobe's first quarter. "The features announced at the Adobe Summit are good enhancements to the already powerful Marketing Cloud," Gartner analyst Gene Phifer said in an email.
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