At this week’s Adobe Summit, Adobe’s annual Digital Marketing conference, the company unveiled upgrades to Adobe Marketing Cloud, its suite of marketing subscription cloud-based products.
Adobe Marketing Cloud is a personalized content marketing engine with eight tightly integrated marketing solutions, including analytics, web and app experience management, testing and targeting, advertising, audience management, video, social engagement and campaign orchestration.
According to Adobe, the explosion of marketing channels has created a fragmented and technologically complicated landscape that can hinder brand consistency and communication. The upgraded Marketing Cloud, Adobe said, has become a “one-stop shop for targeting, data and billing needs within one platform, [which is] an incredibly valuable step toward true programmatic.”
The marketing cloud announcements this week include:
- An Internet of Things (IoT) dev kit to facilitate measurement and analysis of connected devices; wearables, new digital content testing, optimization, and personalization capabilities across IoT devices, including wearables
- Analytics like traffic patterns have been added to the Cloud’s existing beacon capabilities
- In-app messages can now be triggered by iBeacons
- Adobe Experience Manager is now available via the cloud
- New Audience Core Services allow a wide range of audience and behavioral data
- Deeper connections to Adobe Creative Cloud including enhanced capabilities for collaborating with external agencies
- Programmatic Ad-buying and billing
“We believe programmatic efforts to date are broken and focus simply on display ad bidding,” said John Mellor, vice president, Digital Marketing at Adobe. “Having a one-stop shop for all of your targeting and data as well as transparency into technology pricing and media costs is a big step towards true programmatic.”
Insider Take
This week’s rollout of the updates to the Adobe Marketing Cloud continues technological innovation at Adobe the transition the company made in 2013 to a subscription-based cloud technology model. The pivot from their perpetual licensing model in favor of a monthly subscription model has led to steady increases in subscribers and revenue.
The subscription-based Creative Suite and Creative Cloud accounted for 45% of Adobe’s revenue in 2014, with14.7 million total licensees overall. 3.45 million subscribers were added last year, a growth rate of 140% year to year. Forbes predicts that this subscriber base will grow 75% by 2.55 million subscribers in 2015. Access to the entire Creative Cloud suite is $74.99 per month. Based on this success, Adobe’s stock price has skyrocketed from $38 to $77 in just two years.
Adobe’s success with subscription-based cloud technology reflects that they correctly judged the direction of the market in 2013. This week’s announcement of yet more upgrades and technological developments suite of products.
