Adobe Adds Online Audience Optimization via Latest Acquisition

By Irina Guseva (@irina_guseva) Jan 19, 2011

The latest Adobe acquisition of Demdex will be included in Adobe Online Marketing Suite, powered by Omniture, with focus on customer experience management, online audience optimization and ad spending.

What the Deal is About

Taking yet another step into the holy land of Customer Experience Management, Adobe is after the global online advertising spend market. For advertiser and publishers to be successful, they ought to know their online audiences. They ought to know what a specific audience is interested in to sell more efficiently.

Demdex — as part of the Adobe Online Marketing Suite + Omniture power machine — will add audience optimization tools. Adobe defines audience optimization “as intelligent collection, compilation and management of anonymous audience data.”
The solution is targeted at advertisers and publishers, as they comprise the biggest chunk of Omniture’s customers looking to optimize online ads buying and selling practices.

Advertising spend optimization for online advertisers and the ability to leverage audience data to increase revenue for publishers are two primary drivers behind the combined offer.

Who is Demdex

One of the early boomers in the SaaS audience management market, Demex has this concept of a “data bank” of audiences. It contains data collected from various web properties and online ad campaigns, or the one coming from third-party data sellers. These sources are then used to better target online advertising at specific audiences.

New York-based Demdex was founded in 2008. Its investors include First Round Capital and Genacast Ventures, Comcast’s seed venture arm. In 2008, the company seeded US$ 1.5 million.

After coming out of stealth mode in June 2009, in 2010, they received another US$ 6 million in Series A funding, led by new investor Shasta Ventures.

Demdex has been readying for an acquisition for some time now: raising money and adding industry heavyweights to the upper management echelon. Adobe seems to be making all the right acquisitions, Day Software included.