Feature
Campaign, acquired when Adobepaid $600 million in cash for Neolane last July, sends personalized contentacross any channel. Adobe released a rebranded version in January that connectswith its Experience Manager. But the company still has a long way to go before Campaign worksseamlessly with the other four parts of the AdobeMarketing Cloud -- analytics, media optimizer, social and targeting.
"I think it's going to take some time to fully flesh-out thatacquisition and fully integrate it with the marketing cloud," PatrickTripp, senior product marketing manager for Adobe Campaign, said in an interview."It's going to be a journey. It's going to be a series of announcementsthrough 2014."
Feature Preview
The biggest step in that journey will come at the AdobeSummit in Salt Lake City on March 24 when Adobe will preview featuresthat will be included in a major upgrade due out in the third quarter,probably July or August.
"At Adobe Summit, we're going to start to introduce a lot of the majorcontents of this product. It's really very much focused on the alignment withinthe overall marketing cloud," said Tripp. "There are a lot of ways todescribe that -- integration point, look-and-feel, user interface, data aspects.There's a lot to that."
The ultimate goal, illustrated in the flow chart below, is to allow marketing managers to access any part of theAdobe suite when communicating with customers through Campaign. Once complete,that will help to hone the right message to send to individual customers at themost opportune time.
That sort of personalization has become a major goal for marketingtechnology companies, with some pundits calling 2014 the "yearof personalization." Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Oracle and many otherlarge companies compete with Adobe, which has built its marketing cloud into a$1 billion business through pricey acquisitionsof Omniture,DaySoftware, Demdex, Auditude and EfficientFrontier.
Learning Opportunities
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Smashing Silos
"When you build a portfolio like this through acquisitions, it's easy tohave silos, to basically have a lot of acquisitions that stand alone and sitside-by-side," said Jeff Allen, director of product marketing for AdobeAnalytics. "Never mind the organizational overlap. Just the fact thatpeople will stay within their columns can be a problem or at least a missedopportunity ... The right direction for Adobe is to break down thosesilos."
Wall Street holds high expectations for Adobe. Its stock has alreadyrisen 77 percent to $69 from its 52-week low of $40.21, but 15 of the 24financial analysts who follow the stock still rate it a "buy" and nobodyrates it a "sell."
Case in point: Brendan Barnicle, an analyst with Pacific Crest Securities, seta target of $75 for Adobe shares in mid-February. He notedin a research report that "in our channel checks, we have consistently heard that Adobe has all of the core components for creative and marketing. In fact, our channel contacts see no competitor that can come close to the Adobe offering."
"It's really about recurring revenue," said Tripp. "If you sawthe Adobe financial statement, they're really ramping up the company for somesignificant growth in the years coming due to the focus on cloud-based pricingmodels that allow you to have recurring streams of revenue ... and allow thecompany to very precisely forecast revenue for the next few years, which hasgotten the Street very excited."
Images by Adobe
