marketoAs you probably already heard, Adobe entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Marketo, the market-leading cloud platform for B2B marketing engagement. For the grand sum of $4.75 billion, Marketo’s engagement platform can then be added to Adobe Experience Cloud

Acquisition

Marketo’s integrated B2B marketing platform brings together planning, engagement and measurement capabilities. It is feature-rich and cloud-native with significant opportunities for integration across Adobe Experience Cloud. Enterprises of all sizes across industries currently rely on Marketo’s marketing applications to drive engagement and customer loyalty.

Marketo’s ecosystem includes over 500 partners and an engaged marketing community with over 65,000 members. Now it remains to be seen how the acquisition brings together the richness of Adobe Experience Cloud analytics, content, personalization, advertising and commerce capabilities with Marketo’s lead management and account-based marketing technology to provide B2B companies with the ability to create, manage and execute marketing engagement at scale.

Brad Rencher, executive vice president and general manager, Digital Experience, Adobe, said spot on that “the acquisition of Marketo widens Adobe’s lead in customer experience across B2C and B2B and puts Adobe Experience Cloud at the heart of all marketing.”

The transaction, which is expected to close during the fourth quarter of Adobe’s 2018 fiscal year, is subject to regulatory approval and customary closing conditions. Until the transaction closes, each company will continue to operate independently. Upon close, Marketo CEO Steve Lucas will join Adobe's senior leadership team and continue to lead the Marketo team as part of Adobe’s Digital Experience business, reporting to executive vice president and general manager Brad Rencher.

This deal will have a huge impact on martech industry since Adobe is moving then from a “just” creative platform to a full customer experience platform, entering the B2B world more pervasively and adding more vigor to challenge competitors like Salesforce, Oracle, and SAP. The combined power of Adobe’s AI tools with Marketo’s data seem to be a match made in heaven for meaningful engagements with customers.

Expansion

And there is even more breaking news about Adobe this week which are worth to mention, like the announcement that it has expanded voice capabilities across Adobe Experience Cloud to further advance the customer experience, in particular:

  • Advanced voice data analysis: Attribution IQ within Adobe Analytics will be expanded to include voice. Contribution analysis, powered by Adobe Sensei, Adobe’s AI ad machine learning framework can now help identify contributing factors behind anomalies such as user drop-off or a sales surge. Lastly, Segment IQ will use voice data to better formulate target segments – an especially critical effort for engaging younger groups of users.
  • Enhanced personalization: Marketers that can capture voice data with Adobe Analytics have more insights now around how customers engage with the brand. While the data itself is aggregated and anonymous, it provides rich signals into preferences and behaviors – much of which can inform how brands engage elsewhere. In Adobe Target, the personalization engine in Adobe Experience Cloud, new capabilities are being delivered that leverage voice insights to drive more personalization on other channels like desktop web and mobile.


In addition, Adobe released new audio analytics capabilities available in Adobe Analytics so that brands can tap data to drive everything from monetization strategy to personalization. Brands will be able to gather insights on this growing channel, but also tie it back to a singular customer profile.

Features include:

  • Over 70 metrics available: Adobe Analytics takes users beyond vanity metrics and basic KPIs. From drop-off metrics to ad effectiveness, audio analytics allows brands to intuitively understand end-to-end consumption, engagement and service delivery
  • Advanced Analysis and AI: Power features within Adobe Analytics are now being extended to better leverage audio data. It includes Adobe Sensei-powered features like Contribution Analysis, which uses machine learning to identify the contributing factors behind both good and bad anomalies.
  • Integrations with Adobe Marketing Cloud and Adobe Ad Cloud: Adobe Ad Cloud can now leverage audio insights to better guide monetization and paid media. Integrations with Marketing Cloud will drive intuitive personalization across channels with Adobe Target to inform email marketing strategies through Adobe Campaign.


Clearly, the rapid growth in audio streaming is creating both huge potential and challenges for brands. Audio analytics in Adobe Analytics give brands the grounding they need, with deep customer insights that drive all the different ways they connect with their users.

Hiring

Noteworthy is, last but not least, that Marketo appointed earlier this month Mika Yamamoto as Global President. As former Chief Digital Marketing Officer (CDMO) at SAP, Yamamoto brings more than 20 years of enterprise marketing experience to Marketo and will focus on delivering a world class end-to-end experience to the rapidly growing base of nearly 5,000 customers worldwide while expanding the planning, engagement and measurement capabilities of the world's most powerful marketing platform.

Before joining Marketo, she was driving SAP’s digital transformation by leading the strategy and implementation of the SAP demand generation, marketing tools/technologies, and field marketing disciplines. In addition, she worked as CMO for the small and medium-sized businesses at SAP. Prior to joining SAP, Yamamoto founded Amazon's first Amazon Books Store as Head of Marketing and Merchandising and spent more than six years at Microsoft in various channel and product management roles, including designing and launching the first physical Microsoft stores. The foundation of her data-driven approach was laid during her tenure as Research Vice President at Gartner, where she analyzed and forecasted trends in the technology market.

Her broad experience in marketing technology, brand development, customer experience design, research, strategic planning and large-scale implementation, as well as her commitment to building strong diversity and integration programs, gives Marketo an arsenal of valuable capabilities and Adobe one more reason to be pleased with the acquisition.

By Daniela La Marca