Adobe is now officially an ad tech company
The launch follows Adobe's $540 million acquisition of video ad tech company TubeMogul, which closed in December.
The Adobe Advertising Cloud includes three components: Search, TubeMogul's demand-side platform, and what Adobe calls "dynamic creative optimization," which lets marketers change and test what their ads look like, depending on their performance.
The Advertiser Cloud will also integrate with other existing products that marketers use, such as Adobe Analytics.
Speaking to Business Insider, Brett Wilson, the former TubeMogul CEO and current vice president and general manager of advertising at Adobe, said: "Adobe, traditionally, has been known for having a marketing cloud that primarily helped advertisers measure interactions with their audience and data. Advertisers usually have totally separate media execution software. Adobe is the first marketing cloud to have a fully executable advertising layer, riding the gap between martech and ad tech."
Adobe's closest competitors - Salesforce and Oracle - have long been seen as potential strategic buyers of ad tech companies as they look to grow out the services they can offer their marketing customers. However, while both of Adobe's rivals have made major acquisitions in the marketing tech and data space, they have yet to provide marketers demand-side platform software that allows them to buy ads. Some observers within the ad tech industry think Adobe's acquisition of TubeMogul could spur Salesforce and Oracle into reactively buying more companies in the ad tech sector.
Wilson said a big problem for marketers right now is "leaky integrations" between analytics software and media execution software, which results in lost time trying to pair the two.
Consolidation saves time, Wilson added. "We are trying to bring a lot more sanity to ad buying, to make it more scalable, with fewer reconciliation issues."
The Advertiser Cloud was announced at Adobe's annual summit, which takes place this week in Las Vegas. At last year's event, Adobe announced it was launching a "cross-device co-op" that lets marketers share the data they have about their users with other brands and retailers to build a more accurate view of the audience visiting their websites. The co-op only shares the brands and information both companies have seen, not any details about new customers.
While the co-op is not under Wilson's remit, he is excited about its possibilities. "Right now there are two large industry players that seem to have a lot of data," he said, referring to Facebook and Google. "The data co-op allows everyone else to pull their data in a privacy-friendly way to fill out their cross-channel graph. We are integrating with the data co-op for Advertising Cloud advertisers that want to leverage it."