Adobe Enhances Digital Marketing Suite with Adobe Social and New Features

Adobe Systems ramped up the offerings of its Digital Marketing Suite with a new product, Adobe Social, and several new features, which were unveiled today at the annual Adobe Digital Marketing Summit.

Adobe Social, which is offered as a SaaS application, combines social publishing and engagement with monitoring, social ad buying, and analytics in one platform. The platform builds on the social media management and online advertising technology Adobe gained earlier this year from its acquisition of digital marketing agency Efficient Frontier.

With the platform, users can manage their engagements on LinkedIn, Facebook, and other social networks; elevate posts into "Sponsored Stories" on Facebook; create and deploy coupons and contests; monitor the sentiment of conversations through real-time insights, and identify social influencers.

Adobe Social also allows users to engage their audience on Pinterest, the newly popular photo-sharing Web site that acts as a virtual pinboard for images.

"We know brands are increasing their advertising on social networks, but social marketing involves much more than just placing an ad," says John Mellor, vice president of strategy and business development of Adobe's digital marketing business division. "If I'm a brand, I might buy advertising on Facebook to send customers to my page where they can interact with an application on the page. We've pulled all those pieces together and address all the API silos that exist in Facebook or Gooogle+ and other social networking sites."

Adobe also added new predictive marketing capabilities and a Web Experience Management [WEM] solution to its Digital Marketing Suite.

Using the Suite's new predictive analytics, marketers can create what-if scenarios to see how changes could potentially impact business outcomes; forecast campaign results across search, social, and display; identify upcoming risks and anomalies through a virtual analyst; and more. The WEM solution lets users provide a unified brand experience across Web sites, mobile devices, and social media.

Adobe Social and the predictive analytics virtual analyst will be released later this year.

Through recent acquisitions—starting with the 2009 acquisition of Web traffic analysis company Omniture for $1.6 billion—Adobe has expanded beyond its consumer tools and is pursuing digital marketing. Adobe bought Auditude, a video advertising company, and Demdex Inc., whose software provides data about online audiences, last year.

Digital marketing is Adobe's "fastest growing business unit," according to Mellor. "Adobe has spent over $2.5 billion over the last two years in acquisitions that are focused on digital marketing to help marketers optimize the $100 billion in ad spend that will be spent in 2012," Mellor notes. "Chief marketing officers are under more pressure than ever, and we are uniquely positioned to help them navigate this explosive landscape."

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