Adobe to Enable Better Digital Marketing Decisions with Efficient Frontier

The success of any marketing campaign boils down to choices decision-makers must make every day. From the most simple to the most complex, digital marketers have a myriad of decisions to make that have the potential to define, or in more dramatic cases, redefine best business practices. These decisions include two of the most essential indicators of marketing success:

Engaging with customers in a personal and authentic way
Driving real and measurable business impact

An area of marketing where this is most clear is digital advertising.

Digital advertising is like having a bunch of spinning toy tops to manage. Which one should be tended to first – search, display or social media? Which will provide the best bang for your advertising buck? How do you keep multiple channels going at the same time? The challenge of effectively managing online ad campaigns across multiple channels is one I have heard our customers complain about for years – one that is exacerbated by new, bright and shiny digital channels. Just take social media for example. According to an article yesterday in the Wall Street Journal, Facebook’s world-wide ad revenue alone is expected to hit $3.8 billion with its share of display ad revenue growing 16.3% in 2011 and 19.5% in 2012. (In case you haven’t heard, social media could be big.) And social media is just one of the dozens of channels the marketer must consider to keep their advertising campaigns humming along.

What’s more, marketers must take into account fundamental changes in the industry as ad budgets continue to shift rapidly to digital channels which are projected to be 26% of ad spend in 2016 according to Forrester Research. To justify and even accelerate this shift to digital, marketers must clearly understand and prove the business impact of their digital initiatives.

Taking the guesswork out of digital advertising is the task we enthusiastically tackle with today’s news of Adobe’s definitive agreement to acquire Efficient Frontier, a leader in optimizing multi-channel and auction-based digital advertising across search, display and social media. With Efficient Frontier, Adobe takes another step towards being the standard for the way marketers create, manage, execute, measure and optimize their marketing and advertising campaigns. Efficient Frontier technology will provide an automated, highly customizable, and algorithmically driven solution to help our customers make better, faster, and more informed decisions to drive effective advertising campaigns.

For our customers, this is nothing short of fantastic news. We are empowering the marketing team to optimize paid search, make informed social ad buying decisions, see the real ROI of social media channels through a social engagement platform from Context Optional, and harness the power of real-time bidding technology for display advertising. In the end, our customers will be able to standardize their digital advertising initiatives on our independent platform for digital ad buying and optimization – making the task of managing those spinning tops easier than ever.

I couldn’t be more excited to offer marketers this powerful solution for managing search, display and social media in today’s digital world. The Efficient Frontier team will be welcomed to the Adobe family as a key addition to the world-class team and help us continue to build on the strong technology stack that makes up our powerful Adobe Digital Marketing Suite and our customers will reap the benefits.

-Brad