Hear from execs at The New York Times, Thomson Reuters, Trusted Media Brands and many others
Slowly but surely Adobe is setting itself up as an alternative to Google in stitching together the fragmented advertising technology product landscape. Its key competitive advantage: it isn’t Google.
Adobe made its latest move yesterday with the acquisition of Efficient Frontier, the digital ad buying platform. With Efficient Frontier, Adobe gains a critical piece of building a rival ad planning, buying, measurement and optimizing platform: the buying piece. Efficient Frontier started its life as a search ad platform but morphed to include display and social, both of which are starting to look a lot like search.
That piece joins Adobe’s purchase earlier this month of Auditude, a video ad platform, along with its acquisition of data manager Demdex this year, Web analytics giant Omniture back in 2009, and its home-grown tools that are ubiquitous in making digital advertising. Taken together it’s the makings of a rival to what Google has built itself with DoubleClick, Invite Media and other pieces.
There’s a key difference that Adobe exec Aseem Chandra stressed to me: Adobe doesn’t sell advertising. The thinking is it’s quite odd to turn to Google for the tools to plan, buy and measure media. After all, wouldn’t it design those tools to make sure its own ads get bought? That’s the rub of having Google as market maker.
On the other hand, nearly every publisher, agency and advertiser agrees that the ad tech landscape is a mess of complexity. It simply shouldn’t be that difficult to cobble together the tools and platforms to plan and execute campaigns. Digital media has always struggled to balance the need to innovate against the need for efficiency. It’s no wonder that 15 years on, digital ad buying remains so hopelessly inefficient — and brands don’t even buy into most of the metrics from the reputedly most measurable medium around.
Adobe was long identified as a dark horse in the race to provide an anti-Google. The Web ad market’s 22 percent growth in the third quarter, compared to a year earlier, hasn’t gone unnoticed. Big infrastructure players like Akamai and IBM have dipped their toes in the water, yet nothing to the extent of Adobe. The ubiquitous digital media investment banker Terry Kawaja believes SAP could throw its hat in the ring.
Adobe has a ways to go before it’s actually a credible alternative to Google in the many pieces of digital ad infrastructure. It doesn’t have an ad server, demand-side platform or supply-side platform. Chandra wouldn’t go into which pieces he feels Adobe is missing, while reiterating its goal to have an end-to-end system, which ends up sounding a lot like what Google’s said over the years. That’s the plan at least.
“The tough thing for them will be how to integrate them all together without falling on their face,” said Joanna O’Connell, a Forrester Research. analyst.
More in Media
Google AI Overviews linked to 25% drop in publisher referral traffic, new data shows
Organic search referral traffic from Google is declining broadly, with the majority of DCN member sites – spanning both news and entertainment – experiencing traffic losses from Google search between 1% and 25%.
Media Briefing: Amazon’s off-site ad push is becoming publishers’ post-cookie playbook
Amazon is fast becoming a partner du jour for publishers: a kind of post-cookie data wingman that’s helping them monetize the approximate 70 percent of the open web that’s now unaddressable.
Despite the hype, publishers aren’t prioritizing GEO
Even though referral traffic is drying up, most publishers are skeptical of the hype around generative search optimization.