Adobe Q4: Cites Strength In Marketing Cloud Suite

Adobe Systems attributed $316 million of revenue in Q4 to its six-product suite, Adobe Marketing Cloud, a 38% year-over-year increase.

Adobe Marketing Cloud, which includes Adobe Analytics, Adobe Social, Adobe Target, Adobe Media Optimizer, Adobe Campaign and Adobe Experience Manager, “continues to do exceedingly well,” said Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen during the Q4 earnings call Thursday. Adobe Marketing Cloud accounted for $1.02 billion of revenue for fiscal year 2013, about a quarter of Adobe’s total revenue count of $4.06 billion.

Narayen also singled out Adobe Campaign, developed through the company’s summer acquisition of marketing automation platform Neolane, as a contributor to Marketing Cloud growth. Narayen added that the Neolane buy helps Adobe “upsell [Adobe Marketing Cloud] within the enterprise to the chief marketing officer.”

Adobe Campaign, which recently evolved to a CPM-free payment model, gives Adobe’s stack the ability to run cross-channel campaigns, which the company previously lacked.

Despite investments in commerce and data analytics by enterprise technology giants SAP and Oracle, Narayen saw little overlap with Adobe. He claimed Adobe’s audience-targeting and data-management platform (DMP), AudienceManager, “is enabling people to think about what might happen in a cookieless world [and a] media mix solution” that helps marketers gauge their optimal spend thresholds. “Extending into what would be more traditional IT-led areas … is not really an area of focus for us,” he said.

Six thousand customers use Adobe Marketing Cloud products; in a recent interview, Bill Ingram, VP of Adobe Analytics and Adobe Social, told AdExchanger that several customers deploy Marketing Cloud in its product entirety, but that some of the newer products like Social only have about 150 standalone customers. The goal is to get marketing departments deploying more broadly. Adobe has taken steps to do this, for instance, by introducing Adobe Campaign’s CPM-less model that charges by customer profile and engagement instead of by channel (such as number of emails sent).

So far, Adobe’s push seems to be working. “We see Marketing Cloud in more deals now,” said Ray Wang, chairman and principal analyst of Constellation Research. “It’s more than just the Neolane [integration]. We see increases in Target and Media Optimizer [implementations] as well.”

Some of the key verticals using Marketing Cloud products include: media, automotive brands and motor vehicle manufacturers, telecom, CPG, pharmaceutical, banking and Internet retailers.

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