Adobe Systems posted strong growth in its fiscal year ($4.15 billion in annual revenue). Adobe Marketing Cloud also did well in terms of revenue, bookings and customer adoption.
Revenue for the Marketing Cloud in Q4 was $330 million and more than $1.1 billion for the fiscal year, an annual record that occurred because the company exceeded its annual bookings target of 30%. This growth also came from size of transactions, number of solutions adopted by each customer and international growth and expansion in the partner community, according to CEO Shantanu Narayen.
Marketing Cloud recorded 74% growth in companies which have adopted three or more solutions. While retail continues to be strong in this category, Adobe is seeing more interest from financial services companies. Big customer wins in Q4 include: Ford, FedEx, MasterCard, QVC and Morgan Stanley. Adobe also claims 30 trillion data transactions are measured annually within the Marketing Cloud.
Adobe Campaign, built from campaign management tool Neolane, was among the Marketing Cloud’s best-performing solutions this quarter, as was Adobe Target and Media Optimizer.
Narayen called mobile a key focus area for Adobe’s Marketing Cloud, citing last month’s launch of intelligent location-based marketing features allowing marketers to target content based on consumers’ proximity to iBeacons.
Separately, Adobe in October rolled out additional cross-device targeting and personalization features via Adobe’s data-management offering, AudienceManager.
“With these capabilities, marketers have the ability to profile which individuals in a household are consuming content on a connected device at any given moment,” said Narayen during the company’s Q4 earnings call.
Adobe also cited its partnership with Nielsen, which lets it measure audiences across IP-connected devices like gaming consoles and set-top boxes, as a boon for both Marketing Cloud and its video and IP-TV business Primetime. This deal and the partnership with agency holding company Publicis in September were among Adobe’s largest strategic partnerships this year.
“In the video space, we announced the availability of Adobe Primetime digital rights management across mobile apps on connected devices and via HTML5 on major web browsers,” Narayen said.
Adobe seems to be unifying Marketing Cloud with Primetime. In an interview with AdExchanger on Tuesday, Jeremy Helfand, VP of Adobe’s video business, said Adobe is therefore focused on “capturing all this data, including how viewers interact with content, to personalize the experience and [strike] the right balance of content and ads.”
Where the digital Marketing Cloud enables marketers to harness data and execute targeted messaging across mobile, web and social, Primetime assists with the dynamic video ad serve.
While Adobe didn’t address its rumored interest in offline and online data company Datalogix, it dropped $800 million in an all-cash transaction to acquire Getty Images competitor, stock content marketplace Fotolia. That deal is expected to close in first quarter 2015, and should add $75 million to the Creative Cloud.
