Adobe has finalized its $4.75 billion acquisition of Marketo. The companies announced the marketing technology mega deal in September and made the deal official on Halloween.
The deal may spook competitors in the digital marketing space because it brings together two heavy hitters: Adobe and its strength in content management, commerce, analytics and creative capabilities and Marketo with its B2B marketing automation. Officials stated in the Halloween release that it combines Adobe Experience Cloud’s analytics, personalization and content capabilities with Marketo’s lead management, account-based marketing and revenue attribution technology.
The Marketo Engagement Platform will become part of Adobe Marketing Cloud. The Adobe Experience Cloud includes software that is designed to help organizations with customer experience management via marketing, advertising, analytics and commerce. The Marketo Engagement Platform is cloud-native and has opportunities for integration across Adobe Experience Cloud, according to company officials.
With the acquisition now closed, Marketo CEO Steve Lucas will still lead the Marketo team as part of Adobe’s Digital Experience business, reporting to executive VP and GM Brad Rencher.
In other customer experience software news ...
Acquia, Elastic Path Partner for Headless Commerce
Acquia and Elastic Path this week partnered to combine open source content management and headless commerce solutions. The move combines headless commerce and content technology, open platforms, and APIs via the open source content management system Drupal and Elastic Path’s enterprise API-first headless commerce platform, according to company officials.
Key capabilities of a combined Elastic Path-Acquia solution include flexibility, personalized content experiences and enterprise scale via compliance, security, scalability and governance. TA Digital will be working with both Elastic Path and Acquia to offer its CommerceFactory solutions to its clients.
Evergage Unveils Machine Learning Capabilities
Evergage, which offers personalization technology, announced two new machine-learning innovations: Evergage Decisions and the Evergage Data Science Workbench, which are designed to present rich customer data maintained in the Evergage platform. With the new Evergage Decisions algorithms, companies can apply artificial intelligence (AI) to automatically deliver content to website visitors, application users and email recipients. It complements Evergage's machine-learning-driven personalization and recommendation capabilities via Contextual Bandit.
The Evergage Data Science Workbench is designed to give data scientists a way to access and work with data stored on Evergage servers. Such data includes behavioral data, contextual information and explicit survey responses, combined with first- and third-party information from other systems (e.g., CRMs, email service providers, data warehouses).
GBH Insights Hires Korst, Zeug
GBH Insights, a marketing strategy, research and analytics consultancy, named Jeremy Korst as president and former Google managing director Brian Zeug as the newest member of GBH’s advisory board.
Korst will be responsible for the company’s strategic marketing and insights practice, focused on helping CMOs, chief product officers and other organizational leaders. Korst has been a strategic advisor to GBH, and in this new role will partner closely with GBH co-founders CEO Jon Greenwood and Chief Research Officer Eric Bradlow on overall firm and client development. Korst is a former CMO and product management executive with brands including Microsoft, T-Mobile and Avalara.
Zeug has experience with analytics and measurement practices for Google, Nielsen, Yahoo!, Mars Inc. and Unilever. He was the founder and global director of human truths at Google where he built a consulting and scale practice that used Google internal data and advanced analytics techniques.
LinkedIn Integrates with Google Campaign Manager
LinkedIn has announced a measurement integration with Google Campaign Manager (formerly DoubleClick Campaign Manager), now part of Google Marketing Platform. Users will be able to view LinkedIn ad performance alongside the rest of their paid spend and get attribution for LinkedIn ads across all impressions and interactions, measured in a cross-device and cross-platform manner. LinkedIn already launched the integration for a few ad formats and now debuts it for sponsored content.
Users can see LinkedIn ad performance in Campaign Manager, and use their conversion attribution capabilities for Sponsored Content campaigns, including Video, Carousel and Lead-Gen Forms, as well as Text and “Spotlight” Dynamic Ads.
Perficient Acquires Elixiter
Perficient, a digital transformation consulting firm, has acquired Elixiter, a revenue marketing consultancy that specializes in Marketo marketing automation services. Elixiter’s marketing automation capabilities and specialized Marketo services will complement the digital agency Perficient Digital, where Perficient has built an Adobe practice. The deal obviously makes sense with Adobe’s acquisition of Marketo.
The acquisition of Elixiter deepens Perficient’s digital marketing and marketing automation services, adds approximately 40 consulting, technology, sales and general and administrative professionals and brings client relationships with Fortune 1000 customers across several industries, according to company officials. Elixiter President and Founder Andrew Hull joins Perficient in a key leadership role.
Grey Group Acquires Majority Stake in Autumn Worldwide
Grey Group, a WPP company, has agreed to acquire a majority stake in Autumn Worldwide, an independent social media and digital marketing agency. Autumn Worldwide was founded in 2005 by Anusha Shetty and Abhay Rajankar as a brand consulting and advertising company. It advises on digital and social media campaigns, influencer and blogger marketing, online reputation management, content marketing, marketing big data and insights and Command Center Management Services (CCMS). Shetty will continue to head the Autumn operations while working closely with Nirvik Singh, chairman and CEO for Grey Group Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa.