Why did Adobe buy Efficient Frontier

Today Adobe announced that they have bought Efficient Frontier. Efficient Frontier are a web agency who claim that that they help Marketers deliver performance across the digital world and who Adobe describe as a leader in optimising multi-channel and auction-based digital advertising across search, display and social media.

It’s an interesting move for Adobe for two reasons. Firstly they already have an ad management tool (SearchCentre) which allows you to create, manage and optimise your bidding on paid search and on the advertising in Facebook. Is this going to be an acquisition similar to the HBX one whereby they are simply buying a customer base which they’ll then integrate into their other systems.

If this is the case they are going to need to learn the lessons of the HBX integration with SiteCatalyst that left many people (both sides of the tool) frustrated. They’ll need to make sure that they don’t promise quick changes when technical resource is tight. They’ll also need to make sure that if they do combine the two tools into one they don’t take the best features and make them premium with additional charges.

If the two systems are intending to stand side by side as Discover and Insight do, then they’ll have spend lots of time pointing out the value add of Efficient Frontier. It is a tool that allows lots of automation in the system in a similar way to how O2MC works, but with perhaps less ability to input custom data sources. It also has the ad management system that SearchCentre lacks.

The next stage for the technology is critical. How is it going to integrate with other Adobe products – particularly SiteCatalyst. But this should also be true about how it will integrate with Discover, Insight, Genesis, etc. These tools are now all so heavily interlinked that you can’t just build an add on to one of them without thinking about the others.

The second point of context for this acquisition is that Adobe appear to have bought some Marketing staff. For the first time they are thinking about really entering into actually doing Marketing for you, not just enabling you to do it or measuring how it is done. You could argue that this is the next step in the process of creating the Marketing suite – bringing in the resources to be able to do it.

It’s an interesting point, because Adobe has a large partners network (Adversitement included) who already allow you to do a lot of this Marketing on their behalf. The market has always been vibrant as Adobe admits it doesn’t have the resources or the knowledge to be able to do many of these things themselves and advises the use of partners.

Of course resource is a very local thing, so whilst you may be well known in California, you probably aren’t going to get much traction in Budapest, so there will always be a need for partners in all parts of the world, even with companies as multinational as Efficient Frontier, but it will be interesting to see if Adobe keep hoovering up consultancies. And more importantly, can they keep the quality staff?