Adobe Expands Its Marketing Cloud With Predictive Tools, iBeacon Support, And More

As Adobe kicks off its Digital Marketing Summit in Salt Lake City, the company is announcing a number of new features and products in the Adobe Marketing Cloud, its suite of products for digital marketers.

It’s the kind of announcement that’s best outlined with a quick list, and I’ll get to that in just a second. When I discussed the conference with Ray Pun, senior product marketing manager for mobile, he suggested that one of the big themes is Adobe’s ability to cover the full “digital marketing lifecycle,” from making ads to managing the campaigns, measuring them, and making money.

One thing that we did get a chance to discuss in a little more depth was an addition to the Marketing Cloud’s core services that Adobe is previewing today. It’s called Marketing Mix Planning and is supposed to allow companies to optimize their full range of online and offline marketing. That includes online display, search, and social ads, as well as TV, print, PR, and events.

Pun said Adobe will be able to look at historical data to make predictions about how changes in the mix of marketing spend will affect overall performance: “It removes a lot of the guesswork.” He added that to accomplish this, Adobe will be integrating with the third-party data sources that customers choose.

Other announcements today include:

  • A new Master Marketing Profile that creates a single view of customers across all marketing channels.
  • A central repository for all the media assets used by a company across the Marketing Cloud.
  • Support for measuring and targeting marketing messages through Apple’s iBeacon technology for in-store positioning.
  • Adobe Experience Manager and PhoneGap Enterprise, which are supposed to make it easier for developers to build apps and for marketers to adjust the content without any coding.
  • The ability to measure which ad campaigns are driving downloads and other user behavior across Apple’s App Store, Google Play, and other mobile app stores.