Adobe has unveiled a new algorithmic engine and advances in Adobe Marketing Cloud Audience Core Services to bring together the worlds of data-driven marketing and ad tech.

Programmatic ad buying continues to be a challenge for today’s advertisers, with too much focus placed on display ad bidding and multiple data vendors providing different buying methods and billing practices. By integrating programmatic buying natively, Adobe brings the marketplace to the marketer and enables consistent consumer experiences across channels and increased ROI. New Audience Core Services enable brands to connect massive audience and behavioral data from a broad range of sources, including CRM systems, websites and apps while a new set of algorithms lets them reach those audiences with paid media through Adobe Media Optimizer.

“We believe programmatic efforts to date are broken and focus simply on display ad bidding,” said John Mellor, vice president, digital marketing at Adobe. “Having a one-stop shop for all your targeting and data as well as transparency into technology pricing and media costs is a big step towards true programmatic. The ability to share audience segments across other Adobe Marketing Cloud Solutions brings that data to life across channels and ensures that audiences are seeing the same message no matter where marketers connect with them.”

Audience Core Services, Audience Marketplace

Audience Core Services lets marketers bring together CRM and behavioural data collected via websites, apps and IoT device engagements and mine an unparalleled set of customer profiles for unique behaviours based on specific attributes. Brands can use the functionality to deliver more personalised email campaigns, web and app content, social media engagements and more. And by integrating legacy CRM data from Salesforce, Oracle and SAP, Audience Core Services offer the most granular audience segmentation in the industry.

A new Audience Marketplace enables advertisers and publishers to evaluate and purchase anonymous third-party data to expand audience segments and bring them into Audience Manager. For example, audience data can now be shared between a hotel and travel company to better target a specific segment of travellers with an ad or other content. In addition, Adobe Marketing Cloud customers can buy, sell and share their anonymous first-party data, which allows brands to scale valuable audiences, identify partners for data sharing, and improve cross-channel customer engagement.

Algorithmic Engine

Advertisers and agencies can leverage audience segments within Adobe Marketing Cloud Audience Core Services with a click of a button and buy display, search and social ads at scale using a new self-serve UI within Adobe Media Optimizer. The programmatic approach, powered by a new algorithmic engine, removes inefficiencies from the system and lets brands and agencies manage the real-time bidding process directly across major ad exchanges with over one million queries per second. Ad audiences can also be shared across other Adobe Marketing Cloud solutions. This bi-directional sharing enables marketers to deliver more consistent and targeted experiences for prospects and existing customers.