Adobe has signalled its intention to build a major digital marketing empire by shelling out $600m (£393m) in cash for marketing automation company Neolane.
French-owned Neolane provides “conversational marketing” technology, allowing brands to automate a one-to-one dialogue with customers. The platform integrates data from multiple channels, both online and offline, and then sends customised, targeted messages.
The firm can execute campaigns across the Web, email, social, mobile, call centre, direct mail, and point of sale.
Neolane will become the sixth solution in the Adobe Marketing Cloud, along with its Analytics, Target, Social, Experience Manager, and Media Optimizer offerings.
“The Neolane acquisition builds upon Adobe’s strategy of combining organic innovation with key acquisitions to deliver the most robust set of solutions for digital marketers today,” Adobe said in a statement.
The deal follows just weeks after ExactTarget was just acquired by Salesforce for $2.5bn (£1.6bn), and Oracle bought cloud marketing company Eloqua for $871m in December 2012.
In recent years Adobe has acquired a series of digital marketing startups, including Omniture in 2009, Day Software in 2010, Demdex and Auditude in 2011, and Efficient Frontier in 2012.
Neolane has 400 clients, including many international corporations across banking and financial services, B2B high tech, retail, media and entertainment, and travel and hospitality. Customers include Expedia, IKEA, Motorola, Canon, Dior, Samsung, Sony Music, and Wells Fargo.
