Adobe unveils new, deeper partnerships with Microsoft, Drift, Roku, ServiceNow

Software giant Adobe let fly a bevy of partnership announcements at its annual Summit in Las Vegas this week, confirming tie-ups with everyone from Microsoft to Drift to Roku to ServiceNow — with each deal involving data connections to fuel more efficient and powerful marketing.

B2B data integrations include LinkedIn. In addition to the Open Data Initiative details from Wednesday, Adobe has also expanded its relationship with Microsoft to bring together key data sources, including LinkedIn, Marketo, Adobe Audience Manager and Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales.

Adobe’s Steve Lucas discusses Adobe’s new partnership with LinkedIn at Adobe Summit in Las Vegas on March 26, 2019.

The linkages aim to provide B2B marketers with better information for their Account-based Marketing initiatives, so they can more easily identify buying groups within targeted accounts and deliver personalized content.

“Orchestrating the engagement of multiple individuals in a complex marketing and sales journey is at the heart of account-based experiences,” said Steve Lucas, senior vice president of Digital Experience business at Adobe. “With these new account-based capabilities, marketing and sales teams will have increased alignment around the people and accounts they are engaging.”

Specifically, Adobe said marketers would be able to use the predictive modeling and automation capabilities of Marketo Engage Account Profiling to find the correct targets to engage with LinkedIn Matched Audiences. Additionally, the audience data within Adobe Audience Manager DMP can be used with contact-based campaigns on LinkedIn and other channels.

Conversational ABM with Marketo and Drift. Adobe’s partnership with conversational marketing platform Drift is bringing even more ABM goodies to marketers’ toolboxes. Together, the companies are offering what they’re calling Conversational ABM for Marketo Engage, which will let marketers have real-time personalized conversations with members of a target account’s buying committee whenever they visit the brand’s website.

That “conversation” can take the form of a chatbot interaction, a relevant piece of content, or an opportunity to immediately book a meeting with the sales rep handling their account.

Because customers have more power than ever before in today’s environment, David Cancel, CEO of Drift said, “whoever makes it easier to buy, wins — yet most B2B websites add friction and force buyers to jump through hoops just to talk to someone. ”

WPP integration and consulting firm Verticurl has signed on to help customers quickly add this capability to their marketing stacks.

OTT with Roku. The Adobe partnership with Roku aims to arm advertisers with more tools to precisely target consumers watching OTT TV programming. Adobe says its customers using Adobe Advertising Cloud, Adobe Audience Manager and Adobe Analytics can employ the first-party data in those platforms to find their known targets on the Roku platform, reach them with ads and measure the results.

“Roku has a direct, first-party relationship with its consumers and the most advanced ad capabilities in OTT,” said Scott Rosenberg, general manager, Platform business, Roku. “This partnership gives Adobe clients a seamless way to activate their data and reach customers who’ve moved their TV viewing to Roku devices.”

Bringing customer service into the equation with ServiceNow. Meanwhile, Adobe has teamed with ServiceNow — a digital workflow and productivity player — to link customer service data with the other data marketers are gathering and employing. The idea is that the intelligence that goes into winning a customer could be leveraged by the customer service team after the purchase, and then marketers could employ that service data to up-sell or drive loyalty programs.

The companies say this kind of integration will bring together the Adobe Experience Cloud and the ServiceNow Now Platform,“…to provide enterprises with real-time actionable data across the customer journey so they can better manage and grow their digital businesses,” said Shantanu Narayen, president and CEO, Adobe.

Why you should care. Though each of Adobe’s partnership announcements are light on details, for now, they signal some of the areas where marketers can expect new capabilities to become available. The focus on data integrations that span areas of marketing from advertising to customer service points to a broader trend of helping marketers get data out of silos.