Adobe plans to integrate creative and digital marketing cloud offerings

“It is our primary business goal to become a one-stop solution provider, from creation to monetisation of the content, for both creative people and marketers,” he told Campaign Asia-Pacific.

Adobe is traditionally known as a company providing creative software, including Acrobat and its Creative Suites, but it ventured into the digital-marketing business in 2009 with the acquisition of Utah-based online marketing and web analytics business unit Omniture.

It subsequently made several other acquisitions including Day Software in 2010, Demdex and Auditude in 2011 and Efficient Frontier last year, to further expand its brand expertise in digital marketing.

It then consolidated more than 20 products into five pillars, namely analytics, test and target, social, media optimisation and web experience management.

Great Eastern is one example of a client that uses all five pillars. Other clients for its digital marketing business include Standard Chartered Bank, Maxis Malaysia, SingTel, AirAsia and Malaysia Airlines. 

Kinomoto was appointed to his role last November after Adobe integrated the sales functions in Japan and Asia-Pacific. He is responsible for the Asia-Pacific region, including Southeast Asia, Hong Kong, China, Taiwan, India, Korea, Australia, New Zealand and Japan, focusing mainly on B2B companies.

He hopes to expand the digital marketing business with double-digit growth annually, by creating awareness among marketers through events, showing case studies, engaging with executives and through education. Hence, the company is still looking at the opportunity to enhance its digital marketing offering, through acquisition and investment in engineering.

“More and more marketers are aware of digital marketing, content marketing and social, and they need to feel comfortable with digital marketing,” he said. “We will do it by talking to marketers and through education." Kinomoto added that it's an advantage that he is a marketer, too.

According to a six-month study on marketers in Asia-Pacific with the CMO Council last year entitled "Digital investment in APAC: 2012 versus 2013", the findings revealed that marketers in the region are committed to digital, and that the number of marketers who will allocate over half their budget to digital marketing would double this year.

Some 90 per cent of the marketers believe that digital marketing could create competitive advantage for their company, and 52 per cent felt that digital marketing was crucial in helping to create a customer-centric, responsive organisation.

Nearly 60 per cent of the respondents said the promise of greater accountability from the marketing function was driving their leadership team's interest in digital marketing strategy and programmes.

This study measured APAC marketers' attitudes towards digital marketing across four factors, namely mindset, marketing readiness, organisational alignment and skillsets, in Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Korea and Singapore.

Adobe’s main marketing channels are digital, such as display, search marketing, social and own websites, which constitutes about 70 per cent of its total marketing spend.

It also banks on events and conferences, as well as post-event follow-up work like sending out emails, tracking website visits and content views and conversion rates.

Adobe has also since changed the business model for its creative cloud offering, from perpetual licenses (boxed software) to the subscription model. It currently has more than 700,000 paid users.

As the migration of the new business model is still ongoing, the number of subscription for the creative cloud offering is expected to reach 1.25 million users by end of this year, and 4 million by end of 2015.