Adobe pumps up its Marketing Cloud

The Adobe Marketing Cloud logo, rendered as 3-D

A lot of clouds are changing their shapes this week.

Following Salesforce’s updates yesterday to its Marketing Cloud, Adobe today unveiled at its Adobe Summit EMEA in London a variety of enhancements for its Marketing, Creative and Document Clouds.

In the Marketing Cloud specifically, the tech giant added a variety of adtech tweaks to Adobe Media Optimizer, which provides campaign management for advertising.

The existing Dynamic Creative Optimization tool, which was based on the company’s acquisition of Tumri ad tech a year ago, can now be guided by audience segments through an integration with the Cloud’s data management platform, Audience Manager.

The company gives the example of an ad about airfares delivered to a web user who researched flights. That user can now be added to a custom segment of frequent flyers and will receive an on-the-fly customized ad for that segment with, say, free seat upgrades.

Media Optimizer can also now buy and optimize standard video display ads on the Web and Facebook, whereas before it could only handle video ads on Facebook. There’s also the new ability to use location data in bidding for search ad impressions on Google, and Adobe Analytics now provides a more complete view of attribution from display and social ad impressions that drive an app install.

The new data science capabilities, Adobe Fellow in Data Science Anil Kamath told me, are part of Adobe’s overall effort to “make our clouds more intelligent.”

The Marketing Cloud’s A/B testing tool, Adobe Target, now has Smarter Allocation capability that will shift the highest-performing content toward incoming visitor traffic, even if the marketer is still testing options.

As an example, the company said, a celebrity video pushing a new line of t-shirts may be driving the most purchases, so it will be shown to more visitors, even though the retailer is still testing out the responses to other content, like newsletters.

Adobe Analytics now offers “propensity scoring” for cart abandonment, one of marketers’ chronic headaches. Based on behavioral and other data, this scoring assesses the likelihood that such users might return to the site, so emails or other marketing can automatically send out incentives like discounts to the most likely returners.

There’s also now what Adobe calls “Predictive Subject Lines,” a beta feature that Kamath described as a kind of word suggestion tool. A marketer writing a subject line might be prompted, for instance, to use the word “sale” instead of “discount” because the former results in more, you know, sales.

Also announced are several enhancements to the Creative and Document Clouds, including the ability to search images via image analysis in Creative Cloud’s Lightroom, such as looking for photos with flowers without having to manually label the pictures.