Adobe Acquires Ad Buying Company

Adobe Systems has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire privately held Efficient Frontier, a multi-channel ad buying and optimization firm. Adobe currently captures approximately five trillion digital transactions per year for more than 5,000 customers, including many of the world’s largest advertisers, publishers and advertising agencies. The acquisition of Efficient Frontier will add multi-channel ad campaign forecasting, execution and optimization capabilities to Adobe’s existing Digital Marketing Suite.

Adobe’s digital marketing capabilities also include an enterprise-class data management platform, a leading video ad management and monetization platform, and an enterprise content management system. Adobe will continue to build upon the foundation of its independent ad buying and optimization platform for search, social and display, enabling the company to offer a more complete suite of capabilities to digital marketers, advertisers and publishers for reporting and analytics, personalized experiences, multi-channel campaign management and media monetization.

Among other things, Efficient Frontier will bring to Adobe a social ad buying capability for Facebook, which leverages Efficient Frontier’s optimization algorithms to predict results. Additionally, a marketer can upload various creative elements into the solution and it will automatically generate ad combinations. These capabilities will be integrated with the Facebook ad buying functionality currently available with Adobe SearchCenter.

The completion of the transaction, which is subject to customary government approvals and the satisfaction of other customary conditions, is expected to close in the first quarter of Adobe’s 2012 fiscal year.