Technology company Adobe Systems acquired data management platform provider Demdex on January 18. Adobe will incorporate the company into the Adobe Online Marketing Suite and discontinue the Demdex brand.
The acquisition will enable Adobe to offer an audience optimization tool to its clients. Companies that do not buy general ad impressions, choosing instead to target segmented audiences digitally based on demographics, can use audience optimization to reach specific segments, according to Matt Langie, senior director of product marketing for the Omniture Business Unit.
“We acquired Demdex with the intention of bringing audience optimization to the online ad market,” he said. “We see the online ad space moving away from buying impressions to buying audiences. It’s a major tectonic shift in the industry. Companies today want to reach consumers more specifically, based on demographic, and Demdex helps us meet that change in the industry.”
Langie said Adobe is acquiring New York-based Demdex because it is independent and allows clients to maintain ownership of the information in the customer databases.
“We [Demdex and Omniture] are not publishers,” Langie said. “We manage data on behalf of our customers, and they own their own data. We’re merely the pipes that help the data flow.”
Adobe has not yet revealed what future Demdex-Adobe products will look like, but Langie said interested parties should expect answers during the annual Adobe Omniture Summit, which begins March 7.
The acquisition will not result in layoffs, said Langie.
Adobe acquired Omniture in 2009 for $1.8 billion. Less than a year after the purchase, Omniture co-founder Josh James resigned for undisclosed reasons. Adobe filed a lawsuit on December 10, 2010 against James for breach of contract when he purchased alleged competitor Corda Technologies.
Terms of the deal were not revealed. Demdex could not be reached for comment.
