Forget Photoshop. Adobe Is a Marketing Company Now
The business’s recent Wall Street success hastened a transition toward the creepier side of online targeting.
In a dreary meeting room in a San Jose office tower, a couple dozen wonks from Adobe Inc. convened in September to plot the future of the company. The researchers and data scientists presented pitches that weren’t about helping smartphone users airbrush photos or developing a new way to make digital art. Instead, their ideas centered on ways Adobe could use artificial intelligence, based on huge collections of consumer data, to make ads more persuasive.
Adobe’s enduring reputation as the Photoshop company hasn’t caught up to what it’s become: an important conduit in the network of businesses trading and stitching together data about ordinary people to drive more consumption. The biggest problem with that, the Adobe team agreed at their fall research and development meeting, was they weren’t moving fast enough. Chris Challis, a manager of data science at Adobe Experience Cloud, told his colleagues about a plan to speed up things by handing off prototype software to corporate customers for testing. “We have the supersmart people that are creating the next thing,” Challis says. “It’s just a matter of getting it in front of people and proving it in a market setting to see what’s really going to take off.”