Adobe acquires ‘conversational marketing’ company Neolane for $600M

Adobe has acquired marketing automation company Neolane for $600 million in cash.

Neolane provides “conversational marketing” technology. Its suite of products allows organizations to automate one-to-one “lifetime dialogues” with customers. The platform integrates data from multiple channels, both online and offline, and then sends customized, targeted messages. It helps marketers stay on top of the increasing flood and diversity of digital interactions, to deliver “timely, relevant, and interactive messages” on a large scale. Neolane is built on a single codebase, which the company said makes for easier integration and implementation. It can execute campaigns across the Web, email, social, mobile, call center, direct mail, and point of sale.

The concept of a marketing cloud is an interoperable suite of tools that together provide the digital marketer everything they need to find, understand, attract, engage, monitor, communicate, and track consumers, fans, and customers. There are many startups and smaller companies that take on specific components of digital marketing, and Adobe and Salesforce are duking it out to have the dominant, unified marketing suite.

Neolane will become the sixth solution in the Adobe Marketing Cloud, along with its Analytics, Target, Social, Experience Manager, and Media Optimizer offerings.

“The Neolane acquisition builds upon Adobe’s strategy of combining organic innovation with key acquisitions to deliver the most robust set of solutions for digital marketers today,” Adobe said in a statement.

Digital marketing is all the rage these days. Digital marketing firm ExactTarget was just acquired by Salesforce for $2.5 billion, and Oracle bought cloud marketing company Eloqua for $871 million in December 2012. Marketing automation company Marketo went public in May and raised $79 million. 

Adobe has been interested in this space for a couple of years now. It has acquired a series of digital marketing startups, including Omniture in 2009, Day Software in 2010, Demdex and Auditude in 2011, and Efficient Frontier in 2012.

Neolane has 400 clients, including many international corporations across banking and financial services, B2B high tech, retail, media and entertainment, and travel and hospitality. Customers include Expedia, IKEA, Motorola, Canon, Dior, Samsung, Sony Music, and Wells Fargo.

Neolane is based in Paris. The transaction is expected to close in July.