Dive Brief:

• Adobe’s “Experience Business” campaign is the largest cross-media ad campaign implemented solely through a programmatic platform, according to a press release from the tech company. The effort rolled out this week in the U.S., U.K. and Germany.
• The campaign is being purchased 100% programmatically through the Adobe Advertising Cloud. Adobe is using use the Cloud to optimize media investments with its cross-screen planner and then tap the Cloud’s demand-side platform (DSP) to make the media buys across desktop display and video, mobile display, paid social display and video, digital out-of-home, and digital audio, as well as programmatic, addressable and connected TV ad formats. The buys themselves combine real-time bidding (RTB) and non-guaranteed direct buys using the On-Demand Adobe Advertising Cloud’s premium publisher marketplace.
• Experience Business targets C-level executives including CMOs, CIOs, CDOs, CTOs and CXOs, and the creative was handled by Adobe’s in-house creative team and partner agency Goodby Silverstein & Partners.

Dive Insight:

The all-programmatic approach was used because Adobe can target its selected audience via analyzing behaviors and online actions to deliver a relevant, personalized experience across touchpoints. 

The effort comes at a time when some marketers are questioning programmatic's effectiveness, namely due to a lack of control over where their ads appear. Without this control, some brands' ads are winding up sites rife with hate speech and violence or simply across a wide swath of low-quality content sites. As a result, brands' reputations with consumers could be getting hurt and their ROI. Some have even reduced the number of sites their ads appear on with little negative effect on results. 

In this light, it is clear that Adobe's campaign serves a dual purpose. Not only is it an example of maximizing the efficiencies around programmatic advertising — delivering a message to marketers that programmatic can provide relevancy at scale — the campaign also serves as an ad for Adobe’s own programmatic solutions as it is using its own Advertising Cloud DSP to execute the ad buys and its Cloud to optimize the media placements.

Adobe clients participating in the campaign include: Caesar’s Entertainment, Carnival Corporation, Franke Group, Holland America Line, Pandora, Princess Cruises, Sydney Opera House, UBS and T-Mobile.