Adobe to acquire Marketo for $4.75 billion

Adobe has confirmed it is acquiring Marketo Inc. for $4.75 billion, with the deal expected to close during the fourth quarter of Adobe’s 2018 fiscal year. Last week, unnamed sources had revealed to Reuters that Adobe was in negotiations to purchase Marketo, but neither company would comment at the time.

Why marketers should care

Adobe’s Creative Cloud services has long been part of the marketing industry standard for creating and managing media-rich assets. Now with the addition of Marketo’s B2B marketing automation platform, Adobe will be able to deliver a full-scale marketing solution, allowing marketers — and their marketing technology teams — to unify costs within a single layer of their martech stack.

“The acquisition of Marketo widens Adobe’s lead in customer experience across B2C and B2B and puts Adobe Experience Cloud at the heart of all marketing,” says Adobe executive vice president and general manager Brad Rencher.

Marketo CEO Steve Lucas said there is no better home for Marketo to continue to rapidly innovate than Adobe. After the acquisition is complete, Lucas will join Adobe’s senior leadership team, reporting to Rencher.

According to Anita Brearton, the CEO and co-founder of CabinetM — a marketing technology management platform — among CabinetM clients using Adobe, Marketo is the fourth most popular product in those clients’ marketing stacks, following Google Analytics, LinkedIn and Twitter. When rumors broke last week that a deal may be in the works, Brearton told Martech Today that it would be hard to know whether the acquisition would change much for marketers other than offering a purchasing efficiencies.

“We’ll have to wait and see if this impacts product functionality and direction,” said Brearton.

More on the acquisition

1. Marketo’s ecosystem includes nearly 5,000 customers, 500 partners and a marketing community of more than 65,000 members.

2. Upon close of the deal, Marketo CEO Steve Lucas will continue to lead the Marketo team as part of Adobe’s Digital Experience business.

3. At $4.75 billion dollars, Adobe is purchasing Marketo for more than 2.5 times what it spent on the Magento acquisition in May.