Adobe Efficient Frontier Acquisition Revealed To Be About $400 Million

At the end of November, Adobe announced its intent to acquire Efficient Frontier, thought the price was not disclosed.

“The purchase bolsters Adobe’s strategic focus on digital marketing and expands the company’s solutions, which are central to how digital marketing and advertising is created, managed, executed measured and optimized,” an Adobe spokesperson tells WebProNews.

Adobe released its Q4 earnings yesterday, and on the conference call, the company revealed the price to be around $400 million. CFO Mark Garrett said, “Assuming we close the transaction as planned later this quarter, we would expect the acquisition to add between $60 million and $80 million to our annual revenue in fiscal 2012. It would also result in the use of approximately $400 million of our domestic cash and add approximately 350 employees to our headcount. We expect the acquisition to be slightly accretive to non-GAAP earnings for the year.”

Seeking Alpha has a transcript from Adobe’s earnings call. Here’s what Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen had to say about the acquisition:

Late in Q4, we announced our intent to acquire Efficient Frontier, a leader in digital ad buying and optimization. In the acquisition, which we expect will close later this quarter, we’ll add multi-channel ad campaign forecasting, execution and optimization capabilities to our existing Digital Marketing Suite. More specifically, Efficient Frontier strengthens our digital market offering in several key areas.

In social marketing, Efficient Frontier brings a social ad buying capability for Facebook, and we expect synergy with our existing Facebook ad buying functionality in our SearchCenter product. They also bring a social marketing engagement platform to help customers build, manage, monitor and measure their brand presence across the social Web. We will augment the social engagement capability with our social analytics product to provide an analytics solution that moves beyond social monitoring to tie social media to business results.

In search marketing, Efficient Frontier extends our SearchCenter solution with a complementary search portfolio optimization system.

In display marketing, Efficient Frontier has a real-time bidding system to enable our digital marketing customers to increase ad performance on major display inventory sources.

And in multi-channel optimization, Efficient Frontier enables marketeers to take the guesswork out of how to spend marketing dollars across search, display and social media platforms by optimizing bids and allocating budget across all these digital channels for maximum ROI.

Included in the pending acquisition is Context Optional, a subsidiary of Efficient Frontier. Context Optional provides Fortune 500 companies with brand management, monitoring and analytics tools.

Adobe has been more focused on its digital marketing strategy lately, with recent acquisitions and partnerships (such as its partnership with OptiMine Software and its acquisition of Auditude), and of course the Efficient Frontier acquisition.