Adobe Advertising Cloud TV to deliver highly targeted TV ads

Since the dawn of time, watching TV has always been an exercise in patience and frustration. Just as you're beginning to enjoy the unfolding storyline in your favorite shows or movies, they are interrupted by a series of commercials that you most likely are not going to find useful or interesting.

That has been starting to change over the past few years as the entire advertising landscape has undergone massive paradigm shifts, but there's still a lot of work to be done in the prehistoric landscape that is traditional TV ad buying. Enter Adobe.

The digital software behemoth has just launched Adobe Advertising Cloud TV, which will live alongside its more traditional digital platforms like Adobe Campaign, Adobe Analytics, and Adobe Experience Manager. There will be integration between these platforms, allowing marketers to leverage digital user profiles to buy TV ad space that targets their most relevant customers.

This comes as the result of Adobe's late-2016 acquisition of a product called PTV by startup company TubeMogul. TubeMogul quickly became a leader in this emerging type of TV ad buying. While the details of how it uses digital user data to translate to over-the-air TV insights are not disclosed, it's easy to realize that with enough algorithms across social, search, and other interconnected web data, you can figure out nearly anything you want.

A major part of the equation is that the platform isn't just about buying traditional broadcast and/or cable television, but also services like on-demand video platforms, over-the-top streaming products like Sling and PlayStation TV, and connected TVs that do actually connect traditional TV broadcasts with Internet data, like Android TV and Samsung's smart TV operating system.

"Adobe Advertising Cloud TV is knocking down the barriers between digital marketing and traditional TV ad buying to enable marketers to have a single strategy that works," said Adobe Advertising Cloud VP Brett Wilson.

Again, this isn't a new concept. "Multi-screen" advertising synergy has been a goal of advertising technology companies basically since the dawn of broadband Internet. Companies like YuMe, Videology, Rocket Fuel, and digital advertising veteran DoubleClick have all introduced similar platforms.

However, Adobe claims its service blows all of those out of the water, working with more broadcast and cable networks than any of the above. Adobe Advertising Cloud TV had been in a beta phase and already has a number of high-profile clients. This week's announcement is that it is now available for any company, regardless of whether or not they subscribe to any other Adobe services.

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