Yes. It’s true and it’s finally coming. Microsoft, Adobe and, LinkedIn are finally stepping up their ad targeting game. Of course, with the power of friendship (or partnership. Works either way).

As seen in LinkedIn’s past few efforts, it seems like it’s looking to step up its marketing and advertising game! But what about Microsoft and Adobe? What are their roles and what do they hope to accomplish with this?

They want to improve their Ad targeting and Audience targeting! Maybe even more than that in the future. If that’s a good or a bad thing, that’s up to you to decide (after reading the article, of course).

Quick Terms to Know to get You Up to Speed

• Microsoft – Mainly known for Windows Operating System and Microsoft Office

• Microsoft Dynamics 365 – A product line of enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management

• Adobe – Mainly known for Adobe Flash web software, Photoshop, and Acrobat Reader among others

• Adobe Experience Cloud – A product line of marketing techs for Analytics, Audience profiles, and many more

• Marketo Engage – A part of Adobe Experience Cloud

• LinkedIn – A social media platform mainly focused in B2B

• Microsoft owns LinkedIn

A little background story:

Microsoft bought LinkedIn for $26.4 billion in 2016. But it seems like Microsoft doesn’t have any plans for LinkedIn yet (at least, that’s what it looked like).

But recently, LinkedIn has been steadily making new updates to their platform. And interestingly enough, those updates are marketing and advertising focused. If that’s because of Microsoft, we don’t fully know. But in today’s news, it seems more like that way.

Adobe is widely known for their softwares such as Photoshop. These tools are mainly used for marketers trying to reach consumers. However, Adobe has been steadily focusing instead on making tools for business marketers themselves. Adobe Experience Cloud and Marketo Engage are both great examples of these.

Since both Adobe and LinkedIn, Microsoft want to focus in marketing and advertising, guess what they will do next?

Adobe partnered up with LinkedIn, Microsoft in order to improve Adobe’s marketing software’s ability to reach target audience more effectively. This will mainly be done through business goods in LinkedIn.

This would be possible through the data that LinkedIn (mainly), Marketo Engage, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 have. Thus, the data from all of these platforms can be used and utilized for Adobe Experience Cloud customers.

This partnership could create many opportunities. Such as: Accelerate lead conversion, reaching your desired audience, increase ROI, and ultimately better campaigns

This is from LinkedIn themselves:

• To give more marketers a more efficient pathway to reaching their prospects and customers, LinkedIn has been focused on expanding the targeting capabilities of its advertising products.

Recently, we announced the introduction of Lookalike Audiences and Interest Targeting with Microsoft Bing Data. Much of the targeting capabilities on the LinkedIn platform, such as Matched Audiences and Contact Targeting, help companies boost their account-based marketing programs.

Today, we’re excited to share that at Adobe Summit 2019, Adobe announced a new collaboration between Adobe, Microsoft, and LinkedIn to accelerate account-based marketing for our joint customers. By extending LinkedIn account-based marketing capabilities to Adobe Experience Cloud users, we’re creating a seamless way for them to identify and target the right audiences on LinkedIn with meaningful content, ultimately helping improve success of their campaigns.

Through the new integration with LinkedIn Marketing Solutions, marketers can more effectively engage with accounts and buying teams. By enabling LinkedIn’s Matched Audiences integration with Adobe Audience Manager, and adding account targeting capabilities to LinkedIn’s Matched Audiences integration with Marketo Engage, the combined account-based targeting capabilities will help marketers identify the right contacts and accounts to reach on LinkedIn.

The Conclusion

Adobe Experience Cloud can possibly outcompete their rivals with this partnership since LinkedIn alone has massive amounts of data waiting to be utilized.

However, where there’s no competition, there’s monopoly. Well, maybe not to that extent. But dominance is of concern nonetheless.

But before we reach a conclusion of “This is fucking great,” the results will speak for themselves. And sadly, we still don’t have those results. So we have to sit and wait whether this could be a major game changer, or a minor improvement.