UK and Ireland Channel News

Adobe Acquires Auditude to Capitalize on Exploding Video Advertising Opportunity

Auditude Platform Empowers Publishers and Media Companies to Maximize Value of Video Content

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Nov. 1, 2011 — Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced that it has acquired privately held Auditude Inc., a leader in video ad management and monetization technologies for premium publishers and media companies. Through the acquisition of Auditude, Adobe® is now uniquely positioned to provide an end-to-end video offering, seamlessly connecting authoring, publishing, monetization and optimization with the goal of helping customers build long-term businesses through the delivery of quality video content and superior viewing experience across all IP-enabled devices.

“Premium video publishers want to capitalize on the foundational shift to digital by providing viewers with great media experiences and maximizing the value of their content on every IP device,” said David Wadhwani, senior vice president and general manager, Digital Media Business Unit, Adobe. “With this acquisition, Adobe can now offer an unparalleled platform for authoring, distributing, analyzing and monetizing digital video experiences everywhere – simplifying workflows, increasing consumer engagement, delivering insights and driving increased revenue for content publishers.”

Supporting video ad management and monetization delivered via an open architecture platform, Auditude lets premium publishers and media companies efficiently create a high-quality, TV-like, multi-device advertising experience that is an essential component to viewer loyalty and attracting major brand advertisers. Industry-leading features of the Auditude platform include: easy integration into content management and other video operations systems; outstanding targeting capabilities; flexible ad placement and ad product offerings; intuitive sales rights management; access to and control of incremental advertising demand; and efficient cross-device workflow.

“By joining Adobe we are accelerating our vision of helping top media companies and publishers maximize the value of their video content,” said Jeremy Helfand, chief executive officer, Auditude. “Adobe has deep roots in video and bringing our capabilities together will provide great incremental benefits for our customers. As part of Adobe we are excited to bring publishers and media companies a platform offering that has never been possible before, driving unprecedented monetization opportunities for them.”

Auditude’s advertising server platform meshes neatly with Adobe’s video technologies, such as Adobe Flash® Media Server 4.5 software and Adobe Pass. The Flash Media Server family of products delivers media to multiple platforms – including Flash, HTML and native apps – with a choice of powerful protocols that can save significant bandwidth costs and lighten network load. In addition, Adobe Pass, the industry leading TV Everywhere Platform, is enabling premium content publishers to securely bring large catalogues of programming online. The combination of Adobe Flash Media Server, Adobe Pass and Auditude creates the most comprehensive solution for the world’s leading content publishers, broadcasters and brands to encode video once, securely deliver their content across platforms on-demand and efficiently monetize it.

Adobe also plans to integrate Auditude with the Adobe Digital Marketing Suite, which consists of integrated analytics and optimization products to collect and unleash the power of customer insight. For example, using the Suite, customers can identify the most effective marketing and content delivery strategies and ad placements as well as create relevant, personalized and consistent customer experiences across channels, such as onsite, video, display, email, social and mobile. The Suite enables Adobe customers to better maximize marketing ROI and advertising yield, which ultimately can positively impact the bottom line.

 Auditude FAQ

What does Auditude do?

Auditude helps maximize the value of video content through advanced ad technology and monetization services so content owners and distributors can effectively monetize their content wherever users choose to view it. Auditude’s flagship product is the Connect platform, an ad serving and decisioning technology targeted at premium video content owners and distributors that enables the insertion, trafficking, delivery, rights management, and analysis of online video ads.

Why has Adobe acquired Auditude?

As a leader in the authoring, distribution, and measurement of digital consumer experiences, Adobe is uniquely positioned to provide an integrated solution for content owners by seamlessly connecting video authoring, publishing, monetization and measurement.

The acquisition of Auditude provides a key component to the integrated Adobe solution – a best-in-class ad serving platform for publishers looking to monetize their content with marketing messages appropriate for their audiences. When you combine the Auditude ad serving platform with Adobe’s strength in authoring, publishing and measurement, the result is an unparalleled platform for publishers to create, publish, monetize and optimize their audiences across devices.

Who are Auditude’s customers?

Auditude provides a wide range of media companies the opportunity to monetize their video content across all IP connected devices. Examples include Comcast, Major League Baseball, Channel5, Dailymotion, FoxNews, Starz, News Distribution Network, Lionsgate, and Major League Gaming.

What opportunity is the combined company addressing in the market?

The opportunity is to create an integrated solution that seamlessly connects authoring, publishing, monetization and measurement for premium video delivered over IP. This is great for Adobe’s customers (premium video publishers, including broadcast and cable networks, distributors, and aggregators) as it enables them to increase revenue by maximizing the value of their content and also enabling them to offer their audiences a superior experience. Video audiences benefit from better user experience and more premium video content being available online as online content value increases.

Today, content delivery, ad management and analytics for video content and ads are separate workflows. This creates technical challenges for coordinating a great consumer experience and business challenges for maximizing revenue. First, inserting mid-roll ads, the most valuable ad type, is so complicated that publishers either create custom, un-scalable implementations or reduce their

overall revenue potential by relying solely on less valuable, easier-to-implement pre and post roll ads. With premium publishers able to command upwards of $30 CPM on mid-roll inventory, this is significant money that is being left on the table.

How will this acquisition benefit Auditude Customers?

Auditude’s customers will immediately start to benefit from the doubling of resources being applied to the Auditude solution across engineering and support services. This will allow the team to build out and better support existing customers with this best in class ad serving platform. On top of this these customers will now be some of the first to benefit from the vision of the combined solution helping media and publishing customers better satisfy their audiences as well as maximizing monetization opportunities through advertising.

How is this different from other Adobe solutions like SiteCatalyst and Test&Target?

This solution will integrate tightly with SiteCatalyst and Test&Target. In the future, customers will be able to increase ad yield by using data via SiteCatalyst or Test&Target to make the best ad decision.

Is Adobe committed to the Auditude product lines?

Adobe is very committed to Auditude product lines and will continue to invest both in core ad management as well as creating an end-to-end solution integrating ad serving with media delivery and analytics. Customers will still be able to buy the Auditude platform on a stand-alone basis, and will have the opportunity to benefit from the incremental features that are added as integration plans take shape throughout 2012.

Will current Auditude customer contracts continue to be honored?

It is business as usual and customer contracts will be honored as they were before the close of this acquisition.

Who should I contact if I have further questions about this acquisition?

You should contact either your current Adobe or Auditude account rep. If you aren’t clear on who to contact then please email auditudequestions@adobe.com

At MAX 2011 there have been announements regarding new additions to the Adobe portfolio of products:

• Adobe Announces Agreement to Acquire Nitobi, Creator of PhoneGap
• Adobe Acquires Web Typography Innovator Typekit

Open Source HTML5 Mobile App Platform Accelerates Adobe’s HTML5 and Web Standards Strategy

LOS ANGELES — Oct. 3, 2011 — At its MAX 2011 technology conference, Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq: ADBE) today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire privately held Nitobi Software, the creator of PhoneGap and PhoneGap Build. PhoneGap is a popular open source platform for easily building fast, cross-platform mobile applications with HTML5 and JavaScript. With PhoneGap, Adobe® will offer developers the choice of two powerful solutions for cross-platform development of native mobile apps, one using HTML5 and JavaScript with PhoneGap and the other using Adobe Flash® with Adobe AIR®. PhoneGap’s open source framework has been downloaded more than 600,000 times to date and thousands of applications built using PhoneGap are available in mobile app stores that span devices based on Android, iOS, BlackBerry and other operating systems.

“PhoneGap has proven to be an industry-defining app solution for HTML5 developers,” said Danny Winokur, vice president and general manager, Platform, Adobe. “PhoneGap is a fantastic solution for developing a broad range of mobile apps using the latest Web standards, and is already integrated with Dreamweaver® CS5.5. It’s a perfect complement to Adobe’s broad family of developer solutions, including Adobe AIR, and will allow us to continue to provide content publishers and developers with the best, cutting-edge solutions for creating innovative applications across platforms and devices.”

“Adobe has always been a big supporter of the open source community and at the forefront of enabling rich, Web based applications across screens,” said Andre Charland, chief executive officer, Nitobi. “We share the same philosophy about enabling extraordinary mobile and Web applications. Becoming part of the Adobe family with its industry-leading tools and technologies opens up amazing new opportunities for PhoneGap and our customers.”

“We are also excited to announce our contribution of the PhoneGap code to the Apache Software Foundation,” said Dave Johnson, chief technology officer, Nitobi.  “Adobe has been fully supportive of our decision, further demonstrating Adobe’s continued commitment to the developer and open source communities. The Apache Software Foundation’s model makes it possible for contributors to collaborate on open source product development and Adobe and Nitobi look forward to engaging with other community members to advance the PhoneGap technology.”

Nitobi is based in Vancouver, Canada and Nitobi’s employees are expected to join Adobe. The acquisition is subject to certain closing conditions and is expected to close by the end of October 2011. Terms were not disclosed.

Adobe today also released its third public preview of Adobe Edge, the new HTML5 motion and interaction design tool that is bringing Flash-like animation to websites and mobile apps using the latest capabilities of HTML, JavaScript and CSS. The new release contains innovative interactivity features and other additions suggested by the development community, and enables content creators to easily deliver a new level of visual richness to HTML5-only websites and mobile apps.

Adobe has also extended existing tools like Adobe Dreamweaver and Flash Professional to bring the next generation of Web standards to designers and developers who rely on those tools. Adobe today released the new CSS3 Mobile Pack for Adobe Fireworks®, which will enable designers to easily extract CSS3 from their design elements in Fireworks and quickly add them to their HTML based websites and mobile applications.

Adobe continues to work closely with the HTML5 community to make important contributions to the W3C and key open source projects like WebKit and JQuery. Adobe has co-authored with Microsoft and submitted to the W3C a proposal for CSS Regions, which enables sophisticated magazine-like layouts using Web standards. Adobe has also contributed a preliminary implementation of CSS Regions to the open source WebKit layout engine, which is already available in the latest builds of Chromium and the WebKit browser. Microsoft has made an implementation available in the latest preview release of Internet Explorer 10. In addition, Adobe today introduced a new proposal to the W3C, co-edited with other W3C members, called CSS Shaders that brings cinematic visual effects to HTML. Finally, Adobe announced that jQuery Mobile 1.0, a popular touch-optimized open source JavaScript framework to which Adobe is a leading contributor, was just made available as a Release Candidate (RC1) this week. Concurrent with this release will be a new version of ThemeRoller, which Adobe has rebuilt from the ground up to enable users to design custom jQuery user interface themes for tight integration in mobile Web projects.

Acquisition Powers the Delivery of Beautiful Cloud-Based Fonts for Use on the Web

LOS ANGELES — Oct. 3, 2011 — At its MAX 2011 technology conference, Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced that it has acquired privately held Typekit Inc., a leader in the delivery of hosted, high-quality fonts for use on websites. Available as a subscription-based cloud service, Typekit’s vast font library gives designers and developers creative license to deliver beautiful type that enhances the Web experience. Today, more than 250,000 customers use Typekit, including some of the largest sites on the Web, such asThe New York Times, Condé Nast, IGN and many others.

Typekit fonts will be offered as a standalone service and over time as part of Adobe® Creative Cloud. A major new initiative from the company, Adobe Creative Cloud was announced – along with six Adobe Touch Apps for Android and iOS tablet devices – by Kevin Lynch, chief technology officer of Adobe, during his keynote presentation at MAX this morning (see separate press releases).

“Typography is a fundamental design element and something that designers want to be more creative with on websites – especially as these websites now need to be viewed on mobile devices,” said Lea Hickman, vice president, Product Management, Adobe. “Working closely with type foundries, the Typekit team has delivered an outstanding service, empowering designers to present the power of the printed word in new ways – online and on devices.”

Typekit is a fast, easy and reliable way to integrate real fonts into websites and ensure fonts are displayed consistently across all modern browsers. It includes a library of hundreds of fonts from dozens of foundries, all licensed for legal use on the Web. Typekit’s product offerings address a full range of customers, from individuals and small to medium-sized businesses to enterprises and platform partners such as WordPress, Behance and About.me that offer Typekit-powered font menus. Typekit technology is also expected to provide new distribution mechanisms for its foundry partners, including the growing collection of Adobe Web Fonts, which are selected from Adobe’s own library of classic typefaces and optimized for quality on all current Web browsers.

“By joining Adobe, we are now an integral part of the worldwide leader in creative software, and as Adobe moves aggressively into cloud-based services, this will accelerate our vision of reinventing the look and feel of Web through creative and beautiful fonts,” said Jeffrey Veen, chief executive officer, Typekit. “This is an exciting time to be designing for the Web. As millions of new users come online via tablets and smartphones, capturing their attention via high-impact typography has never been more relevant.”