What does Adobe's acquisition of Livefyre really mean?
- Summary:
- Adobe's acquisition of Livefyre raises questions for both companies. Barb Mosher Zinck provides context via Adobe's Experience Manager plans and user-generated content trends. She also shares reactions from Livefyre CEO Jordan Kretchmer.
From the press release:
As the leader in digital experiences, Adobe helps brands create amazing content with Creative Cloud and then deliver and optimize those experiences using Adobe Marketing Cloud,” said Aseem Chandra, vice president, Adobe Experience Manager, and Adobe Target. “With this acquisition, our customers will be able to unify the best social media content with branded experiences created in Adobe Creative Cloud and community-driven content in Adobe Behance and Adobe Stock.
What’s interesting is that along with a previous integration partnership with Adobe (which makes this acquisition not as surprising as one might think), Livefyre also has close partnerships with Salesforce, OpenText (just recently announced) and others.
Livefyre CEO Jordan Kretchmer told me in an email that Livefyre will continue as a standalone platform, which is how most of Adobe’s products are available as well. He said that existing customers will continue to have the same functionality and Adobe will continue to invest in its growing feature-set:
Customers will still be able to use the Livefyre offerings regardless of whether they own an Adobe product. Eventually, there will be a brand name change, but it is unknown at this time. It’ll be decided likely within the next 3 to 6 months.
It doesn’t sound like this acquisition is going to change how the current integration between Adobe and Livefyre works. As it stands now, customers can combine content from the Creative Cloud with social content curated in Livefyre, and deliver it across brand channels using Experience Manager.
Livefyre’s value add to Adobe: it’s user generated
Livefyre is a pretty interesting platform. It has a keen focus on capturing the social conversation and making it available to a brand’s marketing channels. You can create media walls, polls, carousels, maps and other visual presentations. There are conversation apps such as polls, comments (Livefyre started as a commenting platform), live blogs and the very cool Storify2.
Storify2 is a paid version of the free service Livefyre acquired. It is a newsroom style social media solution that you host on your brand website (or you create a separate landing page). It lets you incorporate user generated content across the social web, as well as assign writers who are on the ground adding new material constantly. You are essentially creating a new blog and posting to it in real-time as news is happening. (Some additional interesting info on Storify2 here).
Adobe already has social capabilities through its Adobe Social product. Adobe Social, which initially was a combination of Context Optimal/Efficient Frontier solution and the Adobe Social Analytics solutions, was first introduced in 2012 and offers a range of capabilities including listening and moderation, social publishing, competitive analysis and social analytics.
The Livefyre platform is more complementary than competitive with Adobe Social, and I think its strength is really in its ability to harness the voice of the customer. Adobe has felt user-generated content is extremely important for a while. I talked with Loni Stark, senior director, strategy & product marketing at Adobe back in late 2014 about web experience trends. User-generated content and communities were on the list:
That leaves social, which Stark said is “an interesting animal.” If you look at the software spend and how the channel is used, you can see there’s value there, but Stark said that people are still trying to figure out how to best extract it. She believes you’ll find it in user-generated content, and the community feel social creates. She acknowledges that social networks like Twitter and Facebook are trying to monetize it, but it’s a publisher model, it’s not a business model, and that’s where the work needs to focus. Her advice – find a shareable approach focused on branded communities and forums. That’s where success is found.
Stark wrote about the initial Livefyre, Adobe partnership last September saying:
Your customers are not only consumers of your brand, but also producers of authentic content. This content is inherently engaging because it was born from engagement, a response to your brand and product. All of which makes user-generated content a core building block of a strong brand strategy.
… Through this partnership, our customers will now be able to unify their branded content with the best social content discovered and curated by Livefyre and then easily deliver these unique experiences via owned properties using Adobe Experience Manager.
The most recent Content Marketing Institute report on content marketing benchmarks also gives a big nod to the importance of social (and in turn user-generated content) in a brand’s marketing strategy. The report notes that 93% of marketers use social media content (not including blogs) as the top creation and distribution tactic. If a brand can harness all the user generated content that relates to its customers’ interests and needs, and can build an experience around that information, that’s a pretty smart brand.
The best path to growth is through Adobe
Livefyre is a SaaS-marketing platform that seemed to be doing extremely well in the market. So I was curious to know why they would sell now. Kretchmer had this to say:
After we grew bookings 100% said in 2015, I began thinking about how we scale our platform to more products to deliver even more impact for our customers. We looked at acquisition strategies of our own, but after assessing the market it was clear that us rolling up into Adobe would provide all of the product, sales, and team growth immediately that would have taken us years to execute independently. My board and I also believe that Adobe is going to continue to win the market, and wanted the Livefyre team to be a part of that.
As you mentioned, we were on a great growth trajectory, and in addition to our products and world class team, that’s a big reason Adobe wanted to do this deal, the market was demanding our solutions, and for Adobe to deliver them. The partnership we launched with Adobe at the end of 2015 generated significant pipeline, and a number of closed deals very quickly, which made them our most productive partner right out of the gate. So again, the proven business synergies, culture, and timing were all perfect for us and for Adobe.
As part of the acquisition deal, Kretchmer will be the Senior Director, GM of Livefyre operating within the Experience Manager business unit. He will report to Aseem Chandra, VP of the Adobe Marketing Cloud. The rest of his team will transition to the Experience Manager team as well.
My take
Adobe is pretty well known for smart acquisitions. It’s also known for offering its solutions as standalone or part of the integrated Experience Manager Platform or Marketing Cloud (among other solutions).
I think its ultimate goal is to be the marketing tech stack for enterprise organizations and also for some mid-sized organizations. Livefyre does fit in there nicely to support both markets as they attempt to figure out how to leverage the voice of their customers - without ticking any of them off. Livefyre offers built-in rights management to help here.
But I will wait and see if the standalone version of Livefyre lasts with integrated partnerships with other digital experience vendors. That one seems a stretch to me in the long-run.