Adobe?s announcement to acquire Neolane last week for roughly $600 million points to the growing need for marketers to consolidate their campaign management tools, with mobile and digital playing a bigger role for many.

Adobe will benefit from the acquisition with new cross-channel management tools that add to Adobe?s Marketing Cloud that the company has been building out. The deal will also signals a need from marketers to roll out more comprehensive analytics and automation tools. 

?In just three years ? and mostly just in 2013 ? almost $4.5 billion was spent acquiring marketing automation and campaign management companies, validating the burgeoning value of analytics-based customer engagement,? said Brian Suthoff, vice president of strategy and business development at Localytics, Boston.

?Today, more people have phones and tablets than PCs, and the most valuable mobile engagement is happening in apps,? he said.

?Marketing spend will migrate to where the customers are, so keep your eye on the emerging mobile channels as next critical evolution.?

Mr. Suthoff is not associated with Adobe. He commented based on his expertise on the subject.

Adobe did not respond to press inquiries.

Need for cross-platform tools
With the acquisition, Adobe is looking to build up its portfolio of campaign management tools across mobile, email, social, direct mail, point-of-sale and call centers.

Neolane will join the Adobe Marketing Cloud, which now consists of six solutions. The other services are analytics, target, social, experience manager and media optimizer offerings.

Neolane integrates online and offline marketing data to segment an audience and deliver cross-channel messages.

The goal here is for Adobe to be involved in all parts of a marketing campaign from planning to implementation, according to the company.

The acquisition will also likely place Adobe in stronger competition with other big companies that serve enterprises, such as IBM and Oracle.

Mobile management
As mobile becomes a more critical piece of the puzzle for marketers in cross-channel campaigns, the Adobe news follows on a similar recent acquisition of ExactTarget by Salesforce.

Salesforce recently acquired ExactTarget to beef up its social and mobile offerings to clients (see story).

The challenge for marketers nowadays is to tie mobile into a multichannel marketing approach that is personalized and consistent across platforms.

?These acquisitions by software giants signal an further consolidation of the digital marketing industry,? said Alex Lustberg, chief marketing officer at Lyris, Emeryville, CA.

?But we ask whether the resulting monolithic software suites are optimally positioned to enable true cross-channel marketing automation,? he said.

?How will marketers put customers, not technology, at the center of their strategy??  

Final Take
Lauren Johnson is associate reporter on Mobile Marketer, New York