Adobe Advertising Cloud Exec Who Brokered the TubeMogul Deal Is Leaving the Company

Adobe Advertising Cloud vp Brett Wilson will exit the company next month just two years after he brokered a $540 million deal to acquire ad-tech outfit TubeMogul.

Wilson has not spoken publicly of his next planned career move, although earlier this year online streaming service Tubi announced he was joining its board of directors. An Adobe spokesperson confirmed the planned exit, which the company initially announced via an internal communique late last week.

Wilson founded TubeMogul, a video-focused demand-side platform, in 2007 and steered it to a July 2014 initial public offering prior to joining the ranks of Adobe in a deal first revealed in November 2016.

Keith Eadie, Adobe Advertising Cloud svp, has been serving as the effective leader of the software giant’s ad-tech business since February this year with Wilson’s exit coming at a time when Adobe seeks to assert itself in the ad-tech sector.

This tops off a significant year of transformation in Adobe’s overall marketing cloud business following September’s $4.75 billion purchase of B2B software marketing specialist Marketo, which came just months after its $1.7 billion purchase of ecommerce specialist Magento. Both multibillion-dollar acquisitions will be housed within the Adobe Experience Cloud alongside marketing cloud provider’s media unit to be headed by Eadie.

Eadie’s accession to the helm of Adobe Advertising Cloud also came at a time when it seeks to better assert its ad-tech offering particularly as media buyers’ interest in the fast-developing programmatic TV space picks up pace.

Earlier in the year, it unveiled updates to Adobe Advertising Cloud TV such as integrations with Experian, building upon earlier relationships with LiveRamp, Nielsen Catalina Solutions and Placed in a bid to help marketers anticipate how TV buys generate ROI at the cash register, thus cornering more of the burgeoning $2 billion programmatic TV market, which still only accounts for only 5 percent of all U.S. TV spend.

Adobe’s more assertive positioning of its ad tech in the past 12 months also included a partnership with Flashtalking to better help marketers understand how media exposure drives conversion rates with certain audience types in a move that positions the pair against the dominant ad server of Google.

Speaking with Adweek at the time of the announcement of the partnership, Eadie said that while “cookie-cutter solutions” are suited to the needs of SMEs with limited resources, marketers at more premium brands will require more tailored solutions.

“The big clients are trying to build competitive advantage against their competitors and that’s the market that I think is really going to respond to this kind of partnership,” he said.