Adobe Advertising Cloud vs. OpenX

The platform is highly useful for digital ads marketing and campaign management. The platform provides a custom set of templates and tools to your ad production or designer team to create thousand of ads very quickly for your products or brands. To your marketing team, the tool provides full control over campaign strategy in terms of how to present relevant sets of ads to your web and app visitors based on customer behavior, demography, and age group. I could not think about any scenario where this platform is less suitable if you are looking for an advertising platform.

Incentivized

This is a wonderful product that is well supported and fully backed by OpenX. If you have green staff that require some training to get their foot in the door for basic ad management, this is a great tool. We've never utilized the OpenX ad market so I can't speak to the quality of the ads in that open market, but for in-house ads in complex networks with its targeting tools, this software would be more than suitable to fulfill your needs.

• Automation - One of Adobe Marketing Cloud’s amazing marketing solutions is Adobe Campaign. This allows users to implement marketing automation to increase their campaign productivity and deliver an amazing customer experience. I can even set up users so they can build individual customer profiles based on the interests, actions, and preferences that are tracked through different marketing channels.
• A/B Split Testing – Most platforms have this now and most do not know how to even use it. However, the only way for a user to know how their marketing can be improved is to get a clear idea of how it is performing. But if all their data is in separate locations, it’s difficult to know which image, text or video is leading to sales or conversions. Adobe Marketing Cloud helps with keeping all of this clear for everyone on board.
• Social Analytics – when you or your customers are looking to improve their social marketing results, this platform offers Adobe Social, which is a social management platform that allows users to monitor conversations, promote and publish content, and analyze and engage with followers. One of the best parts is that the system automatically attaches tracking codes to users’ social content to identify what content drives engagement. It is a very powerful tool.

Incentivized

• When it comes to RTB and spending on the open exchange market, the number one reason why we spend in one exchange over another is simple performance
• When Open X doesn't perform which it tends not to, we have to shut that exchange off. This exchange tends to not perform at a CPA or CPC KPI and tends to not have the safest sites either.
• Because I only use Open X as an exchange which I tap into from a DSP I can't speak to it's other capabilities.

• As with most Adobe products, it can be a little tedious to use and requires a bit of extra training and "googling" around to make sure you are getting things right. It has improved over time within the entire Adobe suite, and I anticipate that this will be true of this as well.
• Adobe training and learning platforms can include a lot of technical terminology and jargon that makes it difficult for a novice to understand without feeling like they need a whole new education.

Incentivized

• Propagation could be improved; ad units that need to go live immediately could take up to 45 minutes to propagate.
• Over-complexity can be confusing. There are multiple tiers before assigning ad units per order and it seems unnecessary.
• Real-time reporting or a status dashboard would be great.

As of this writing, we have just discontinued our use of Adobe Media Optimizer. Other vendors gave us a better rate, a better contract option, and the product is just better than what we had with Adobe at the time. We may revisit Adobe again at the future, but it seems like they have a lot of work to do to catch up with the leader in the space

Incentivized

I would renew use of OpenX as it is a solid ad serving platform that is easy to use, install, and maintain with some great advanced features that give more control to publishers ad ops teams large or small while reducing the costs associated with managing, serving, and delivering ads from third party vendors.

It definitely takes some instruction to get to be able to use the system. One would struggle trying to get it to work without any previous experience with it. If you are famailiar with the interface it is actually quite fast and easy to maneuver around.

I was given the system to use as part of setting up a whole new site from scratch in less than 2 months, with a large number of specialty hub pages to run ads on and lots of content I needed to run disease specific ads on. The system was easy for me to learn on the fly in a very compressed time frame. I would have loved more chance to really dig in under the hood to see all that it could do, but given how fast I had to work, I got everything up and running and looking great. And I did it ahead of my launch deadline too. My only reservation might be for people who are not as patient as I am in picking things up, or as hands on. Customer service was great if I needed them, and a quick start guide with the essentials would be ideal for those people.

The reason being that support is extremely hard to reach, after the initial training period was over support became much harder to get from Adobe Media Optimizer's customer service agents which no one wants to deal with and we had to wait a long time for many inquiries to get answered

Incentivized

They went above and beyond without ever asking for additional money and we met our launch date and immediately started to meet and even surpass our business goals. Nothing was too much trouble, which really stood out compared to other companies I had and was at that time also working with. Customer service can really make or break any business; if i expect my staff to give good customer service, I expect to get it too, and Open X gave it.

It was difficult initially, but the implementation of the Dynamic Tag Manager was a big help and timesaver.

It was a step up from Marin in terms of UI. Very similar functionality to Marin. Compared to Kenshoo Search and Google Marketing Platform it was probably not as advanced but offered the benefit of integrating with other products in the Adobe stack like Adobe Analytics, Adobe Target, and Adobe Campaign.

Incentivized

Double Click, Adbrite before it became sitescout. We chose Open X because it was easy to integrate into the back end of our site and we liked the reports it provided and the ease of use. Double Click is a Google company, and frankly, while they are good at some technology, their products can be clunky failures AND we are not so sure we want to give them so much data about the inner workings of our business and keyword universe

• Adobe Media Optimizer delved deeper than other search engines could and actually provided us very useful information regarding how keywords were performing.
• The tool itself at first was quite useful in speeding our days up in being an all in one solution however it has various bugs that caused us to double-check our work basically costing us more time when using this tool.
• A large impact I had to how we were tracking our keywords was a bug with Adobe Media Optimizer informing us that we were not using a few keywords when it turns out we actually were and the tool was in fact incorrect in identifying what we actually were using.

Incentivized

• OpenX made it easy to manage online advertising. At the time I used the product I was the lead developer in charge of implementing the solution but quickly was put into the role of managing the traffic and training other users. It was really easy for a technical user to become a traffic manager. Getting other users trained and up to speed was very efficient.