Martech: What it is, the 'tools,' and the relentless corporate spin

Adobe Just Dropped $1.9 Billion on Semrush. Are We Supposed to Be Impressed?

Alright, folks, buckle up. Another day, another corporate titan, Adobe, decides to throw a cool $1.9 billion at a company called Semrush. You heard that right. One point nine billion. All cash, no less. This isn't just a big number; it's the sound of a thousand marketing managers collectively sighing, knowing full well what’s coming next. They expect us to believe this is some grand strategic stroke, a master move in what Adobe's press release hilariously dubs the "agentic AI era." Give me a break. It sounds less like innovation and more like a desperate attempt to buy relevance in a landscape that's shifting faster than a politician's stance on, well, anything. The recent news of Adobe buys Semrush is a prime example of this trend.

Let's dissect this, shall we? Adobe, already a behemoth with its creative suites and analytics platforms, is now gobbling up Semrush, a company known for its SEO and "brand visibility" tools. Their big sell? Semrush is gonna help marketers manage their brand through "data-driven generative engine optimization (GEO)" and search engine optimization (SEO) solutions. GEO, people. This ain't just SEO anymore; it's generative SEO. It's like they took a perfectly good term, sprinkled some AI pixie dust on it, and slapped a new sticker on the box. My cynical brain immediately translates "agentic AI era" to "we're kinda late to the party, so we're buying our way in." This isn't about pioneering; it's about playing catch-up, and they're doing it with a checkbook the size of a small country's GDP.

Adobe's President of Digital Experience Business, Anil Chakravarthy, chirps that "Brand visibility is being reshaped by generative AI, and brands that don’t embrace this new opportunity risk losing relevance and revenue." And Semrush CEO Bill Wagner adds, "With the advent of LLMs and AI-driven search, brands need to understand where and how their customers are engaging in these new channels." Look, I get it. AI is a big deal. ChatGPT and Google's Gemini are changing how people find stuff. But are we really supposed to believe this GEO thing is some revolutionary concept, or just SEO in a fancy new hat? It feels like the same old song, just with a slightly different beat. They're telling us marketers need a "holistic understanding" of how their brands appear across LLMs, traditional search, and the wider web. Well, no kidding. That's been the damn job description for years, just without the fancy buzzwords. It's like corporate kids in a candy store, grabbing every new buzzword off the shelf and hoping it tastes like success.

The Never-Ending Learning Curve (And the Companies Cashing In)

This whole acquisition circus brings me to something Adam Esposito, a Salesforce Marketing Cloud expert, recently hammered home: continuous learning is the only way to stay ahead in martech. And honestly, he's not wrong. For more on his insights, see Adam Esposito, A Salesforce Marketing Cloud Expert, Explains Why Continuous Learning Is the Only Way to Stay Ahead in Martech. "The moment you stop learning in martech is the moment you start falling behind," Esposito says. He’s seen how fast tools and systems change. But here’s my beef: these massive acquisitions, this constant re-branding of existing concepts with new, shiny acronyms like "GEO," they don't make learning easier. They make it a never-ending, exhausting sprint on a hamster wheel.

Adobe buying Semrush? That just means another platform, another set of dashboards, another integration headache for the poor souls who actually have to do the marketing. It’s not about mastering the latest platform, Esposito argues, it's about staying adaptable. But how adaptable can one person be when the goalposts keep moving because some exec decided to drop a cool couple of billion on a new toy? It's like you've just spent a year learning to drive a stick shift, and suddenly your company buys a fleet of self-driving cars and expects you to be an autonomous vehicle mechanic by Tuesday. It's ridiculous. This isn't just about tools. No, it's about the fundamental disrespect these companies show for the human element in their "agentic AI eras." They talk about "human investment" and "learning culture," but then they pull stunts like this, forcing everyone to re-learn the entire ecosystem.

Esposito's right when he says, "Buying technology does not transform your marketing. Developing your people does." But how much "developing" can people do when the "technology" they're supposed to be developing on keeps getting bought out, rebranded, and integrated into some larger, more cumbersome corporate beast? Are we just going to see Semrush's tools disappear into the Adobe cloud, becoming another tab in an already bloated interface? Will the nimble, data-driven insights Semrush was known for get bogged down in Adobe's enterprise-level bureaucracy? My gut says yeah, probably. It always does.

My Take: Just Another Tuesday in Martech

So, Adobe bought Semrush. Big whoop. It's another chapter in the endless saga of tech giants trying to stay relevant by buying up the competition and rebranding existing capabilities with sexier, AI-infused jargon. It’s not about revolutionary new martech tools; it's about market consolidation and the perpetual hamster wheel of "innovation" that keeps marketers scrambling. The real winners here are the shareholders, offcourse, and maybe a few execs getting nice bonuses. For the rest of us, it's just more learning, more adapting, and more wondering if this "agentic AI era" will ever actually deliver on its hype, or if it's just another shiny object to distract us until the next billion-dollar acquisition.