How Adobe Wants to Transform Digital Marketing

How Adobe Wants to Transform Digital Marketing
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Adobe Systems is bringing the cloud and "big data" to digital marketing, CEO Shantanu Narayen told CNBC's "Squawk on the Street" on Thursday.

"We've really positioned ourselves as the big data company for marketers," the Adobe executive said. "As hundreds of billions of dollars moves online, we're the company that helps create that content, deliver that content and help monetize that content."

Narayen added that the next generation of marketing will leverage existing creative content, but it will need to be influenced by data analysis to improve return on investment.

This push into data analytics puts it into direct competition with other enterprise software companies like Salesforce.com and Oracle. But Narayen told CNBC that Adobe is already the leader in the creative industry.

"We process over 6 trillion transactions with respect to analytics," he said. "Our data platform grew over 100 percent year on year. We think the others are coming after Adobe."

Adobe is also embracing cloud computing. "We're really trying to reimagine the creative process with the move to the creative cloud," Narayen said. "It enables us to attract a whole new set of customers and we can innovate at a rapid pace." (Read More: Active in Cloud, Amazon Reshapes Computing.)

"We're driving where digital marketing needs to be," he added.