With their gaze fixed firmly on the future, Adobe re-launched their vision for the Adobe Marketing Cloud at Summit;
“…making marketing free from the burdens of backwards compatibility; it’s data and creative turned into action in realtime at that last millisecond.”
Brad Rencher – Senior Vice President and General Manager, Adobe Digital Marketing
The new Marketing Cloud is not designed to put an end to silos – it’s designed as if those silos don’t exist. At the heart of the Cloud are the solutions that we all know:
- Analytics – the workhorse in the suite, helps brands understand what’s happening and why, and what to do about it.
- Campaign – cross-channel, cross-device marketing automation via the acquisition of Neolane.
- Experience Manager – helps companies build unique web experiences, managing the content along the way.
- Media Optimizer – the technology to help make the right ad buying decisions and integrate with demand-side ad platforms.
- Social – allows you to monitor, monetise, create and participate in conversations.
- Target – creating personalised experiences, run A/B and MVT tests, build custom search solutions and deliver realtime recommendations.
These solution are built on top of a platform comprising of data and content all being fed into the Marketing Cloud, which is built for massive scale. And by massive, it’s truly huge. Every year, 18 trillion transactions are seen and 460 billion dynamic creative assets are delivered from 25 data centers around the world.
The Marketing Cloud sits on top of all of this – sort of encompassing it. It’s been designed to help combat fragmented views of our audiences, incomplete profiling and targeting capabilities. It’s designed to help bring together silo’d channels to reduce the manual work currently required to curate reports and content before we can share them to our stakeholders.
Core services
The latest Marketing Cloud has a suite of new core features that Adobe has been working on for quite some time, bringing together the 6 main solutions above with a set of 8 new core services, to further streamline the overall solution. The following view was presented on it at Summit (surely the pinwheel is not making a comeback?);
Profile Management – audience profiles will be shared across all 6 solutions, and can be augmented by data from across the enterprise, whether it be from CRM, Point of Sale or other internal databases. This core service inside the Cloud gives us a single profile across the Marketing Cloud for all solutions, a centralised profile. Don’t confuse this with Audience Manager though – they are still separate. A single profile has been the #1 consistently requested feature by customers, and they’ve now delivered on it. And, the profile is open and accessible to other marketing systems through API’s.
Tag Management – through the recent acquisition of Search Discovery, an enterprise class tag management platform is now included. Taking over 12,000 different tag vendors it applies realtime rules to tag execution and streamlines the delivery and management of the tag in a best practice way, all the while reducing the reliance on IT resources and truly puts tagging in the hands of the marketer. Why pay for Tag Management when you get it free through the Marketing Cloud?
Collaboration – brings teams together (not to be confused with dashboard access) by enabling sharing and collaborating of reports across the enterprise. Teams can now collaborate on boards, feeds and cards in a community environment, and leave updates and post comments etc around centralised reportlets.
Asset sharing – this new feature will make content assets available across the enterprise and to all solutions within the Cloud. It’s essentially a content management platform, tied into the Adobe Creative Cloud, that gives you a centralised location to save and share content across the organisation through direct access to approved images and videos.
Marketing Mix Planning – this coming-soon tool is the so-called crystal ball that marketers have been looking for. It will allow you to understand which of your marketing channels combined with your spend is most effective, and if you only had one dollar more, where you should spend it.
User Management and Security – finally, a single sign-on via the Adobe ID, one username and password, giving access to everything. Hallelujah.
Join the Cloud
Now that you’re so excited, you want to get in… While they are rolling it out slowly, you can request access to the Cloud by provisioning it.
What does the future hold?
Seemingly a closer integration between our data and our solutions, sharing and collaboration, and more managed workflows. Adobe has been listening. Thank you.
