Upon returning from Adobe Marketing Cloud Summit 2015 I've had some time to digest the experience fully. The Summit is a great weak of digital marketing discussions. Of course since this is an Adobe event, the discussions are around the products Adobe is selling with the marketing cloud. Fortunately for me, and Adobe, the overarching strategy Adobe is putting together with their products is extremely compelling.
Just five short years ago Adobe had $0 of revenue from digital marketing products. I believe in 2014 the amount of revenue was over $1.2 billion, but I didn't write the number down, it's not important. What is important is Adobe, through mostly acquisitions, has created the most compelling digital marketing hub/cloud in the industry. Adobe rates highest on the Gartner Magic Quadrant and it is in its infancy.
Having come from a software product background also, it is impressive they have been able to start to integrate most of these products together. What Adobe is setting out to accomplish is no small feat. Creating a singular platform from many disparate products is what marketers have to do on a daily basis with their own systems, but Adobe is attempting to make that life a whole lot easier.
Last year we were introduced to the marketing cloud strategy, a set of 6 products with 6 core services that support all the products. I was very bullish on what was being layed out by Adobe. The idea of taking a customer through their lifecycle with the company from anonymous to known, from new to dormant, all in one platform is very appealing to me as a marketer. Adobe is trying in essence, to let marketers control their own destiny.
Today marketers have to fight to get things done. Marketers destiny is in the hands of many other groups, from website developers, IT, database engineers and creative agencies. Sometimes it amazes me that we as marketers are able to get an email out the door, or target an individual on a website. The amount of effort sometimes makes a campaign not worth doing at all.
There are three main thoughts I came away from the Summit with this year.
- Audiences are the key to digital marketing
- Adobe has a messaging issue
- AEM should be the center of the marketing cloud universe
Audiences
I have always firmly believed the customer is the center of all businesses, yet I never believed they were the center of the marketing universe. My belief is that everything starts with the customer and they are all different in their various ways. Advertising tended to lump all the customers into one bucket and make the product the center of the universe. Digital has come along and helped marketing become more targeted, but the hardest part of targeting is creating the single customer database.
Marketers have had to deal with a plethora of disparate databases of customers, which has made targeting especially difficult. The need for database engineers to create a data warehouse bringing all the different customer databases together with each individuals spend slows the process of driving behavior through targeted experiences down to a crawl.
Adobe audiences are referred to as a Core Service. What that basically means is that all of the applications of the marketing cloud can use this customer database. This makes audiences the key to allowing the marketing cloud to be the most targeted customer solution I have seen to date.
Adobe tracks a customer from their first anonymous visit, to authentication, through the entire customer lifecycle. The applications then allow marketers to target those customers in so many different ways. From purchasing of ads, to email marketing, to push notifications for mobile apps, through retargeting campaigns, audiences can be used in all of these ways. Same database. No need for database engineers. Hallelujah.
For example, a customer may come into the website, authenticate and reach a certain part of the purchasing funnel. Through Analytics, this group of customers can be identified and a custom audience can be created. Through AEM, email creative and a landing page can be created, by marketers, with approved assets from the brand team, to be used to create an email campaign for these guests. With Target, different messages can be tested to determine what is the most effective message and offer for a customer to create the conversion. Through Campaign, this audience can be used to send an email, measure the results, and a new audience can be created with all of the customers that didn't convert to create retargeting campaigns. That's pretty powerful stuff right there.
Adobe Messaging
One of the concerning parts of the conference was the introduction of 2 new products for the marketing cloud. The idea of having 6 products is already a little overwhelming. The constant comments I was hearing from other attendees was confusion on what products they need and why. This is a problem for Adobe. I believe they have 1 product, the Marketing Cloud, with many features inside the product. By keeping the multiple product structures, it is showing some infighting within Adobe. As I said earlier, these products were purchased by Adobe to then be integrated into the cloud. It seems those product owners are fighting for their power, which is making it confusing to develop the strategy with Adobe as a partner.
I also believe this product strategy makes the cloud more cost prohibitive. Because so many products have to be purchased, it becomes more expensive than turning on features. There also tends to be salespeople dedicated to the certain products, so there is a loss of 1 dedicated resource.
I'd like to see Adobe move away from products an into features. This will simplify the messaging and allow customers to purchase based on what they need, instead of what Adobe is trying to package. It will allow more customers to be locked into the ecosystem of Adobe, instead of keeping their current products that aren't as integrated. They should take some lessons from Apple. The ecosystem is the most important play for Adobe right now and they should have a longterm vision for this strategy. Once customers start crossing over into different products within the marketing could it will make it impossible to leave, because the customer database and all the processes are driven by Adobe.
AEM is the Center of the Cloud
The digital marketing platform all started with the purchase of Omniture which turned into Adobe Analytics. Analytics is the heart and soul of the Marketing Cloud and I believe has the largest user base by far. Analytics may be the soul, but I don't believe it should be the heart of the solution.
Adobe Experience Manager is the heart of this solution. It is the product that puts the marketers destiny into their own hands. The ability to manage assets, create approved templates, change website messaging, create emails and create landing pages with variable content is so powerful. It even can build mobile applications across platforms and manage all those apps in realtime.
This is the heart. Analytics allows the identification of opportunities to enhance conversion and make more money, but without AEM a marketer is stuck waiting for many other departments to help them take advantage of the opportunity. Campaign allows for great multi-channel marketing, but without email creative and dedicated landing pages, the marketer is in a waiting game. Target allows offers to be measured in real-time and a winner is chosen, but to get to that point, AEM has to manage all of the content and messaging.
Content is the key to delivering targeted experiences to customers in the digital age. Let me say that again, content is the key to delivering targeted experiences to customers in the digital age. The faster a marketer can deliver that content, through whichever channel, be it mobile app, website, email, social or ad, the bigger a competitive advantage that company will have over its competition. This is why AEM is the heart of the marketing cloud/hub. AEM will ultimately create the competitive advantage, because without it, the content will not be delivered at the speed in which customers will not only demand, but will also change their behavior.
Bravo to another great Summit from Adobe. Adobe is truly the leader in this nascent category and they are continuing to push the envelope with their vision. I am super bullish on Adobe and what the future holds for the Marketing Cloud Plus, having Imagine Dragons play at the bash was super awesome!!!