With all the enthusiasm among Adobe executives about Firefly AI, the AI-powered content supply chain and Adobe GenStudio, other announcements at 2024 Summit were in danger of being drowned out, not least new products for B2B marketers and enhancements to Adobe Real-Time CDP.
We took the opportunity to sit down with Brian Glover, senior director, product marketing and Ryan Fleisch, head of product marketing for Real-Time CDP and Audience Manager to fill in the gaps.
Focus on the buying groups
The premium offering for B2B teams at this year’s Summit was Adobe Journey Optimizer, B2B edition. A B2C version has been extant for some time. “The B2B Edition is focused really on what we believe to be an industry-first approach around the journey orchestration of buying groups,” said Glover. Buying groups are found within target accounts.
“Sales knows how to focus on a buying group within an account,” he explained. “They find the decision-maker and the other people they need to convince. Marketing has never really had the concept of a buying group; they’ve had leads and contacts and account-based marketing.” The leads and contacts approach is too narrow, Glover said. It misses out on engaging certain roles within the buying team. Conversely, the account-based approach can be too broad, spamming people who are not engaged in a specific buying process.
This does depend on Adobe’s customer being able to define the roles within buying groups.
“Our goal here it to bring marketing and sales closer together; allow marketing to create demand that is more aligned with what sales does. Journey Optimizer is where we’re building in this concept of a buying group; we’re using generative AI to create the content.”
This new product, said Glover, is also deeply connected with Adobe Marketo Engage. “From within Adobe Journey Optimizer B2B you can engage all your Marketo programs, workflows and content.”
Don’t forget the genAI
The magic of genAI is also sprinkled over the new Journey Optimizer offering. “The email designer not only includes AI Assistant to help to create the email copy; it also includes access to all the images that would live inside Experience Manager Assets; this is where all the Firefly-created imagery would go and the connectivity to the creative suite. B2B practitioners will have all this at their fingertips when they are creating emails.”
AI Assistant is also being leveraged to create libraries of question-answer pairs for Adobe’s Dynamic Chat.
Enhancements to Marketo Engage
One recent development within Marketo Engage has been the launch of Interactive Webinars. “Marketo for years has done the email marketing around webinars,” Glover explained. “You send out invites; you send out email follow-ups. Last year, we announced that we were bringing end-to-end webinar creation, management and delivery into Marketo Engage. This is built on Adobe Connect technology. This year, we’re expanding on that.”
For on-demand viewing, generative AI will be used to create a summary from the webinar transcript; create a list of FAQs; and also create video chapters. “It’s a much more consumable experience for the on-demand version of the webinar.”
Also, the email designer within Marketo Engage is getting similar genAI treatment to the one in Journey Optimizer, including integration with AI Assistant and Experience Manager Assets.
Dig deeper: Adobe GenStudio — 3 key questions answered
The status of Adobe Real-Time CDP
Fleisch described the “dynamic” status of customer privacy as “a boon” to the CDP industry. In short, with third-party cookie tracking going away, the importance of first-party data has grown exponentially. But that’s not enough for customer acquisition, he said.
“First-party data is your bedrock, but it has to be extensible and that ventures quickly into second- and third-party data territory. This is a solution for complete data management, from the first time you engage with someone at the top of the funnel to building loyalty for a lifetime.
Notably, Real-Time CDP can ingest data about the performance of content including the AI-generated content so central to Adobe’s strategy. “You’re able to understand, based on the profile you have in the CDP, what touchpoints they were reached on and what experiences they received,” said Fleisch. “You’re able to see the downstream metrics; did they engage with that and did it lead to the outcome you want?”
There’s also AI modeling within Real-Time CDP that can assign propensity scores based on desired outcomes. “In the future, with Content Analytics, we’ll be able to understand — even more deeply withina piece of content — what seems to have resonated or where you’re getting better performance.”
Fleisch does see this as a “big unlock” in Adobe’s mission to bring creative and data together.
Notes on Collaboration and composability
Finally, we asked Fleisch about the two chief CDP announcements, Real-Time CDP Collaboration and steps in the direction of composability.
Responding to concerns about the need to import or copy data into the CDP for activation purposes, it will now be possible for it to ingest brand data directly from where it resides in data warehouses or lakes including Snowflake, Google Cloud, AWS and others.
Adobe also announced Adobe Real-Time CDP Collaboration, a data clean room for brands and publishers to share and collaborate on audiences without risk to privacy.
“We still stand by our approach — what we’ve told clients is needed is a real-time profile with data that’s ready and actionable in milliseconds, to be able to personalize experiences in the moment,” said Fleisch. “Taking an approach of composing or federating data from a warehouse — there’s trade-offs. Typically, you’re not going to be able to deliver the same latency of a real-time nature that marketers need; but ther are significant benefits to certain use cases.”
For example, a telco company trying to get people to enlist in auto-pay might look for customers that have missed a payment in the last three-years. “To start building that segment, I probably wouldn’t want to copy three years worth of data from my warehouse to my CDP.” There’s a need for both federated and real-time data, he said.
With respect to Collaboration, Fleisch wanted to explain why the announcement related to Real-Time CDP rather than another application. “If a core value proposition of a CDP has been to break down data silos, it doesn’t seem right to us to say, buy a CDP for your first-party data and now buy a completely separate application to carry out things like discovering and measuring audiences through a clean room.”
Adobe took the view that a clean room should be a critical part of what a customer data platform delivers. “The industry is not defining it that way right now, but we are.” Buying the Real-Time CDP application gives access to these Collaboration features.
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