CDP Takes Centre Stage at Adobe Summit

A dazzling array of speakers took to the stage last week to showcase the state of the digital economy, the power of AI and the potential of 1:1 personalisation. The themes may have been the same as last year, but there was still plenty of new and interesting content as Adobe's annual customer conference went virtual for the third year in a row. Even the metaverse got a mention.

Adobe are big players in enterprise marketing, with their Experience Cloud portfolio becoming increasingly common in large companies across a wide range of industries. They've become a go-to vendor for in-house digital teams with complex web requirements. This has been complemented by the strength of their ad tech and marketing automation products.

Marketo and Adobe Audience Manager are among the leading products in their field. However, the integration between the various parts of the Adobe Experience Cloud has often been stronger on paper than in practice. Some of the newer parts of the portfolio don't play nicely with AEM and Adobe Analytics, which can limit the multi-channel orchestration capabilities that Adobe tout as their USP.

Three years ago, Adobe launched their real-time CDP to close those capability gaps. Since then, it has been integrated into most Adobe products in order to provide a unified data layer across the entire tech stack. This year sees Adobe Target and OneTrust embedded into Adobe's CDP. Target is already closely linked to Analytics andAudience Manager, so doesn't benefit that much from the added integration. The new functionality will simplify data pipelines synching from third-party applications powering web personalisation. However, it doesn't unlock major new capabilities for users of Adobe Target.

Integrating OneTrust into the Adobe CDP is much more interesting. Stronger data protection is now a global phenomenon, with GDPR inspired laws becoming increasingly common across the globe. Having a central consent management database is critical to compliance, and for many digital teams that system is OneTrust. Their cookie consent tools will be familiar to anyone who regularly visits enterprise websites, but they can also manage any form of consent or preference data. These additional preference capabilities now sync directly into the Adobe CDP, and can be leveraged to ensure profiling and marketing permissions are respected in systems that engage with the customer. Consistent enforcement of privacy controls is a key step in building customer trust, thereby enabling consumer confidence in the personalised customer experiences that marketers are expected to provide.

For B2B marketers, two new CDP related announcements are of particular interest. The first affects Marketo Engage users, who will be able to leverage a new sales opportunity predictions AI. This adds predictive lead scoring to Marketo's target account management features. The CDP link is what makes this interesting, because it extends predictive lead scoring to activity data across the entire marketing technology stack. In theory, a predictive scoring engine powered by the wide array of activities recorded in Adobe Analytics should be more accurate than a scoring model that only uses Marketo data. Adobe's new Sales Opportunity predictions features will put that to the test when it lands later in the year.

Adobe are also bringing AI to attribution reporting, as part of a major relaunch for Bizible. For starters, Bizible has been rebranded as Adobe Marketo Measure. The use of the Marketo name is new here. This was avoided in the past, because Bizible does not require Marketo and can work on a more limited basis with other marketing automation platforms. That will continue, with the new name simply being a sign that Bizible is finally being integrated into the wider Experience Cloud.

The new functionality comes as part of a brand new Adobe Marketo Measure Prime product. This integrates Marketo Measure into the Adobe Experience Platform data layer that underlies the entire Adobe stack. Marketo Measure is an attribution platform, and accurate attribution requires a complete picture of customer activity across the entire funnel. Leveraging the existing integration capabilities of the Adobe Experience Platform should enable Marketo Measure to integrate with a far wider range of technologies than Bizible does today, including with CRM and marketing automation products that currently aren't supported. Custom integrations will be supported, with any relevant profile and activity information transferred into Adobe's data structure ready for measurement by Marketo Measure as well as for orchestration by the wider tech stack.

Attribution is going to become a much more important part of the Adobe tech stack, with new attribution AI being added to the Adobe CDP. This will power the dashboards you see in Adobe Marketo Measure, but can also be proactively used in improving the campaign journey. The Attribution AI will be used for customer journey analysis in Adobe's analytics tools, but is also incorporated in the predictive scoring and customer experience modelling capabilities that are available across the Experience Cloud portfolio.