Adobe Summit 2024 - Marketing Data Stack Highlights

The Adobe community recently concluded its annual pilgrimage to fabulous Las Vegas to partake in Adobe Summit 2024 where Adobe introduced new solution innovations while reaffirming its vision of Personalization at Scale across customer experiences. The central theme was AI everywhere and while its application of this technology focused primarily within the content and campaign solution areas, we also began to see practical applications of it within the data, insights, and journey management sectors of its ecosystem.

We here at DiveTeam are focused on effective enablement of customer channels through the modern marketing and customer data stack, so let’s dive into the data, insights, and journey management highlights from Summit.

Data Management and Integration

Federated Audience Composition

Adobe addressed a common frustration we hear from clients wanting to leverage Adobe Experience Platform’s (AEP) extensible, cross-channel capabilities but do not want to replicate data already managed in other platforms like AWS, Azure, Snowflake, Google BigQuery, and so on. It’s expensive (and repetitive) to duplicate these data necessary to activate customer audiences while managing governance across these critical data sets. Federated Audience Composition now enables AEP to access these external data sets directly without having to ingest them into AEP.

We see this as a significant enhancement that removes a challenging point of friction for many enterprise users reluctant to implement yet another data platform and more willing to consider AEP to expand new use cases available to power customer experience workflows such as profile enrichment, audience segmentation, and personalized engagement.

Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform (CDP) Collaboration

This was announced as a new clean room approach for advertisers and publishers to share audiences in a privacy-first manner using each’s own first-party data and activate composited high-value audiences without having to directly exchange proprietary data. This fills a significant gap that AEP has had relative to platforms like Snowflake and is a key feature as we continue to navigate data management without being reliant on cookies. This also opens up new partnership opportunities among brands to share (and even commercialize) first party data in an environment where third-party data is becoming less reliable. We also can’t help but to wonder if there’s a data marketplace in the roadmap.

Cross Channel Insights and Activation

Journey Optimizer

AJO gained new functionality focusing on B2B enablement, now bringing the ability to plan real-time journey personalization at both the individual and account levels. We’re pleased to see this as current AJO use cases have focused primarily on individuals (B2C) up to this point and have had limited adoption by B2B clients already creating audiences and segments at the company/account level within RT-CDP B2B.

Another enhancement that was only briefly noted was AJO’s ability to now manage brand-initiated journeys using real-time customer signals. This is significant as brand campaigns are often mistimed for some audience segments when deployed en mass. The ability to filter activations of these based on customer events or attributes reduces poor experiences and can create a better overall brand engagement.

Adobe Experience Platform AI Assistant

This is essentially Adobe’s AI Copilot that aims to answer business questions from data and to automate configuration tasks based on data sets within AEP. The use cases here are simulating outcomes, generating audiences and planning journeys within Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform, Adobe Journey Optimizer, and Adobe Customer Journey Analytics.

We’ll look forward to getting more hands on in real-world client data with this feature to see what it can really do. We suspect that there will be both a learning curve and some maturation needed but when you look at what Customer Journey Analytics as a solution has done in terms of speeding time to insights (value) across customer channels, this feature is a natural extension of what AEP seeks to deliver. We’re very much focusing on where the puck will be in time for this feature—not necessarily where we see it right now.

Final Thoughts

2024 continues to be the year of Personalization at Scale for Adobe, now empowered by generative and conversational AI assistants. While most of the AI enhancements focused on the Adobe Creative Cloud products, the experiences activated from those assets are made more relevant to customers through the data, analytics, profile, and journey management solutions that are foundational to activating impactful, personalized, engaging, and seamless experiences.