Adobe Summit is an opportunity to discover where Adobe is putting the focus on for the development and roadmap of products in 2024. Here’s what you should know if you’re an Adobe Experience Cloud user (including Marketo Engage, Workfront, and more).
While Adobe Summit 2023 brought us Adobe Firefly and the Content Supply Chain, Adobe Summit 2024 leaned into connectivity and deepening capabilities within existing frameworks.
The overarching theme was a drive to increase value and performance by unlocking new use cases within existing tools. This message is in line with the 2024 market trends of controlling spend and consolidating technologies.
Executive Summary:
- Marketers will be able to better orchestrate content and campaigns around accounts rather than just individual leads. Adobe Journey Optimizer (AJO): B2B Edition allows the definition of buying group journeys.
- The everyday marketer will be able to more easily create audience segments, and more on the fly thanks to a new Generative-AI assistant inside AEP.
- It will be easier than ever to connect the different Adobe platforms in your content supply chain thanks to GenStudio, a new application that pulls together the technologies deployed throughout the content supply chain.
Doing More with First-Party Data
What you need to know:
- The Adobe Experience Platform has a new AI assistant that makes it easier for the everyday marketer to navigate the tool and create audience segments through conversational queries.
- Real-Time CDP now allows collaboration with trusted data partners to unlock the potential of your first-party data.
As the world adjusts to a cookieless future, marketers are building strategies around first-party data. For Adobe, this means activating two new use cases:
#1 – AI Assistant for Adobe Experience Platform
AI Assistance will make it easier to use AEP without having a data science background. Non-technical marketers will be able to use the conversational interface to answer technical questions about the tool and the data within AEP, automate tasks, simulate outcomes, and generate audiences.
Users will be able to easily access help information about Adobe products such as “how to build a segment” or “what is an identity map” to accelerate product learning. They will also be able to gain insights into their data such as “how often is my segment used?” or “where is this schema field used so I can label it properly?”
Image Source: Adobe
#2 – Adobe Real-Time CDP Collaboration
Adobe is also maximizing value from first-party data by creating a new cleanroom environment for brands and publishers to safely collaborate in a privacy-centric manner. Marketers and trusted partners can discover and reach high-value audiences, activate campaigns, and measure advertising effectiveness all without the need for third-party cookies.
Image Source: Adobe
These innovations make it possible for non-technical users and partners to more efficiently activate owned-data segments. This new functionality is the highest value for organizations who have enough first-party data sources that they have a need for a CDP.
A Spotlight on Account-Based Marketing
What you need to know:
- Marketo Engage is structured to market to and engage with leads. However this made it challenging to view prospect and customer data on an account-level inside Marketo.
- With Adobe Journey Optimizer (AJO): B2B Edition slated to launch in summer of 2024, marketers will be able to activate campaigns at the buyer group-level and segment messaging according to buyer group roles.
Customer journey orchestration took a leap forward with the announcement of Adobe Journey Optimizer (AJO): B2B Edition. This tool, intended as an extension of Marketo Engage, allows marketers to orchestrate account and buying group journeys at scale:
These groups, similar in concept to opportunity records, allow marketers and sellers to identify which contacts belong in a particular buying group, the lifecycle status of the group, solutions of interest for the group, and completeness and engagement of the group.
Image Source: Adobe Summit 2024
This solution is suited to organizations who lead with an ABM strategy. Business leaders no longer need to advocate for the creation of pre-opportunity opportunity records or deployment of custom objects in CRMs to track individual sales inquiries or simulate buyer groups.
Marketers can use Marketo Engage as their inbound marketing engine and as their center of excellence for orchestrating campaigns to audiences segmented by role, geo, product, etc.
AJO B2B Edition is intended to unlock a pure ABM use case where metadata and campaign activation takes place only at the group level. Rules-based logic programmatically assigns contacts to buyer group roles, with sellers and marketers able to follow up and complete a manual review.
The next gen email editor, using Adobe’s AI Assistant and Firefly, can create email variations tailored to each member of your buying group. The assistant learns your brand tone and messaging by training on your existing content libraries.
Marketo Engage is then used as the point of activation for sending emails and cross-channel communication to members of the buyer group. A bidirectional sync allows asset engagement metrics to flow from Marketo back into AJO and roll up to a buyer group engagement score.
Launching in the summer of 2024, marketers who rely primarily, or solely, on ABM plays should watch for AJO B2B Edition.
Innovations in Content Authoring
What you need to know:
- Adobe has announced three key features that will help streamline the content supply chain: AI-generated email copy and images, digital asset content hubs to enable content versioning and governance, and real-time optimizations with GenStudio.
This theme highlights the undercurrent that ran throughout Summit: the need for connected applications. Adobe is doubling down on its bet that best-in-class solutions with strong integrations, along with market pressures promoting vendor consolidation, will convert organizations into Adobe shops.
Let’s take a look at three specific areas that received attention this Summit.
#1 – Adobe’s Next Gen Email Editor
Embedded with AI Assistant and Firefly, Adobe’s next gen email editor will enable marketers to generate entire emails (including images and copy) by defining audience characteristics, campaign objectives, and pointing the model to a content reference library.
This accelerated email authoring will be available starting in Adobe Journey Optimizer and Marketo Engage.
Image Source: Adobe Summit 2024
#2 – Content Hubs in AEM
AEM is a critical component of Adobe’ Content Supply Chain. As the source of truth for digital assets, organizations using AEM are able to control versioning and distribution of their assets. Content hub functionality will allow teams to easily distribute brand-governed assets across their organization and external partners, reducing friction in their content supply chains. Marketers will also be able to search for assets in connected applications and create personalized variations with Firefly.
#3 – GenStudio for Content Supply Chain Orchestration
Adobe GenStudio is an application that lets marketing teams quickly plan, create, manage, activate, and measure across applications and publishers. It works independently or in conjunction with other content supply chain products and empowers marketers to quickly find and generate assets, create variations, and optimize experiences based on real-time content performance insights.
Image Source: Adobe
Conclusion
As tools advance and consumer expectations shift, marketers are called to create increasingly cohesive and personalized experiences. The content supply chain is what marketers are executing and connected applications and structured data stores is how they are doing it.
Summit 2024 outlined a vision where innovations to Adobe Experience Cloud and Adobe Creative Cloud technologies could bring together customer data, content, and journeys for the next generation of work management and personalization at scale.
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