The 3 Main C’s of 2022 Adobe Summit: Customer, Connection, and CDPs

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Love or hate this year’s Adobe Summit, there was certainly a ton of emphasis on “Experience 4.0” and where Adobe fit into that mix. Again, reverting to a virtual format this year, many sessions and keynotes talked about the burgeoning digital experience and where Adobe’s specific solutions can help with implementations.

Anyone new or familiar with their applications would certainly tune in to see if there were any bombshell software news or updates. However, while I didn’t personally see any noteworthy rollouts, there were some nuggets I found personally interesting relating to my work with Adobe applications like Target, Marketo, Analytics, and others. And, more importantly, there were some more strategic sessions that touched on a prevalent question. While we have the tools and technologies to accomplish “digital first experiences”, do we have the correct strategies, insights, and business cases in place to experiment and learn from?

Adobe CDP B2B Next Generation Announcements

adobe summit 2022 screenshot - b2b next generation cdp

You can read the full press release here on Adobe’s expanded offerings with their CDP B2B platform. What I found most interesting is their focus on consent management data unification and capturing those preferences as part of the customer profile. Along with direct integrations like OneTrust, this also indicates Adobe is taking notice of customer’s increasing control (and concern) of personal data usage and how it impacts the overall CX journey.

Marketo’s Continued Leap into AI-Based Account-Based Marketing

Adobe Summit 2022 screenshot - predictive lead and account scoring with Marketo

I’ll say it again and again, Marketo is one heck of an expensive ESP if you just use it as such. Once you get past the “batch and blasts” capabilities, it can really serve as a true demand generation insights and execution engine. Personally, I’ve worked in Marketo since 2017 and I have done extensive work within its native and API integrations to try to extract Marketing-Influence analytics through RCE, Account Target Management, Marketo Insights, and more. I’m interested to see whether this AI predictive scoring model can move the needle in ABM marketing and sales. (See screenshot above for more details)

Change Management in Effect for Personalization Strategies

a man sitting at a desk looks at his smartphone device while smiling

Putting customers and strategy first seems like a no-brainer. Just sometimes it’s good to hear from actual use cases. This year, I did get to hear from different retail, healthcare, and financial services brands that talked about their own GTM initiatives around “digital-first.” What was extremely refreshing was to hear one or more subject matter experts talk about the internal buy-in that the marketing, data, and product groups had to work collectively on. And, how many of these speakers were humbling to admit that their work wasn’t over yet. Particularly, one speaker talked about the various intelligence layers that their team needs to collect, leverage, and learn from in order to execute and scale personalization. These intelligence layers consisted of “How”, “What” and “Why” customer data feeds which fed into the unified profile(s). Furthermore, the speaker(s) also talked about “mission-based” teams, which all had their part to play in creating their own specific personalization frameworks that included team-based accountability and ownership.

But Wait… There’s Another “C” to Consider…

A nurse sits at a desk and conducts a telemedicine appointment with a patient

Yes, we heard a ton about customers and customer data platforms (CDPs)… but what about care? Amazingly, more healthcare entities and those that service specific populations are beginning to truly leverage data in driving behavior change. We got to hear from a few brands that touched on the future of health through proactive, personalized, and predictive care. Again, I believe Adobe and their solutions can make an impact in that area as adoption becomes more widespread in the healthcare landscape. Hopefully, next year we’ll get to hear more positive patient/member outcomes from a “digital-first” lens.

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