John Rizzuto

Can a millisecond make a difference for a software platform?  If it’s a digital marketing platform, it may separate the winners and losers as SVP of Adobe’s digital marketing business, Brad Rencher, explains.

Adobe is aiming to build a millisecond of a lead on the competition.  This millisecond lead, as Adobe would have it, may very well be insurmountable by competitors.  It turns out that the millisecond is the one that occurs between the last piece of data a consumer “gives“ a system and the content with which the system responds.   What happens in that millisecond?  The system needs to correlate, manipulate, measure and analyze all the various pockets of data is has on the consumer and then choose, assemble and display the relevant content to her.  The content that these algorithms choose and that the infrastructure renders, must create a positive user experience. The experience is designed to encourage the consumer to take a preferred action – in ecommerce that is usually to buy something. This is not big data, this is big aspiration.

Envision a lifecycle.  The digital content lifecycle.  It stretches across content creation to content management to content utilization.   Adobe has three “cores” in each.  Its creative solutions to build rich digital content, a web content management platform, and web and information analytics to select the right content.  Its goal is to bring these three pillars together in real-time to so the process is dynamic and orchestrated instantly.

This is not technology it is magic.   Adobe cannot do this today, no one can.  However, it is a panacea which every major consumer-oriented company is pursuing – even if only theoretical.  Adobe has great potential to fulfil this promise and surely the right stuff to make important inroads now.  The key is how effective will it be and how long will it take to fulfill the vision?

At the Adobe Digital Marketing Summit, Adobe unveiled a streamlined digital marketing cloud.  The Adobe Digital Marketing Cloud was comprised of 27 separate point products and it has been rationalized to five solutions.  They are: Analytics, Social, Experience Management, Target, and Media Optimizer.   Some features and components demonstrated are available today and some are expected to hit the market before year-end.  Adobe has made important strides in making these solutions more intuitive and they more seamlessly integrate complementary functionality within them.

Of the many capabilities Adobe demonstrated, the one that interested me the most was the shared workspace between Adobe Creative Cloud and Adobe Marketing Cloud.  The workspace enables marketers, agencies and content creators to collaborate, coordinate and build campaign process flows between the Adobe Creative Cloud and the Adobe Marketing Cloud, which share the same common infrastructure platform. It turns a sequential and linear process into a more effective iterative one. It’s Adobe’s first step in creating synergies across the content lifecycle.

Synergies across all three of these segments will be critical for Adobe’s success.  This market promises to heat up and the competition will be fierce.  If Adobe can show that content creation, an area it dominates, is a key element and differentiator of the broader digital marketing platform, it will be difficult for competitors to respond. Adobe possesses some of the best in class technologies and capabilities in content management and analytics; hence, I continually seek examples of Adobe leveraging its position in the content creation market into its digital marketing business. This is going to be fun to watch.  But don’t blink, in an instant it might be over.

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