At the Adobe Summit in Las Vegas on 26 March 2024 (billed as the world’s largest Digital Experience Conference), the company announced several Adobe Experience Cloud innovations that enable brands to unify customer data across their organization. This is said to be a necessary ingredient to implement and derive value from generative AI. The idea is that a single view of customers across every channel, allows AI to analyze data and deliver actionable insights in real-time. Brands can then drive activation across marketing channels with applications built on the Adobe Experience Platform for delivering one-to-one personalization.
While these innovations or tools and platforms may at first seem like arcane jargon, they are interesting for media and entertainment publishers as they prepare for a cookie-less world by investing in improved customer data collection and analytics. Ultimately they will have to analyze the data using AI and use it for customer engagement and possibly, in a ‘privacy-centric’ way leverage this data with their partners including advertisers and or brands.
Major releases announced at the summit include an upcoming Adobe Experience Platform AI Assistant with access through a conversational interface that enables brands to make high-value data residing in enterprise data warehouses actionable – within customer experience workflows and without the need to move or copy the data into Adobe Experience Platform. This would give first-party data activation capabilities to advertisers and publishers collaboratively on the Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform (CDP). Adobe uses the expression ‘Federated Audience Composition’ which it says allows its customers to decide what data to use when and avoid unnecessarily duplicating data sets or integration patterns.
The AEP AI Assistant’s conversational interface can answer technical questions and will automate tasks, simulate outcomes and generate new audiences and journeys within applications such as Adobe Real-Time CDP, Adobe Journey Optimizer and Adobe Customer Journey Analytics.
“Brands have relied on Adobe Experience Platform and Adobe enterprise applications to deliver personalization at scale, an imperative that is greatly accelerated in the era of generative AI,” said Anjul Bhambhri, senior vice president of Adobe Experience Cloud. “Adobe Experience Platform innovations such as an AI Assistant powered by generative AI enable brands to understand individual customer context and generate tailored omnichannel experiences. This increases productivity and boosts experimentation of new ideas, all while ensuring brands adhere to strict governance and security controls.”
In a world without third-party cookies
Marketers have relied on third-party cookies to glean insights that support advertising campaigns and personalization. In a world without third-party cookies, brands need new ways to discover, reach, and measure high-value audiences. A new offering in the Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform portfolio, Real-Time CDP Collaboration empowers teams to make the most of their first-party data and safely collaborate with trusted partners in a privacy-centric manner. Marketers can discover and reach high-value audiences, activate campaigns and measure advertising effectiveness all without the need for third-party cookies.
To enable successful and scalable collaboration for brands, Adobe is offering a flexible approach – allowing customers to securely leverage data from any source, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Databricks, Google, Microsoft Azure, and Snowflake, among others. In addition, identity partners such as Acxiom, Blockgraph, Experian, LiveRamp, Merkle and Unified ID 2.0 will help brands scale their audiences.
Adobe is partnering with NBCUniversal as the first publisher to allow brands to discover and reach audiences with the media entertainment company’s proprietary first-party data and campaign delivery data to better understand audiences’ viewing habits and interests. Businesses can then utilize the insights to inform and activate marketing campaigns directly, across any digital property within NBCUniversal’s portfolio, with engagement metrics to support a holistic measure of ad performance.
Federated Audience Composition
Adobe says, Federated Audience Composition enables brands to make high-value data residing in enterprise data warehouses actionable within customer experience workflows while minimizing the need to move or copy data into Adobe applications. Adobe Real-Time CDP and Adobe Journey Optimizer enable practitioners to build audiences, enrich customer profiles with aggregated signals, make journey decisions to power engagement and personalize channel content in the moment —with data and audiences federated from data warehouses and data platforms including AWS Redshift, Azure Synapse, Databricks SQL, BigQuery and Snowflake. This creates a seamless marketer experience while ensuring data security and data administration controls are respected.
