Last week at the National Retail Federation conference in New York, Adobe announced integration between Adobe Campaign (formerly Neolane) and Adobe Experience Manager, two planks of the Adobe Marketing Cloud. According to Adobe, In addition to the Experience Manager integration, new functionality in Adobe Campaign includes:
- Real-time interaction management and scalability, allowing marketers to deliver large volumes of campaigns, offers, data, and interactions with an enhanced real-time marketing infrastructure.
- Distributed marketing improvements - New tools, processes, and assets make it easier for marketers to create and customize local campaigns.
- Reporting enhancements in transactional messaging - Transactional messaging, which completes or confirms a previously agreed upon transaction such as order or delivery confirmations, provides marketers an opportunity to increase brand loyalty and drive incremental revenue.
When looking at the marketing cloud arms race taking place in the industry between companies like Salesforce, Oracle and others, Adobe's approach stands out in the sense that their cloud is built on the foundation of content creation, experience design and analytics. The acquisition of Neolane, Adobe Campaign brings the power of traditional multi-channel campaign management to the Adobe Marketing Cloud. And having a content/experience design foundation today should prove to be critically important, as marketing is more visual, experiential and analytical than ever before.
With this new integration between Adobe Campaign and Experience Manager, Adobe is beginning to marry the power of their design and analytics underpinning with the campaign management tools the Neolane purchase brings to the table. So now collateral/content designs created in Experience Manager can be built with access to customer profile data in order to create more personalized, contextual marketing pieces. Then these pieces can be delivered in a more effective manner using the Neolane functionality at the heart of Adobe Campaign.
Adobe's "content/analytics-first" approach to their marketing cloud offering got the important missing piece with the birth of Adobe Campaign. This first step in integrating it with Experience Manager is MC fold is important. And I expect that it will be followed up sooner rather than later with further integrations with some (if not all) of the other planks in the platform (Adobe Social, Adobe Target, Adobe Analytics, Adobe Media Optimizer). And it will probably need to be sooner as the pace of the marketing cloud wars seems to be quickening.
It will be interesting to see how the Adobe Marketing Cloud approach will connect with C-Suite marketing execs, in comparison to the traditional CRM vendors and their marketing cloud offerings. It only makes the arms race we're witnessing that much more fascinating.
To learn more about the new Adobe Campaign - Adobe Experience Manager integration, I recently spoke with Patrick Tripp, Adobe's Sr. Product Marketing Manager for Adobe Campaign. Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.
Brent Leary: Can you give us a little background on what Adobe Campaign is?
Patrick Tripp: Adobe Campaign is a cross-channel campaign management solution, the newest solution within the Adobe Marketing Cloud. Adobe Campaign is a part of the acquisition that happened back last year of Neolane, which was founded in Paris, France and has now been re-branded as Adobe Campaign. But very much focused on delivering personalized experiences across digital, as well as traditional or offline channels for customers.
Brent Leary: When it [Adobe Campaign] was still under the Neolane umbrella, there was already some level of integration with Adobe Analytics through Adobe Genesis. But you're now taking a deeper step integrating into the Adobe Marketing Cloud, particularly with Experience Manager.
Patrick Tripp: We're really excited to be announcing the integration into the Adobe Marketing Cloud, and the first real focus for us, for Adobe Campaign is with Adobe Experience Manager. For those that don't know, Adobe Experience Manager is a leading web content management and digital asset management solution that allows marketers and users to create really high-quality content.
We're really going to be marrying that content design experience with the cross-channel execution experience of Adobe Campaign. So think about it like right brain and left brain marketing really coming together to be able to do all that in a single environment.
Brent Leary: What are the kind of things that customers will be able to do that's going to improve their ability to understand what works when it comes to content, creating experiences?
Patrick Tripp: I think a lot of it's about personalization and engagement, and relevancy for brands. So by using Adobe Experience Manager, not only can they create high-quality content, but they could use the elements of the Adobe Campaign piece to really add very personalized blocks of content within there.
So it could be based on who you are, Brent, and what we know you've purchased in the past. Some of your preferences that you've indicated to us, we could have placeholders in the content to be able to deliver that uniquely for you. That's very much based on the profile that we'd have around the individual customer. So we're allowing marketing organizations and brands in a number of different industries to really get to another level of personalization in not only the high-quality content, but also the coordination of that.
When you're delivering a campaign and a message you have the ability to determine, "Well, Brent has already viewed this email a few times, and he hasn't actually clicked through or he hasn't purchased. So therefore, we're going to provide him with something else or we may provide him something in a different channel based on some of the rules that we have in place.
Brent Leary: How does this integration work and what do your customers need to do in order to get this working?
Patrick Tripp: This is a first-level integration. So it does require a license for Adobe Experience Manager as well as a license for Adobe Campaign. There's sort of a service pack that Adobe Experience Managers will just sort of download and allow these two to work together. More work will be done throughout this year on making that more seamless from the technology standpoint, as well as from the customer buying standpoint.
Something that Adobe Campaign has been working on is trying to simplify the way we go to market. So we're also counting some simplified bundles that we offer to customers that move away from high-volume cost-per-thousands email delivery. It's really focused more on customer' profiles.
Brent Leary: I think it's the first big step in bringing Adobe Campaigns fully under the Marketing Cloud umbrella. Down the line, if there's anything you could share, what direction do you see Campaign going in terms of becoming even further integrated into the Marketing Cloud?
Patrick Tripp: Yeah. That's a really good question, and there are so many different ways and opportunities for us to be unified within the Marketing Cloud. You're going to hear a lot more from us this year about that. But think about themes like analytics and web analytics, and how we would leverage that information to do better re-targeting strategies within campaigns.
Think about testing and think about A/B testing and multivariate testing, things of that nature, and think of just deeper integrations around content and delivery, and how it can further extend that experience. So a lot is happening there, and we'll be announcing more of that later this year, including at our Adobe Summit event in late March.
Brent Leary: Great. Where can people go to learn more about Adobe Campaign and this integration, and what's coming down the line?
Patrick Tripp: You can just go to adobe.com. Under the Digital Marketing Cloud you'll see all the solutions, including Adobe Campaigns. And you can get the latest information there, including some cool videos.