Adobe launches a super-cloud to manage customer experience

This new uber-cloud reorganizes existing capabilities and adds a variety of new features to power omnichannel experiences from online to traditional TV.

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Adobe Experience Cloud Logo

Adobe is gathering its clouds and making more.

Today, the company unpacked a truckload of announcements at the Adobe Summit digital marketing conference, currently taking place in Las Vegas.

In light of these announcements, it looks as if Adobe has decided that the real game is not just marketing or sales but customer experience, something that also extends across product development, customer service and other departments.

At the top, it’s announcing a new Experience Cloud. It’s actually what you might call an uber-cloud, since it is comprised of the existing Marketing Cloud (which includes Adobe Experience Manager, Target, Campaign, Social and Primetime), a new Advertising Cloud and a new Analytics Cloud.

Last week, Adobe announced the next gen of Experience Manager, which includes a deeper integration of its recently acquired user-generated content (UGC) platform Livefyre. Now, for instance, Experience Manager’s Assets can directly utilize and acquire permissions for UGC assets in Livefyre.

In addition to the Marketing, Advertising and Analytics Clouds, the Experience cloudset is also integrated with Adobe’s two stalwarts — the Creative Cloud and the Document Cloud. This integration, for instance, now enables a more streamlined management between Adobe Sign in the Document Cloud and Adobe Experience Manager Forms.

And all of these clouds are embedded with the silver lining of Sensei, the recently-added layer of artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Sensei is now powering three new features: Fluid Experiences, One-Click Personalization and automated anomaly detection.

Adobe VP of Technology Anil Kamath told me that Fluid Experiences can automatically cut down a text description and resize an image to fit a given destination. He gave the example of a 600-word description with headline and image that needs to be posted on Twitter. Sensei can suggest an appropriate 140-character post, and it will resize the photo and headline to fit.

One-Click Personalization, he acknowledged, is really more like a sophisticated optimization. Auto-Target previously allowed a marketer to automatically test out A/B or more variations of a campaign, and then move traffic into the most effective campaign.

With One-Click in Auto-Target, if you have multiple user segment profiles — with such differences as specific geography, age or interest attributes — you can test existing multiple campaigns against each of those multiple profiles with one-click, thus automatically determining the most effective version in this matrix of possibilities.

And anomaly detection — such as many cart abandonments by users of the Chrome browser — previously required a marketer to request such detection by the platform. Now, Sensei just points them out.

The new Advertising Cloud inside the Experience super-cloud is designed for linear TV, over-the-top TV and online channels, and Adobe is describing it as “the largest independent advertising platform that does not have direct ownership in media or content.” Here’s a screen shot:

Adobe Ad Cloud Screenshot Veoruy

The Ad Cloud is composed of the existing Adobe Media Optimizer plus the video ad capabilities of the recently purchased TubeMogul, so that the previous repertoire of search, display and social ads now includes video ads.

Because it covers all forms of TV and online ads, Adobe is touting this new cloud as “the first end-to-end ad platform,” with the previously existing demand-side platform, a Dynamic Creative Optimization tool that integrates with the Creative Cloud suite of tools, and cross-channel planning.

Similarly, the new Analytics Cloud combines previous tools for audience data: Adobe’s data management platform Audience Manager and its segmentation and real-time analytics tool, Adobe Analytics.

Beyond clouds, Adobe also said it is expanding its earlier announced partnership with Microsoft.

There are new joint solutions that integrate Adobe Campaign with Microsoft Dynamics 365 customer relationship management system for a single-customer view and Adobe Analytics with Microsoft Power BI to better understand customer data. And Adobe Experience Manager Sites Managed Service is now available through Microsoft’s hosting service, Azure.

A potentially far-reaching collaboration is that the two companies say they are now working on developing the first open industry standard for data related to delivering marketing, sales and service experiences at scale. The effort, which could allow every vendor to share and compare data relating to customer experiences, is also supported by Zendesk, MasterCard, Dun & Bradstreet, Acxiom and others.


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

Barry Levine
Contributor
Barry Levine covers marketing technology for Third Door Media. Previously, he covered this space as a Senior Writer for VentureBeat, and he has written about these and other tech subjects for such publications as CMSWire and NewsFactor. He founded and led the web site/unit at PBS station Thirteen/WNET; worked as an online Senior Producer/writer for Viacom; created a successful interactive game, PLAY IT BY EAR: The First CD Game; founded and led an independent film showcase, CENTER SCREEN, based at Harvard and M.I.T.; and served over five years as a consultant to the M.I.T. Media Lab. You can find him at LinkedIn, and on Twitter at xBarryLevine.

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