Experience, Personalization, and One-to-One Marketing: Adobe’s New Personalization Features for Customer Data Platform

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Personalization is the name of the game in digital marketing today. At its Summit virtual conference this week, Adobe took the opportunity to announce a number of new features for its Real-Time Customer Data Platform tools. They are designed to allow brands greater ability to understand and react to customers as individuals. At the same time, they accommodate the reality that today, we are more aware than ever of data privacy and increasingly cautious about who we give information to.

Adobe refers to CDP as "real-time" due to the way that customer records are instantly updated as contacts browse web pages, read emails, use loyalty cards or interact with social channels. This enables marketers to respond instantly with automated recommendations, promotions, or any action they feel will help build a stronger connection between their brand and their customers. It's a solution that's trusted by global brands including Coca-Cola, Nike, Best Buy, and Telefónica.

Ahead of the announcement, I had the chance to speak to Steve Allison, Adobe’s head of audience and data technologies. He told me that while every brand these days talks about three essential concepts – experience, personalization, and one-to-one marketing, this is often still highly aspirational. Put bluntly; not many marketing departments yet have the necessary maturity across their toolset, strategy, and data infrastructure to action them effectively.

“This is where companies want to go, but achieving it is difficult”, he tells me. “Data is still in silos or warehouses … it’s not optimized for front-end, in-the-moment experiences.”

Just as importantly, infrastructure isn’t built to allow speedy actions that take into account issues such as privacy or consent.

At Summit, Adobe announced a number of new customers that have signed up to use Adobe Real-Time CDP. These include General Motors, Real Madrid football club, retailer Coles and TSB Bank.

They are set to benefit from a new people-centric approach to data, highlighted in another of Adobe’s Summit announcements. This is a new set of integrations with consent management platform OneTrust. Adobe’s customers will have instant, real-time understanding of what their own customers have and have not agreed to when it comes to using their data, giving peace of mind that every data-driven interaction is authorized and compliant.

Allison tells me, "When a customer says 'yes, you can track me…' OneTrust manages that consent. We take that consent information and map it against the data we collect. As we collect data, we are writing what information we have about consent into that data. So when I use it, I know exactly what consent I have.”

Adobe has also come up with novel approaches to tackling some of the ongoing challenges around personalization – such as understanding who a brand is dealing with when multiple users in a household use the same device. CDP can now make an assessment as to whether it should assume that it is sending communications to a specific individual, or a member of their household, or a business user. For example, if it recognizes a device that is being used but not a specific person – perhaps they are not logged into a personal account – it can apply household rules. If the person using the device is logged into a work email account, it will apply business user rules. This allows greater levels of personalization to be built into customer communications.

Other innovations on show at Summit revolve around integration with Sensei – Adobe’s artificially intelligent machine learning platform. This is now being used for predictive lead and account scoring within the B2B edition of Adobe Real Time CDP, enabling smarter decision-making around promotions and offers. Previously only available for B2C, Adobe has taken what they have learned from providing those services and applied it to B2B marketing. Additionally, Sensei is now used for generating product recommendations and search results in Adobe Commerce (Adobe’s in-cloud e-commerce solution, previously known as Magento).

It has also been configured as an "attribution AI," known as Cross-Channel Budget Optimization, in which it analyzes user journeys in real-time to extract further insights on customer behavior. It does this in order to answer questions about revenue that can be generated by placing adverts across particular channels. ??

Allison tells me that thanks to Sensei, over 80% of its Experience Cloud customers are already using machine learning across their marketing operations.

He said, "The whole point of this is to empower the marketer to be able to make more intelligent decisions, as they're executing their day-to-day business. We are seeing marketers becoming much more numerate, much more knowledgeable about machine learning, about data handling … this is giving them the insights they need to do their job, as a function of our technology, and making life easier for them.”

A big challenge facing marketers in coming years will be the “death of cookies”, as major browsers like Chrome remove support for the tracking codes that websites have traditionally been able to store on our computers. These allow the sites to recognize us again when we return and, if we give permission, to pass data on our behavior to advertisers.

These cookies have been the foundation of personalized online advertising for decades, but consumers have become increasingly distrustful of them. As new legislation like GDPR has enforced the principle that their operation must be signposted and easily opted out of, their effectiveness has dwindled.

Many see newer, consent-focused platforms such as Adobe Real Time CDP as a solution that will allow marketers to continue to create personalized interactions while enabling consumers to meaningfully give or withdraw consent, depending on how they see their data being used.

“We see one of the big things brands have to do now is rebuild that trust,” Allison says, “A lot of our customers are trying to work out … how do I show them I’m using that information in a way that justifies them giving it to me in the first place?”

?These are questions that the wider marketing industry will have to find answers to as society and individuals become savvier about who they give data to and what they let them do with it. The “death of cookies” – though highly publicized – is really just the start, and the real test will come as legislators in more jurisdictions introduce new laws and regulations.

To stay on top of these and other trends, sign up for?my newsletter, and check out my books ‘Tech Trends in Practice’ and ‘Business Trends in Practice.'

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About Bernard Marr

Bernard Marr is a world-renowned futurist, influencer and thought leader in the field of business and technology. He is the author of 20 best-selling books, writes a regular column for Forbes and advises and coaches many of the world’s best-known organisations. He has over 2 million social media followers, over 1 million newsletter subscribers and was ranked by LinkedIn as one of the top 5 business influencers in the world and the No 1 influencer in the UK.