The Digital Marketing Architect

One of the first tasks that you have to do when implementing the Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) is to select your identities. This is not a trivial decision, it will define how the identity graph will work, which, in turn, will have profound implications for the functioning of the tool. In all cases, the ECID will be one of the identities. The typical next candidate for identity is the email address. However, before you take this decision, read on.

Earlier this year, Google reached an agreement to delete billions of records. This time, the reason was how private browsing was perceived vs. what it really was. This post will explore the technical aspects of private browsing, the lawsuit, and how it can affect digital marketing in general.

Adobe Audience Manager offered a fundamental feature for a Data Management Platform: recency and frequency. However, the Adobe Experience Platform does not provide such a feature, at least not in the same way. Let’s see why this is so and what alternative options we have.

I am currently working on a project where my main activity is to support and guide the development teams in configuring a fairly new integration: Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) and Adobe Commerce (AC). The more I learn about this integration, the more interesting it becomes. In this post, I am going to introduce it and explain all its potential.

Many of you may be wondering what the heck I am going to write about today with this title. I know, the first time you hear these words together it sounds like someone made a bad choice of words. However, once you finish reading this post, it will make a lot of sense. In fact, I am sure you will get it even before getting to the end.

My first post of the year, where I talk about use cases vs capabilities, has been very successful. Even last week a coworker mentioned it to me, 4 months after publishing it. The interest in this topic has kept me thinking about what else I could write about. Then I had a flash, an idea where I realized that there are certain parallelisms between SMART goals and use cases, and I am going to explore them.

When I wrote my post comparing Adobe Journey Optimizer, Adobe Campaign, and Marketo, I got a lot of attention. I guess there is a lot of interest in comparing Adobe tools to decide which one is best for a particular situation. Today I am going to do a similar comparison, this time between Adobe Analytics (AA) and Customer Journey Analytics (CJA).

In my last post, I introduced the problem with flicker. The post was already becoming too long and I decided to split it into two. This is the second part, where I will explain the solutions that can be applied. If you have landed directly on this post, I strongly recommend that you first read my previous post.

For the past 5 years or more, almost every client I work with has raised their concerns about flicker or the causes that generate flicker. For reasons that will become clearer in this post, this topic tends to be a bit heated, with very strong opinions on either side. I will try to stay away as much as I can from subjective matters, but I will also give you my point of view. This is the first post of a two-part series, where I will talk about the problem and potential solutions to this issue.

This is a post I have had on my list for quite some time and today I thought it was high time I wrote about it. If you do a quick Internet search, you will see that this topic is very popular, with hundreds of results. I will not repeat what others are saying. Instead, I will provide my point of view with the aim of clarifying what each acronym is and is not. I know there is some confusion about these terms.

Unless you have been living in a cave, you must have heard the term Generative AI, or GenAI for short, recently. The best example is ChatGPT, which has taken the world by storm. Adobe, on its side, has also been working on this technology and it is now available in some tools. I have to admit that it has taken me some time to start playing with it, as my main project has eaten all my time. However, I have finally started digging into it. I am far from an expert, but I wanted to share with you what I have learned and my point of view on where I think it should go to.

Most digital marketing initiatives involve one or more of the following channels: email, SMS, push notifications, mobile app, or web. I would call them traditional channels, as they are what we are most used to. It is no coincidence that Adobe Experience Cloud tools cater mainly to them. However, there are other channels that, while more niche or less popular, should also be explored. There may be opportunities in them that you may have not thought about.

First post of 2024! Throughout my career at Adobe, I have seen from time to time a conflict between the two potential approaches when implementing a new technology: base it on use cases or base it on capabilities. I have a very hard time when I have to face this discussion with my customers, as I understand both sides and see the benefits of both approaches. However, the choice will have a deep impact on the future usage of the tool.

Here we are again, at the end of another year. I remember a conversation with my grandmother many years ago, where she told me that, for her, the days just flew. As I grow old, I am beginning to feel the same. Just looking at this blog, I started it almost 9 years ago, with my first post in February 2015. A lot has happened since then, but today I will only cover the events of 2023.

Today’s post is going to be a short one. Adobe Journey Optimizer (AJO) has a very useful feature called test mode. This allows you to perform a dry run on a journey before publishing it. It will only use profiles that are marked for this test.

Ever since I had my first statistics lesson in high school, I have hated the subject. All I can really understand is that each side of an unloaded dice has a probability of 1/6. Other, more complex concepts like stochastic processes are just black magic to me. Unfortunately for me, there is one area of digital marketing that requires a good knowledge of statistics: the measure of incrementality. I do not claim to be an expert, but I more or less understand the important concept behind it. I will do my best to explain it in this post, although this is more for me to keep track of something I have learned.

One of the reasons why some people start a blog is to document what they have recently learned. In my case, I have mainly written about things that I feel confident enough about. Today is going to be different, I will write about something I have recently come across: how Adobe Journey Optimizer (AJO) manages consent. In general, most people will never need to dive into it, as it is a bit internal to AJO, but I am in a project where I have to manipulate profiles’ consent. This post will be an introduction to this topic, where I will document what I learned so far.

The design that I am going to explain today came as a request from a customer a few years ago. The problem statement was very interesting, something that probably should have a better solution; designing the architecture was fun. It is one of those cases where you have to put your Multi-Solution Architect hat on and use your knowledge to combine the Adobe tools in a way that, probably, nobody had thought before.

I first heard about Content Supply Chain (CSC) as we were approaching Adobe Summit 2023. For some reason, it did not feel to me as something revolutionary. It was rather a concept that made a lot of sense, and that had already existed before, but nobody had given it a catchy name. And we all know that humans love naming things. If you have never heard of this concept, this post is for you.

Since I became a multi-solution architect back in 2016, people around me kept on talking about the two distinct areas in digital marketing, almost adversaries: data and content. In their view, there should be two types of architects, one for data and another for content. I always said that I was against this differentiation and that an architect should work across both. However, I was alone in this quest, and, to this day, this wall still exists.