The Digital Marketing Architect

You probably remember when you were in primary or secondary school and you were taught about the five Ws: who, what, when, where, and why. Some people will also add how, me being one of them. It is very handy that, in English, these words start with WH, making them easy to remember. When you learned them, they were just boring language constructs you had to learn. However, over the years I have realized that they are much more important than just that. It helps a lot to ask these questions in everything in life, but today I will focus on digital marketing.

Any system that stores a decent amount of data ends up needing a data lake. The Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) is no exception and there is surely one, which will be today’s topic. I want to particularly focus on the misconceptions, with the hope that you understand this building block and know how to use it.

At the heart of the customer engagement area of the Adobe Experience Platform (AEP), we have the Real-Time Customer Profile (RTCP). This building block is where you find capabilities like the profile store, the identity store and the various segmentation engines.

During the session I delivered during the 2023 Summit, I condensed a lot of information into just 30 minutes. Some of it I already knew, but there were other concepts that I had to learn. Some people like to follow a video so, if you are one of those, here you have the recording of my session: See Under the Hood of Adobe Experience Platform - S401. However, if you are like me and instead prefer to read, when it comes to learning new content, this post is for you. It will be the first of a series of posts where I am going to document what I explained during this session.

A few weeks ago, Chenna asked me how a developer should approach a server-side implementation of the Adobe Experience Cloud tools. I am afraid there is no universal answer to this question, as it depends entirely on the Content Management System and the Content Delivery Network. However, I will give some clues on how I would do it and some details to consider.

As I explained in my last post, I was invited to attend the US Summit 2023, an invitation that made me very happy. If you have attended this year or any of the previous events, this post is probably not for you. However, if you have never attended, this will give you a flavor of what you get.

I am happy to announce that I will be delivering a session at the upcoming US Summit in Las Vegas in March 2023. This will be my first time at the US Summit (I have already been at the EMEA Summit) and I am very excited about it. If you are planning to attend in person, come and say hello!

I think that I have said a few times that, when I got trained in Adobe Audience Manager (AAM) in September 2014, I only understood about 50% of it and it took me another year to become an expert. With the advent of the Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) and its Real-Time Customer Data Profile (RTCDP) application, I did not need that much time to feel comfortable with it. One could say that RTCDP is the successor of AAM, which makes the transition easier. However, the two have very different backgrounds. So, what are the commonalities and differences between the two?

I am returning to my series of posts on Adobe Experience Platform (AEP), which I left a few months ago. We are at the last step, although it will take me a few posts to get into all the details I want to explain. The activation part of AEP is when we finally see the value of AEP, when we are finally using its results in our marketing efforts.

Sometimes I joke with my colleagues saying that, if I had to start again my career as a consultant, I would have chosen security as my area of expertise. I do not think that I would have liked it as much as my career at Adobe, but I know that I would have always been in demand. That being said, we all have to be very conscious of the security of everything we do, even in digital marketing. Let me explain why.

We made it again! With all the issues that we have faced due to the pandemic in the last three years, we have reached the end of 2022. At least I can say that this year has been better that the previous 2 years for several reasons.

If you have been involved in Adobe Experience Cloud implementations, at some point you probably have stumbled upon CNAMEs. If you have wondered what are these creatures and why they can be useful for your marketing goals, this post is for you.

As I said in the introduction to RTCDP B2B, marketing automation activities are very different in B2B compared to B2C. If there is one detail that I have found particularly difficult to understand in B2B, that is the data model. The first time you see it, it feels too complex, until you start to understand what it is all about. This post is an explanation of the AEP B2B schemas, using my own words. My goal is to help you understand this data model if you, like me not that long ago, have no clue about it. Any subject matter expert could write a dissertation on each schema. However, my goal in this post is to help newbies. If you find any error, let me know in the comments and I will fix it.

Although I have been 10 years at Adobe, during 9 of those years I had been oblivious to the business-to-business (B2B) world that lies out there. My customers had been from many different verticals: retail, telecom, banks, gambling, CPG… but all these cases were business-to-consumer (B2C). Last year I had my first encounter with a B2B customer; this year I have had two RTCDP B2B implementations. If you are a bit lost regarding the differences between B2B and B2C in the Adobe Experience Platform (AEP), this post is for you.

One of the main purposes of Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) is to create a 360-degree view of your customers. In more technical terms, this is what we call the unified profile. While this is a conceptually sound capability, there are certain cases when this unified profile could be wrong, with information from other profiles which should not be there.

Today I want to tackle an area that I rarely mention in this blog: digital transformation. I know, this is a very broad concept, with many ramifications and ways of implementing it. Every digital strategist has their idea of what it is, how to approach it and how to implement it. My goal today is just to introduce the three pillars of a digital transformation program: people, process and technology.

If you have been following my series on the Adobe Experience Platform (AEP), you should now have data ready to work with. If you have the RTCDP or AJO SKUs, you will now want to start communicating with your customers. For that, the next step is to segment your total population, which is what I will describe here.

I have mentioned a few times the expression enable for profile, without explaining what it really meant and how to play with it. I wanted to document it a few months ago when I started writing more about the Adobe Experience Platform (AEP). However, as usual, I realised that I had to first explain some background before addressing this concept. This is what I have done in the past few posts, but now you should have all you need to understand it.

Creating an XMD schema does not also create storage for this schema. A schema is just a data model, not the data itself. To get the data in Adobe Experience Platform, you need to create datasets, which conform to schemas. In other words, the datasets are the storage where the ingested data is stored.

I had written this post a few months ago, but I realized that there were many topics that I needed to explain before I could finalize it. Now that you understand what the Experience Data Model (XDM), the AEP identities and the unified profile are, let’s see how all of these features are used together.