The Digital Marketing Architect

I am currently working on a project where my client is in the process of transitioning from Adobe Analytics (AA) to Customer Journey Analytics (CJA). A few months ago, I helped another customer with their CJA implementation. While AA and CJA are similar, they are definitely not the same beast. Of the many differences that they have, I will start today with the basic metrics.

Now that I have addressed the Experience Cloud ID (ECID) from a 2025 perspective, I can proceed to write a post on the First Party ID (FPID). It has remained on my list of future posts for some time, but until recently, I had not encountered it in a client scenario. Now that I have sufficient context, I can provide an explanation of this feature, how to use it, and the typical use cases for it.

I was in the process of writing a blog post on the FPID and I realized that my post on the Marketing Cloud ID was very outdated. Even that name has not been used in many years. So I decided that I needed an update to this feature. If you are familiar with it, I do not think I will explain anything new to you. However, if you are just starting with the Adobe ecosystem, this post is for you.

Picture the following scenario: you and your marketing team invest countless hours analyzing your total population, building an audience for a campaign and crafting content tailored specifically for them. The campaign launches and becomes a resounding success. Then, out of the blue, executives decide you should double the audience. Their logic is simple: double the audience, double the revenue. No further thought is given to the complexities involved. Does this sound familiar? What could possibly go wrong?

I have written a few times about flicker, it is a recurring topic that I hear more often than I would like. Fortunately for me, in the last few weeks it has not been a major concern for my clients but this luck can change at any time. To get ahead of the curb, I want to be ready with a different approach - an alternative solution for this issue.

I have already written about the Unified Profile. In that post, I explained how the Real-Time Customer Profile (RTCP) manages profiles. However, I did not delve deeply into the internal process of how a profile is created or, more accurately, projected. This is a widely misunderstood topic and not easy to grasp. Therefore, I have decided to write about it again, with an emphasis on profile projection.

The Adobe Summit 2025 is now a distant memory. If you had followed my LinkedIn posts, especially the last one, you would have seen that I had an amazing time there, so much so that I would have done it all over again. I know it is not for everybody, as a coworker told me that she could not wait to get back home.

Tomorrow, I am flying to Las Vegas to participate in the Adobe Summit 2025. My focus in the last couple of weeks has been preparing my session with Anish. I will also be manning the booth and I will share my schedule there so that you can visit me.

I have recently written about testing, where I explained that everything in digital marketing should be tested. There are a couple of reasons for this: first, because you can test nearly everything, you have the means to do so; and second, because it is a scientific approach. Now, you might be wondering: how do I run those tests? The answer is simple and, again, scientific: by creating holdout groups. Let me explain.

Just a quick note today. I am happy to announce that I will delivering a session titled “Before the Login: How Sling TV Turns Anonymous Visitors into Customers”, with Anish Raul from Sling TV at the upcoming Adobe Summit. Last year I could not go, but this 2025 I will be again in Las Vegas. I am excited!

If you have watched Mad Men, you will notice one detail about the marketing campaigns they created: it had to be a success right from the beginning, there was no room for errors. One of the reasons the main character (Donald Draper - Jon Hamm) is so successful, is because his campaigns are almost always perfect: they convince the client and be public alike. He could even convince the public to smoke more when health organizations were advocating for the opposite.

One of the fundamental features of the Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) is that its database revolves around a single entity: the profile. All schemas and all datasets are just part of the unified profile. I know, there are some exceptions, like the lookup tables and B2B tables, but they do not have the same power as the profile. The reason for this decision is very simple: when running marketing campaigns, you want to personalize to the individual. It has been proven time and again that generic campaigns are less successful than personalized messages, be it on the Web or in an email.

I was thinking about what I could write in my first post of 2025 when I remembered something I had seen with some customers. This post is my point of view of a decision I have witnessed or heard more often than what I would have initially expected: big corporations purchasing a license for an expensive enterprise tool, only to have it sitting on a virtual shelf, unused.

We are at the end of 2024. It feels like events are happening faster than ever. Five hundred years ago, most people spent their entire lives in the same area and rarely experienced significant changes in their way of living. Now, we receive news every month about new inventions, revolutions, and shifts in paradigms that we often do not fully understand. I remember when reading vehicle license plates was considered AI; now this technology is nearly a commodity.

I have already written about the problem with flicker and the main solutions to it. I also remember how I received some comments agreeing with my views about the page speed zealots. The obsession with page speed is ever-increasing, which is having some unintended consequences. Today I want to show how you cannot have everything and you need to find a compromise.

Navigating an Experience Data Model (XDM) schema is not always easy. If your schema is simple, you can probably fit it on a screen and see it in full. However, the moment you start adding nested fields, things can get hairy very quickly. Not only this, but the XDM nomenclature can also feel confusing. The goal of this post is to clarify how to model the data in XDM, using a bottom-up approach: I will start with the most granular elements and how they are grouped to create an XDM schema.

In the last month or so I have noticed a developing interest in a new feature offered by Adobe Experience Platform: Federated Audience Composition. It has been some time in the making, a time during which I rarely heard about it. Now that it has been released, it looks like everybody wants it. Today I will explore what it is and what you can do with this capability. I will not explain how to configure it, maybe in a future post.

In 2016 I had the privilege and pleasure of being part of the first cohort of Multi-Solution Architects at Adobe Consulting. We had to undergo super-intense training, but it was worth every second. I learned a lot and met with exceptional coworkers. I still remember those days as one of the best experiences I have had at Adobe. A lot has changed during these 8 years (already 8 years!?), which means that the role has also changed significantly. So I thought it was time to write a follow-up to the post I wrote on the role of the Multi-Solution Architect when I started this path.

You have likely heard about Content Supply Chain. In summary, this is a set of processes and tools that work together to facilitate the creation, distribution, and optimization of content. The previous link will describe it in more detail. The concept is not really new, it is just now becoming more prevalent. However, the idea of “supply chain” can be applied to multiple constructs, not just content. And this is where Experience Supply Chain enters the scene. Have you heard about it?

I started my career at Adobe as an Adobe Analytics consultant. This means that I was on the data side of the data-content divide. I have always been cautious when diving into the content side, although I have managed to run Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) on my own laptop and in a cloud provider. Recently, one of my customers started a transition from traditional AEM to AEM Edge Delivery Services (EDS), so I decided to give it a try.