The Digital Marketing Architect

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.

In the marketing automation space, Adobe currently has three offerings: Adobe Journey Optimizer (AJO), Adobe Campaign Classic (ACC), and Marketo. If you are wondering why so many options or what the difference between them is, you are not alone. This is a typical criticism that some customers give. However, when you understand them, you realize that they make a lot of sense and each one has its own space. Sure, there are overlaps, but there are also important differences. My hope with this post is to help you navigate these options and help you choose the best one for you.

One of the probably least understood tools that come with the Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) is Offer Decisioning Engine (ODE). It is currently bundled with Adobe Journey Optimizer (AJO), although I personally consider it a completely independent tool. I have used it in a couple of projects and, in the last one, we have configured it to do some cool stuff. While conceptually simple, it has so much flexibility that it is difficult to understand it in full. This post is just an introduction to help you understand it.

I have explained a few times that the main purpose of the Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) is to create segments. With AEP’s promise to be a real-time engine, it makes sense that segment evaluation is also real-time. In other words, as soon as a profile matches a segment definition, it qualifies for it and it is sent to the destination for activation. However, there are some nuances that you need to be aware of before you start creating segments.

Digital marketing requires enough customer data to be able to segment your customer base and run personalized campaigns. Quite often I find clients who tell me that they have very little data from their customers, leaving them mainly with anonymous behavioral data. In some cases, there is a fairly easy solution: a loyalty program. Let me explain the benefits you get beyond the “loyalty” part.

Having lots of data in a data lake sitting idle is a waste of resources. If you store data, it is because you want to take advantage of it. If you have no use for some data, you should, at the very least, archive it, if not completely delete it. Let’s see a few options of what you can do with your Data Lake.

You should understand by now the Real-Time Customer Profile and the Data Lake. However, these building blocks need data, a lot of data, to operate. Just to give you an example, I am currently working on an implementation that will host more than 150 million profiles. And this is not the biggest that we have seen in our customers. This why I call this post “Feed the beast”.

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.