Articles by category: Opinion

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.

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.

Those of us in the digital marketing industry use very liberally some concepts, taking for granted that everybody knows what they mean. Two of such concepts are “segments” and “audiences”. I have used them in my posts very often, without giving much thought to which word I use. I had a recent enablement session with a customer and I realised that I have never explained these terms.

It has been a long journey, but here I am: in less than 1 week I will celebrate my 10th anniversary at Adobe. It has been an amazing journey, much better than what I thought 10 years ago. Without a doubt, it has been my best job ever. Not everything has been rosy, though. Let me summarize the positives and the negatives of these 10 years.

You probably remember from your school days, that there are 3 types of industries: primary, secondary and tertiary. It goes without saying that we are in the last one: tertiary or services. While jobs in all industries require knowledge, in the services industry it is all about the knowledge: we do not have factories or farms or mines or…, just our brains.

Here we are again, at the end of another year, a year that many will want to forget. Still, some things have happened and I wanted to share with you my sensations about the last 12 months.

This post is going to be very different from those I usually write. Instead of talking about Adobe technology or related topics, today I want to explain how I became an architect in the Adobe consulting organisation. This came as a suggestion from a colleague, in case others would like to follow the same path.

At beginning of this year, I wrote a blog post on a cookie-less web. In it, I explained where did this witch hunt against the cookies come from and what would the (expected) next chapter in this drama be. However, a recent plot twist has sent ripples, which have been felt in every corner of the Internet.

As I said at the very bottom of my 2020 Retrospective post, one of my personal projects for 2021 was to migrate this blog from Wordpress to Jekyll. I am not sure there was a clear goal, I just thought it would be fun. With all the time that I have spent at home during this long British winter in lockdown, it has been a distraction that has kept my mind busy. Finally, after so long and so much time invested, here it is. I hope you like it!

When people talk or think about Adobe Analytics, the first idea that comes to their minds tends to be “reporting”. In fact, this idea applies to any visualisation tool. However, this is only half of the story. Many forget that these tools actually have another, very important, capability: data analysis.

In the last 3 months I have been working on a project where the star is Marketo. It has been a great experience for me, as I have had the opportunity to learn a lot about this tool. So I thought I would share with you my newly acquired knowledge.

I wanted to start 2021 with a view of the future, probably trying to forget the past. At least, with my personal view on an important point that will affect us all in the digital marketing world soon. Unless you have been hiding in a cave, you already know that there is a death sentence over browser cookies. It all started with Apple’s crusade against 3rd party cookies, but later Google committed to remove these cookies completely by 2022 from its browser. Let me explain what I think will happen.

My colleague Jan Exner has the habit of writing a retrospective in his last post of the year. He is not the only one, Datanalyst.info has done it from time to time. I have never written any such post, but I think it is a good idea. This is my first attempt. Hope you like it!

Many years ago, my grandmother told me that she did not understand why I received a salary for spending the whole day behind a computer. In comparison, my grandfather had been a captain in cargo ships and a pilot. Although I did not ask her what troubled her, I assumed that, for her, a computer was just another machine and mainly for gaming. To make money, you had to do “something”.

The English expression put (oneself) in (someone’s) shoes has similar versions in many languages around the world. In the case of Spanish, for example, instead of “shoes”, we say “skin”. The older I grow, the more important I find this idiom. Personally, I think that, in order to be successful in life, you need to think about it every time you interact with others. It applies to every aspect of life but, since this blog is about digital marketing, let’s concentrate on this area.

When we talk about the Adobe Exprience Cloud (AEC), we tend to ignore a part of it. Some weeks ago I wrote about the typical AEC solutions, but I skipped on purpose three of them: Advertising Cloud, Magento and Marketo. If you were waiting to hear about them, here you have the details of the smaller siblings of the AEC.

Two years ago, on 25/05/2018, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) started to be applicable in the EU. Although this regulation entered into force 2 year earlier, in 2016, it caught many companies by surprise. Initially, there was panic around it. Some even thought that it would send ripples all along the Internet, which would change forever. Has this really happened?

A few years ago I wrote a post on business vs technology. Since in our world, 3 years is a very long time and now I have more experience on the matter, I decided to write about it again. It is not just an extension of the previous post, but a new angle to it. You probably have guessed that I am a bit (or more than a bit) tired of this confrontation.

Today I want to give an overview of the Adobe Experience Cloud. Now that I think about it, I should have done it a long time ago. I just got into the habit of explaining how to solve individual problems, that I never actually thought about the bigger picture. So, if you are familiar with the whole Adobe Experience Cloud or are looking for specific solutions to certain issues, you better skip this post. On the other hand, if you came here trying to understand what the Adobe suite of tools is about, this is for you.