SALT LAKE CITY–Adobe announced it has improved the ability for digital marketing professionals to work with creative professionals by linking the Adobe Marketing Cloud with the Adobe Creative Cloud.
Part of this comes in the fact that Adobe announced the availability of a new Digital Asset Management (DAM) offering within its Adobe Experience Manager, a portion of Adobe Marketing Cloud. Adobe has reimagined digital asset management with both marketers and creatives in mind, giving organizations “unprecedented” capabilities to bridge workflows and more easily deliver consistent, high-quality experiences anywhere and on any device, Brad Rencher, senior vice president and general manager of the company’s Digital Marketing Business, said at the Adobe Summit 2013 here.
Adobe Experience Manager DAM is deeply integrated with Adobe Creative Cloud, which makes collaboration between marketers and creatives easier and stronger, and results in more efficient planning, production, search and global distribution of images, videos and other content, the company said. In addition, out-of-the box integration with Creative Cloud applications and comprehensive metadata support improves content quality, increases production speed, and ensures brand consistency and the ability to reuse assets.
The new offering also combines digital asset management capabilities with Adobe Scene7 for optimized video, dynamic media and personalized media delivery to the Web, tablets and smartphones, as well as in-store kiosks and displays and customized print products. This helps marketers get the most value from their digital assets by adapting and re-using them for rich mobile experiences, social sites and more, Adobe said.
By uniting the creation, management and delivery of all assets, marketers and content publishers can now support responsive design, which tailors the experience across devices, as well as manage the ever-increasing number of assets required to deliver the most personalized experience.
“Adobe continues to close the gap between creative development and technology, allowing marketers to increase their focus on what really matters,” Barbara Venneman, principal at Deloitte Consulting and national practice leader for Deloitte Digital, said in a statement. “By integrating Adobe Creative Cloud and Adobe Marketing Cloud, the Adobe platform now offers digital marketers the ability to smoothly manage and promote creative assets in a true omni-channel environment. This level of integration assists companies to break down the barriers between marketing disciplines to create cohesive, effective marketing units focused on brand enhancement, revenue generation, and customer engagement.”
Andy Jacobs, executive vice president and chief technology officer at MRM, a digital agency, said in a statement: “The convergence of Adobe Creative and Marketing Clouds in Adobe’s new digital asset management offering provides us a powerful platform to develop ideas with purpose and experiences that create value to people. There is no other platform that brings all facets of marketing and creative together for the collaboration and delivery of industry leading customer experiences.”
Adobe also announced that it upgraded Adobe Social, part of Adobe Marketing Cloud, with a redesigned user interface focused on interpreting and presenting social data in a more digestible format that helps social marketers prove business results. Adobe also introduced new ways for social marketers to work and collaborate better with their partners across the organization, and debuted Adobe Social for mobile phones and tablets. Social marketers now have a marketing tool that’s as mobile as they are, Rencher said.
Adobe Marketing Cloud Links With Creative Cloud
“Nothing moves faster in digital marketing than social, so we have redesigned Adobe Social to get to insight and action more quickly,” he said in a statement. “We’re seeing incredible momentum with Adobe Social as more and more brands see the value of connecting social activity to business results.”
Christopher Reynolds, vice president of marketing analytics at Conde Nast, told eWEEK the new social capabilities in the Adobe Marketing Cloud really stood out to him. “Before this, I thought the front end was lacking a bit,” he said. “But the social additions to the marketing cloud represented a huge step–it delivers what we tried to create in our team. We’ve been historians where we would take stuff out of social media and feed it in for analysis. The progress they made on the front end is impressive.”
With the new Adobe Marketing Cloud UI, “it is nice to have the team be able to talk together,” Reynolds said. “We were actually looking for other tools for that. The ability to have a conversation about a piece of data is big. To be able to have all the people involved in the process comment on what’s happening is important because there are usually a lot of different pieces in play.”
Rencher said this is all part of Adobe’s strategy to deliver what its digital marketing customers need.
“We need to iterate faster,” he told eWEEK. “We need to meet the expectations of an increasingly mobile customer base. Consumers expect consistency and relevance whenever and wherever they interact with us. The thing is we need to let them have it their way.
“We want them to be able to take an action and we deliver an experience that makes sense. We call this the last millisecond; that is how you get this experience together and how do you deliver it to an iPhone, a tablet or a PC,” he said.
Last year, Adobe had 27 distinct products in its digital marketing portfolio. Now the company has five key solutions in its Adobe Marketing Cloud. They are the following:
Adobe Analytics puts the power of relevant data into the hands of marketers. They will be able to see trends, get key insights, and make strategic decisions that help them customize their digital experiences, find and create loyal customers, and increase revenue.
Adobe Target lets marketers create, dynamically serve and continually optimize personalized messages that break through the clutter, increase conversion and keep customers coming back.
Adobe Social ties social activity to business results, showing marketers what is working, how it is working and what they need to do to get even better results across all their social media investment.
Adobe Experience Manager allows marketers to create, manage, customize and deliver brand-building content seamlessly between smartphones, tablets and the desktop.
Adobe Media Optimizer is an ad-management platform that gives marketers a consolidated view of how their media is performing, along with tools to both accurately forecast and continually optimize their media mix to deliver peak return on their investment.