Evaluating Adobe Summit 2024
Executive Summary
- This article offers independent insights to critically evaluate content from Adobe Summit 2024 last month.
- Highlights from Marketo's product roadmap for the upcoming year are covered, along with guidance about how to incorporate these new features into your marketing efforts.
- Considerations and caveats are covered around implementing Adobe Experience Cloud exclusively across your marketing technology stack and parallels from IBM and Apple's approach to personal computing in the 1980s.
The body content of your post goes here. To edit this text, click on it and delete this default text and start typing your own or paste your own from a different source.Last month, Adobe Summit really highlighted a world of changes that have been happening across the digital marketing industry over the past 2 years. Of course, Artificial Intelligence was a key driver for these changes and that was covered throughout the presentations at this year’s conference. However, AI has been nearly ubiquitous at all marketing events since early 2023. Summit is unique because it’s a product showcase of Adobe’s intentions to incorporate AI into its product offerings.
So, this article is going to ignore a lot of those announcements because they’re covered elsewhere. While interesting and potentially valuable, you can read all about the keynote announcements in Adobe press releases, corporate blog posts, and in content from sponsored advocacy programs like the Adobe Champions and the Adobe User Groups.
Instead, we’ll approach Adobe Summit from an independent consulting perspective, exploring and scrutinizing whether these options are a fit for the marketing operations at your firm. Not because there’s anything wrong with these new product offerings per se. But when you’re asked to make a purchase decision to implement them into your marketing tech stack, you should - and probably will - go through a similar evaluation process to conduct your own due diligence.
Two big questions from this conference come from different audiences:
- Financial Analysts: Will the different products and user bases that Adobe acquired (e.g. Marketo, Magento, etc.) alongside the innovations developed internally (Interactive Webinars, Engagement Canvas, etc.) be able to work together going forward to drive more value at an affordable price point.
- Marketing Leaders: Will operating your marketing department with more and more products from the Adobe Experience Cloud yield more impact than searching for and integrating different applications to build your own marketing tech stack?
Only time will truly provide answers, but we’ll cover some of the prospective ideas here from a Marketo-centric perspective so that you can evaluate them for yourself.
Marketo's Product Roadmap 2024
Since the acquisition, Adobe Marketo Engage is steadily being enveloped into the Adobe Experience Cloud ecosystem. You can see this year-over-year in its product releases notes in your Marketo documentation library. It’s also important to understand that the concepts that were outlined during Adobe Summit may or may not materialize in the 2024 calendar year, given the many other priorities across the entire Adobe Experience Platform.
Here are the updates that you will find in this year’s announcements:
- Migrating Marketo’s Login and User Management capabilities into Adobe Experience Cloud
- Retiring the Marketo UX interface and shifting this towards one that continues to match the Adobe’s branded user experience
- Further enhancements between Adobe Marketo Engage and Adobe Connect using Integrated Webinar programs
- A focus on developing Dynamic Chat as a prominent feature to capture engagement data within Marketo programs using Adobe’s data ecosystem
- Synchronizing Adobe Real Time CDP and Marketo via the Adobe Experience Platform
New Email Editor
Marketo’s email editor has long been a source of frustration among Marketing users because of the amount of proprietary HTML/CSS coding knowledge required to build out branded email templates and clunky asset management capabilities. Once you’ve passed this hurdle, it offers a great opportunities for branded, drag-and-drop content creation. However, that hurdle is rarely present in other marketing automation platforms these days and it can add a considerable additional expense.
Marketo Email Template Solutions today
All Marketo implementation consultants – including Conversion Store – offer a solution to address email templates. When we get into a Marketo instance that was originally implemented elsewhere, we see two approaches that have their own pros and cons as shown in the table below:
| Marketo Email Template Solution | Pros | Cons |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Offshore template development work to a firm like Grazitti Interactive or Uplers | - Fast Deployment - Lower Costs - Marketo native interface / features | - Less customization - Overflow of modules - Further custom coding for additional changes - Less direct control over content creation |
| 2. Set up agreements with 3rd party email template software tools like Knak or Stensul | - Greater ability to control your own content creation - Additional control over authorized campaign management and execution users - Better file management options outside of Marketo | - Higher cost to implement - Ongoing cost to own another tool - Additional technical debt |
Adobe Journey Optimizer B2B Edition
Addressing the growing sizes of buying committees at B2B firms was cited as a main reason for adding an Adobe Journey Optimizer B2B edition as an add on into Marketo.
Although the offering was largely conceptual at the time of writing, there were a few use cases that cannot be addressed within the current capabilities of Marketo, regardless of whether Marketo’s ABM module is installed. Here were a few different types of use cases that were discussed:
- Build a Smart List showing the percentage of Buying Committee members at an Account that meet your Ideal Client target and have engaged with your marketing content
- Multi-person targeted marketing messages for different stages of the buying journey such as inducing a trial of an enterprise account or onboarding the product after a sale
- Creating cross-sell opportunities and delivering relevant communications to all stakeholders on a buying committee
Caveats when deploying Adobe Journey Optimizer B2B Edition
These features are anticipated towards the end of the 2024 calendar year, but it’s important to understand that it’s possible this feature will be delayed. It’s also quite likely to be available as an additional charge on top of your Marketo subscription. If you don’t operate in an environment where buying committees or Account Based Marketing is a part of your Go To Market strategies then you might not need to make the additional investment in this tool and could use Marketo in a typical manner.
Marketo's AI Generation Capabilities
Much of the AI generation capabilities announced around Marketo this year were related to content creation and Dynamic Chat. With the new Email Editor, AI content creation capabilities are likely to arise within Rich Text block elements inside of modules.
There were a few sessions involving AI generation around Opportunities Data and Interesting Moment data. In the latter presentation, data that is typically organized through daisy-chained text area fields by time stamps could be transformed into tables and then sent to the CRM to help Sales teams understand the engagement activity of a lead prior to becoming an MQL.
AI Expectations for Marketo in 2024
- Dynamic Chat generative answers
- Splitting Interactive Webinars into chapters
- Email copy creation
Interactive Webinars provide another area of AI to help organize longer webinar recordings into chapters. You could repurpose this content for social media marketing such as YouTube Shorts.
Within the Marketo User Group YouTube channel we’re starting to use a similar technology to help generate Shorts content around Adobe Summit After Hours, for example. This saves a tremendous amount of time scrubbing a 60-minute video for potential short-form content segments.
Marketo Measure Updates
Marketo Measure held a smaller, yet meaningful segment of hands on lab content through Adobe Summit 2024. A new set of reporting capabilities will become available within the tool itself. There were also AI capabilities announced around Marketo Measure Ultimate, which is an additional tool available to purchase above and beyond your typical Marketo Measure implementation.
Fair Warning: we experienced some serious issues accessing these new dashboards in Las Vegas where the majority of the reports crashed and were unavailable throughout the presentation. However, in fairness, it’s unlikely that any one Marketo Measure instance would receive over 40 people accessing the data within one instance simultaneously, which might account for the technical issues.
Your next steps
In latest years Summit has become more of a product-centric showcase highlighting elements of updates that could be made to a collection of different programs that address challenges that different kind of marketers face. It’s clear that these roadmaps are developing to encourage marketers give Adobe a greater share of their wallet. However, the real question is whether those updates will actually lead to a benefit to the firms involved?
Questions you should ask:
- What is the additional cost of each feature once it’s available?
- What other products or services offer a similar feature at a competitive price?
- Is the opportunity in your space worth being an Early Adopter for these features?
Next Steps in your consideration process:
- Review the roadmap features we’ve outlined for 2024 and compare them with your marketing plans for the remainder of the year. Where do you see opportunities to streamline profitable gains?
- Talk to an experienced solutions provider (can I humbly recommend Conversion Store?) about the new features announced for 2023 and 2024. Are they a fit for your GTM Strategy?
- Considering your Total Addressable Market (TAM), what is the highest Return on Investment you can generate from this initiative? If you consider the Data Model in your GTM Strategy, contemplate the Conversion Rates you typically generate in the earlier part of your lifecycle where Marketo typically generates value within your customer journey. Then compare that with the price ranges you receive for these new features.
Before the days of cloud computing, there was a popular idea among CIOs that it’s a good idea to wait 18 months before adopting a brand new technology. The idea largely stemmed because it was a much more difficult process to update enterprise-grade software across server rooms. These days the cloud allows for an almost constant stream of updates that are tested and changed
A final thought: Are proprietary clouds better?
The trend towards proprietary product clouds that we’re seeing from Adobe, Salesforce, Microsoft, Google, and other firms like Zoho remind me of similar challenges in the PC revolution of the 70s and 80s. In these early days of personal computing, IBM and Apple built computers with a proprietary approach. If you bought an IBM or an Apple, you’d get a premium service experience, but you could only use software specifically written for those computers. Also they could only communicate with other IBM or Apple computers.
Contrast that approach against a consortium of Compaq, Hewlett Packard, Olivetti, Packard Bell, and several others. The names today have changed to Dell, Asus, Lenovo, or Samsung as the desktop computer market matured. Yet that model of open computing is what drives the internet today. I can freely collaborate with few compatibility issues from my Dell laptop with a client using an Apple Macbook, an Android tablet, or a Chromebook.
Initially IBM and Apple had better product offerings because they were able to exert a greater control over their sales channels. Their retailers, implementation providers, software developers, and support personnel were all entirely dependent on the direction of the desktop computer manufacturer to ensure a consistent customer experience.
Introducing the first PC Compatible portable computer at Comdex in Las Vegas in 1982. This was a dramatized version on the TV series Halt and Catch Fire. But it was based on the Compaq Portable PC, which ran software from any PC - including IBM's - at a much lower cost.
However, as the Personal Computer market lifecycle matured, the user base expanded into an Early Majority and a Late Majority stage. At that point, the needs within a product category also become more sophisticated. It becomes more cumbersome for one vendor to provide all of the needs within the marketplace at an affordable price point.
The point: Consider whether it would be better for your business to shop around for the combination of SaaS products that meet your specific needs. Is that preferable to working with one unified set of products from one horizontally-integrated vendor?
When you look at the 10,000+ technologies in the MarTech cloud diagram, understand that many of those independent SaaS vendors exist because they serve very specific niches within their respective categories. It's very important to separate those realities from any experience you receive at an event when you're evaluating the .
