The Digital Marketing Architect

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.

Arguably, the first use case that any marketer should implement is cart abandonment. It is usually the lowest-hanging fruit and requires little effort compared to other use cases. It is so important that Adobe Campaign and Adobe Analytics have had an integration for more than 10 years to be able to implement it and Adobe implemented Triggers mainly to satisfy customers who wanted a shorter delay in sending the email.

As a small kid, I loved watching Sesame Street. One of my favorite characters was the Cookie Monster. I liked how he would try to eat as many cookies as possible, creating a mess. I later heard that there was an initiative to make him eat vegetables and fruits, but I never saw it and I do not know how true that statement was. Returning to the mess, this is a very accurate picture of what we have today with browser cookies, especially third-party cookies.

Ever since I started working as an Adobe Analytics consultant, more than 10 years ago, I always recommended my clients to follow a naming convention. I probably should have done a better job of explaining the why and the how. They say it is better late than never, so I am going to redeem myself today.

Today I am going to explain a trick that I have used once in an Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) implementation. I had a requirement where my customer wanted to personalize based on an entity that was not a person but could be shared by multiple people simultaneously. My solution was to create a schema for this entity. It worked well with this customer, but you need to be very careful and read the warnings and limitations that I will explain below.

One of the first tasks that you have to do when implementing the Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) is to select your identities. This is not a trivial decision, it will define how the identity graph will work, which, in turn, will have profound implications for the functioning of the tool. In all cases, the ECID will be one of the identities. The typical next candidate for identity is the email address. However, before you take this decision, read on.

Earlier this year, Google reached an agreement to delete billions of records. This time, the reason was how private browsing was perceived vs. what it really was. This post will explore the technical aspects of private browsing, the lawsuit, and how it can affect digital marketing in general.

Adobe Audience Manager offered a fundamental feature for a Data Management Platform: recency and frequency. However, the Adobe Experience Platform does not provide such a feature, at least not in the same way. Let’s see why this is so and what alternative options we have.

I am currently working on a project where my main activity is to support and guide the development teams in configuring a fairly new integration: Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) and Adobe Commerce (AC). The more I learn about this integration, the more interesting it becomes. In this post, I am going to introduce it and explain all its potential.

Many of you may be wondering what the heck I am going to write about today with this title. I know, the first time you hear these words together it sounds like someone made a bad choice of words. However, once you finish reading this post, it will make a lot of sense. In fact, I am sure you will get it even before getting to the end.

My first post of the year, where I talk about use cases vs capabilities, has been very successful. Even last week a coworker mentioned it to me, 4 months after publishing it. The interest in this topic has kept me thinking about what else I could write about. Then I had a flash, an idea where I realized that there are certain parallelisms between SMART goals and use cases, and I am going to explore them.

When I wrote my post comparing Adobe Journey Optimizer, Adobe Campaign, and Marketo, I got a lot of attention. I guess there is a lot of interest in comparing Adobe tools to decide which one is best for a particular situation. Today I am going to do a similar comparison, this time between Adobe Analytics (AA) and Customer Journey Analytics (CJA).

In my last post, I introduced the problem with flicker. The post was already becoming too long and I decided to split it into two. This is the second part, where I will explain the solutions that can be applied. If you have landed directly on this post, I strongly recommend that you first read my previous post.

For the past 5 years or more, almost every client I work with has raised their concerns about flicker or the causes that generate flicker. For reasons that will become clearer in this post, this topic tends to be a bit heated, with very strong opinions on either side. I will try to stay away as much as I can from subjective matters, but I will also give you my point of view. This is the first post of a two-part series, where I will talk about the problem and potential solutions to this issue.

This is a post I have had on my list for quite some time and today I thought it was high time I wrote about it. If you do a quick Internet search, you will see that this topic is very popular, with hundreds of results. I will not repeat what others are saying. Instead, I will provide my point of view with the aim of clarifying what each acronym is and is not. I know there is some confusion about these terms.

Unless you have been living in a cave, you must have heard the term Generative AI, or GenAI for short, recently. The best example is ChatGPT, which has taken the world by storm. Adobe, on its side, has also been working on this technology and it is now available in some tools. I have to admit that it has taken me some time to start playing with it, as my main project has eaten all my time. However, I have finally started digging into it. I am far from an expert, but I wanted to share with you what I have learned and my point of view on where I think it should go to.

Most digital marketing initiatives involve one or more of the following channels: email, SMS, push notifications, mobile app, or web. I would call them traditional channels, as they are what we are most used to. It is no coincidence that Adobe Experience Cloud tools cater mainly to them. However, there are other channels that, while more niche or less popular, should also be explored. There may be opportunities in them that you may have not thought about.