The Digital Marketing Architect

Tomorrow, I am flying to Las Vegas to participate in the Adobe Summit 2025. My focus in the last couple of weeks has been preparing my session with Anish. I will also be manning the booth and I will share my schedule there so that you can visit me.

I have recently written about testing, where I explained that everything in digital marketing should be tested. There are a couple of reasons for this: first, because you can test nearly everything, you have the means to do so; and second, because it is a scientific approach. Now, you might be wondering: how do I run those tests? The answer is simple and, again, scientific: by creating holdout groups. Let me explain.

Just a quick note today. I am happy to announce that I will delivering a session titled “Before the Login: How Sling TV Turns Anonymous Visitors into Customers”, with Anish Raul from Sling TV at the upcoming Adobe Summit. Last year I could not go, but this 2025 I will be again in Las Vegas. I am excited!

If you have watched Mad Men, you will notice one detail about the marketing campaigns they created: it had to be a success right from the beginning, there was no room for errors. One of the reasons the main character (Donald Draper - Jon Hamm) is so successful, is because his campaigns are almost always perfect: they convince the client and be public alike. He could even convince the public to smoke more when health organizations were advocating for the opposite.

One of the fundamental features of the Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) is that its database revolves around a single entity: the profile. All schemas and all datasets are just part of the unified profile. I know, there are some exceptions, like the lookup tables and B2B tables, but they do not have the same power as the profile. The reason for this decision is very simple: when running marketing campaigns, you want to personalize to the individual. It has been proven time and again that generic campaigns are less successful than personalized messages, be it on the Web or in an email.

I was thinking about what I could write in my first post of 2025 when I remembered something I had seen with some customers. This post is my point of view of a decision I have witnessed or heard more often than what I would have initially expected: big corporations purchasing a license for an expensive enterprise tool, only to have it sitting on a virtual shelf, unused.

We are at the end of 2024. It feels like events are happening faster than ever. Five hundred years ago, most people spent their entire lives in the same area and rarely experienced significant changes in their way of living. Now, we receive news every month about new inventions, revolutions, and shifts in paradigms that we often do not fully understand. I remember when reading vehicle license plates was considered AI; now this technology is nearly a commodity.

I have already written about the problem with flicker and the main solutions to it. I also remember how I received some comments agreeing with my views about the page speed zealots. The obsession with page speed is ever-increasing, which is having some unintended consequences. Today I want to show how you cannot have everything and you need to find a compromise.

Navigating an Experience Data Model (XDM) schema is not always easy. If your schema is simple, you can probably fit it on a screen and see it in full. However, the moment you start adding nested fields, things can get hairy very quickly. Not only this, but the XDM nomenclature can also feel confusing. The goal of this post is to clarify how to model the data in XDM, using a bottom-up approach: I will start with the most granular elements and how they are grouped to create an XDM schema.

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.