Adobe is in the middle of Summit, its annual digital marketing conference, and as expected it’s making a bunch of product announcements. The biggest one is a new interface for Adobe Marketing Cloud, the company’s suite of products that includes Adobe Analytics, Adobe Target, Adobe Social, Adobe Experience Manager, and Adobe Media Optimizer.
Brad Rencher, senior vice president and general manager of Adobe’s digital marketing business, said that as consumer expectations change and as companies have access to more and more data, marketers need to deliver great “last millisecond interactions” — that, he said, is “where we’re either heroes or we’re average.” And that means it’s increasingly important for design, advertising, and analytics teams to work together in an efficient way.
“You’ve got to try harder to reduce these organizational silos,” Rencher said.
The new interface, which allows users to collaborate across all five Marketing Cloud products, is an attempt to make that happen. For starters, there’s now one access point/login for all of those products. And each product will have a share button, which can turn any piece of content or data into a “card.” When users sign in to the Marketing Cloud, they get a news feed of cards that are relevant to them, which they can view, comment on, and annotate. Cards can also be pulled together into a board — so if there’s a specific issue or project that the team needs to discuss, all the relevant cards can be gathered on one place, then the team members can have a real-time discussion around them.
Now, you may or may not be impressed by any of the individual features, but again, the promise lies in how it allows teams using different Adobe products to work together — they don’t even all have to be at the same company. Or, as Rencher put it (perhaps a tad hyperbolically), “The power of this is that it sits on top of the broadest and most complete marketing suite of applications that have ever been assembled in the history of the Earth.”
Adobe says the new interface will be available this summer. Planned additions include a unified asset management system and a campaign creation tool that integrates with that system.
Plus, all of this can be viewed on tablets and other touchscreen devices. In fact, all five Marketing Cloud products are getting mobile-specific upgrades, including new mobile analytics reports (and integration with Distimo) and new mobile ad creation tools.