Adobe has unveiled a new cloud services bundle pitched as an all-in-one solution for organisations to deliver winning customer experiences.

Adobe has announced a new suite of cloud software at Adobe Summit 2017 in Las Vegas this week. Named Adobe Experience Cloud, it brings together the software giant’s Marketing Cloud, Analytics Cloud and the new Advertising Cloud.

To sell Adobe’s vision for Experience Cloud, the key messaging at this year’s Summit is “building an experience business” – and the software company is arguing that should be the goal of organisations of every type.

According to Brad Rencher, executive vice president and general manager, digital marketing, at Adobe, the imperatives for an experience business include:

1. context strategy replacing data strategy,
2. rethinking the content supply chain,
3. focus on the milliseconds that make the journey, and
4. innovation through integrating teams, rather than hiring lots of new people.

“This is your recipe to become an experience business,” Rencher said. “It is an all-hands-on-deck moment for companies – it isn’t just the charter of the marketing department – we are all stewards of the experience. To make it an amazing experience every time, you need a purpose-built platform.”

Adobe Experience Cloud includes Adobe Marketing Cloud, Advertising Cloud and Analytics Cloud.

Rencher took a swipe at the competition by pointing out its slightly different origins to other vendors that now have marketing cloud suites. “While Experience Cloud was born in marketing, it was engineered for enterprise,” he said. “You cannot grow up in ERP or CRM and suddenly decide you’re about experience. Simply slapping a mobile UI on an ERP or CRM is not enough. But when your DNA has always been about the experience, spanning the enterprise is what you do.”

Speaking with Marketing, Adobe’s APAC president Paul Robson says Adobe’s legacy as a business built around creativity gives it an edge over the more IT-flavoured competition. “Previous waves of technology, ERP and CRM, were focused on making the company more efficient, but none of them did anything for the customer,” he says.

“Content is the core of our business. The thing about Adobe is that it came to the world of marketing technology from the world of content creation. More than 95% of the world’s digital content is touched by an Adobe product, whether it’s Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Acrobat or Dreamweaver. It’s a natural extension to then ask how we measure what people are doing with that content and how we manage it better. And, importantly for brands, ‘how do we monetise that content?’

Adobe is pushing the message that its uniqueness, or differentiation, comes from its combination of art and science, of content and data.“Data will tell me what type of content to put in front of someone at the right time in the right place, but if the content I put in front of you doesn’t create a connection, you delete or swipe right or move on,” Robson says. “Companies that have come from ERP or CRM don’t know what creates emotive connections and gives you goosebumps.”

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Before we get into the additions and improvements to Experience Cloud and its components, here’s a chart to help illustrate the relationships.

To the suggestion that Experience Cloud is simply bundling new and existing software to create a new product or to get greater penetration in existing customers’ businesses, Robson says Experience Cloud is more than the sum of its parts. “We’re launching literally hundreds of new features across the technology stack. It’s a gross understatement to say it’s just a rebranding of technology. There is so much underneath it.”

Adobe Marketing Cloud offers solutions that help marketers craft experiences that differentiate their brands. Inside Adobe Marketing Cloud is Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Target, Adobe Campaign, Adobe Social and Adobe Primetime. Updates to Marketing Cloud announced this week include: Fluid Experiences, in which content fragments are used in different combinations to design a personalised web page on the fly; one-click personalisation; and improved integration between Adobe Campaign and Creative Cloud.

Adobe Analytics Cloud is the customer intelligence suite that combines Adobe Audience Manager, the data and audience management platform, and Adobe Analytics, the solution for applying real-time analytics and detailed audience segmentation across marketing channels.

Adobe says the new Adobe Advertising Cloud is, in part, a response to findings from its ‘Adobe Digital Insights Advertising Report’, in which 47% of marketers said that not having an integrated data and media buying solution was one of their biggest challenges.

The merging of martech and adtech has been accelerating as of late, but Adobe has taken it slowly at first, setting up Advertising Cloud as a sister product to, rather than a component of, Marketing Cloud.

Adobe Advertising Cloud combines capabilities from Adobe Media Optimiser and recently acquired DSP TubeMogul. As a result, Adobe is pitching its Advertising Cloud in a similar way to TubeMogul did itself: as an end-to-end platform for managing advertising across traditional TV and digital formats.

Adobe Advertising Cloud is now available globally and includes three offerings: AMO Search, for search marketing, AMO Demand Side Platform, for cross-channel campaigns, and AMO Dynamic Creative Optimisation, which involves dynamic creative optimisation integrated with Creative Cloud.

Adobe claims Advertising Cloud already manages about US$3.5 billion in annualised ad spend on behalf of more than 1000 global clients, including Ford, Johnson & Johnson, Kraft, L’Oréal and Nickelodeon.

Adobe Experience Cloud integrates with Creative Cloud and Document Cloud and is built on the Adobe Cloud Platform, which enables Adobe Sensei, the company’s machine learning and artificial intelligence layer.

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Disclosure: The author attended Adobe Summit 2017 as a guest of Adobe.