Marketing organizations, thanks to a passionate interest in all things Big Data, are supposed to consume mass quantities of it in the years ahead. But as marketing services increasingly become delivered via the cloud, it appears that much of the data consumption is going to take place beyond the scope of the traditional IT organization.
At the Adobe Summit 2015 digital marketing conference today, Adobe unfurled updates to the Adobe Marketing Cloud that add a new algorithm engine to target advertising based on multiple sources of Big Data collected inside the Adobe Marketing Cloud.
Jeff Allen, senior director of product marketing for Adobe Analytics, says that instead of merely being a repository for digital marketing assets, Adobe Marketing Data is leveraging the data that marketers collect to enable them to better target advertising without hiring a data scientist. The end goal, says Allen, is to not only eliminate most of the cost associated with acquiring Big Data expertise, but also give organizations the benefit of investing in collecting all that data much faster.
To further that goal, Adobe also announced Adobe Core Services, which will help customers segment their data, along with a marketplace through which they can purchase data from third parties. Adobe also announced a mobile application development framework to enable organizations to build mobile applications using all that data and an alliance with IBM through which Adobe Marketing Cloud will be integrated with IBM e-commerce software.
There is no doubt that marketers from organizations of all sizes will be leveraging Big Data more aggressively in the years ahead. The only real question is to what degree the internal IT department is actually going to be involved in enabling that to occur.