Adobe Embeds AI into Marketing Cloud Service

Many organizations have been assessing the level of investment they need to make in data science and various forms of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to advance their digital business initiatives. A new update to the Adobe Marketing Cloud delivered this week that bakes these technologies into an Adobe Target personalization engine suggests that most organizations are about to benefit from these capabilities without having to make substantial investments of their own.

Kevin Lindsay, head of product marketing for Adobe Target, says an Adobe Target personalization engine that employs the Sensei machine learning algorithms developed by Adobe can now optimize which content is presented based on which attributes are known about the individual viewing the content. In real time, the Adobe Marketing Cloud can then expose offers to that individual based on the digital business goals of the organization that marketers work for are trying to achieve, says Lindsay.

In effect, Lindsay says, the days when marketers manually crafted those experiences are coming to an end because algorithms will be able to mass personalize individual content experiences with much higher degrees of accuracy. Organizations will be able to provide those experiences by either employing the Sensei algorithms developed by Adobe or inserting their own algorithms into the Adobe Marketing Cloud.

“We refer to that as bring your own algorithms,” says Lindsay.

That advance, adds Lindsay, also extends out to marketing campaigns because the algorithms will be able to identify which sites on the web have the most desirable audience for a vendor to target their campaigns. Rather than relying solely on the intuition of the marketer, the Adobe Marketing Cloud will be able to identify campaign targets based on empirical data, says Lindsay.

Lindsay says marketers will have to get used to the fact that they will exercise less control over granular details. They can tune Adobe Marketing Cloud to achieve strategic goals. But there will no longer be a need to manually craft and implement each tactical campaign element associated with achieving that strategic digital business goals, says Lindsay.

The implications for smaller organizations trying to compete with larger organizations that have made massive investments in personalization and data science are obviously profound. In effect, Adobe is now making it possible for smaller organizations via Adobe Marketing Cloud to level the playing field by taking advantage of algorithms that Adobe will make available as part of the core service.

The implications of applying AI to digital marketing also naturally extend out to all the sales people trying to influence their decisions. If more of the implementation of the marketing strategy is being optimized by a machine, organizations trying to influence those decisions would be better served by investing more in, for example, content and audience development than in sales. In fact, whatever last vestige of “Mad Men” that exists in the world of advertising is about to be laid to rest once and for all.