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Adobe updates Experience Manager for fast, multi-channel content delivery

The updates should help marketers deliver consistent but contextually appropriate messages across the growing number of devices and channels customers use.
Written by Stephanie Condon, Senior Writer
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Adobe has updated Experience Manager, its tool for publishing and managing marketing campaigns, so that marketers and developers alike can quickly publish and update content to consumers across a variety of devices and media channels.

It's challenging for marketers to manage messaging campaigns quickly and seamlessly across existing media channels, like mobile apps, websites, point-of-sale kiosks and social media. Consumers already use an average of 3.5 devices, and "when you look at the number of devices we bring to engage with any experience, it's only going to increase," Haresh Kumar, director of strategy and product marketing, told ZDNet.

The addition of new channels, such as chatbots and voice-activated assistants like Amazon's Alexa, makes it all the more difficult to give consumers a consistent experience.

Historically, different media channels come with their own content management system, and marketers have relied on basic tools like USB sticks to transfer content, Kumar said. That can leave them without basic information, such as who's allowed to handle or modify the content, or how the content should be presented to an audience.

Experience Manager 6.3 aims to solve challenges these with its new Content Services feature. Content Services relies on two other features: Content Fragments and Experience Fragments. A Content Fragment is a locked piece of content that a marketer may want to publish across channels without any changes -- such as a disclaimer notice.

Meanwhile, an Experience Fragment is a locked "experience," which includes the Content Fragment, as well as locked instructions about layout and the use of multimedia. For instance, an Experience Fragment may specify if a certain image, with specific dimensions, must remain on the left side of a Content Fragment. Marketers and content creators can use Experience Manager to build a library of Content and Experience Fragments.

From there, Content Services offers a lightweight, read-only way to access that content and deliver it to any channel.

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"The developer and businessperson can easily collaborate in one environment, where a marketer can drag and drop content they want to start serving on these customized, emerging channels," Kumar explained. "It starts to open up this path where marketers can start to think holistically about omni-channel strategy, how content can flow consistently across any endpoint and how it can be context relevant."

For instance, a hotel marketer could use Content Services to advertise to guests a happy hour special tied to a football game. If the marketer wanted to quickly update the happy hour special in response to one team's victory, he could use Experience Manager to update the relevant Content Fragment while keeping the overall message consistent across platforms.

"It's really about thinking about how content can flow across any screen to any customer, at any point in their customer journey," Kumar said.

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