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Adobe taps consumer social media trends for Marketing Cloud revamp

Adobe is revamping its marketing cloud platform with a Pinterest-like UI and optimization for tablets to encourage collaboration among mobile employees.
Written by Rachel King, Contributor
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SALT LAKE CITY -- Call it the Pinterest effect. Like the consumerization of IT, all segments of business technology seem to be influenced by popular consumer tech trends these days, and a new example of that is the latest version of the Adobe Marketing Cloud.

Announced at the 2013 Adobe Summit in Utah today, the new user interface for the Marketing Cloud has visual-heavy design intended to inspire as well as encourage collaboration among teams and agencies.

Brad Rencher, senior vice president and general manager of the digital marketing business unit at Adobe, described further in prepared remarks that "when managing teams for creative design, advertising and analytics are all under the same roof, marketers need information that paints a full picture of their business, in one easy-to-access spot."

Acknowledging the ever-growing Pinterest platform as a base model, Adobe said the gist is to take visualization and sharing capabilities and apply them to the enterprise.

Also, like most consumer software and products seeping into the enterprise market, there shouldn't be much of a learning curve here. Users simply pin images to and curate boards around projects. From there, those "cards" show up on team members' news feeds, and co-workers can edit and comment on cards too.

As seen in the chart below, those cards also turn into more data as well. Every time cards are shared, that content is filtered into a metrics report for further analysis.

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Speaking of analytics, Adobe also introduced a new workflow that is touted to enable marketers with the chance to both identify and target "high-value" customers within minutes.

Essentially, the predictive workflow integrated into the latest version of Adobe Analytics takes advantage of big data, promising to sort through terabytes of data "quickly," identifying audiences based on shared characteristics and then score them based on how likely they are to convert to customers.

That information can then be filtered to Adobe Target — another realm of the Adobe Marketing Cloud — to deliver optimized offers depending on which category or audience they fall into.

Finally, Adobe is making a major mobile push for all of its releases, with a heavy focus on tablets.

From the simplest user point-of-view, Adobe Marketing Cloud is being optimized for tablets with a touch-based, mobile-first interface, which was done in reflection of the growing mobile workforce in general.

But Adobe is particularly keen on strengthening its portfolio for trapping and analyizing mobile data through new social apps and advertising. This includes delivering optimized content through mobile-optimized websites thanks to a revised SDK.

Supporting content for iOS, Android, Windows 8, Windows Phone 8, OSX, and Blackberry mobile apps, the SDK has been configured to automatically identify a consumer's device and then deliver real-time content specific to that device.

The San Jose-based corporation is also aiming to conquer mobile analytics with help from industry partners.

For example, Adobe is integrating solutions from apps analytics and conversions specialists Distimo to discern app store data such as downloads, rankings and revenue to offer marketers with a more well-rounded perspective on the engagement process from initial download through monetization.

While most of the new mobile UI changes to the Marketing Cloud are available in beta, an integrated digital asset manager along with a campaign setup wizard are scheduled to follow in a few months.

The mobile analytics updates are also out now in beta with a full-fledged release planned for the second quarter.

Slides via Adobe

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