by Jess Nelson, March 21, 2017

The marketing cloud wars just heated up as Adobe announced a host of new cloud-based solutions aimed at creatively inclined marketers on Tuesday at the company’s annual Adobe Summit conference in Las Vegas, NV.

The four key announcements include a new partnership with Microsoft and expanded capabilities in the Adobe Cloud Platform, as well as two completely new cloud products, Adobe Experience Cloud and Adobe Advertising Cloud.

Adobe’s new advertising platform, the Adobe Advertising Cloud, aims to simplify media buying on traditional and digital video formats, display, and search advertising. The product is a result of Adobe’s acquisition of TubeMogul, and includes three solutions from Adobe Media Optimizer to automate media buying.

The new Adobe Experience Cloud is a suite of cloud services for enterprise companies that can be integrated with Adobe’s Creative Cloud and Document Cloud to optimize communication and deliver better customer service. The new solution combines capabilities from Adobe Marketing Cloud, Adobe Advertising Cloud and Adobe Analytics Cloud, as well as leveraging Adobe’s Sensei’s machine-learning intelligence.

Sensei is Adobe’s artificial intelligence competitor to Salesforce’s Einstein and IBM’s Watson, acting as an intelligent layer built into the Adobe Cloud Platform to help customers work and communicate more effectively. Examples of Sensei’s capabilities include Intelligent Alerts, Automated Advertising Insights, Anomaly Detection and Lookalike Modeling, but Adobe has also released a series of new Sensei capabilities at Adobe Summit.

Adobe announced the addition of Fluid Experiences to Sensei to help marketers deliver cohesive campaigns across any connected screen, including virtual reality and Internet of Things devices. In addition, Adobe has added a one-click personalization tool to Sensei that will likely make any email or content marketer salivate.

“Email marketing sill remains that marketing workhorse,” says Kristin Naragon, director of product marketing, AdobeCampaign. “It is still the number one channel marketers rely on to do seemingly mundane things, like shipping details and password resets, that are critical to the customer experience.”

Added Adobe Cloud Platform capabilities include added artificial intelligence capabilities in Sensei, a new tag management system, and expanded integrations between Adobe’s cloud-based solutions. Adobe also added a new Experience Data Model (XDM) to the Adobe Cloud Platform that helps standardize and centralize customer data.

Adobe has also enhanced its cross-cloud developer portal, Adobe I/O, with Creative Cloud APIs to merge the development and creative processes of marketing. An integration between Adobe Campaign and Adobe Dreamweaver, first announced last year, is also now available in beta.

“The real value here lies in accelerating content delivery,” says Naragon. “It breaks down barriers in the creative process, when a designer needs to going back-and-forth with a third party.”

“This year we’re focusing on reimagining how email marketing can be exciting and imaginative,” says Naragon.

MediaPost.com: Search Marketing Daily

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