Adobe Campaign Classic 8 and Adobe Workfront – Sometimes it’s the Little Things

CACI is an Adobe partner with experience of implementing, optimising and running Adobe’s Experience Cloud for our clients. We’ve been following the developments in Adobe’s product development and will be sharing our insights here. In this post, David Moore shares his view of the integration between Adobe Workfront and the new version of Adobe Campaign.

Watching the introduction to Adobe Campaign Classic 8 in this year’s Adobe Summit I was taken by JJ Haglund’s top 10 innovations. Sitting at number 10 was the “close integration with Adobe Workfront”, a product Adobe acquired in 2020. It sparked an immediate interest. Why? Let’s go on a journey.

Marketing is no longer the free for all it was. You can no longer sell Snake Oil and get away with it (apart from hi-fi industry see footnote *). Especially in the UK, marketing is now closely regulated and in certain verticals such as financial services, energy, telecoms there are external bodies who have the authority to audit a company’s marketing and apply fines if they find inappropriate marketing practices.

As such for any marketing campaign, organisations in these sectors, must have an audit trail for a campaign including the assets that makes up that campaign and the audiences selected to receive the campaign. For example, in the retail finance sector the principles of the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) include explicit and implicit guidance on the fair treatment of customers. This fair treatment defines six consumer outcomes that firms should strive to achieve. Three of these are: –

• Products and services marketed and sold in the retail market are designed to meet the needs of identified consumer groups and are targeted accordingly.
• Consumers are provided with clear information and are kept appropriately informed before, during and after the point of sale.
• Where consumers receive advice, the advice is suitable and takes account of their circumstances.

So, the selection criteria for customers to be included in an email, SMS, DM, outbound or push marketing campaign needs to include a justification for the selection of the audience, including sign-off, to be recorded for audit purposes.

Also, all the assets chosen for a campaign such as the images and copy need to go through an audited approval process, passing through both the marketing management and legal teams to ensure that customers are being treated fairly. Every sign-off needs to be recorded in case the FCA come knocking and pick on some campaigns to audit. Also, we must remember that a campaign is not just email/SMS/push/DM, but also billboards, TV, YouTube, social media, radio, off the page. All the assets making up the overall campaign, across all distribution channels, need to go through the same process.

So, I’m really excited about Adobe Workfront integration into Adobe Campaign. For our regulated customers (and regulation across the marketing industry is only set to increase) Adobe Campaign and Adobe Workfront looks like a real winner. I’d certainly have ranked it higher than 10. And if you also have Adobe Experience Manager then Workfront integrates with that as well ensuring all assets have been built, reviewed, and tagged appropriately.

An interesting story. I was involved in a pitch to a large regional financial services organisation. We were invited to pitch the two best marcomms tools (Adobe Campaign and Unica) at the time, our presentation was to cover both the campaign management and asset audit management capabilities of the tools. At the time Adobe excelled in Campaign Management but was flawed in Asset Management, Unica was also good in Campaign Management (though poor in delivery integration) and we thought was OK in Asset Management but not a class leader. Which won?

Neither. Unica came close but could not handle radio, TV and social media assets. The company went purely with an audit asset management tool and to my knowledge have still to buy a campaign management tool.

(* cables that are directional: Really?)

If you are considering what the announcements from Adobe Summit mean for your business, please get in touch and we can arrange an initial consultation to help.