Brands Lay Out Their Top CX Priorities, Themes, and Challenges for 2017 and Beyond.

Companies worldwide are transforming their businesses with one goal in mind: ensuring that each customer receives the most personal, compelling, and memorable experience possible — and then returns for more. To gain insight into this shift, we partnered with eConsultancy to survey 14,163 online marketing, digital, and e-commerce professionals; and thus, the Digital Intelligence Briefing: 2017 Digital Trends report was born.

Here, we present key trends that brands should heed in 2017 — most importantly, that customer experience (CX) be regarded as the primary way for marketers and agencies to differentiate themselves from competitors. This digital transformation isn’t an easy one, but the so-called ‘experience economy’ we’ve been teased with since the 90s is coming to fruition, and — ready or not — we’re all part of it.

Brands’ Top CX Priorities and Themes for 2017
Survey respondents indicated that CX is the primary means through which organizations plan to differentiate themselves in 2017. As a result, they’re prioritizing organization-wide initiatives to update skills, break down silos, and infuse their cultures with a customer focus. In fact, three-quarters of respondents named a cohesive strategy, digital-marketing skills, and a customer-focused culture as key drivers for brand success in 2017.

In keeping with this, personalization initiatives — such an improved ability to connect customers with relevant content — are also one of the top three priorities for one-quarter of all client-side marketers this year. Client-side marketers list refining data-analysis capabilities, optimizing internal collaboration between creative and marketing teams, and improving internal workflows as “very important” — all of which lend the agility and insights needed to deliver highly personalized experiences in customers’ moments of truth.

On an even more granular level, a design focus is considered the next step to digital transformation, as:

• 86 percent of respondents said design-driven companies outperform other businesses;
• 80 percent believe that creativity is highly valued within their organizations; and
• 77 percent are investing in design to differentiate their brands.

This shift comes as brands view design as the not-so-secret strategic weapon for delivering compelling CXs. “Design impacts every part of a customer’s experience and so should impact how companies go about delivering that experience,” according to the report. This design-led mindset is rooted in survey respondents’ emphases on creating the most personalized, relevant, and valuable CXs possible.

Top Challenges to Delivering a Winning CX
The era of CX is definitely here. However, as businesses jump into the experience game, many of them overextend themselves, and thus, neglect to care for the basics. To deliver personalized design- and content-driven experiences, brands must focus on four areas of development.

1. Data & Analytics
To ensure the CX is valuable, businesses need a strong foundation of data, coupled with analysis capabilities. As mentioned previously, nearly two-thirds of client-side marketers agree that improving data-analysis capabilities is ‘very important’ for delivering great CXs.

Despite this, brands are not matching enhanced analytics budgets with enhanced efforts. While 97 percent of respondents plan to either increase or maintain their marketing-analytics budgets, they’re putting more effort behind other marketing activities — design, social-media marketing, content marketing, personalization, and video advertising, for instance.

Still, as we reviewed other top challenges, we found the root of brand problems is often a fragmented or weak data foundation. “Without prioritizing data, marketers will fail to bolster their understanding of customers, hindering their priority to optimize the CX,” the report concluded.

2. Cultural Change
While 13 percent of companies rated breaking down silos to adopt a collaborative, cross-team, and customer-focused approach as the most difficult thing to achieve, 12 percent consider it the easiest. This highlights a gulf between organizations’ abilities to deliver winning CXs but serves as an opportunity for brands to gain a competitive advantage.

In fact, most companies expect to compete over the next five years by focusing on delivering optimal CXs, and therein lies the challenge — so many companies are CX-focused that, to compete successfully, brands must continuously strive to improve. This means a boundless, organization-wide obsession with the customer and his or her changing needs is in order.

Consequently, brands must understand that data scientists don’t have to reside in silos based on their statistics and data-analysis degrees. Yes, this expertise has its purpose in the experience business; but with the right tools in place, anyone can use data science to create greater relevance for customers.

The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) trained their entire organization in testing and optimization. Thus, even RBS board members can solve customer problems without relying on IT or the company’s analytics geniuses to do it for them. With company-wide training and the strategic placement of support tools, one RBS rule helped drive company-wide action: for every insight surfaced, members must pair one action to improve the CX. To win in the experience era — like RBS has — brands must get their entire enterprises on board with using data science.

3. Design Processes
One-half of those surveyed don’t have the processes and collaborative workflows to achieve a design advantage. Strategy, user-experience (UX) design, and process development top client-side respondents’ lists as more difficult elements to master in their transitions to customer-focused environments.

To develop a design advantage, brands must first focus on creating strong data foundations. Remember, balancing content and data often requires a change in organizational culture to adapt to the experience era. Content — whether copy or creative — that isn’t fueled by data often misses the mark. Using insightful data, creatives can determine how design variations help (or hurt) their campaigns in the long run, discover compelling directions they may have dismissed previously without the necessary data to predict success, and narrow down creative ideas to deliver hyper-relevant CXs.

The goal should be to deliver compelling, personalized campaigns — not just make things look pretty. Each design component should be tested to ensure it meets targeted recipients’ needs. By testing and swapping out images and copy, L’Oréal targeted two segments using the same design template but with personalized imagery and content to meet customers’ needs. Like L’Oréal, with the right tools in place, you can sync your data, design, and content teams to deliver the CXs customers demand.

4. Customer Expectations
Keeping up with customer expectations is another big challenge respondents cited, “driven in many cases by industry disruptors (from Uber to AO.com), which often set new standards in terms of UX and delivery.” Adjusting to meet customer expectations means adapting the system to quickly and flawlessly deliver relevant value. Difficulties arise in organizations when systems focus too much on CX components as opposed to the journey in cohesion.

The good news is, 23 percent of companies placed the highest emphasis on creating ‘valuable’ experiences. In doing so, they create the agility, customer-oriented culture, and collaborative processes necessary to be future industry disruptors — instead of the disrupted.

Key Themes for The Future
Despite these challenges, brands are optimistic about the prospects that connected devices and the Internet of Things (IoT) will bring over the next three years as well as the roles of artificial intelligence (AI) and bots in driving campaigns and winning CXs.

This appreciation for IoT, AI, and bots, however, isn’t shared equally by all. European marketers are generally more excited about AI and bots than their Asia-Pacific and North American counterparts are; and marketers in Asia-Pacific are slightly more excited about enhanced payment technologies, such as mobile wallets and e-receipts, than their European and North American counterparts are — a finding that isn’t remarkable, given the growing popularity of digital payments in the region.

In a Nutshell
No matter your region or what excites you about the future of digital marketing, remember that content, design, and data are key building blocks in providing great CXs. This means that you need to focus your efforts on each of these areas, combining them to create hyper-personalized customer experiences. Understanding the role each plays in creating great CXs should help any organization pioneer the internal change needed for success in the experience-business era.

Learn more by downloading our 2017 Digital Trends report.

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Advanced Data Analysis — the Process Behind the Insight

One of our most recent Adobe Digital Insights (ADI) reports focused on the evolution of digital advertising. The scope of the project was broad, including many different sources and the impact of different advertising types — search, display, video, creative resource, web traffic, e-commerce, online video, and TV Everywhere (TVE), for instance — on business. Our strategy was to create a holistic view and then delve into larger questions, develop themes, and build a story.

Five Tips for Working Through Advanced Data Analysis
With any analysis, particularly one containing new data, you start with the basics — metrics every business unit needs to understand, such as year-over-year growth or market share, before exploring new questions. Once the baseline is established, I’ve found that following the lead — rather than burying it — helps uncover meaningful insights. Here are five tips — a best-in-class “how to” for understanding the process behind the insight — for working through advanced data analysis.

1. Understand the Strengths and Weaknesses of Your Data.
All data has strengths and weaknesses, and becoming familiar with them is essential. Spend extra time talking to experts — both technical and business — to not only reveal assets and liabilities, but also determine what the data does and doesn’t measure or capture. Data from marketing technology, for instance, measures what it was built for and not necessarily the entire market. Gain a sense in the beginning by working with the data to resolve simple questions — such as share of traffic by device — and comparing those answers to other sources to see whether they make sense. Not everything you carry out in this step will make the final analysis, but it will build invaluable knowledge and experience and prevent skewed numbers from entering the process.

2. Become a Polyglot: Learn at Least Three Languages to Work With Data More Easily.
Working with such a wide range of data means using different technology stacks. We used standard SQL (web traffic), Hadoop (raw video advertising data), Splunk (TVE event logs), R (customer retention), and even Excel (yes, it still plays a role). Rounding out your skills across a variety of technologies allows for better integration of data from technology silos. Learning the difference between ‘top,’ ‘limit,’ and ‘head’ seems to be a minor point, but being able to seamlessly flow from one language to another is a critical skill.

3. Explore Relationships Across the Data — in the Right Order.
Telling the whole story around data involves finding a common thread and building a narrative. Understanding how one fact relates to another is a logical step in data analysis, but the key to maintaining structure is to prioritize in the right order. I’ve found it best to use a three-step method of understanding the basics first, then looking at relationships across data sets, and finally identifying new relationships.

At ADI, we work to discover insights not previously reported upon. In the United States, for example, we found that desktop-formatted ads were completed less than half the time when viewed on mobile devices — effectively doubling the cost of reaching that audience. This idea led to exploring the creative executions used in video ads and identifying what worked and what didn’t.

4. Review Academic Journals to Find What’s Topical in the Academic World.
Another often-untapped resource for analysts is the world of academia. Explore research and journals, and if you find something interesting, reach out to the author or authors. Talking to academics can lead you to a new line of questioning. Based on research surrounding the increased “cost of attention” in advertising, we compared the cost of digital advertising to inflation (ad cost is rising much faster) and looked back in history to see when the introduction of technology changed how consumers interacted with content and, ultimately, affected the cost of ad delivery (1997 seems to be a tipping point).

5. Aim for Continuity.
People make decisions based on relative changes rather than absolute numbers. For example, “10,000” doesn’t reveal much, but “an increase of 10 percent” does. To uncover those meaningful comparisons and trends, you need to have baseline data. However, as industries evolve, research methods do too. If you’re changing how things have been done in the past, be respectful of what came before and do your best to build from a common foundation before venturing into new territory. That said, uncovering strategic insights — the “I didn’t know what I needed to know” facts of life — often comes from looking at different perspectives.

In Conclusion
Fleshing out threads of information that will uncover meaningful insights in complex data requires a strategic process. As an analyst, you need to develop (through repetitive work and exploration) the ability to understand relationships between data sets. True insights come from looking for context, exploring academic research, developing themes, and following the lead. Don’t be beholden to preconceived notions of hypotheses — instead, let the data take you to the story.

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Adobe Named the Leader among Digital Intelligence Platform Vendors by Independent Research Firm

Earlier today, we announced that Adobe has been recognized as the only leader in the recently published report The Forrester Wave™: Digital Intelligence Platforms, Q2 2017—the only vendor whose current offering, strategy and market presence scored high enough across 26 evaluation criteria to earn the title of “Leader” in the report.

The “Leader” designation is a familiar position for Adobe. Adobe pioneered the Marketing Cloud category and has had an uninterrupted tenure as a leader in this category since its inception. With the expansion of the roles and requirements placed on marketers, Adobe unveiled Adobe Experience Cloud, a comprehensive set of cloud services designed to give enterprises everything they need to deliver exceptional customer experiences.

Core to any solution designed to facilitate the creation, delivery and optimization of personalized experiences is a purpose-built platform—capable of aggregating, interpreting and taking action on digital intelligence. Adobe Experience Cloud running on the Adobe Cloud Platform excels in this space. Emerging as the leader among Digital Intelligence Platform Vendors in this latest report underscores Adobe’s leadership position when it comes to helping brands deliver exceptional and personalized customer experiences at massive scale.

What is a Digital Intelligence Platform?
According to this latest Forrester report, companies are pushing for digital intelligence platforms to help them “unify the understanding of customer digital interactions and to deliver consistent, continually improving experiences.” These requirements have long been the goals and objectives of digital marketing. Today, every division within a company needs this holistic view of the customer and the ability to act on insight provided.

In this report, Forrester clarifies that “the habit of piecemeal purchasing of digital analytics and optimization technologies in isolation for use by different teams (e.g., marketing, product management, and customer support) stymies attempts to track and keep up with the customer at scale across all digital touchpoints. Enterprises and their vendors are now starting the move toward consolidated technology platforms…”

What are the key pillars of a Digital Intelligence platform?
1. Digital data management technologies
2. Digital analytics technologies
3. Digital engagement optimization technologies

The Forrester Digital Intelligence architecture comprises 15 technology capabilities across these three pillars. These include: data warehousing and tag management (digital data management); application analytics, cross-channel attribution, digital performance management, interaction analytics, IoT analytics, predictive analytics, social analytics, spatial analytics, voice-of-the-customer, and web analytics (digital analytics management); and behavioral targeting, online testing, and recommendations (digital engagement optimization).

In this evaluation of Digital Intelligence platform vendors, vendors were given a series of scores for their ability to integrate and deliver customer value across 26 evaluation criteria, which ultimately graded the strength of their current offering, the strength of their strategy, and their market presence. In the end, Adobe emerged with the highest score for current offering and strategy, and tied for the highest score for market presence. In fact, Adobe received the highest scores possible in nine categories, including cross-channel attribution, social analytics, web analytics, behavioral targeting, online testing, tag management, partner ecosystem, digital intelligence revenue and number of enterprise customers—which we believe is a testament to the robust digital intelligence capabilities provided by Adobe Experience Cloud solutions.

Here’s what Forrester had to say about Adobe specifically:

“Adobe continues to have strength and depth in digital intelligence, primarily for optimizing customer experiences and engagement, all within the framework of its marketing cloud platform in a marketing and eCommerce context. … Looking forward, the vendor aims to continue to entice and extend its customer base through partnerships with Microsoft Azure (to strengthen its appeal to enterprise sales teams) and Adobe Sensei (to focus its AI efforts on scaling customer experiences).”

We’re thrilled to receive the recognition and see it as further validation for our strategy of enabling our customers with Adobe Experience Cloud and the Adobe Cloud Platform to become experience businesses. Adobe has long maintained that data without intelligence is merely history. Data with intelligence is the fuel that drives excellent experiences.

Download the full report from our website HERE.

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Ask Yoast: Video on YouTube or on my own site?

Point of Sale: Retail & Travel Weekly

This week’s articles examine the underutilization of some advanced marketing automation techniques, how some companies are creating more-shoppable content, the challenges that many retailers are experiencing with personalization, and more.

• Are Advanced Marketing Automation Techniques Underutilized? [eMarketer]: More advanced automation techniques — such as profile-based targeting — are not utilized as much as simpler techniques are.
• How Content is Becoming More Shoppable [L2]: Successful companies are finding ways to make video and other content more shoppable.
• Despite expectations of personalization, most shoppers don’t want to share data [Retail Dive]: According to a recent survey, only 43 percent of users are willing to share data with their favorite retailers.
• Mobile Shopping Doesn’t Mean Skipping The Store [Forbes]: Nearly one-half of users who order from mobile devices choose in-store pickup, speaking to the importance of the whole purchase experience.
• Social Commerce Not a Hit—Except When It Is [eMarketer]: While few users are clicking on ads through social media, those who do click are three to five times more likely to purchase.
• ‘Same-Store Sales’ Is Retail’s Increasingly Irrelevant Metric [Forbes]: Many omnichannel-focused retailers are experiencing flat — or even declining — store sales alongside double-digit growth rates from the e-commerce business.
• Amazon Doesn’t Do Long-tail. Why Should You? [Practical Ecommerce]: Online retailers should be cautious about offering an endless-aisle approach.

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from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/news-and-resources/point-sale-retail-travel-weekly-58-25/

Brands, All We Want Is for You to Talk Human to Me

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from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/digital-marketing/brands-want-talk-human/

Keeping Customer Trust in an Era of Brand Safety Concerns

It may take years for a brand to earn a customer’s trust, but it only takes minutes to lose it. An example of this is when a brand’s ads appear alongside extremist, hateful, or inappropriate content. Brand safety is not a new issue, but it’s one that’s on the rise — and it’s keeping advertisers awake at night.

In just the past two weeks, major companies all across the globe have pulled advertising spend or significantly limited display advertising because their ads have appeared next to undesirable content such as that containing hate speech, extreme violence, and other extremist content. In February alone, DoubleVerify reported that eight million ads were blocked from appearing on pages it classified as containing hate speech — up threefold from January.

Adobe’s Commitment
As a leader in digital marketing, we believe that we have an obligation to provide our customers with solutions that are secure, transparent, and in accordance with their values. In advertising, Adobe is committed to helping marketers achieve their goals without compromising brand safety, media quality, or transparency.

Digital marketers and advertisers are understandably worried. According to a recent survey conducted by Adobe Digital Insights, 58 percent of marketers report that their concerns about digital ad fraud have increased in comparison to 2016, and one-half of media buyers surveyed identified “media quality” as the biggest challenge facing the industry.

Enhancing Brand Safety Through Third-Party Integrations
With that in mind, today we’re enhancing our brand safety capabilities with the integration of yet another trusted third-party anti-fraud technology — Grapeshot. Grapeshot provides pre-bid filters that scan for objectionable content on a page before an ad is placed there. It joins Adobe’s existing third-party brand safety and fraud integrations with Integral Ad Science, Proximic, and White Ops to offer maximum brand safety for advertisers.

The Full Scope of Adobe’s Preventative Measures
In addition to these integrations, Adobe Media Optimizer demand-side platform (DSP), part of Adobe Advertising Cloud, provides customers with proprietary brand safety features, including automated tools to prevent ads from appearing alongside objectionable content and a manual site-screening process performed by a team of quality assurance specialists.

The full set of preventive measures Adobe provides for its customers’ protection includes:

• Site- and app-level screening performed by a specialized team of experts who review quality and content, excluding any unsafe inventory (e.g., pirated content, malicious content, etc.);
• Contextual targeting that enables advertisers to target only pages containing content that is relevant to their ads as well as exclude those containing certain topics;
• Pre-bid filtering to proactively detect and prevent ads from being delivered on pages with objectionable content before the website or app loads — a crucial point because it proactively protects the brand’s image and prevents their ads from appearing alongside hateful and extremist material; and
• Third-party brand safety and fraud integrations (noted above).

We’re also asking advertisers to put these features to the test by offering Grapeshot’s filters and other brand safety technology integrations at no cost through the end of June 2017. The technology is available on Adobe Advertising Cloud’s DSP across desktop video and display inventory.

Adobe’s focus is to do what’s best for marketers, and as such, our DSP automatically refunds purchase impressions identified as fraudulent by our partner White Ops. But, as Brett Wilson, VP and GM of Advertising for Adobe, notes, “making bot traffic immaterial is only one piece of the puzzle; contextual brand safety has always been equally paramount. We’re proud that the adoption of our brand safety tools is effectively protecting our customers from both.”

About Adobe Advertising Cloud
Adobe Advertising Cloud, which launched at Adobe Summit last month, is the industry’s first end-to-end platform for managing advertising across traditional TV and digital formats. The platform already manages roughly $3.5 billion in annualized ad spend on behalf of more than 1,000 global clients, including Allstate, Ford, Johnson & Johnson, Kraft, Liberty Mutual, L’Oréal, MGM, Nickelodeon, and Southwest Airlines. Learn more about Adobe Advertising Cloud.

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