In this week’s Pi Point of View, Jeff Coveney, Digital Pi CMO, talks with other B2B Marketing leaders about the future of Adobe and Marketo Engage and the development of more B2B features. He is joined by Adam Mincham, VP, Executive Global Director, Merkle B2B Group; Marne Reed, Chief Evangelist, Brand Experiences, PFL; Chris Messina, Vice President of Alliances & Partners, LeanData, and Colby Cavanaugh, VP of Product Marketing, Integrate.
Jeff Coveney: Today’s PI POV is all about the future of Adobe. As B2B marketers, we’ve been waiting ages for all the great features and applications that our B2C counterparts enjoy. So check out what’s going on with the future of Adobe.
Jeff Coveney: Where do we think Adobe is going in the future?
Adam Mincham: Yeah, I can jump in first. I mean we’re working closely as everyone is day to day with Adobe on their strategy. And I think the most exciting shift I’ve seen since the acquisition of Marketo and it’s just go faster is that Adobe broadly is leaning into B2B. B2B is the thing it’s in the scene as a future. So Marketo started that trend, Magento followed that trend, AEP B2B is continuing that trend. And I think that we’re going to see more and more acquisitions in this space. So I’m super excited that Adobe is creating a true B2B practice and going to market and thinking about B2B as an integrated experience, different from the consumer experience.
Colby Cavanaugh: I completely agree that’s what I’m most excited about. And then when we think about Adobe’s ability to manage and experience across a consumer audience, thinking about applying that same learning and that same practice to B2B audience is really, really exciting. And from a marketing perspective, we’ve come a long way with the help of technology like Marketo. Being able to bring individuals into a nurture experience and move them kind of through a gated track of marketing, but that word experience, right? How do we move from a single channel to even a multi-channel or a marketing across different channels to really being able to market an experience and a sequence of an experience across omni-channel, right?
Colby Cavanaugh: And so I’m not meeting you for the first time in individual channels. You’re meeting me as a buyer where I live and you’re getting me the experience that I need as an individual while still keeping in mind the overall account and what the account is experiencing from your brand. So I think we got a lot of work to do there, I think we’re still fairly in early days from a B2B perspective, but that’s what makes it exciting. And that’s when Adobe applies some of their experience on the B2C side and the experience that they’ve had driving across multiple channels there that I think it’s going to get really cool over the next few years.
Marne Reed: Well, and Adam even brought up the Workfront acquisition. I was listening to a podcast by Jared Ferlaywer. He’s got a partner-up podcast that I love to listen to. And they had Chris Jenkins on there recently from Workfront and just talking through what that was like to be a partner of Adobe, but being so good that Adobe is like, we have to have this as part of our strategy and the B2B side. So very interesting to the direction that they’re heading. And I think they’re putting a lot of the puzzle pieces together there.
Jeff Coveney: Yeah. I mean, when you think about the experience and that’s what Adobe talks about, right? The customer experience, and it sounds good, right? But how do you actually get to it? It can be sometimes a challenge and Adobe is trying to bring that together. And when I say it’s a challenge, it’s a challenge because well, you want to send out email, you want to have a trade show, you want to have an event. How how do you orchestrate all those together? That’s the real challenge. Any one of those individually is not that difficult, but bringing them together to tell a story, just like B2C, right? Getting that to that next level and B2B is it’s going to be exciting to see that more.
Marne Reed: Jeff, just a little side note, I read an article lately. So it’s how do you orchestrate it, but how do you actually get it delivered to the audience? And so I read an article by Microsoft work trends, delivery emails are up by 40.6 billion year over year. So I mean, I think that’s really making marketers really forced themselves to look at all of the different channels and how they’re making them fit together.
Jeff Coveney: Yeah. Along that email track, I was running out of space in my own personal email, in Gmail, because Gmail only lets you do so much. And so I had to go in and delete all these emails for years. It was like 180,000 messages in my inbox over years. I couldn’t believe it. But it didn’t do enough to get rid of all the space so I had to get rid of some other files, but email, there’s just so much going around.
Jeff Coveney: Well, I for one, am excited about what’s happening and where things are heading. If you are too, let us know at hello@digitalpi.com.