The Adobe $1.5B acquisition of Workfront was one of largest Adobe has made and in doing so, the company was placing a bet on simplified, structured collaboration on the one hand and content and marketing complexity on the other. Adobe has recognized that managing and recording the content creation process is increasingly important within all organizations as much as achieving effective marketing. Managing artifacts, content items and other similar materials are, and will, continue to consume increasing amounts of staff time as content is deployed everywhere and where measurement of the impact and use of this content is critical.
Workfront is now the workflow solution within Adobe Experience Manager: Using this framework marketing managers connect strategy to execution and can ensure the business is driving to the desired outcomes as it deploys content and creates uniquely personalized experiences for consumers. As user experience is enhanced with more and more personalized content and a widening of the access points to content, the amount of activities and transactions around this messaging will massively increase as these experiences are pushed (or pulled) to consumers. Managing all this activity requires robust workflow and tools which is where Workfront inside Adobe Experience Manager realizes its strength.
Within Workfront, staff map out their marketing campaigns and assign responsibilities which may be completed in any of the Adobe applications. These tasks have approval processes and 'jobs' are routed for review, approval and publishing and each activity is logged in Workfront. As campaigns are executed, managers can review how the entire campaign came together and what the results were. Adobe is calling this the "marketing system of record - a unified solution for sharing ideas, managing content creation and automating complex processes".
While Adobe saw the value of Workfront as supporting marketing and creative functions, within Book publishing the Workfront solution has also been used by publishers to replace spreadsheets and other tools within the editorial and production processes. Even as a 'generic' workflow product, WorkFront is a strong competitor to the software solutions provided by industry players. National Geographic and Royal Society of Chemistry are two publishers using Workfront. Since Adobe products are embedded in publishing we will likely see an increase in the number of Workfront deployments and this should worry the incumbent software players in our space.
The other interesting news item concerned data privacy. Here Adobe is betting that third-party cookies which store our activities on the internet as we visit websites will disappear (or at least will not be used to identify our traffic). A new concept named the 'consumer data platform' whereby product companies and marketeers build a closer relationship with consumers by better utilizing the first-party data they already own to establish a coherent brand experience. This is explained in a good post here
Where it gets interesting is the Adobe spin. At the event, Adobe suggested a capability to leverage information the customer has chosen to share so that personalized experiences can be created and delivered to the consumer. Adobe has enabled "Segment Match" capabilities which will allow brands with similar interests to share data and to build collaborative engagement and expand their reach with consumers who have cross-over interests. A good example of this would be a travel publisher and an airline. This is in early days and we will see how this develops but for publishers with a broad array of content the opportunities to build partnerships based on real data could be an opportunity too important to miss out on. Just another reason why Adobe, already embedded in publisher workflows could see more expansion within publishing.
For more information check out the Adobe Summit Video.
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