Adobe Target has some catching up to do
Bad news for Adobe…
The latest Gartner Magic Quadrant report is out.
And, as it turns out, Adobe Target has some catching up to do.
In today’s quicktake, I’m going to break down the winners and why Adobe can’t seem to get traction despite having a personalization engine that's been on the market for a decade.
Over the past decade, I've helped dozens of companies better understand Adobe technology and project delivery. Along the way I've had the opportunity to see a lot of what works and a lot of what doesn't. My goal is simply to share with YOU what I've learned. And I hope that gives you back a little sanity in your day.
💡 What do you think? Share your thoughts in the comments and let's have a conversation about it.
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Transcript:
Over the last few months, you've been hearing a lot from Adobe around how personalization is critical for businesses to succeed. But with the new gartner magic quadrant report that just came out adobe has a lot of catching up to do.
Okay, so let's break this down. The magic quadrant report came out yesterday and it features strengths and weaknesses across the personalization players that are out there. And although Adobe has been at the top right. For pretty much the whole time they've had their target product.
But with technology history, doesn't matter only what the future holds does. So let's break down who's actually in the lead. And some of the pain points that I think Adobe is struggling with with their personalization product called target.
So to get a sense of a top right players in this quadrant, the number one, and it's been there for five years is a company called dynamic yield, the second is insider, adobe and then Salesforce.
The leader in this year's report and they've actually been the leader for the last five years is a company called dynamic yield. As a side note, they actually were just acquired by MasterCard, which is pretty interesting. But nonetheless, I think their strength seems to be they been working on this thing called adapt M L, which is a deep learning capability that extracts user intent for recommendation and personalization. And they've had some really great success with this with customers.
The runner up to the leader as a company called insider and their strength is really around product discovery reporting and using templates to be able to implement and define experiences a little bit faster.
And before we get into Adobe target, I have to mention Salesforce. Which has made a lot of progress over the last few years with their experience cloud and i think one of the key differentiators for salesforce is they just started to encrypt data for hipaa compliance which is huge for the healthcare industry.
And now to Adobe target. So Adobe target is one of the first products that complemented Adobe AEM when that launched 11 years ago. And to really get the most leverage out of target, you would need AEM and you need Adobe analytics and all three of those systems need to be neatly integrated together, and sharing data.
And unfortunately that level of maturity, meaning integrating those three systems together, plus the additional cost of all the licensing has really hampered the personalization innovation that needed to happen. Now Adobe is trying to make inroads into this would their sensei or their AI system, as well as expanding analytics to measure a lot more around metaverse, online, offline channels and bringing those together around a customer data platform, which again is another product.
And this is why you're hearing adobe aggregate their products into things like the adobe experience platform or adobe experience cloud.
Because when these products are actually all brought together, they can achieve some really innovative personalization goals for customers.
But for now, that's reserved for those customers that have a really healthy budget to afford these systems, as well as the development ability to integrate them and the maturity to be able to leverage personalization at scale.