Personal blog of Yzmir Ramirez

As I walked the long halls of Adobe Summit this week in Las Vegas and listened to the company’s marketing and data integration story, I thought about the obvious disconnect that happens between brands and their customers. With tons of data, a growing set of tools to bring it together and a desire to build an optimal experience, you would think we have been set up for thrilling consumer experiences, yet we all know that is not always what happens when the rubber meets the road.

Maybe part of the problem is that data sitting in databases doesn’t always translate into employee action when dealing directly with consumers. In many cases, the experience isn’t smooth, data isn’t passed from one source to another and when you do eventually reach a person, they aren’t always knowledgeable or even nice.

It’s to the point that when my data does get passed smoothly from bot to human CSA, and I’m not asked for the same information for the second or even third time, I’m pleasantly surprised, even a little shocked.

That’s probably not the story marketing automation vendors like Adobe and Salesforce want to hear, but it is probably far more common than the one about delighted customers. I understand the goal is to provide APIs to connect systems. It’s to stream data in real time from a variety of channels. It’s about understanding that data better by applying intelligent analytics, and to some extent I’m sure that’s happening and there are brands that truly do want to delight us.

The disconnect could be happening because brands can control what happens in the digital world much better than the real one. They can know at a precise level when you interact with them and try to right wrongs or inconsistencies as quickly as possible. The problem is when we move to human interactions — people talking to people at the point of sale in a store, or in an office or via any communications channel — all of that data might not be helpful or even available.

The answer to that isn’t to give us more digital tools, or more tech in general, but to work to improve human-to-human communication, and maybe arm those human employees with the very types of information they need to understand the person they are dealing with when they are standing in front of them.

If brands can eventually get these human touch points right, they will build more loyal customers who want to come back, the ultimate goal, but right now the emphasis seems to be more on technology and the digital realm. That may not always achieve the desired results.

This is not necessarily the fault of Adobe, Salesforce or any technology vendor trying to solve this problem, but the human side of the equation needs to be a much stronger point of focus than it currently seems to be. In the end, all the data in the world isn’t going to save a brand from a rude or uninformed employee in the moment of customer contact, and that one bad moment can haunt a brand for a long, long time, regardless of how sophisticated the marketing technology it’s using may be.

At last year’s Microsoft Ignite conference, the CEOs of Microsoft, Adobe and SAP took the stage to announce the launch of the Open Data Initiative. The idea behind this effort was to make it easier for their customers to move data between each others’ services by standardizing on a common data format and helping them move their data out of their respective silos and into a single customer-chosen data lake. At this week’s Adobe Summit, the three companies today announced how they plan to expand this program as they look to bring in additional partners.

“The intent of the companies joining forces was really to solve a common customer problem that we hear time and time again, which is that there are high-value business data tends to be very siloed in a variety of different applications,” Alysa Taylor, Microsoft’s corporate vice president, Business Applications & Global Industry, told me. “Being able to extract that data, reason over that data, garner intelligence from that data, is very cost-prohibitive and it’s very manual and time-consuming.”

The core principle of the alliance is that the customers own their data and they should be able to get as much value out of it as they can. Ideally, having this common data schema means that the customer doesn’t have to figure out ways to transform the data from these vendors and can simply flow all of it into a single data lake that then in turn feeds the various analytics services, machine learning systems and other tools that these companies offer.

At the Adobe Summit today, the three companies showed their first customer use case based on how Unilever is making use of this common data standard. More importantly, though, they also stressed that the Open Data Initiative is indeed open to others. As a first step, the three companies today announced the formation of a partner advisory council.

“What this basically means is that we’ve extended it out to key participants in the ecosystem to come and join us as part of this ODI effort,” Adobe’s VP of Ecosystem Development Amit Ahuja told me. “What we’re starting with is really a focus around two big groups of partners. Number one is, who are the other really interesting ISVs who have a lot of this core data that we want to make sure we can bring into this kind of single unified view. And the second piece is who are the major players out there that are trying to help these customers around their enterprise architecture.”

The first 12 partners that are joining this new council include Accenture, Amadeus, Capgemini, Change Healthcare, Cognizant, EY, Finastra, Genesys, Hootsuite, Inmobi, Sprinklr and WPP . This is very much a first step, though. Over time, the group expects to expand far beyond this first set of partners and include a much larger group of stakeholders.

“We really want to make this really broad in a way that we can quickly make progress and demonstrate that what we’re talking about from a conceptual process has really hard customer benefits attached to it,” Abhay Kumar, SAP’s global vice president, Global Business Development & Ecosystem, noted. The use cases the alliance has identified focus on market intelligence, sales intelligence and services intelligence, he added.

Today, as enterprises often pull in data from dozens of disparate systems, making sense of all that information is hard enough, but to even get to this point, enterprises first have to transform it and make it usable. To do so, they then have to deploy another set of applications that massages the data. “I don’t want to go and buy another 15 or 20 applications to make that work,” Ahuja said. “I want to realize the investment and the ROI of the applications that I’ve already bought.”

All three stressed that this is very much a collaborative effort that spans the engineering, sales and product marketing groups.

Microsoft and Adobe have been building a relationship for some time, and today at Adobe Summit in Las Vegas the two companies announced a deeper integration between the two platforms.

It involves sharing Marketo data, the company that Adobe acquired last September for $4.75 billion. Because it’s marketers, they were duty-bound to give it a new name. This data-sharing approach is being dubbed Account Based Experience, or ABX for short. The two companies are sharing data account data between a number of sources, including Marketo Engage in Adobe Experience Cloud and Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales, as well as the LinkedIn, the business social platform Microsoft bought in 2016 for a whopping $26.2 billion.

Microsoft has been trying to find ways to put that LinkedIn data to work, and tools like Marketo can use the data in LinkedIn to understand their account contacts better. Steve Lucas, former CEO at Marketo, who is now senior vice president and head of the Marketo team at Adobe, says accounts tend to be much more complex sales than selling to individuals, involving multiple decision makers. It’s a sales cycle that can stretch on for months, and having access to additional data about the account contacts can have a big impact.

“With these new account-based capabilities, marketing and sales teams will have increased alignment around the people and accounts they are engaging, and new ways to measure that business impact,” Lucas explained in a statement.

Brent Leary, principal at CRM Essentials, who has been working in CRM, customer service and marketing for years, sees this as a useful partnership for customers from both vendors. “Integrating Microsoft Dynamics and LinkedIn more closely with Marketo gives Adobe’s Experience Cloud some great data to leverage in order to have a more complete picture of B2B customers,” Leary told TechCrunch.

The goal is to close complex sales, and having access to more complete data across the two product sets can help achieve that.

Marketing analytics is an increasingly complex business. It’s meant to collect as much information as possible across multiple channels from multiple tools and provide marketers with as complete a picture of their customers and their experience in dealing with you as possible. Perhaps not coincidentally, Adobe, which is holding its Adobe Summit this week in Las Vegas, and Salesforce both made Customer Data Platform (CDP) announcements this week.

The Customer Data Platform is a complex construct, but it’s basically a marketer’s dream, a central database that pulls customer data from a variety of channels and disparate data sources to give marketeers deep insight into their customers, all with the hope of gathering enough data to serve the perfect experience. As always, the ultimate goal is happy repeat customers, who build brand loyalty.

It always comes down to experience for marketers these days, and that involves serving up the right kind of experience. You don’t want the first-time visitor to have the same experience as a loyal customer. You don’t want a business customer to have the same experience as the consumer. All of that takes lots and lots of information, and when you want to make those experiences even more personalized in real time, it’s a tough problem to solve.

Part of the problem is that customers are working across multiple channels and marketers are using multiple tools from a variety of vendors. When you combine those two problems, it’s hard to collect all of the data on a given customer.

The process is a bit like boiling, the ocean and to complicate matters even further, it involves anonymized data and non-anonymized data about customers being stored in the same database. Imagine those two elements being hacked. It wouldn’t be pretty, which is just one reason that these kinds of platforms are so difficult to build.

Yet the promise of having a central data hub like this is so tantalizing, and the amount of data growing so quickly, that having a tool to help pull it all together could have great utility for marketers. Armed with this kind of information, it could enable marketers to build what Salesforce’s Bob Stutz called “hyper-targeted messages” in a blog post yesterday.

Stutz used that same blog post to announce Salesforce’s CDP offering, which is not the same as the Customer 360 product announced at Dreamforce last year, although you would be forgiven for confusing the two. “Salesforce Customer 360 helps companies easily connect and resolve customer data across Salesforce and 3rd party applications with a single customer ID. Our Customer Data Platform builds on this unified identity foundation to deliver a ‘single view of the customer’ for marketing professionals,” Stutz wrote.

Adobe, which announced its CDP use case today, sees it in somewhat similar terms, but its approach is different, says Matt Skinner, product marketing manager for the Adobe Audience Manager product. For starters, it’s powered by the Adobe Experience Platform and “brings together known and unknown data to activate real-time customer profiles across channels throughout the customer journey,” Skinner said. In addition, he says it can use AI to help build these experiences and augment marketer ideas.

Both companies have to pull in data from their own systems, as well as external systems, to make this work. That kind of integration problem is one of the reasons Salesforce bought MuleSoft last year for $6.5 billion, but Skinner says that Adobe is taking its own open API approach to the problem. “Adobe’s platform is open and extensible with APIs and an extensive partner ecosystem, so data and applications can really come from anywhere,” he said.

Regardless, both vendors are working hard to make this happen, and it will be interesting to see how each one plays to its strengths to bring this data together. It’s clearly going to be a huge data integration and security challenge, and both companies will have to move carefully to protect the data as they build this kind of system.