This article first appeared in Digital Edge, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on September 6, 2021 - September 12, 2021

In the early 2000s, Adobe was known for its creative software suite. Sometime in 2008, the company embarked on a digital transformation to integrate cloud capabilities into its offerings, although at the time, companies (including its clients) were more focused on content creation and developing websites.

Fast forward to today, when most companies are intent on getting onto the cloud, Adobe is one of the pioneers in this space, placing it ahead in the game. Today, most companies realise that going digital (and getting on the cloud) is no longer a value-add but a simple matter of survival.

And Adobe is well-poised to take advantage of this shift. It has expanded its suite of offerings to include digital marketing solutions and platforms, complemented by its creative suite.

Simon Dale, managing director of Adobe Southeast Asia, tells Digital Edge that now people are starting to understand the digital marketing landscape and the plethora of tools that can help them, including Adobe. At the same time, people in the industry see digital marketing as an opportunity as it is the next wave of automation.

However, the digital marketing industry is facing a “problem of plenty”. Nowadays, Dale explains, marketers are able to obtain a lot of information about a customer’s behaviour but the challenge is having the capability to do the smart thing with that information.

“The data that people are used to is structured data, but the data that comes from a consumer’s digital behaviour is in different formats and volumes, and some data is in real time and lasts only for a short period. Dealing with the complexity of data is the challenge and can overwhelm people,” he says.

After understanding the data, the next challenge will be to build a digital marketing capability in a timely fashion. Dale explains that in a bricks-and-mortar establishment, customer service is provided as soon as someone walks into the store. With digital channels, there is the possibility of missing a customer engagement opportunity if it is not made known a customer is on the website.

“There is this latency of doing something at the appropriate time. Sometimes a company has a few hours to act on it, but other times, it is more complex than that,” he says.

With that in mind, Dale says 80% of marketers will abandon the concept of personalisation due to failed data management strategies. Personalisation requires a cycle of improved data, where a marketer’s improved understanding of the customer will lead to personalisation, which requires better technical capabilities.

“It’s really about using the data at the appropriate time, in the appropriate part of the customer journey, which is quite difficult. This is why personalisation efforts fail because people haven’t realised that it’s quite a steep change from old-style projects based on data. The data needs to be continually evolving because people grow, change and do different things in their lives,” he says.

While the world has seen accelerated growth in digital engagement methods, Dale says the company is expecting to see two-thirds of marketers decrease spending on in-person events and shift their focus to content marketing, supported by data analytics. This is based on a white paper from Marketo, a company acquired by Adobe.

“There are two dimensions; the personalisation has to be done right along with the content, which needs to be delivered in the right way to get people to engage with it. And so, we see consumers expecting more from digital engagement and marketers planning to do more.”

Southeast Asia, however, has a few challenges to overcome, the first being legacy systems and processes. Dale says based on a digital trends study done by Adobe, one of the biggest barriers in Asia compared with other markets is that legacy workflows are getting in the way of people improving, innovating and merely completing tasks.

Legacy workflows are also a challenge because in most cases, many people need to be involved in making a decision or taking action. In a bid to overcome this, Adobe has been running programmes on digital marketing capability building, says Dale.

“We’ve been working with our Adobe Experience Cloud customers to provide customised training. We’ve done it with a couple of banks in the region, where over 200 people have turned up. About two-thirds of them have never heard of Adobe's experience management solutions, but they worked to get certified in our technologies and started using them because they see value in it.”

The biggest thing the industry is seeing right now is the importance of first-party data. Dale says the digital marketing industry is seeing the rise of a “cookieless world”, where marketers will need to be less reliant on cookies (bits of data that contain consumer personal identifiers) for digital marketing. The shift into this new world will really force marketers to pay more attention to building their own understanding of their customers using data that they control.

“It’s one of the challenges that we’ll be seeing, where a lot of companies may try to build [something for] themselves, rather than look at something that has been built for that purpose. This is a trend that will underpin a lot of marketing technology (martech) strategies, roadmaps and investments.”

Dale shares that another phenomenon happening at the moment is the focus on digital customer experience (CX). This wave is not just confined to martech, but rather a part of most companies’ business transformations.

People still think that digital CX is only the responsibility of marketers when, in fact, it is much broader than that. Dale says this is something that Adobe has been working with the Singapore government, when deciding who should go through a workshop on digital CX. He points out that not only those in the marketing department should sign up, but anybody who manages a digital channel for citizens.

“Everything is going to be digitised, so we teach them how to use digital CX to help them. It’s a big transformation of all touchpoints with the customer to digital channels, which then needs to be organised, consolidated and orchestrated efficiently.”

Ultimately, Dale says technology alone is not going to help companies improve on their customer experiences. It has to be complemented with business experience, bringing together both technical and soft skills to get to know their customers better.

“What’s more important is bringing your existing workforce with you into the new digital world. They don’t have to learn coding,” he says.

“This is how [Adobe] in Singapore is differentiating itself from a lot of the other tech vendors who are training people in coding. We’re not teaching people tech skills, but we’re teaching people how to use tech in what they already know, which is a lot quicker and more impactful.”

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