Does Digital Marketing Success Depend on Reinvention?

Adobe's new enhancements, including predictive analytical capabilities and Live Stream, are among the innovations that have prompted such rapid change in the marketing world.

The findings of a recent Adobe Digital Roadblock study uncovered some highly insightful and somewhat worrying opinions of European digital marketers, validating the current state of disarray within the broader marketing context.

So, building on the themes of change and reinvention I previously talked about in my article over on Search Engine Watch, this year’s Adobe Summit Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) tackled the topic of “marketing reinvention.”

Adobe in EMEA

adobe-europe-mapImage credit: https://flic.kr/p/deSuCf

Some may question the position that Adobe, a traditionally American company, may have in EMEA. They cite the disconnect found among the U.S. and Europe, when some tend to over-generalize that speaking the same [business] language inevitably means that culturally they are equal. However, Adobe’s credentials show their deep integration, and understanding, of the EMEA marketplace, as the company now boasts:

  • Six out of the top 10 European businesses
  • Five of the top five European car manufacturers
  • Five of the top five European banks
  • Five of the top five global media companies

European Marketing State of Disarray

But many marketers in Europe are seeing the need for reinvention. The European part of the Digital Roadblock study uncovered that:

  • 68 percent of European marketers believe that marketing has changed more in the last two years than in the last 50.
  • 54 percent of European marketers expect their role to change in the next 12 months.
  • 73 percent of marketers need to reinvent themselves to succeed.
  • 30 percent lack training to develop new skills, are confused over their roles and responsibilities, and experience resistance to trying new programs.

You can access the rest of Adobe’s European Digital Roadblock study here.

So how to address the issues unearthed in the study?

Adobe’s move toward a traditional (and somewhat outdated) software licensed approach has seen one of the most dramatic embraces of the “cloud” to date. Adobe Creative Cloud and Adobe Marketing Cloud have lowered the barriers to entry into the digital sphere from both an individual (freelancer) and scalable (large agency) basis, enabling the despondent responders of the cited European study to develop new skills, control the changes that they expect to happen in their current role, and to reinvent themselves.

Adobe’s Solution: How You Can Simply “Reinvent” Yourself

The fact is, whether it’s big-budget media driven campaigns, local low-spend pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, or deep data analysis that are taking place, the real focus for anyone involved in the ever-evolving marketing landscape (Europe or further afield) is on execution and the means by which we tackle the tasks ahead of us. Data is key. Reinvention is a form of evolution, and in true Darwinist terms, adapting to your environment takes incremental changes, not revolutions.

adobe-marketing-cloud-graphic

Adobe’s Marketing Cloud already stands as one of the industry’s best-selling and most advanced enterprise solution:

  • It serves 140,000 global active users
  • It allows the world’s largest brands to navigate Big Data
  • 63 percent of customers are spending more than $1 million on data analysis per year

The Cloud already enables a large amount of the worlds leading brands and organizations to manage this adaption.

If scale is the issue, then Adobe Analytics is setting up a way to interpret and understand data a significantly high volume with their move into predictive analytical capabilities and Live Stream (a real-time event firehose).

adobe-live-streamImage credit: BusinessWire

Adobe’s new products further enable organizations to embrace the changes that lie ahead. These are the innovations that have driven observers to state, “There has been more change in marketing in the last two years than in the last 50.”

But the real test will be found in the reaction from the European marketplace. The ability to draw data from a multitude of sources together in one place, at unprecedented scale, begs the question: “Are we Europeans ready to refocus, embrace change, enable ourselves and, most importantly, reinvent?”

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