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The Adobe Client Data Layer (ACDL) by Jim Gordon

Abstract

It’s been a while since I started writing about the Event-Driven Data Layer (EDDL). Since then, I’ve had a lot of really incredible discussions with practitioners around its usage and best practices. The general consensus has been that the W3C is outdated and that the EDDL is the future. Now admittedly, it’s also the past. While Google was working on the W3C, they were also building their own EDDL for Google Tag Manager (GTM). ANYWAY… one of those EDDL discussions was with Gabriel from Adobe. He mentioned that he was working on a data layer called the Adobe Client Data Layer. Well it was finally unveiled and I took it for a test drive!

Before I begin – my point of reference is GTM and Search Discovery’s Data Layer Manager (DLM). If you aren’t familiar with either one, that’s okay; but I will be making some references to these in this article.

Overview
I want to talk a little bit about the problem that we need to solve as Adobe practitioners. Adobe Launch was built with the intent to be extensible – like a sandbox (within reason). About a year ago I wrote an appeal, asking Adobe to integrate a standard data layer with their TMS since it’s such a critical component to an implementation. Since then, XDM and Alloy.js were unveiled which have clear implications on data layer schema. With so many different companies using different design patterns in their implementation, it’s clearly time to push toward consolidation. It doesn’t make sense to support 100,000 different ways to do one thing – and that’s why codifying an EDDL is so important… and to be clear, the ACDL is an EDDL.

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The Adobe Client Data Layer (ACDL)

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