India Hackathon: Introducing Campaign Classic as an Activation Channel for Adobe Experience Platform

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Authors: Anup Kumar, Pankhri Singhai, Saurabh Gupta, Akshit Jain, and Per Andreasen

A team of Adobe Campaign developers created a proof of concept for an exciting integration between Adobe Experience Platform and Adobe Campaign Classic at the Adobe India Hackathon 2019.

Adobe Campaign Classic is a powerful tool for marketers. It lets you handle large audiences with personalized messaging on the platforms and at the time that each member of your audience prefers. The larger your audience, the greater the value Adobe Campaign Classic has. But the limit of your audience managed in Adobe Campaign Classic is 100 million members, which has kept many large marketers from taking advantage of it. So, a team of Adobe Campaign employees decided to take part in India Hackathon 2019 and show that Adobe Campaign Classic can be used as an activation channel for Adobe Experience Platform.

Without the use of Adobe Experience Platform it takes roughly 48 hours to ship a segment from Adobe Analytics to Adobe Campaign. This time will be brought down significantly by defining segments based on user behavior data in Adobe Experience Platform and flowing them into Adobe Campaign Classic. This use case makes it easier for customers using Adobe Campaign Classic to use profiles and segments for cross channel marketing. At the same time Adobe Experience Platform will let Adobe Campaign Classic users create even more tailored customer journeys to maximize conversions.

There is a similar consulting use case for Adobe Campaign Standard. However, we had not yet heard of this, when we went to the hackathon. We just knew that our use case could become the ideal platform for customers to create segmentation. It will ease big data segmentation and speed up audience sharing from Adobe Analytics and Adobe Audience Manager to Adobe Campaign Classic.

Running large queries in a shorter time

When a person visits your company website, you are often left with clear signs of intent. Perhaps this visitor wants more information about a certain service or product. Perhaps she needs more information about the value of said services and products. Either way, any marketer will know that there is no time to waste. When the visitor leaves your site after just browsing, you should be able to stay top of mind right away in order to secure conversion. When you have to wait at least 48 hours for your audience to be updated, your visitor may very well have forgotten all about you or solved her problem otherwise. Opportunity lost.

With this particular use case, we will be able to store the data in Adobe Experience Platform bypassing Adobe Campaign Classic’s limit of 100 million users and the delay that comes with storing data in Adobe Campaign Classic. You will be able to run larger queries in a shorter amount of time, share an updated customer profile with Adobe Campaign Classic, and begin a retargeting sequence with emails, SMS, targeted banner ads, or direct mail within six hours. Because these profiles are centrally maintained in Adobe Experience Platform, they are also easily accessible by any Adobe solution.

Automating shuffling of data between systems

At the Adobe India Hackathon 2019 we did not have working code for this particular use case. We did, however, have a goal of bringing together working models in Adobe Campaign Classic and Adobe Experience Platform. Adobe Experience Platform has a limitation as of this writing. The segmentation tools make user data available as files on Azure data lake. It is impractical to have to go there to fetch out the data, so we wanted to automate the streaming of this data to Adobe Campaign Classic. Adobe Campaign Standard has a service that puts the data from the data lake into a queue, so we wanted to build a similar service for Adobe Campaign Standard.

While we did have success in creating the use case, we would have liked to spend more time creating a satisfactory workflow. In order to deliver great user experience, it should be clear to users of our solution how long they should wait for their data to be ready. When the user starts the process of shuffling data, there should immediately be a clear message about the expected wait time. If the data will be ready in a couple of minutes, the user could just go get a fresh cup of coffee. If it will take longer, the user should know, so she could take up work on another assignment.

Using Audience Service to retrieve audiences

Adobe Experience Platform lets us gather data from customer platforms, customer relationship management systems, and streamed data from Adobe Analytics in Adobe Experience Data Model complete with profile data, non-profile data, and experience events. We used the backend framework and APIs of the Adobe Experience Platform Audience Service originally in place for Adobe Campaign Standard to retrieve the audience data for activation in Adobe Campaign Classic. The audience service finally posts the requested information of the selected audience on to Adobe Pipeline. A service running on Adobe Campaign Classic reads them and waits for all the data to be available before proceeding to the next step of targeting in the workflow.

Being in close contact with Adobe Experience Platform product managers and engineers during the entire hackathon helped us resolve any problems and complications quickly. This collaboration also brought us closer together with colleagues that we will be working with in the future to reach our final solution of the limitations on streaming data into Adobe Campaign Classic. It is very beneficial for us to know exactly which person is the best to go to about a certain issue regarding Adobe Experience Platform technologies.

Apart from this crucial connection we also got to meet other colleagues and learn a great deal about other valuable solutions using Adobe Experience Platform.

Figure 1: How data is moved from customer platforms, customer relationship management systems, and Adobe Analytics to Adobe Campaign Classic through Adobe Experience Platform.

Voted most market-ready hack

Our confidence in this use case only grew when we got to work on building it out with inspiration from the similar use case for Adobe Campaign Standard. When the hackathon was nearing the end, we were proud to have our use case awarded ‘most market-ready hack’ and receive the accompanying trophy. We are very excited to bring it into production as soon as possible.

We are well on our way planning out the second half of 2020. Due to a lot of commitments on pressing solutions it does not look like a possibility for us to prioritize this use case before 2021. We are hoping to book time for it during the first half of 2021.

Our next steps for introducing Adobe Campaign Classic as an activation channel for Adobe Experience Platform will be to have it prioritized in a road map. We aim to have more customers share their thoughts about it in an informal internal canvassing.

This post concludes our series about the Adobe India Hackathon 2019. Have a look at previous hackathon posts to learn more about this exciting event.

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Resources

1. Adobe Campaign Classic — https://docs.adobe.com/content/help/en/campaign-classic/using/getting-started/starting-with-adobe-ca...
2. Adobe Campaign Standard — https://helpx.adobe.com/dk/legal/product-descriptions/campaign-standard.html
3. Adobe Campaign — https://www.adobe.com/dk/marketing/campaign.html
4. Adobe India Hackathon 2019
5. Adobe Experience Platform — https://www.adobe.com/dk/experience-platform.html
6. Adobe Analytics — https://www.adobe.com/dk/analytics/adobe-analytics.html
7. Adobe Audience Manager — https://www.adobe.com/dk/analytics/audience-manager.html
8. Azure Data Lake — https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/solutions/data-lake/
9. Adobe Experience Data Model — https://www.adobe.com/experience-platform/experience-data-model.html
10. Adobe Experience Platform Audience Service — https://docs.adobe.com/content/help/en/campaign-standard/using/profiles-and-audiences/working-with-a...
11. Adobe Pipeline — https://theblog.adobe.com/creating-adobe-experience-platform-pipeline-with-kafka/

Originally published: May 21, 2020