Axel Schaefer is Senior Manager, Product & Industry Marketing EMEA and part of Adobe´s Global Marketing Cloud Strategy group. His responsibilities include definition of customer-relevant topics, use cases and the translation of digital transformation into actionable strategies. While at the Adobe Summit 2016 in London, I had the opportunity to interview him on the contribution of Adobe to data science.
Nicolas Malo: You recently wrote an article titled "Analytics is a commodity, long live analytics!" As an analytics practitioner, working hard to get the data collection right on a daily basis, I do not feel that we are at a stage where analytics is a commodity as electricity or water. Could you please elaborate more on your idea?
Axel Schaefer: I understand where you are coming from. When looking at the bigger picture of data-driven marketing, analytics has become one essential part to provide a seamless customer experience. What I meant by "commodity" is the automation of digital measurement for standard metrics like visitors, visits, page views, etc... which are now provided out of the box for all new websites implementations. Of course, it still takes some hard work to get quality data for more in-depth measurements of digital activities.
Today, one of the biggest challenge is to be able to make the insights available to all departments within the organization and to take this into action.
This is what I meant by "Long live analytics" in the second part of my title. With data science, deeper knowledge is available to bigger parts of the organization as a core component. As a software vendor, our role at Adobe is to push the availability of knowledge further throughout organisations with the development of capabilites that do not require data-scientist knowledge.
Nicolas Malo: Adobe announced a series of innovations related to data science at the Summit today. Will Adobe users need to get better skills in statistics in the future to use your tools?
Axel Schaefer: At Adobe, we recommend our customers to follow an "Analytics Maturity Curve" with 5 steps: Descriptive, Diagnostic, Advanced Diagnostic, Predictive and Prescriptive. In the organization, data scientists will be needed to exploit the potential that is available nowdays, especially at the Predictive and Prescriptive stages. On the other hand, there will still be a digital analytics team in order to perform advanced diagnostic analytics. To get back to your question, our software will help the teams to grow progressively their skills without having to be experts in statistics. Having said that, some training will be beneficial to leverage the full depth our tools. Data science should be the vision to aim for on the horizon, but please start simple and more importantly - start NOW!On this topic, we've developed a capability-maturity self assessment tool available at the following location: adobeanalyticspro.com.
Nicolas Malo: In your article titled "Do You Know your Digital Marketing Maturity?", you shared some interesting insights from the Quaterly Intelligence Briefing. I was quite surprised to learn that only 13 % of surveyed companies have implemented a Single Customer View and 15 % are reporting this to be a budgeted priority. From your experience, what are the main challenges to implement a Single Customer View?
Axel Schaefer: To put things into perspective, there is indeed a big disconnect between being aware of the need for data-driven marketing and putting it into reality. In order to become a data-driven organization, a company needs to become fully transparent in addition to the more obvious technological changes. This implies being ready to share the full picture within the organisation - only if there is a complete, aligned understanding – real changes can be made. Not all companies seem to be ready for this as it is a big cultural change most of the time. People need to accept the fact that control has gone out of their hands. Organisational change management is necessary to succeed data–driven marketing.
Nicolas Malo: Regarding audience amplification, what are the features that are available in Adobe Analytics right now?
Axel Schaefer: As mentioned in my "Do You Know your Digital Marketing Maturity?" article, audience amplification is the process of gathering data about your most valuable customers and using that data to find new customers with similar profiles. Almost two-thirds of companies that engage in audience amplification have seen “very high” or strong ROI from digital data marketing initiatives.
By using Adobe Analytics, it will be possible first to understand the target groups for your campaigns by using advanced segmentation capabilities. Then, with Adobe Audience Manager and the Audience Marketplace, you will be able to search and aquire similar profiles outside of your audience. Beyond that, these additional, new audiences can be leveraged to create personalised experiences, e.g. through Adobe Target and Adobe Campaign.
There is so much value to get from audience amplification and yet - not many companies have realized this huge value.
Nicolas Malo: With all the capabilities brought by data science, is there a risk that marketeers will become lazy and that all campaigns will look like the same based on algorithms?
Axel Schaefer: From my perspective, this doesn´t necessarily only depend on the data-driven aspect of your customer experiences. The stronger your brand identity will be, the less likely you will end up in this situation. By definition, the essence of a brand should always be different from the one of its competitors. Marketing techniques may be similar, but data should not replace the part of creativity. Data should provide a solid foundations to your marketing creativity and allow you to fully exploit the creative potentials that branding allows.We are in a unique position to fuel creativity with data – it is in our own hands to grab that opportunity!
