Adobe gives marketers a data-science boost with new cloud services

If the marketer’s goal is to reach customers with the right message, in the right place, at the right time, it stands to reason that deeper insight into any of those dimensions could only be a good thing. Enter Adobe, which just rolled out a raft of new data-science tools designed to help make that happen.

Scheduled to be introduced soon at the company’s Adobe Summit event in Las Vegas, the services bring new algorithms to the Adobe Marketing Cloud with the goal of helping brands deliver optimal customer experiences.

In the Marketing Cloud’s Adobe Experience Manager, for example, a new Smart Tag feature taps machine learning to help marketers find Creative Cloud assets such as photos or videos. Smart Tag is available now. “Customers today often hire teams to go manually through images and videos,” said Amit Ahuja, senior director of data management for Adobe. “What we’ve introduced here is the ability to use machine learning to scan those images and automatically tag them to make them more accessible.”

In Adobe Analytics, Virtual Analyst is designed to surface real-time insights that marketers might not even have known to look for. The tool monitors and prioritizes changes made to data over time and delivers email alerts flagging anomalies or shifts in important dimensions. Virtual Analyst is due to ship this fall. A new capability in Adobe Campaign taps technology acquired through Adobe’s 2013 purchase of Neolane to help marketers decide which email subject line will drive the highest level of engagement for a particular audience. Essentially, it analyzes data on success rates from previous subject lines to come up with recommendations. It will be available in beta in the second quarter of this year.
Also unveiled by Adobe were new tools for personalized recommendations of TV shows, automated segment analysis, customer value optimization and campaign analysis. The new capabilities join more than 40 existing data-science tools in Adobe Marketing Cloud, including contribution analysis and shopping links within videos.