Sitecore, Adobe update customer data platforms

In a broad platform update, Sitecore continues to infuse generative AI into marketing, website design and customer data platform tools and workflows. Adobe also updated its CDP with a data clean room for anonymized marketing.

Sitecore, whose digital experience platform (DXP) includes web development and design, marketing, A/B testing and numerous other applications and services, added generative AI tools to create text and visual content variants tailored for different marketing campaign audiences. Also included in this week's update are workflows to integrate GenAI agents and marketing productivity tools to more quickly tune up marketing campaigns and generate content.

The company continues to invest in what it calls "brand-aware AI" features, which set rules for its AI creations to stay within a brand and sub-brand's guidelines. AI can consider preset tones of voice, do-and-don't-type rules and visual guidelines, and apply them to content creation and customer chatbot conversations.

Brand-aware AI is foundational to the Sitecore DXP, said Roger Connolly, chief product officer at Sitecore.

"It's going to kind of complement all of our portfolio products as we move forward; it's not just specifically for our [content management system]," Connolly said. "It's going to also be in our content operations products and our [digital asset management] products. It will help customers take control of their content in a pretty precarious time, with the acceleration of generative AI-created content."

The platform update also includes GenAI tools for its CDP, which summarize web behavioral data trends on both aggregate and individual levels.

CDP vendors are starting with GenAI, spotting trends and delivering insights that can either inform the next marketing campaign or enhance one-to-one marketing personalization, said David Raab, founder of the CDP Institute.

"It's not a direct customer interaction, so you're not at risk of the system putting out some stupid message that gets you in trouble," Raab said. "It's more analysis and work to understand what's in the data -- and check that the system got it right and that it's a useful insight -- and that it's not just some random correlation that has no particular business value."

Adobe's CDP clean room

Adobe also released a CDP update, Real Time CDP Collaboration. Announced last year but generally available Thursday, the tool acts as a data clean room for marketers to connect with third-party data sources -- publishers or channels, such as smart TVs and digital audio -- and send campaigns without accessing protected individual personal information.

So far, Adobe's CDP supports third-party identity resolution services, such as Acxiom, LiveRamp, TransUnion and The Trade Desk, which anonymize consumer data.

Real Time CDP Collaboration's feature is designed to suppress people who have bought goods from further marketing campaigns for those goods. This feature can reduce consumer annoyance and stretch advertising budgets by focusing on prospective -- not current -- customers, according to Adobe.

Adobe senior product marketing manager Nina Caruso said the deprecation of third-party web browser cookies and the rise of regional, country-specific -- and, in the United States, state-specific -- privacy regulations have spurred the idea of a CDP clean room. It enables the commingling of a company's first-party data with third parties while keeping an eye on compliance.

Even with Google's reversal of their stance on third-party cookies, it remains the case that the entire industry has come to understand that cookies are not reliable, now that it's easier than ever for consumers to opt-out, Caruso said.

"On the same side, many organizations want to develop deeper relationships with their customers and grow their first-party audience data," she said.

Data clean rooms built into CDPs are an emerging trend, Raab said. 

"It's part of a larger trend of CDPs supporting advertising, which didn't used to be all that common," Raab said. "Today, nearly every CDP at least offers Meta and Google integrations that can push advertising audiences from the CDP into those platforms."

Adobe Real-Time CDP Collaboration is a free add-on for Prime and Ultimate subscribers and is also available as a standalone product.

Don Fluckinger is a senior news writer for Informa TechTarget. He covers customer experience, digital experience management and end-user computing. Got a tip? Email him.