Getty Images/iStockphoto
Adobe adds CDP functionality for B2B use cases
Adobe catches up with the competition with the release of new customer data platform features for marketers, including a 'data clean room' and tools for B2B users.
The Adobe customer data platform, which planted its flag in the B2C market, is moving deeper into the B2B space with its latest feature release.
With Segment Match, Adobe CDP users can share customer data with partners, also known as second-party data, and combine it to create new marketing segments for joint promotions while maintaining privacy for consumers, said Ryan Fleisch, head of Real-Time CDP and Audience Manager product marketing at Adobe.
Technology to support joint promotions -- such as an airline and a credit card company pooling customer data to jointly promote a sale or financing offer -- has been around for years, said David Raab, founder of the CDP Institute.
Putting together two companies' data in a privacy-controlled sandbox with supporting technologies to maintain privacy compliance such as homomorphic encryption -- called a data clean room -- is commonly practiced by companies selling ads, such as Google, Amazon and Facebook. Some CDPs also have the capability to set up data clean rooms.
"That's what to do when it comes to privacy-safe ways of sharing data," Raab said. "Usually, both parties contribute the data, and the analysis of encrypted data still gives a true result [of the size of the mutually created market segment], which is intriguing to think about."
With Segment Match, users can apply familiar Adobe data governance and consent tools to commingle data with partners without cookies, instead using identifiers contained within their data sets collected from multiple digital channels.
Adobe also released AI-powered predictive lead and account scoring for its Real-Time CDP B2B and business-to-person editions. AI lead scoring has been table stakes for sales teams using CRM and marketers using most other CDPs for a long time.
Adobe is playing a bit of catch-up here to reach parity with CDP competitors and vie for B2B customers, Raab said. That is understandable, as Adobe's CDP has been available for only three years, compared with more mature CDPs such as Segment, which was released in 2011.
Compliance tools for healthcare users
On the consumer side, Adobe released compliance tools for Adobe Experience Cloud through Healthcare Shield, an Adobe Experience Cloud add-on for HIPAA compliance. Users at health insurers, health systems, pharmaceutical companies and drugstores are subject to the law, which the federal government occasionally updates to keep up with technology and automation.
Marketers and experience designers for those organizations can protect personal data -- and secure patient communication permissions -- as they execute offer campaigns, personalize in-store experiences, build automated treatment plans, and send reminders to customers for appointments and prescription refills. The Adobe CDP can also aggregate patient activity data so that users can get one view of their contact across digital and phone channels.
While Adobe Experience Cloud for Healthcare isn't an electronic medical records system such as those used by physicians and nurses, it can touch enough clinical data that HIPAA compliance comes into play. Fleisch said Adobe plans to make Healthcare Shield available for other applications from the vendor in the coming months; it is available now for the CDP.
"[Users] can practice all the right hygiene around health data, keeping their first-party data fresh, and deleting data when it might reach an expiration date," Fleisch said.
The Adobe CDP will also soon connect to Adobe Commerce, formerly Magento. An integration now in beta previews capabilities to come, including more granular marketing personalization in Adobe Experience Platform based on buying behavior in Commerce.
Don Fluckinger covers enterprise content management, CRM, marketing automation, e-commerce, customer service and enabling technologies for TechTarget.
