By: Marketo, an Adobe Company, Product Marketing Team
We'll be the first to say it: there has never been a better time to be a marketer. The last 10 years alone have produced an astounding array of technologies that dramatically improve the marketer's effectiveness, productivity, and arguably their wellbeing. Industries live and die with their ability to adapt to changing technologies, and it's tough to think of one that's done more to adapt than marketing.
Think about it: a great customer experience today is the result of an entire ecosystem, an accumulation of several technologies operating in harmony to provide a seamless interaction between customer and company. The customer may experience dozens of technologies in a single browsing session alone, and the marketer can collect insightful information from them all. This was nearly unheard of just a decade ago, and the progress has made the average marketer remarkably more effective.
So effective, in fact, that a paradox has been born: with so many new tools and platforms to use the collection, organization, and management of so much information has become a challenge in itself. The average enterprise website has gone from deploying two third-party technologies on their website in 2009 to over 20 today(!). With tenfold increases in functionality come tenfold responsibilities to make sure these technologies work together and, perhaps more importantly, avoid slowing each other down.
A Brief History: Tags
(If you’re familiar with tags and tag management, feel free to skip to the next section)
To get marketing campaigns up in years past, companies would manually add new HTML tags for their third-party technologies across potentially hundreds of web pages. This process was arduous, delaying campaign launches and increasing the cost to get anything out the door; the longer campaign launches take, the more time is taken away from employees.
This is where tag-management systems save the day.
Tags, simply put, are a piece of javascript code that you or a third-party technology provider places on your website to enable a number of functions. First, they make tracking possible. Without tags, Adobe Analytics would not be able to capture data. Tags are also the mechanism by which any technology used on a webpage is installed and configured. Without tags, chat services, personalization platforms, and customer experience software would not function. Tags matter because they are the infrastructure by which web-based data and technology operate. Without them, these things don’t work. Furthermore, if these tags are not implemented well, the systems plugged into them don’t deliver as much value as they could.
Enter first-generation Tag Management Systems (TMS), which helped orchestrate the functionality of the small handful of tools used on the average website, but as we enter 2019 and the volume of tags and technologies increases exponentially, what worked yesterday is quickly falling behind. As we dug into it, we realized the reason why legacy tag managers fail in today’s environment is because they are closed ecosystems, meaning only engineers that work for the tag management company can add functionality to the tag manager. The implications of this are substantial because in the case of integrations the engineers that work for the tag management company are ones building integrations with the other marketing technology providers. The problem with placing ownership over integrations upon the shoulders of tag managers is that they lack the expertise to build high-quality integrations. Not because they aren’t talented engineers, but because by designs they are forced to support hundreds of technologies they aren’t familiar with. They become generalists and not specialists. There are no other engineers best equipped to build integrations with Adobe Analytics than Adobe Analytics engineers. There are no engineers more qualified to build an integration with LinkedIn or Facebook than LinkedIn or Facebook engineers.
The Solution: Adobe Experience Platform Launch
These are the challenges that Adobe Experience Platform Launch solves. Launch is built on the Adobe Experience Platform, and it’s the first web-based technology that shares ownership over innovation with the entire marketing community, so businesses can benefit from the collective innovation of many, and not a select few.
Serving some of the world’s largest enterprises, Launch can function as a tag management system or SDK configuration tool, but it has two qualities that bring your data management strategy to the next level: openness and extensibility. Open APIs coupled with a modern and modular product architecture expand the reach and flexibility of your efforts, as third-party technology providers can add new functionality and your business can automate the deployment, configuration, or function of technology managed in the platform.
A Welcome Gift to Marketo Customers
We’re thrilled to announce that as a Marketo customer, Adobe Experience Platform Launch is free of charge, as a welcome to the Adobe Experience Platform, a collection of best-in-class solutions for marketing, analytics, advertising, and commerce.
As a Marketo customer, Adobe Launch adds value by delivering:
- Faster time to value: Quickly browse, configure, and deploy technology, like an analytics products, built by technology providers—including both Marketo munchkin and Bizible’s javascript.
- Trustworthy data: Cleanly collect, organize, and deliver data across technologies
- Unified Integration: Integrate the data and functionality of your tech stack to better control how each one adds to the experience
- Automate implementations: Automate the deployment and use of technologies on websites, mobile apps, or other digital properties using open APIs
- Extensibility: Extensions make deploying non-Adobe products easier while also adding new functionality
- Community: The majority of available extensions in Launch are built by an open community of third-party partners and developers -- not just Adobe. With a powerful developer ecosystem based on universal coding languages, you can trust that Launch will continue to be at the forefront of innovation and usability.
In anticipation of this great opportunity, learn more about Adobe Experience Platform Launch and the Adobe Experience Cloud. We’ll let you know when you can get started, so be on the lookout for communication from us in the near future!
We’re excited to offer you this valuable tool as the first of many benefits Adobe Experience Platform can offer. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to your Marketo point of contact.
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