Hi Marketo Community! Just had a couple questions about using custom activities. We created these new custom activities:
- Can you trigger off of these in smart campaign?
- Can you use the as tokens to populate in the email?
LOL Hi Mark! This is Michelle. Back from the Marvel days 
So you cannot use custom activities as tokens in emails right? Strictly to use in smart campaigns than or to push data into the system. Just want to know the different between using custom activities versus using custom object.
Thought so, that's part of the reason I replied. To help an old pal with a complicated problem 
Here are some quick thoughts:
Custom Activities are good to log an event and associated attributes where you do not need to reference those attributes in an email. Generally these are to log events where the data doesn't change. You can expect custom activity data to work similar to something like an email click or webpage visit activity. You can trigger off of it, go to the activity log and see the attributes, use them in a smart list, read them using the activity/bulk APIs but cannot pull them into an email natively.
The custom object you can trigger off of, use in a smartlist, see in the activity log, read using the API, as well as merge into emails.
The JSON field approach is great if you just need a bunch of variables to reference on email send and aren't so concerned with using the data to drive reports, smart lists or triggers. This simplifies what would be many lead fields or a custom object into just 1 field. If you go this route I can give you details on howI do the triggers.
Are you leveraging the custom activity data outside of the system presently? Trying to figure out what the dependancies are before providing a suggestion.
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