Having navigated the marketing technology landscape for 25 years, I’ve witnessed firsthand how each technological leap forward reshapes the very essence of marketing. From the early days of basic email campaigns to today’s sophisticated, AI-driven personalization, one constant remains: the need to evolve our approaches alongside the technology that powers them.
Throughout this journey, I’ve worked extensively with Adobe Experience Cloud (AEC), seeing it transform from a simple digital toolkit into what it is today – a comprehensive suite of marketing solutions that sits at the intersection of technology, creativity, and customer engagement.
Adobe’s commitment to innovation mirrors the evolution I’ve observed in our industry. Through strategic acquisitions, substantial R&D investments, and a deep understanding of marketers’ changing needs, Adobe has built AEC into a powerful, flexible, open ecosystem that enables brands to orchestrate personalized experiences at scale. But when it comes to understanding how to harness this potential – that’s where my quarter-century of experience comes into play.
Your path to business value in 2025
Despite the robust capabilities of AEC, many organizations find themselves grappling with how to prioritize, implement, and operationalize this sophisticated technology stack to drive real business value. The end goal is clear – to acquire, retain, and grow customer relationships while extracting meaningful insights from every interaction. Yet the path to achieving this goal often proves more complex than anticipated.
As a platinum Adobe solutions and technology partner, Acxiom has guided many businesses through their AEC journey. One pattern we consistently observe when engaging with new clients is that many have technically implemented various AEC components, and activated features, but they have done so without first aligning their data and technology strategy with their customer journey vision. The consequences of this disconnect are costly. These organizations fail to realize the full potential of their investment, missing out on the substantial value AEC is designed to deliver.
Looking ahead to the rest of 2025, I want to share targeted recommendations for either implementing AEC for the first time or optimizing your existing implementation to align with your customer journey strategy. By acting on these insights now, you can transform your customer journey performance and maximize your return on investment by year’s end. Here’s how to bridge the gap between AEC’s capabilities and your organization’s goals.
Step 1: Build your foundation: unifying data to power your customer journey vision
The cornerstone of any successful AEC implementation is a robust data and insights engine – and Adobe’s Real-Time CDP (RTCDP) is where this magic happens. But before diving into data unification, I always advise my clients to carefully map their ideal customer journeys and identify the specific data points needed to bring these journeys to life.
Working with an experienced martech partner like Acxiom can accelerate this critical foundation-laying process to just a couple of months. If you start now, by spring, through this collaboration, you’ll have achieved several crucial milestones. You will have developed:
- A clear understanding of implementation costs and a detailed budgeting roadmap.
- A comprehensive assessment of gaps in your identity and data strategy.
- Deep insight into how critical data points flow through your customer journeys in AEC.
- Confidence in your data quality, ensuring meaningful customer experiences.
- A crystal-clear role definition for every team member involved in the project.
Step 2: Orchestrate the experience: implementing AEC components strategically
With your data foundation solid, it’s time to bring in the powerful components of AEC that will transform your customer experiences. The components listed in the sidebar – whether Adobe Journey Optimizer, Adobe Campaign, or Adobe Target – all serve a purpose in bringing customer experiences to life.
Partnership is crucial at this stage. Our recent research, The Mass Martech Modernization, revealed that 82% of organizations that have worked with a partner have an articulated martech strategy compared with 47% that haven’t. A services partner can help you configure each component of the AEC to support your customer journey requirements and integrate them in a way that allows data to flow seamlessly across platforms and channels. A partner can help you build a clear roadmap that drives toward your customer journey vision and ensures your team has the tools required to bring those journeys to life. Acxiom’s approach incorporates three elements:
- Creating detailed roadmaps for configurations, integrations, and data management.
- Implementing using an agile approach with flexible resourcing options.
- Providing dedicated support throughout the entire project lifecycle.
By late summer you’ll be activating customer journeys in AEC. Rather than trying to activate all customer journeys at once, we recommend identifying your highest-value customer journeys and piloting one before expanding from there.
Key Adobe Experience Cloud components
Adobe Real-Time CDP:
Unifies cross-channel data into real-time personas for activation anywhere, while respecting customer preferences.
Adobe Experience Manager: Omni-channel content management for your brand’s website, digital assets, and forms.
Adobe Journey Optimizer: Orchestration for omni-channel customer engagement. This is where your team will set up customer journeys.
Adobe Campaign: A campaign-building tool that enables you to create workflows, deploy emails, and manage audience data across digital channels.
Adobe Target: AI-powered testing, omni-channel personalization, and automation at scale.
Adobe Customer Journey Analytics: Connects customer identities and interactions across channels, devices, and time for fast, holistic insights.
Step 3: Evolve and excel: measuring and optimizing journey performance
Your customers’ needs and behaviors are constantly evolving, so once you’ve activated your customer journeys you’ll need to continually measure and optimize their performance. This isn’t easy to achieve. Our research also revealed measurement and attribution are the top challenges brands face in delivering on their marketing objectives.
To help you in this endeavor, Adobe has launched a new analytics method that allows brands to fully understand the value of each customer engagement across all brand touchpoints. Customer Journey Analytics (CJA) connects customer identities and interactions across channels and devices for quick and precise customer insights and enables you to evolve from an antiquated, events-based analytics approach to a more holistic customer-journey analytics approach.
Entering this transformation from events-based analytics to journey-based analytics requires re-evaluating business KPIs, establishing new calculation methods for those KPIs, and learning new technologies. So we recommend partnering with a martech services provider for this process.
You’ll need a partner with experience across both customer journey analytics and aligning data and identity to your customer journey vision. They’ll need to help you seamlessly integrate CJA in your tech stack, and onboard your team. The overall process will take approximately three months and should include these key checkpoints:
- Assessing current marketing analytics capability.
- Developing a new vision and goals for marketing insights.
- Altering campaign planning processes with journey-based insights.
- Designing data flows and models for migration.
- Building architecture with a phased implementation roadmap.
- White-glove support throughout migration and adoption.
By the end of the year, when this journey is complete, you’ll be able to inform business decisions, including where and how to invest your media and marketing budget. You’ll understand the performance of high-value customer journeys and the impact of each engagement on the end-to-end buyer journey. And you’ll be able to enhance your models for more precise insights using reliable third-party data to constantly improve your analytics engine.
This isn’t just about implementing technology – it’s about transforming how you understand and serve your customers.
Acxiom + Adobe is a recipe for AEC success in 2025
As we move deeper into 2025, successfully implementing AEC so you can realize full value is intrinsically tied to your customer journey strategy. The three-step approach outlined above – starting with the data you need for your customer journey vision, implementing technology purposefully, and leveraging analytics for continuous improvement – creates a foundation for sustainable success in your digital marketing efforts.
To find out more about how Acxiom can help you realize full value from AEC take a look at our Acxiom + Adobe partnership page.
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Deepak Naristy
Marketing Technology Practice Leader
Deepak Naristy is the Marketing Technology Practice Leader at Acxiom with over two decades of experience in digital commerce and marketing. He has mastered various software platforms such as Adobe, Salesforce, Hybris, and Magento. Deepak has held leadership roles at Sapient and Merkle, leading the global solutions practice for Adobe and creating innovative marketing solutions. Deepak is committed to leveraging the latest technologies to help organizations achieve their goals in the digital age.
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