Master Plan Brings AI-Powered Efficiency to Campaign Planning
Steve Wirig shares Master Plan on stage during Sneaks at Summit 2018.
Managing a digital marketing campaign is becoming increasingly complex. Reaching consumers requires engaging experiences—delivered consistently and smartly—across an expanding surface of channels, apps and devices. Meanwhile, roles and responsibilities inside marketing teams have become more specialized and fragmented, requiring greater levels of collaboration and orchestration to manage effectively.
Steve Wirig, group product manager for Adobe Experience Cloud, wanted to provide marketers with a better set of tools for planning and managing multi-channel campaigns across distributed teams. “Campaign planning is a fragmented experience today, with siloed and segmented systems that don’t connect to each other. It forces marketing planners to organize their campaign assets with third party project management tools, or by spreadsheet, and then copy and paste assets into different delivery systems in the cloud. What I wanted to do is create a centralized environment to both plan and execute a campaign collaboratively with their team within Adobe Experience Cloud and Adobe Creative Cloud,” he says.
The result is a concept technology called Master Plan that Steve demonstrated at Adobe Summit as part of Sneaks.
Master Plan provides campaign planners with a core set of capabilities and workflows for planning and visualizing a detailed marketing campaign, along with Adobe Sensei, AI-powered recommendations for getting the most out of campaign touchpoints and assets.
It starts with a centralized, living campaign brief that a marketing team can access in real-time to collaboratively document a campaign’s goals, KPIs, milestones, channels, calendar of events and activities, audiences, metatags, contributing roles and more. The difference from a traditional campaign brief is that each of these items connects directly to assets, experiences and workflows elsewhere in the Experience Cloud.
“It’s not just another marketing calendar—that wouldn’t be exciting. What makes Master Plan interesting is the connected, universal view of all your marketing activities. We connect to the actual audience segments you use in Adobe Experience Cloud, the strategic metadata and tags you use to organize your campaign assets and the real-time analytics you use to track your KPIs,” Steve explains.
The integration of analytics alongside real assets and work flows is critical because it opens the door to machine learning, leveraging analysis of past performance from a marketer’s previous campaigns and activities as well as Sensei-generated recommendations—a functionality that was especially important to Steve.
“I started my career as a consultant at Omniture out of college, so I’ve always been interested in the intersection between analytics and technology. I wanted to use AI, analytics and marketing planning to up-level the value of every experience in Creative Cloud and Experience Cloud,” he says.
At Summit, Steve showed the audience how Adobe Sensei can be used to apply natural language processing to the creative brief to generate recommendations for metatags and KPIs, analyze analytic performance data to recommend high-performing campaign assets, or to recommend strategy and activities that were effective in achieving similar goals from past campaigns. It gives the marketer the ability to create a full campaign plan in just minutes, and then customize and adjust as needed.
“What we’re showing as a concept technology with Master Plan is just fraction of what will be possible with centralized, omnichannel campaign management and content delivery in the future,” he adds.
This story is part of a series that will give you a closer look at the people and technology that were showcased as part of Adobe Sneaks. Read other Peek Behind the Sneaks stories here.
