Adobe MAX: New Adobe Workfront capabilities tackle challenges of scaling personalized content

Today, Adobe announced new capabilities in Adobe Workfront targeting one of the most challenging aspects of delivering personalized content at both speed and scale: Dynamic collaboration, communication and workflows within creative teams, and between creative and marketing teams.

Content is at the heart of personalized customer experiences. Scaling that content to address every stage of the relationship across an increasing number of channels and formats is a puzzle few companies have solved. Adobe’s latest Future of Marketing Research Series found brands are only personalizing between 25 percent and 50 percent of marketing content — a far cry from their goal of 50 to 75 percent personalization.

Simply adding budget and headcount won’t solve this growing problem. The place where most companies get stuck is in the hand-offs between marketing and creative, where teams create, iterate, approve, review and manage content. This “messy middle” is nonlinear and includes dozens of steps and processes running concurrently across a vast web of internal and external stakeholders. The failure to effectively personalize and scale content hurts customer relationships, runs down budgets and wears out employees.

“The ability to align complex workflows, processes and the foundational work — especially those handoffs between marketing strategy and content development — is critical in enabling teams to get personalized content to customers faster, with greater impact, and aligned to company strategy,” said Liz Miller, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research. “Adobe Workfront brings order to the nimble, bidirectional madness of marketing work, serving as the ‘effectiveness engine’ for the modern marketing machine so critical to moving digital business forward.”

New capabilities announced

• Adobe Photoshop Plugin: The all-new Adobe Photoshop plugin gives creatives the ability to “collaborate in context.” Through an embedded Workfront update screen, creators can see tasks and issues, and post and view comments related to the project they’re working on. They can log time, export assets, and seamlessly collaborate on digital proofing, reviews and approvals — all without ever leaving Photoshop. This plugin is available today on the Adobe Marketplace and Creative Cloud Desktop.
• Adobe Experience Manager Assets integration for enterprises: Orchestrate world-class campaigns with seamless publishing, integrated approvals and content delivery with a new enhanced connector. Synch metadata between projects and final assets and keep the work flowing with advanced enterprise workflows, including auto-publishing of assets. This integration is available now for enterprise customers.
• Adobe Experience Manager Assets Essentials integration for departments: Brands that need a lightweight digital asset management solution for individual teams or departments can now unify work and asset management. Content creators can push assets and metadata from Workfront to Assets Essentials, link assets to projects and tasks, and facilitate versioning workflows with ease. This integration is available now to new Workfront customers via a simple, in-app configuration.
• Updated Adobe XD Plugin: Experience designers can stay in XD, while collaborating to keep work moving. With the plugin, designers can work with internal and external stakeholders, log time, and view details on all projects, tasks, issues, and documents. They have full access to all Workfront folders and documents, can upload work, send shared links for review, attach proof workflows to assets and maintain version control. This plugin is available today on the Adobe Marketplace and Creative Cloud Desktop.

Adobe also announced additional capabilities to enhance experience delivery to B2B brands and make accessing Workfront features easier for all Adobe customers. They include:

• Adobe Marketo Engage Connector: Connect upstream ideation and creativity with downstream delivery. The powerful automation of Adobe Marketo Engage plus the integration with Workfront enables brands to create cloneable programs to scale customer engagement and support global efforts with a small team. This connector is available today through Adobe Workfront Fusion.
• Identity Management Services: Users can leverage Adobe Identity Service for authentication and validation of the end-user, including federation and runtime Single-Sign-On (SSO). With Adobe Admin Console, administrators can easily manage Adobe entitlements across their organization. These services are available now to new Adobe Experience Manager Assets Essential and Workfront customers and will be generally available in the first half of 2022.

We’re excited about how these new capabilities will simplify the way brands deploy and engage across teams, and the native integrations ensure customers always have access to the newest and most powerful product features. Watch this video to see how the new capabilities come together to empower the people and power the work behind great customer experiences.