Marketing Nation: Marketo Engage weaves in Adobe AI and launches ‘Conversational ABM’ with Drift

Marketo’s Marketing Nation became an event-within-an-event at Adobe Summit on Thursday, where senior vice-president Steve Lucas referenced everything from The Matix to Coachcella and Fyre Festival to explain how B2B marketers can focus on creating stronger experiences for their customers. Following its acquisition by Adobe last year, Marketo’s key product, engage, was enhanced with several integrations with features from Adobe Marketing Cloud and its artificial intelligence engine, Sensei. Using Automated Personalization in Adobe Target, for example, marketers will be abel to crop photos for web sites and manage other creative tasks directly within Marketo Engage. Account Profiling, meanwhile, is designed to let sales and marketing team run fit data and intent data through Sensei to develop their ideal customer profile and compile more relevant target lists for account-based marketing initiatives. Lucas likened the combination of Adobe and Marketo to the “little red pill” in The Matrix, where marketers will be abel to find out “how deep the rabbit hole goes” which in this case means how far they need to go to reach their customers. He contrasted this with what he described as the ineffectiveness of customer relationship management (CRM) tools. “I’m not saying sales people are terrible data entry people but . . . they’re the worst,” Lucas said. “Your strategy winds up being based on what somebody heard. It’s like playing the gossip game. It’s weird. That’s how we rely on CRM today. It is a fallible system.” Instead, Lucas urged the Marketing Nation audience to make every customer experience “epic” by using data to learn about customers in the moment. He cited the Coachella music festival and the work its organizers consistently put to curate great acts, versus the infamous Fyre Festival.