The metadata of marketing — what a marketing system of record with Adobe Workfront Planning can do for you

The marketing world is at a tipping point. Customer data is everywhere, and the volume is only increasing. Most organizations have more than enough data. But what they lack is the ability to quickly turn that data into something useful or actionable for marketing teams.

At Adobe, we’ve spent years focusing on how to capture data, make sense of it, and use it to fuel exceptional individual experiences — and our Adobe Experience Cloud solutions are used daily by companies worldwide to deliver those experiences.

But that’s just part of the story. To get the most out of campaigns, marketers need to not only bring together data from across the marketing lifecycle but also connect planning processes to execution workflows. In short, marketers need a central hub to plan and orchestrate in a coordinated fashion across their organization.

Today, Adobe launches Workfront Planning, a new solution that connects fragmented plans and data across marketing teams. This offering helps brands execute campaigns with greater speed and agility. Workfront Planning serves as a common metadata layer across Workfront and the broader Adobe GenStudio, letting organizations define a “system of record” for marketing.

This enhanced visibility into day-to-day marketing operations helps our customers execute campaigns more effectively by facilitating coordination both cross-functionally and externally with agencies and partners. Workfront Planning gives marketers a clear line of sight from strategy through delivery and ultimately to business outcomes, with tailored views for everyone from executives to execution managers.

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A comprehensive view across all marketing activities

A marketing system of record consolidates data across an organization and throughout the marketing lifecycle. With centralized data transformed into marketing calendars and shareable views, anyone can see planned campaigns, their schedules, target audiences, locations, and required assets.

Having a comprehensive view of all activities reveals patterns. Recognizing these patterns helps marketing teams adjust plans to better engage audiences and identify where to focus their time and energy.

Workfront Planning gives marketers a standardized way to define objects (like campaigns), add relevant data (like tactics or channels), and connect them to execution (like projects or programs). For example, it provides a central hub where a marketer can define a campaign, including its timeline, target audiences, channels, and goals. It also offers visibility for coordination of similar activities happening across the organization. Workfront Planning allows the flexibility for marketers to define their own metadata structure and terminology, making it easier to filter, search, and organize data so they can find exactly what they need. AI in Workfront Planning shortens time to value and enables marketers to work faster by ingesting unstructured documents from Word, PowerPoint, or PDF to generate records or data points.

Bringing change to global marketing teams

Workfront Planning is already having a big impact at Adobe. The Adobe Global Marketing Organization (GMO) supports strategy and planning for brand, marketing, and communications worldwide. They set the big picture campaigns, messages, and guidelines annually, while leaving flexibility for teams in different geographies to lean into their creativity and local knowledge to deliver campaigns that resonate.

Lizzy Ragno, a senior manager of workflow and operations on the GMO team, said trying to keep track of global campaigns at a large company can get complicated very fast. To address this, the team replaced their existing tools with Workfront Planning to establish a marketing system of record. It offers a single source of truth for all planning and strategy, finally giving marketers one place to develop coordinated plans and gain full visibility into marketing activities.

Having a single solution encourages all teams to speak the same language when it comes to marketing. A marketer may refer to each activity they’re developing as a campaign, whereas executives might define a campaign as a high-level strategy. With a single planning solution, the team has established a standard taxonomy to reduce confusion and streamline marketing discussions.

“Workfront Planning is incredibly user-friendly. It’s encouraged our teams across Adobe to adopt it quickly, adding even more valuable information to our system,” Ragno said.

Working with centralized data opens doors to gaining deeper insights faster. In the past, executive leadership frequently asked the team for information such as the number of programs launching each quarter. It might seem like a simple question, but finding the answer could take days. Each team had its own workflows, planning calendars, and management tools, requiring someone to navigate through various siloed systems to gather the needed information.

Now, finding answers like these and providing spreadsheet or timeline-style views takes the team a matter of minutes. Marketers can also dig deeper for even more meaningful insights, such as determining if there’s enough coverage across all regions, gaining visibility into cross-team collaboration or engagement when targeting the same audiences with different messaging, or determining what tactics have the biggest impact with audiences.

Ragno gave a great example of how having a better grasp of schedules lets marketers handle more changes on the fly, saying: “When we decided to send a global communication to every Adobe customer, we could see at a glance what other campaigns were running that week. Workfront Planning gave us the visibility and speed to identify areas where we wanted to pause activities or push back timelines so that the customer communication didn’t get lost in the shuffle.”

Timely decision making is essential when working to present customers with the right content at the right time.

Setting up marketers for success

Workfront Planning gives marketers the tools to improve how they manage growing demands on their time and resources. With insight into planning and campaigns, they are well-positioned to create more value for their company and work better to drive engagement. Standardized data also lays a solid foundation for leveraging generative AI to achieve large-scale automation and further streamline marketing activities.

We can’t slow the growth of marketing, but we can give teams the tools to keep ahead of the curve. We’re excited to see what our customers will achieve with Workfront Planning.

Learn more about Adobe Workfront Planning here.

Brent Rudewick is senior director and head of Adobe GenStudio. Rudewick is responsible for driving the vision, strategic roadmap, and value realization framework to deliver the industry leading end-to-end enterprise content development and orchestration platform. Rudewick’s experience building an enterprise system of record through scaling Workfront in his previous marketing operations role established a work management maturity model that provided a roadmap for planning, executing, and measuring work — as well as aligning strategy to execution. He spent 23 years managing some of the largest brands at Tyson, USAA, and Charles Schwab, supplying a library of curated, relevant content to support customers.

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