Workfront by Adobe: Automated Workflows & Customer Experience

Adobe Integrates Workfront to Enhance Marketing Workflows

Five months prior, Adobe completed the acquisition of Workfront, a company specializing in marketing workflow solutions, for a sum of $1.5 billion. Today, the company is formally detailing its plans for integration. As marketing leaders strive to align strategic planning with creative execution and deliver personalized customer experiences, a dedicated workflow tool is a natural fit within the Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) suite, and that is precisely where it has been positioned.

System of Record for Marketing

Alex Shootman, formerly CEO of Workfront and currently serving as VP and GM of Adobe Workfront, explained that the tool is envisioned as the central system of record for marketing departments operating within AEM. This integration leverages data generated from Workfront’s workflows to document the entire creative process.

Following its incorporation into Adobe, the company has established connections between Experience Manager and Creative Cloud. This allows marketing’s creative endeavors to proceed through a structured and traceable process, generating a data trail that provides management with a clear understanding of all activities – effectively creating a marketing system of record.

Connecting Strategy and Execution

Shootman emphasized that this system of record empowers marketing teams in several key ways. Primarily, it facilitates the connection between overarching strategy and practical implementation. “A Chief Marketing Officer and their team establish the core priorities for decision-making annually or quarterly, and this system ensures those priorities directly influence activities within the marketing organization,” he stated.

This involves unifying the individuals, procedures, and data within marketing into a cohesive system. Teams can then iteratively plan and adapt their work as circumstances evolve. Workfront is central to enabling this dynamic planning process.

Industry Analyst Perspective

Brent Leary, a leading analyst at CRM Essentials, affirmed the strategic rationale behind this integration. “Delivering sufficiently personalized content at scale to maintain customer engagement as their needs change requires collaborative teamwork. This necessitates enhanced collaboration throughout the content creation lifecycle, and integrating Workfront within AEM introduces a sophisticated project management capability to the creative process,” Leary observed.

Increased Need for Agility

The shift towards online sales accelerated during the pandemic, intensifying the demand for both speed and adaptability. Integrating this workflow tool within Adobe Experience Manager not only empowers marketing to construct customized experiences for customers but also enables the automation of the workflows underpinning those customizations.

Practical Application of the Integration

Consider a scenario where a marketing team develops a campaign and outlines it within Workfront. Tasks are then assigned to creatives, and these assignments appear directly within Creative Cloud. Upon completion, the work automatically returns to Workfront for review, approval, and subsequent publication to the Digital Asset Management (DAM) tool, making it accessible to the entire marketing team.

A Strategic Acquisition

Predicting the success of acquisitions can be challenging, but Workfront appears exceptionally well-suited to the Adobe ecosystem. It introduces a crucial workflow automation component to the complete creative process, while simultaneously providing marketing executives with comprehensive visibility into how their strategies are executed.