🎛️ Securian Financial grapples with new Workfront-Adobe integrations

In November 2020, Adobe announced an agreement to acquire Workfront for a headline-grabbing $1.5 billion. It seemed a timely, albeit costly, deal with so many distributed teams needing to get a better handle on workflow. Securian Financial, the St. Paul, Minnesota-based financial services company, is an example of a brand that was using both Adobe and Workfront within its marketing organization before the acquisition happened, or indeed was even foreseen.

As for getting value out of integrations between Workfront and Adobe tools, it’s early days. “I’m seeing the possibilities theoretically. We haven’t squared them away yet. We are starting to — and here we’re just scraping the surface — capture metrics where it makes sense,” said Chris Brown, Securian’s Marketing Operations Manager.

“Two things we’re looking at right now are the Adobe Creative Cloud connector to Workfront, allowing people to accept tasks within Illustrator, within the Adobe tools,” he told us. “The other one is the Adobe DAM connector which allows us to add metadata, add new assets to the DAM. Our mantra is that we want to eliminate as much pivoting as possible, and we view Workfront as the starting place. If we can get people working in Workfront, and staying in Workfront, pulling in data on the campaign or whatever they’re working on, that’s what we’re trying to do.”

Read more here.

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Tripadvisor, the travel discovery platform, has announced the launch of a new subscription plan for users. Previously, it had been free to prospective travelers and had monetized its offering through membership plans for hotels, resorts and other attractions.

The D2C plan will initially be limited in geographical scope and product offers, but essentially it will offer subscribers perks, discounts and deals.

Tripadvisor had around 400 million unique visitors per week pre-COVID and has relationships with thousands of hotels and hundreds of thousands of tour and activity providers.

Why we care. Okay, this might look like an old-fashioned loyalty program — but not really. It’s not a points-for-prizes structure, apparently, but a gateway to unspecified perks. Effectively, it makes subscribers a VIP subset of the membership.

The theme here, which we’ll see repeated in the months to come, is developing something more than a transactional relationship with an audience. If this is executed well, it promises to build engagement and trust. And it’s no coincidence that CEO Steve Kaufer, announcing the news, referred to “special experiences.” That’s what people are truly in the market for — not just flights and hotels, but experiences.

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“Historically, data-hoarding digital companies such as Google, Facebook and Amazon have made it difficult for academic researchers to access that data to study how people behave on the internet,” said Max Willens for Digiday.

Mozilla’s new Firefox browser extension Rally hopes to change that. Internet users can “donate their data” for research studies “that are designed to build new resources, tools, and potentially even policies that empower people just like you to build a better internet and fight back against exploitative tech,” according to the Rally website.

With consumer privacy top of mind and both advertisers and consumers worried about the “black box” of Google’s FLoC, many internet users may be willing to use the data that others collect for research purposes. The goal is also to help understand how big players exploit user data for their own gain.

Currently, Rally is used by hundreds of people, but the goal is to expand those numbers to collect even more data. The data collected from the extension varies based on the research you’re participating in, and Mozilla says it will not sell any data. It’s purely for academic research.

To join you set up a profile, find a study to join, and then browse away. “Before you enroll, we’ll tell you exactly who we’re working with, which data is being collected, where it’s going, and how it’s being used,” says Mozilla.

Why we care. Not using this data for commercial purposes is, of course, really important. But trusting Mozilla, this seems like a worthy project. Why should marketers care? It’s not an immediate thing, but the academic research will eventually filter through and should contain useful teachings about internet UX.

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“I think what’s going to happen is that everyone on the marketing team is going to be in the business of improving the customer experience, and email people will be leading this charge because they’re pros at this.” April Mullen, Director of Brand and Content Marketing, Sparkpost.