IBM Amplify: IBM Marketing Cloud Roadmap

This session was  a review of the vision for the IBM Marketing Cloud and how it will continue to evolve under the Watson Campaign platform. It also highlighted how IBM is pulling together new capabilities in order to support broader marketing department needs.

Jeff Demavich, the Offering Management Leader, gave the roadmap presentation.

Definition: Watson Customer Engagement is comprised of Watson Marketing, Watson Commerce, and Watson Supply Chain.

Definition: Watson Marketing Cloud is now Campaign Automation

Roadmap Themes:

1. Collaboration and user experience
2. Digital messaging
3. Campaign automation
4. Cognitive marketing
5. Open Marketing Platform
6. Globalization

Collaboration and User Experience

This has been primarily focused on Journey Designer. The designer allows you to cross channels. The designer recently added custom icons.  You can create an icon for you CMS (whether it’s IBM or not).

One key focus is on taking key concepts here and pushing them a little closer to the actual implementation of the journey / execution.

Working to make broader changes:

• global navigation that’s similar across the tool and different products
• Left hand toolbar with common drill downs
• Campaign Manager view. A better starting place to execute on a campaign. Take it from journey design to the actual implementation of the campaign. This is the umbrella campaign of many activities. It’s more than just relying on tags so they created a campaign hierarchy.
  • Includes a reuse button to do the same task again.

Digital Messaging

Have an increasing number of enterprise customers who have access to developers.  They can do more without having to do lots of pointing and clicking to do a task. To that end:

• Allow Transact to do more automated personalization, dynamic content, and better formatting of data arrays
• Allow Engage to format numbers, dates, and text, loop and format RT data, get data into subject line
  • this is all about message scripting getting access to more data
• Add to SMS and push capability (Q4/Q1)
• Parent child relational tables
  • simplifies the integration.  No need to flatten out the data
    • can create the right model
  • Easier to update RT records
  • Can access RT query statement (sum,count)
• Native support in 2H 2017 cloud version. Will integrate with on premise product
• More flexible configurations. Drag and drop functionality for more than core capabilities
• Connected to org to know databases and column mapping
• Supports more advanced use cases like writing to RT’s from a web form
• Integrates with Form Experience Builder. In the long term, this will be the solution.
• Channels
  • Transact allows XML attachments
  • Transact XML add true BCC recipients
• Mobile
  • Mobile Push
  • location based messaging
  • etc.
  • Lots and lots of functionality being added here.

Campaign Automation

Have Campaign 10 integration launched.  Will also do more:

• Email integration
• Streamline data flows
• For high volume senders not using campaign offers: one marketing cloud database for all email sends
• For campaign offers or highly personalized emails: one marketing cloud database per campaign
• Will have a new programs section.
  • includes a newly launched programs canvas
  • Multi-path routing. No longer just a yes/no decision.
    • via configuration
    • Can create up to 10 rules based paths
  • Percent split routing
    • Can split the program journey into different paths. Useful for creating a placebo test group to compare and then justify more campaign automation. Also useful for splitting to different creatives.
• Can set emerging features to display.  It’s a configuration setting

Cognitive Marketing

Bringing Watson to bear in three key ways:

1. Quickly understand massive amounts of data
2. Deliver the ideal interactions to each individual customer via the most appropriate channel
3. A trusted advisor to help marketers make smarter decisions faster

Watson Marketing Assistant: This is the voice enabled assistant to get campaign results, analyze tone of email subject line, etc.  It’s a preview but freely available.

Watson Content Hub: scans and tags documents and images.  It integrates asset and content management features.  It allows you to create content templates and even create renditions on the fly.  WCH will begin to replace the core asset library in Q4/Q1 of this year.  Future enhancements should make it more like a DAM. The tags will help assign keywords to user behavior.

Performance Insights

Will replace the data reporting you have today. Key though is the intent to give you more insights and better insights than you have today.

1. Consolidate first and third party data
2. Provide context of performance
3. Create new statistical and analytical observations. This is Watson and predictive analytics.
4. Will create a new workspace that is very configurable
   1. Workspace is a pre-defined set of visualization to track how marketing activities are performing. Could be just focused on “hats”
5. Audience management
   1. Will show how it performs based on he audience. Will automatically aggregate and roll up this data
   2. Will be near real time data aggregation for audience performance.
   3. Won’t allow dynamic changing of segments and then reporting on history

Watson Marketing Insights

Used to be Predictive analytics. Will now publish or output to a segment.