---
title: "Adobe Marketers Pin Hopes on Data Analysts to Keep Up with the Times"
url: https://adtech.lol/articles/ddce685a-be18-42dd-9680-bff1ca908b9d
source_url: https://www.exchangewire.com/blog/2014/05/15/adobe-marketers-pin-hopes-on-data-analysts-to-keep-up-with-the-times/
source_site: exchangewire
author: "ExchangeWire"
published: 2014-05-15T00:00:00+00:00
tags: ["Adobe", "Data", "Digital Marketing", "Marketing", "Data Analysts"]
publisher: AdTech Radar
---

# Adobe Marketers Pin Hopes on Data Analysts to Keep Up with the Times

> Adobe study points to serious gaps in the digital skillset among brand-side marketers across Europe, with those in the UK looking to hire data analysts to help ‘reinvent’ themselves.

### Adobe's Wake-Up Call

Adobe marked its European Summit by publishing "a wake-up call for business leaders" via a study revealing that 73% of marketers had to "reinvent themselves", to underline the depth of demand for its content marketing cloud services.

The findings in the report – dubbed ‘Digital Roadblock: Marketers Struggle to Reinvent Themselves – quizzed 350 marketing professionals in the UK, Germany, and France, with more than two-thirds of European marketers (68%) stating that marketing has changed more in the last two years than in the previous 50.

### Skills Shortages Acknowledged

But respondents cited organizational challenges over personal obstacles as barriers to becoming the marketers they aspire to be in the digital era. Over half (58%) of European marketers surveyed claimed marketing success is dependent on organizational change.

Other perceived obstacles in Europe include a lack of training in new skills (30%), confusion over roles and responsibilities (30%), and company resistance to trying new programs (30%).

When asked to identify the most significant driving forces of change, usual lip service was paid to platforms such as ‘social media’ and ‘mobile’, with the report itself not specifically mentioning the word ‘programmatic’.

### Data-Driven Changes

But 59% of respondents did mention that exploring new ways of thinking about audience engagement was high on their list of priorities. Meanwhile, 54% reported that new technologies for analyzing marketing effectiveness were needed.

The majority (73%) of marketers in the UK, Germany, and France agree they need to be more data-focused to succeed. However, the findings revealed differences in attitudes between countries.

In France and Germany, marketers say digital talent - including social marketing and e-commerce management - is the most critical for new hires. However, in a sign that the UK market is slightly more sophisticated in terms of programmatic media trading, UK respondents reported that recruiting data analysts was top of their list of planned appointments.

### Data Analysts Highly Sought After in the UK

Respondents in the UK and France generally agree on how data has affected their approach to marketing. Seventy percent of marketers in the UK and 68% in France agree that capturing and applying data to inform and drive marketing activities is the new reality, compared to just 56% of respondents in Germany, indicating tighter levels of data privacy there.

When asked about what they hope to do more of in the next 12 months, 50% of UK marketers said they want to use more consumer data and behavior to shape marketing strategies, compared to 37% in France and 33% in Germany.

Mark Phibbs, Adobe, VP, marketing for EMEA, said: “This is a wake-up call for business leaders - success in the digital age is not going to happen until marketing teams feel they have the training and organizational support they need. It’s critical to get these investments right. Companies that can’t evolve fast enough are going to get left behind.”

### Digital Talent Viewed as Critical, But Performance Lagging

The research also exposed significant gaps in how marketers are currently performing.

When asked to rate both the importance and how well they feel their companies are currently doing in key digital marketing functions, the findings revealed a 24% gap in the areas of personalization and targeting, as well as a 24% gap in customer response management.

Likewise, marketers across Europe are struggling with content management (22% gap), marketing measurement (21% gap), and social marketing (19% gap).

Speaking with ExchangeWire, Jonathan Beeston, Adobe, director of new product innovation, said the survey highlighted how companies “need to take their data out of silos”.

He said: “It’s a horrible phrase but it’s almost as if we have to ‘de-silo’ the data… so the communities manager can understand what the search guy is doing.”

When discussing the aforementioned skills gap, and ‘organizational issues’ identified in the Adobe study, Beeston said: “Basically, when it comes to marketing functions, maybe the answers lie outside of the marketing department? Argueably it’s down to the CEO or HR person to look at how they can restructure, or incentivize their teams [to implement effective changes needed for the digital era].”

### Here Comes the Sales Part

Of course, the timing of the release coincided with the launch/summit of updates to various elements of Adobe’s Marketing Cloud services. Perhaps the most relevant to ExchangeWire readers was the update to its digital advertising platform Adobe Media Optimiser.

This update includes a renewed user interface, with Adobe claiming it could increase performance by up to 25% through new predictive modeling algorithms that forecast and optimize campaigns across search, social, and display channels.

The update also includes tools that let marketers evaluate their campaign optimization models ahead of implementation (this includes dynamic campaign optimization, including budget allocation), as well as unified campaign analysis, through tighter integration of Adobe Analytics.

Basically, it means that better integration between its media optimizer tool and the rest of its marketing cloud stack improves its efficiency, i.e., ‘spend more money with us, and your campaign metrics will improve’.

Source: [https://www.exchangewire.com/blog/2014/05/15/adobe-marketers-pin-hopes-on-data-analysts-to-keep-up-with-the-times/](https://www.exchangewire.com/blog/2014/05/15/adobe-marketers-pin-hopes-on-data-analysts-to-keep-up-with-the-times/)