Notes from the 2025 Adobe Summit, which I did not attend.
In the year 2025, Adobe—bless their silicon, subscription-obsessed souls—decided that B2B marketing wasn’t just a cosmic accident after all. They’ve doubled down, tripled up, and road mapped a brave new Marketo Engage and Adobe Journey Optimizer (B2B Edition). We live in an audacious epoch where AI doesn’t just write emails, it builds your entire customer journey while you nap. Progress!
The Big Takeaways (Bite Sized)
- Journey Optimizer B2B Edition Roadmap: AKA “The Future Is AI and You May As Well Admit It”
- Marketo Engage Roadmap: AKA “Automation Isn’t Going Anywhere, and It’s Maybe Better at Your Job Than You”
Key Innovations (The Machines Are Learning WAY Faster Than We Are)
Adobe Journey Optimizer B2B Edition
Apparently, it now does Account-Based Marketing (ABM) clairvoyant style, fingers to temples, eyes closed. It uses AI to sniff out buying propensity, and serves them up before your sales team has had time to not update leads in the CRM. It knows which accounts are “surging”—whatever that means—and where they’re going. Probably to your MQL dashboard.
- Prioritization? Enhanced.
- Activation? Accelerated.
- Your place in the marketing universe? Uncertain.
Marketo Engage Enhancements
You thought that was all? No, friend. The Marketo folks have been pretty busy too. (And let’s be honest, it’s a tad overdue)
- Efficiency: Better picklist management, duplicate filters, and global & trigger tokens. Less busy work, more time to read Godot.
- Data Streams: Data delivered in relatively real-time, because the past is quickly irrelevant, and the present is fleeting.
AI Email Marketing: Includes AI writing assistants, Handlebar scripting (no relation to your aproned mixologist), and built-in testing tools. It practically emails itself. Maybe the content team are recast as reviewers & editors.- AI Journies: Journey Agents and Journey Canvas help nudge your leads through the marketing machine with all the tenderness of HAL 9000. You might want to get your content team on speed dial, or not…
- Reporting & BI: You can now visualize your KPIs with “dynamic ad-hoc analysis,” which is a fancy way of saying “pretty charts.”
Why You Should Pretend To Care
Adobe’s playing for keeps in the B2B space. And sure, it’s exciting-ish—like watching your coffee table develop a split personality. But there’s a catch: most of this magic only happens after you adopt the Adobe Identity Management Service (IMS). Some features are exclusive to certain Marketo packages, which is shareholder speak for: “you’ll have to pay more.”
Why I Should Pretend To Care
Because this changes a bit of our verbiage and approach when solutioning. And it forces me to keep talking about AI at extended-family dinners. When marketing and sales are at each other’s throats, or worse—politely ignoring each other—every “solution” you deliver ends up being a beautifully engineered bandage on a weeping wound. But if you understand the dysfunction, really understand it, you stop just delivering tools and start delivering transformation. You stop playing tech support and start rewriting how organizations think, talk, and move—one buzzword at a time. Suddenly, we’re not just a vendor. We’re time travelers, dragging clients into a better version of their own future, while somehow charging them for the honor. Strange work. Noble though, no?
So What Now?
Want help figuring it all out? I’d be delighted to hold your hand while the AI holds your heart hostage. Reach out and we’ll help you make sense of the glorious, chaotic marvel that is Adobe B2B marketing in 2025. Onward.