What DMOs Can Learn About Marketing Measurement from Adobe Part 1: Lessons in Attribution
July 22, 2024
For DMOs, with no control over the final point of conversion, tracking success or return on investment isn’t always easy. The following is part one in a three-part series that looks at Adobe’s model and how DMOs can apply it to manage and measure their marketing impact.
Navigating Marketing Measurement Without a Cash Register
For many years now, I’ve repeated the mantra first given to me by my friend and mentor, Bob Jameson, the CEO of Visit Fort Worth, that defines the most significant challenge every modern DMO faces, “We don’t have a cash register, but most of our stakeholders do.” That simple fact separates us from virtually every other industry. Unlike our tourism industry brethren, such as Carnival Cruise Lines, Disney, or American Airlines, we have no effective control of the final point of conversion nor the means to measure success as they do. Despite this handicap, DMOs and their partners face one of the toughest challenges in all marketing: grappling with a multifaceted visitor journey with diverse touch points over an often extended period and no ultimate conversion metric. Hey, if it were easy…our jobs wouldn’t be challenging and fun, right?
Enter Adobe: Lessons in Attribution
Yes, that Adobe. Most of us would be forgiven for thinking there are only so many similarities between us and a global software company with a quarterly marketing budget that equates to the GDP of a small country. Ah, but perhaps there is. Adobe has a sophisticated and well-funded marketing department. Still, it faces many of the same challenges we do: fragmented data, siloed departments, challenges communicating success, and difficulty in connecting strategic decisions to business outcomes—even with ‘cash registers’! Their solution? The Data-Driven Operating Model (DDOM). DDOM revolutionized how Adobe plans, executes, and communicates its marketing and operational strategy by integrating a unified data platform, defining clear Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), and establishing robust processes and organizational structures. These changes became increasingly necessary as Adobe transitioned its business from selling software in a box to the current subscription-based service model.
DDOM, on the surface, is very similar to the destination intelligence platforms available to us in the DMO industry, including Madden’s Voyage, Tourism Economics’ Symphony, and Zartico. Like those services, DDOM, from a technical standpoint, unified Adobe’s data from a diverse range of sources into a single platform. It was designed to provide a comprehensive dashboard-style view of Adobe’s customer journey. It is segmented into five phases: Discover, Try, Buy, Use, and Renew. These individual phases each have their own primary KPIs and secondary KPIs, making it easier for leaders at Adobe to more efficiently and effectively analyze quarterly performance snapshots and better understand how decisions at one stage of the customer journey can affect metrics or even the customer experience at another stage. For example, a drop in qualified visitors to the website in Q1 of a given year could affect downstream performance metrics in the Buy and Renewal phases later in the same year, ultimately resulting in declining financial performance.
Additionally, Adobe uses DDOM to help balance marketing budget allocations between ‘fixed’ and ‘variable’ marketing investments in each of the five customer journey stages. Variable spending (such as an ad campaign) has a short-term effect on the KPIs. Still, that impact is typically closely tied to the level of the allocated budget. Fixed investments are long-term investments that can positively impact KPIs in each phase but often take longer to fully realize (this might include building a new website, for instance). We’ll discuss balancing between these two investment types later in the discussion. More than just being another dashboard, DDOM became an operational philosophy that helped Adobe unify and center on understanding the customer journey, ensuring data consistency, establishing clear ownership of KPIs, and aligning metrics with business outcomes across all of Adobe’s various departments. This holistic, data-driven approach can empower DMOs to manage and measure their marketing and organizational impact strategically.
At Madden, we’ve found similar success using a strategic approach centered on Key Business Objectives (KBOs), which we now prefer to build out using the “Play to Win” Strategic Framework, first developed by A.G. Lafley, Roger Martin, and Jennifer Riel. KBOs ensure that an organization has a structure of clear, well-defined strategic goals that support a DMO’s ‘Winning Aspiration’ or ‘North Star’ — our reason for existing, in other words.
Combining KBOs with Adobe’s DDOM approach presents an intriguing solution to the data deluge many DMOs face and a new path toward addressing the challenge of marketing attribution in our industry.
Up next…
With metrics for just about everything from room nights to visitor spending to brand awareness, pulling together these data points to show success for particular marketing tactics can be difficult for DMOs. Part two in this blog series dives into The Challenges of Attribution in a World Without Cash Registers.
