Corey Spencer is Group Product Manager for Adobe Launch. While at the Adobe Summit 2017 in London, Nicolas Malo, Optimal Ways’ founder, had the opportunity to interview him on the incoming release of Adobe Launch which will replace eventually Adobe Dynamic Tag Management (DTM).

 

Nicolas Malo: Why did you build a new product instead of an upgrade for Adobe DTM?

Corey Spencer: Very good question! With Adobe DTM, we realized rapidly that none of the tag managers are using a scalable model when they needed to include new tags from various vendors. This is the reason why we decided to build a true and open platform in which partners will be able to create and maintain their integrations themselves.

Nicolas Malo: How is this different from templates provided by other tag management solutions?

Corey Spencer: If you think of Tag Management Systems as application stores, applications are built most of the time by the tag management solutions’ team themselves without involving the vendors’ teams. Consequently, templates are not always optimal for the vendor solution and are not updated frequently. With Adobe Launch, we want to change this model by having vendors building their integrations themselves, the same way you have with applications stores. For example, Facebook has built its own integration into Adobe Launch and our customers can have the confidence that they will benefit of the most recent Facebook innovations.

Nicolas Malo: How many partner integrations are available today?

Corey Spencer: When our platform will be released this fall, we are aiming for 15 to 20 partner integrations. By early next year, we should have over a hundred of partner integrations. Our goal is to grow our partner integrations responsibly based on 4 levels:

  • Adobe Solutions (updates policed by the Launch team),
  • Certified Partners (updates policed by the Launch team),
  • customers (updates policed by themselves),
  • end-users of the user community (updates policed by themselves).

The creation of integrations will rely on HTML and Javascript. From our experience, building an integration takes a couple of days and we are building developer tools to facilate the process. Also, the Launch engine is open-source and developers will have access to our source code.

On top of this, end users will always have the possibility to add regular JavaScript tags. No existing features of DTM will be removed in our Launch platform.

Nicolas Malo: What effort will be required to migrate from DTM to Launch?

Corey Spencer: We are currently building a migration tool that will extract your properties out of DTM and populate them into Launch. Like for DTM, Adobe Launch will be available for all Adobe customers without any extra cost.

Nicolas Malo: To which extent will the implementation of Adobe Analytics change compared with DTM?

Corey Spencer:  A more granular control will be provided with Adobe Analytics in Launch. For instance, there are new analytics actions that will enable to set variables, clear variables and send beacons each independently. This will give customer much more control especially with single page sites. Implementation with Adobe Analytics will be simpler. For instance, any data available in the page will be easily accessed and sent to Adobe Analytics event if you don’t have a data layer.

Regarding the mobile tagging, the current SDK will stay different from Launch for now. Having said that, we are working to unify Web-based and application-based tagging in the future.