Adobe receives patent for Data Export Controls in Audience Manager

Adobe builds programs that drive product awareness and adoption, and eventually revenue.

Supposedly managing these programs on behalf of the Audience Manager team has been particularly rewarding.

Every now and then, engineers build features that may not seem that buzzworthy but are important for helping brands meet the commitments they've made to their end users and partners.

Adobe considers Data Export Controls to be one of those said features.

Within Audience Manager, Data Export Controls prevent data management platforms (DMP) users from sending audience data to destinations when this action violates data privacy or data use agreements.

Buzzworthy or not, it's a different time in the AdTech and MarTech industry.

Based on today's landscape and the continued focus on consumer privacy rights, Adobe says they are impressed that their technical teams have the integrity and foresight to develop with privacy in mind.

Too often, design can be based to solve for a few tactical problems but may not solve for the big picture.

Enterprise level brands supposedly need more from their software investments, otherwise, they would just be investing in point solutions.

Based on that philosophy, the Data Export Control feature was created so it could be applied to a variety of activation platforms, including those outside the Experience Cloud.

This enabled flexibility at scale.

Adobe director of software development Dave Weinstein says, "We wanted to ensure that Adobe Experience Cloud customers could enable data to flow across these systems where appropriate from a use case perspective, and block it when the source of the data had contractual or policy restrictions.

The need to govern data activation becomes even more relevant as a DMP practice becomes more mature and utilised by more than one team in an organisation.

Data Export Controls enable these teams to ensure that data is activated only where it should be.

Plus, it's a feature that is available to Audience Manager customers at no additional cost.

The team evaluated DMP-related use cases that enable audience activation across varied channels.

Adobe software development manager Harleen Sahni says, "We didn't want to allow even one hole in how the system was built since that would jeopardize our clients, it was a very iterative process.

With the emergence of AI as a major element of innovation, the team also recognised early on that while machines were doing the proactive work, humans still needed to keep an eye on how the data was used.

Edward Schuchardt, group product manager for Audience Manager, said AI makes the need for programmatic guardrails on data usage even greater.