Campaign Launchpad and Adobe Workfront: where one stops and the other starts

Two halves of a campaign

Every campaign an enterprise sends has work around it and work inside the platform.

Around it, someone asks for the campaign and someone decides it’s worth doing. Someone writes and designs it, people review it and it gets a date on a plan. Inside the platform, someone clones the program or campaign and builds the email in the right template. They pick the audience or load the list, get it approved and schedule it.

Workfront was built for the first half. Campaign Launchpad was built for the second. Each covers a little of the other’s ground, and that overlap is where a team running both has to decide which tool owns what.

What Workfront does

Adobe Workfront is work management for marketing and creative teams. For marketing ops the parts that matter most are these:

• Request queues. A request queue takes in work that isn’t planned yet. Routing rules send each request to a person, a team or a project, and it can become a task or a project of its own. Workfront Planning adds request forms that create planning records.
• Projects and templates. Project templates capture a repeatable process with its tasks, approvals and custom forms.
• Portfolios and programs. A portfolio groups projects that compete for the same people, budget or time slot.
• People and capacity. The Workload Balancer assigns tasks and issues by capacity. The Resource Planner budgets people’s time against projects.
• Review and approval. Proofing collects comments and decisions on a draft, with versions and an audit trail. Approval processes hold a project, task, document or proof until someone signs off.
• Reporting. Reports and dashboards, calendar reports included, show the work across teams.

None of this happens inside Eloqua or Marketo. To Workfront a campaign is a project or a record. The program, the email and the segment live in the marketing platform.

Building campaigns from Workfront with Fusion

Workfront Fusion connects Workfront to other apps with scenarios: a trigger followed by a chain of actions. It is included with Workfront Ultimate. On Prime and Select it is bought separately and priced by the operations it runs each month.

In Marketo, Adobe documents the route. Fusion’s Marketo connector can clone a program, add leads to a list, schedule a campaign and make custom API calls. Adobe publishes scenario templates that turn a Workfront request into a Marketo program and that send a Marketo email draft through Workfront’s review. Its Intake and Create blueprint walks through the whole thing. A requester fills in a Workfront form. A scenario picks the right program template, clones it and passes the request’s values into the program’s tokens.

The blueprint also says what that leaves to you. Tokens don’t work in smart lists, so audiences “will need to either be created in Marketo Engage by a user” or come preset in the program template. The program templates have to be built around tokens first. And “if you want to automate the creation of programs, you’ll need a center of excellence in Marketo Engage.” The scenario is something your team builds and keeps working as both products change. Adobe’s notes on unified approvals are one example: they say scenarios built on legacy Workfront Proofing “don’t automatically work” with the new storage.

In Eloqua, there is no documented route. Fusion’s list of apps has no Eloqua connector and Adobe’s campaign blueprints cover Marketo only. Adobe’s advice for an app that isn’t listed is to use Fusion’s universal connectors. For Eloqua that means building against Eloqua’s API yourself.

Even in Marketo a scenario fills in a template. It doesn’t give a marketer a way to edit the email inside locked regions, choose among approved audiences or upload a list that gets checked before it loads. That part is what Campaign Launchpad is for.

What Campaign Launchpad does

Campaign Launchpad builds campaigns inside Oracle Eloqua and Adobe Marketo. Marketing Ops turns each kind of campaign into a wizard once. A marketer runs the wizard and Launchpad builds what it describes in your own instance:

• In Eloqua it clones the campaign, creates emails, landing pages, segments and contact lists, clones forms and imports contacts or custom object records.
• In Marketo it clones the program with its tokens and smart campaigns, creates, updates or clones emails, creates or updates landing pages and imports leads or custom object records.

Ops decides what each wizard leaves open. Emails and landing pages are built in templates with the editable parts marked and everything else locked. Audiences come from the ones Ops allows for that wizard, or from an uploaded file that is checked row by row before anything reaches the platform. Names, folders and dates fill in from the marketer’s answers. Approval goes to a group, to the marketer’s manager or to each email on its own. Approvers can preview the email and send themselves a test before they decide.

After launch the person who sent the campaign sees its sends, opens and clicks and who opened, without a platform login. Ops sees every team’s campaigns on a status board, with what each one is waiting on and for how long.

Launchpad stops where the platform stops. It has no portfolios, budgets or resource plans and it doesn’t schedule people. A wizard can include custom steps for work outside Eloqua and Marketo, such as a print ad or a social post. Those go to Ops with an owner and the record stays on the campaign. That keeps a campaign’s loose ends with the campaign, but it isn’t project management.

Side by side

What Adobe Workfront and Campaign Launchpad each do for campaigns in Oracle Eloqua and Adobe Marketo

Capability	Adobe Workfront	Campaign Launchpad
Kind of tool	Work management	Campaign platform for Eloqua and Marketo
Campaign requests	Request queues and forms, routed to people or projects	A wizard the marketer runs instead of filing a request
Projects, programs and portfolios	Yes	No
People and capacity	Workload Balancer and Resource Planner	No
Creative review	Proofing with comments, versions and approvals	Comments and @mentions on each campaign
Approval before the send	Approval processes on work items, documents and proofs	Group, manager or per-email approval, with a test send
Builds the program in Marketo	Through Fusion scenarios your team builds	Yes, from a wizard
Builds the campaign in Eloqua	No Eloqua connector in Fusion	Yes, from a wizard
Email editing in locked templates	Not part of Workfront	Yes, with the editable parts set by Ops
Audience	Built in Marketo or preset in the program template	Chosen from audiences Ops allows, or an uploaded list
Uploaded lists checked before import	Not part of Workfront	Yes, row by row
Calendar	Calendar reports of tasks, issues and projects	When each asset goes live, week by week
Results for the sender	Reports and dashboards on the work	Sends, opens, clicks and who opened, per campaign
What a requester needs	A Workfront account, usually a Contributor license	A Launchpad login, no Eloqua or Marketo login

Where they overlap

Three things show up in both tools. Each one works best in one place.

Requests

A Workfront request queue is the right front door for work that is new. A product launch, a kind of campaign nobody has run before, anything that needs a brief and creative and a plan. For campaigns that repeat with new details, the wizard replaces the request. The marketer fills it in and the campaign gets built with no ticket in between. The queue is left with the exceptions. The campaign request guide covers how to find which request types to move first.

Approvals

Review the creative where it is made and approve the send where it is built. Briefs, copy and design proofs fit Workfront’s proofing. The last look before a campaign goes out fits Launchpad. There the approver is looking at the email Launchpad built in Eloqua or Marketo. They can send it to themselves and see how many rows of an uploaded list were valid before anything deploys. If the copy was already approved in Workfront, a wizard can ask only the marketer’s manager or skip approval altogether. The guides to Eloqua campaign approvals and Marketo email approval go into what each platform does natively.

Calendars

Workfront’s calendar reports show when work is due: the tasks, the projects, the plan. Launchpad’s calendar shows when each email and campaign goes live, from the dates set when it was built. The first is the plan. The second is what will go out and when.

Running both

The two don’t connect out of the box today. A simple split works without an integration:

1. The campaign lives in Workfront as a project or a task, with its owner, its due date and its place in the portfolio.
2. Creative that needs review goes through Workfront proofing.
3. The build runs in Launchpad. The Workfront task links to the Launchpad workflow.
4. Launchpad handles the approval before the send, the launch and the results.
5. When Launchpad shows the campaign as deployed, the Workfront task is closed.

Planning stays where the planners work and the build stays where the platform rules are enforced.

Which one you need

Start from where the work gets stuck.

• If the problem is seeing and planning the work (what’s been asked for, who is on it, what’s late and what it costs), that is Workfront’s job. Launchpad won’t do it.
• If the problem is the build (Ops cloning programs, building emails and loading lists for other people one ticket at a time), Workfront moves the request along faster but the build still waits for Ops. In Marketo a Fusion scenario can take part of it. Launchpad takes the whole build off the queue on both platforms.
• If you run Eloqua, Workfront has no documented way to build the campaign. Launchpad builds it from a wizard and one account can hold Marketo instances beside it.
• If you run a center of excellence, you need both jobs done. Someone has to run the work and something has to hold every build to the standard. The Eloqua and Marketo guides cover what the center owns in each platform.

Comparing Launchpad with email builders instead? The guide to Knak, Stensul, Jeto and Campaign Launchpad shows which part of the campaign each one builds. To put a number on what the build costs your team today, try the Campaign Launchpad calculator.