Key Takeaways From Adobe’s RT-CDP Collaboration Forum 2025

On October 16, 2025, Adobe brought together marketers, technologists, publishers, and data leaders in New York City for the Real-Time CDP Collaboration Forum. The event focused on how secure, privacy-safe data collaboration is changing the way brands work with partners, activate audiences, and measure performance. Further participated as a strategic partner, and our team helped interpret what these developments mean for modern marketing organizations.

The main message of the day was clear. Collaboration is becoming a core capability for marketers. It is no longer experimental. With privacy regulations increasing and walled gardens limiting access to data, brands and publishers need new ways to work together without sharing sensitive customer information. Adobe’s RT-CDP Collaboration tool is emerging as one of the strongest solutions for doing this in a secure and scalable way.

A New Era of Partner Activation

To level-set, Adobe Collaboration is its modern clean-room framework inside Real-Time CDP. It allows brands, publishers, and partners to work together in a secure, no-code environment. In practice, it helps teams:

• Discover new collaboration partners
• Understand audience overlap
• Activate audiences across channels
• Measure results
• Keep all customer data protected within each company

Adobe positions Collaboration as more than a clean room. It is:

• A secure, no-code space to work with partners
• A framework for activating audiences across paid and owned channels
• A measurement solution that explains reach, overlap, lift, and impact
• A way to avoid risky data transfers or manual file sharing

Rather than exchanging spreadsheets or building one-off integrations, Collaboration allows brands to work with privacy-safe audience summaries, coordinate audience activation directly within Adobe Experience Platform, and measure campaigns without exposing raw customer data.

This is not theoretical. It is already being used by advertisers to make smarter media buys, by retail media networks to extend their reach, and by brands to run collaborative marketing programs.

What the Event Demonstrated

Through demos, lab sessions, and architecture walkthroughs, Adobe highlighted three major areas.

1. How brands find partners
The partner catalog inside RT-CDP is expanding quickly. Adobe also previewed several major new additions. This makes it easier for brands to discover publishers and retail media partners for high-value activations and to build private connections for strategic collaboration.

2. How audiences move securely across the workflow
Attendees followed the full process, including creating collaboration accounts, matching audiences, selecting shared segments, and activating campaigns. The walkthrough showed how quickly partners can move from an idea to a working activation without needing engineering support.

3. Where measurement is headed
Adobe showed how metrics like reach, frequency, indexing, and audience overlap can be calculated without exposing any personal information. They also previewed stronger measurement tools that will come from backend improvements and future integrations with Customer Journey Analytics.

What This Means for Brands Right Now

A major theme emerged. Organizations must prepare operationally, not just technically. Success with Collaboration depends on clear processes across data, marketing, partnerships, and legal teams.

Brands that succeed with Collaboration will need:

• A clear match key and identity strategy
• Strong governance around consent and permissions
• Coordination across Marketing, Data, Partnerships, and Legal
• Scalable processes for building audiences in AEP
• A test and learn approach to partner activation

Early adopters are already seeing stronger results with privacy-safe collaboration than with traditional prospecting methods. In similar programs, brands have seen:

• 15% more new-to-brand customers
• 20% fewer wasted impressions
• Higher incremental ROAS from better audience overlap
• Customer acquisition costs that stay at or below targets

These results show that organizations who build readiness now are the ones getting measurable performance improvements.

Further’s Role in Helping Clients Prepare

As Adobe expands RT-CDP Collaboration, Further is already helping enterprise organizations bring these capabilities into real-world marketing operations. At the event, our experts offered guidance in four key areas.

Audience Strategy and Match Key Readiness

We help brands build the identity foundations needed for long-term collaboration, including choosing match keys, designing namespaces, and setting scalable rules.

Journey Activation Across AEP, AJO and Marketo

We connect Collaboration insights to actual marketing workflows. This includes refining audiences, building suppression strategies, and coordinating cross-channel activation.

Governance, Measurement, and Operational Planning

We build governance frameworks that ensure compliance while supporting speed, including permissioning, consent rules, decay logic, and partner controls.

Partner Enablement and Co-Marketing Design

We help brands understand where Collaboration creates the most value, including:

• Publisher efficiency
• Retail media activation
• Co-branded campaigns
• Joint customer growth
• Enhanced audience attributes

Our goal is to help organizations turn Adobe Collaboration into a repeatable, scalable capability that ties directly to business outcomes.

Where This Is Headed

Adobe made it clear that Collaboration is becoming central to its marketing ecosystem. Future enhancements will include:

• Deeper reporting
• More available partners
• Stronger AJO integration
• New identity and matching options

The next 12 to 18 months will determine which brands become leaders in this space. Those who begin building their operational and strategic foundation now will be well-positioned for a future where partner-based activation and data collaboration are just as important as first-party data strategy.

How Further Can Help

If your team is exploring Adobe RT-CDP Collaboration, Further can be your hands-on Adobe partner. We support every step of the journey, from strategy and governance through activation and measurement. Whether you are just getting started or expanding your clean-room and collaboration capabilities, our experts can help you build a program that is privacy-safe, scalable, and directly tied to business impact.

If you want guidance or an initial conversation, we are here to help.

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