Adobe Summit brought with it a great nirvana of a near-future where marketers are able to deliver relevant content to customers creating great experiences. The words that permeated throughout the conference were those, content, experiences and data. The big stars of the show were content and customer experiences, which I believe are extremely important as I have written before.

However, there is no right content delivered at the perfect moment to create wonderful customer experiences without data. Data is the key to making this all work, and not just any data. No, I'm not talking about "big data", I'm talking about actionable data.

Most companies are sitting on a treasure trove of data already. Without purchasing third-party data, understanding every click, customers have data that can transform their business. The issue is in interpreting the data, making it actionable. Actionable data isn't a product, it's a culture.

Actionable data is the combination of art and science. The path to actionable data isn't necessarily going out and hiring a bunch of talented data scientists, though it doesn't hurt to have these people on your team. The path to actionable data is marrying the data with the business acumen. It's not enough to have data telling you something happened, there has to be an understanding of the business as to why it happened.

Once there is an understanding of what happened (science) and why it happened (art), you have actionable data. Now you can create optimal tactics to deliver relevant content to create targeted experiences in the digital age. The great thing about this process is it's circular. Once a company creates great targeted experiences for their customers, customer behaviors will change and the entire process starts all over again. There are always puzzles to solve and amazing content and experiences to create.