• by Gavin O'Malley , Staff Writer @mp_gavin, October 13, 2016

This may not come as a huge surprise, but a clear majority of digital brands consider themselves to be pretty immature.

That’s according to fresh findings from Adobe, which surveyed 735 digital pros in the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Germany.

Rather than emotional or developmental maturity, Adobe wanted to know how well equipped marketers were to face current and future digital challenges.

In response, a mere 19% of domestic marketing pros said their organizations were digitally mature.

“It’s concerning, but not surprising,” Kevin Lindsay, director of product marketing at Adobe Target, said of the findings.

“What we see is that consumers are moving quicker than brands, and it’s difficult to navigate a landscape that gets more and more complex every day,” Lindsay explained in the report.

On the bright side, the vast majority of U.S. organizations (94%) say they plan to invest in all or some additional structure, people, processes and tools.

More than half (51%) specifically plan to invest in mobile technology over the next 12 months, Adobe found.

Meanwhile, 53% of survey respondents said their organizations have responsive mobile site designs, 50% have mobile apps, 34% have adaptive mobile Web sites, 30% have dedicated mobile sites, and 9% said they currently have none of those things.

Among those organizations that self-identified as digitally advanced, 68% are automating Web content, and 65% are planning to use predictive analytics.

At the same time, 81% say digital efforts have helped differentiate them, and 91% report automation is helping improve KPIs on the Web.

This column was previously published in Moblog on September 23, 2016.