Yes, the brands who advertise during the Super Bowl have the budgets pay for a captive audience of 115+ million viewers. But does it make sense to spend upwards of $4 to $5 million for a :30 spot? And will this content help them drive business across other channels?

When it comes to a major marketing spend, the odds aren’t necessarily stacked against you, as long as you have a strategy.

Remember the Oreo whisper fight ad from the 2013 Super Bowl? Nabisco clearly planned to take this to Instagram, but instead the brand’s social media team took advantage of an opportunity no one could predict – the lights going out at the Mercedes-Benz Superdome for 34 minutes.

When Oreo released its Twitter ad proclaiming “You can still dunk in the dark,” it won the marketing competition of the 2013 Super Bowl hands-down. So how did Oreo pull it off?

Just three years ago, viewers of major sporting events were already interacting on a second screen using social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Taking this into account, Oreo had a 15-person social media team at the ready to respond in real-time to significant events during the Super Bowl. It was an investment that paid off, garnering more attention than the expensive Super Bowl ad.

But what if your business doesn’t play on the same field as Nabisco or Anheuser-Busch? The CMO in the commercial for Adobe Marketing Cloud said it best: “Look at the data. Look at the data before going all in.”

Marketing in 2016 must be heavily targeted across all channels – digital in particular – and driven by data. In fact, 53% of organizations stated that data-driven marketing is their top priority this year.

With insights from data comes more tailored and timely content sought by customers, which ultimately improves the overall experience across channels.

Make sure you’re not putting it all on the line with your marketing budget. For ideas on where to start, download Digital Transformation: Laying the Groundwork for Success.

Shantanu Narayen, president and chief executive officer of Adobe. (Photo courtesy of Adobe/CNN)

“Ultimately, when you do the right thing for the customer, everything falls into place.”

Wise words for any enterprise, but particularly for those now considering digital transformation. And the speaker should know.

Shantanu Narayen, president and chief executive officer of Adobe Systems, Inc., one of Perficient’s Strategic Partners, led his company through one of the most notable transformations ever witnessed in the corporate world. He is credited with lifting a company famous for digital publishing off of the desktop and into the cloud, then selling online subscriptions to Adobe’s market-dominant products such as InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop so customers could reach into that cloud.

Criticism rained hard on Narayen for doing this, in part because cloud computing was still elbowing its way into contemporary corporate language and people were uncertain whether the technology was secure enough to serve the marketplace. Today, however, Adobe is considered a global leader in digital marketing and a standard-bearer in the march toward digital transformation.

Recently, Narayen addressed transformation in comments for the Australian Financial Review while visiting Sydney for an Adobe symposium. In the sprawling land Down Under, the federal government raised transformation’s profile by creating a Digital Transformation Office that will oversee co-ordination and development of that country’s digitally delivered government services.

On this side of the Pacific, a development of such magnitude suggests Australia’s cloud is well above America’s, perhaps hovering somewhere near the stratosphere. In fact, the two markets remain at the same altitude, and attitude. For example, a recent survey found that 89 percent of large and medium-size retailers in Australia and 37 percent of small retailers believe they offer good customer service but had no means of measuring that perception beyond charting unsolicited customer feedback.

Narayen says that belief inflicts the boards of too many retailers worldwide and trickles down throughout their organizations to slow transformation’s progress.

“A great board is one that spends disproportionate amounts of time with management, taking active steps to understand the opportunities and challenges facing the business,” he told Financial Review. “With the world increasingly moving to digital and businesses implementing digital strategies, boards also need to boost their digital capabilities to be better strategic advisers to the business.”

In the United States, that will be tough when IT budgets are expected to rise no more than 1 percent higher this year over last, putting tech staffs in a difficult position to shepherd transformation at the legacy level.

At Adobe, “our digital transformation has been the foundation for growing our business, opening new doors to customer engagement and delivery, and also disrupting and leading many of the categories we operate in,” Narayen said. “Our board has been involved in our transformation strategy from day one and continues to be supportive.”

Probably every corporate board in the world is pondering digital transformation and desires Adobe-level results, Narayen said. The first step in that direction requires accepting digital’s dominance in the marketplace.

“Every multi-year strategic business plan must include digital thinking,” he said. “It’s not an option to ignore it.”

The next step requires boards to make a convincing argument for transformation and its overarching purpose.

“As an organization, we have to be clear why the digital transformation is going to be better for customers,” Narayen added.