Make Experience Your Business - Adobe Summit 2018
By Natalie Evans
April 6, 2018
Adobe, Adobe Advertising Cloud, Adobe Creative Cloud, Adobe Experience Cloud, Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Sensei, Adobe Summit 2018, Advertising Cloud Creative, Hootsuite, innovation, Shantanu Narayen
The Adobe Summit concluded last week and it is one of the world’s largest digital marketing events. Held in Las Vegas, it attracted over 13,000 people. Since none of our team was able to make their way down to the event this year, I thought a recap of some of the important event takeaways was in order.
The Summit featured more than 200 sessions and labs across eight tracks, including cross-channel marketing, customer experience, data-driven marketing, mobile marketing and more. The sessions offer the latest strategies for bringing together all your data and content into a single place, so you can deliver the ideal experience to every customer, every time.
Shantanu Narayen Chairman, President and CEO of Adobe, kicked off the first keynote session of Adobe Summit, with a simple question: “What do you remember about your last vacation?” strange as it may sound it conveyed his message.
“When you look back at the big moments in your life — your favorite trip, your make-or-break product launch, or the birth of your first child — you might remember some of the details, but it’s the overall experience that stays with you, evoking feelings that create lasting memories, build affinity, and keep us chasing those experiences again,” Shantanu said.
This year Adobe's call to action at the summit was “Make Experience Your Business”, focusing on their Experience Cloud platform; Adobe Sensei along with the launch of Adobe’s Experience League.
“Making experience your business is good for business,” Brad Rencher, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Adobe Experience Cloud, said during the main presentation. “So, if you and your company have not placed it at the top of your agenda, you need to get started — especially if you want to stay in business.”
Adobe's New Innovations
With this message in mind, Adobe introduced new innovations across the Adobe Experience Cloud. Featuring Experience Cloud Profile, which unifies customer data across the enterprise via the company’s Experience Data Models. They also introduced advanced capabilities in Advertising Cloud, Marketing Cloud and Analytics Cloud.
Adobe Advertising Cloud now features Advertising Cloud Creative, which is a self-service platform that expands the company’s Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO) offering by giving marketers control over basic design elements such as advertising copy and assets used in display ads. It also allows the creative assets designed in Adobe Creative Cloud to be automatically available in Adobe Advertising Cloud Creative.
Two new features were unveiled for Adobe Analytics Cloud: Adobe Analytics for streaming audio and Adobe Experience Cloud Device Co-op. Adobe Analytics for streaming audio gives organizations a way to gain insights into online and offline audio including listening behaviors, streaming quality, and monetization opportunities. Adobe Experience Cloud Device Co-op which leverages Adobe Analytics Cloud and Adobe Sensei to aggregate anonymous device data from participating Adobe customers with the goal of enabling organizations to recognize actual consumers, not just devices, across all digital touch points.
New innovations for the Marketing Cloud, included Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Campaign, and Adobe Target. Experience Manager now has new Adobe Sensei–powered content capabilities, which includes intelligent image discovery, tailoring of images for different screen sizes, and automated personalization of content. Native support for Experience Manager in Creative Cloud applications unifies creative and marketer workflows. New features in the campaign included a creative designer that simplifies email creation and email templates pre-built with Adobe Behance. With this, marketers and data scientists can now customize their algorithms in Adobe Target.
Adobe's CTO & EVP, Abhay Parasnis, came to the stage to discuss the increasingly importance of advanced artificial intelligence and the machine learning platform Adobe Sensei, Adobe’s framework for AI.
“AI and machine learning will completely transform enterprises. We are entering an AI-powered world," said Parasnis, who announced Adobe’s plans to open up the Sensei platform to enterprise developers and the broader partner ecosystem.
The company launched Adobe Sensei-powered content capabilities in Experience Manager, including intelligent image discovery, allowing the tailoring of images for different screens and automated personalization of content.
Since technology alone isn’t enough to transform a business. Adobe also introduced Adobe Experience League which is a new customer enablement program that will help customers get the most out of their Adobe Experience Cloud investment, through guided learning. It will provide training materials, one-to-one support from experts, as well as the ability to connect with a thriving community of fellow professionals.
In addition to showing of the latest innovations, the summit featured several keynotes from individuals who have used experiences to transform their businesses, including Virgin Group Founder Richard Branson, Nvidia Founder and CEO Jensen Huang, along with senior executives from Coca-Cola, Facebook, LinkedIn, Tourism Australia and Twitter. Also starring was Leslie Jones of “Saturday Night Live” (SNL), who emceed Adobe Sneaks, the company’s annual showcase of bleeding edge technology from the Adobe Research labs.
Hootsuite Named Partner of the Year
Lastly, Vancouver based company Hootsuite recieved Adobe’s Exchange Partner of the Year Award. Hoostuite, a social media management platform developer, received recognition for its ability to help clients create timely, personalized, multi-channel social media campaigns using the Adobe Cloud platform.
“We’re thrilled to be selected as Adobe’s Exchange Partner of the Year,” said Penny Wilson, CMO of Hootsuite. “Our relationship with Adobe enables our joint customers to create personalized real-time experiences across channels to strategically grow their brand, business, and customer relationships with social—all with an eye toward delivering and measuring true social ROI.”
“This award recognizes Hootsuite’s innovation in bringing the power and value of social to Adobe Experience Cloud customers,” said Amit Ahuja, Vice President, Adobe Experience Cloud Partners and Ecosystem Innovation. “The social data and insights that Hootsuite delivers are powerful, and help our joint customers achieve competitive advantage using our combined solutions. We look forward to continuing to advance our work with Hootsuite in 2018 and beyond.”
Ending Notes
This is one event that I would definitely like to attend next year. So when Rencher, stated “Making experience your business is good for business. Especially if you want to stay in business.” with ever changing technology landscape, we have to go beyond it. Rencher said that organizations “need to transform from the inside out, and that starts with people." Every organization has change agents, he added, who can be found everywhere, from the intern pool to the C-suite. These people have spent a ton of time thinking about the types of experience customers want and need, “but we need to change from experience thinkers to experience makers,” Rencher said. “We need to be customer-obsessed, not customer- centric.” I really thinks this hold truth! Many of us are getting too obsessed with technology that we forget basic human needs. Adobe's call to action this year "Make Experience Your Business” hits the nail right on the head, on how companies should approach their customers and businesses today.
With so many great speakers and session, I highly suggest taking a stroll through the Adobe Summit site.
Natalie Evans
Natalie Evans has over 16-years in the tech industry and currently works as the event coordinator and tech reporter for CMS-Connected, keeping up-to-date on what's happening in and around the Content Management industry.