Adobe Summit: Three Key Updates

The official kick off of Adobe Summit yesterday saw over 12,0000 digital marketing experts make their way to The Venetian and Palazzo Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada. We are here to hear from the company that has catapulted itself to a position as leader in digital marketing and experience management technology and thought leadership since it initially moved into the space following the acquisition of Omniture in 2009.

The Summit opening session was introduced by Adobe CEO, Shantanu Narayen. He touched on the well-documented challenges marketers face today; proliferation of channels/devices, complex data management, rapidly changing and unpredictable consumer habits, disruptive technologies etc., that are putting pressure on brands around the world. He talked about the fear that businesses have of being left behind, the pressure to transform.

Shantanu then talked about Adobe’s own transformation. He reminded the audience that although Adobe have always had good penetration with their creative and document cloud products, they still had to transform their offering almost a decade ago due to not being considered important by senior business executives. Of course, many brands were using their products, but executives didn’t think of Adobe as a strategic partner; leading them to challenge themselves as to how they could change that. Their answer is what we see today – that Adobe moved from just focusing on the production of content, to its use across marketing channels and the measurement of its effectiveness.

Introducing the Adobe Experience Cloud

With that he made the announcement that they have launched a new offering to the market: Adobe Experience Cloud. The Experience Cloud is made up from five clouds:

Adobe Analytics Cloud
The Adobe Analytics Cloud includes the Adobe Analytics and Adobe Audience Manager solutions. The newly positioned Analytics Cloud has three key objectives; to enable more precise audience creation; create instant, actionable insights; and to provide meaningful measurement. They demonstrated some nifty new product features including the ability to use SMS to request more detail on Analytics reports and a new virtual assistant within Analytics Workspace that uses Adobe Sensei’s Artificial Intelligence to pre-empt spikes and dips in data and analyze anomalies instantly for users.

Adobe Advertising Cloud
This Cloud is run by Brett Wilson, previously CEO of Adobe’s recent acquisition, TubeMogul. It is made up of three solutions within Adobe Media Optimizer; DSP, Search and DCO. The Advertising Cloud provides all the functionality required for planning, buying, measuring and optimizing advertising in one place. They demonstrated how the platform enabled instant purchase of linear TV Advertising which generated a wave of gasps and applaud from the audience.

Adobe Marketing Cloud
The Adobe Marketing Cloud is made up of the other solutions you are likely already familiar with; Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Campaign, Adobe Primetime and Adobe Target.

These three clouds then seamlessly integrate with the existing Adobe Document Cloud and Adobe Creative Cloud, which all now sit under the Adobe Experience Cloud.

Adobe and Microsoft

Another key update came from Adobe CTO, Abhay Parasnis and Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President at Microsoft. Their partnership has been announced and promoted already but today they provided a little more detail on exactly what the partnership has achieved so far. They promoted three key integrations; Adobe Campaign and Microsoft Dynamics; Adobe Audience Manager and Power BI; and Adobe Experience Manager and Azure.

“Today’s customers have high standards when it comes to brand interactions. Enterprise companies must deliver exceptional experiences at scale or risk losing customers to competitors,” said Abhay Parasnis. “Bringing together Adobe’s and Microsoft’s sales, marketing and customer intelligence solutions enables brands to better understand and engage with their customers across all touch points.”

“We believe the combined power of our technologies will allow enterprise businesses to harness their data in new ways, unlocking critical business insights and actionable intelligence,” said Scott Guthrie. “Together, we are delivering compelling and personalized experiences that will drive brand loyalty and growth.”

Adobe Sensei

Last but by no means least, Adobe provided updates on their Artificial Intelligence product; Adobe Sensei. Adobe said Sensei has three primary intelligence initiatives; Computational Creativity; Experience Intelligence; and Understanding Content. These three areas have a huge range of applications, as seen from this photo shared by Mark Polly (@markapolly)