Highlights of Adobe’s Marketing Summit 2017 in Las Vegas

Recently at the Venetian in Las Vegas, Adobe employees, partners, customers, press and analysts gathered for the annual digital marketing conference, Adobe Summit 2017. With over 250 sessions this year, the event drew over 12,000 attendees—a 20% increase over last year’s participation—including more than 120 sponsors and 1,500+ partners.

The event took place over the course of three jam-packed days with a little something for everyone in attendance. Keynotes and break-out session topics ranged from cross-channel marketing, to customer experience, data-driven marketing, integrated marketing, mobile marketing, and programmatic advertising.

Day One – Annoucements

The first day of the Summit consisted of chiefly product-related announcements and news. Analysts were invited to a breakfast briefing with Suresh Vittal, VP of Platform and Products at Adobe. Vittal opened the breakfast with an overview of Adobe’s strategy. In recent years, Adobe has been strongly focused on cross-cloud and cross-solution integrations. Integration and innovation are key components of Adobe’s strategy. “Experience is the key differentiator across our organization,” explained Vittal. Adobe expects to continue to be multi-cloud in strategy going into the future. Vittal also revealed new product announcements and integrations including, but not limited to, the following:

• The Adobe Advertising Cloud was announced, which Adobe is positioning as the industry’s first end-to-end platform for managing advertising across traditional TV and digital formats. The platform combines capabilities from Adobe Media Optimizer (AMO) and TubeMogul (an advertising software platform recently acquired by Adobe for approximately $540 Million). Adobe stated that its Advertising Cloud will simplify the delivery of video, display, and search advertising across channels and screens.
• Adobe announced new capabilities for their internally-developed artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning framework and intelligent services, Adobe Sensei. These capabilities include simplifying data analysis by helping users to distinguish relevant insights and easily identify inconsistencies within the data (Enhanced Anomaly Detection). In addition, new AI capabilities help users quickly identify and recommend relevant messages or offers to customers (Auto-Target).
• The Adobe Experience Cloud was also announced, which consists of the Marketing, Advertising, and Analytics Clouds. The Experience Cloud is built on the Adobe Cloud Platform, leveraging Adobe Sensei’s machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities in order to help deliver the optimum customer experience through personalization and providing enterprises with a better understanding of their customer.  The Adobe Creative Cloud and Document Cloud for enterprises are also integrated within the Experience Cloud.

• Adobe’s growing and critical partner network resulted in new integrations, such as Adobe Campaign with Microsoft Dynamics 365, which will allow users to more easily synchronize their contacts with Campaign. In addition, Adobe announced the Analytics Cloud integration with Microsoft Power BI which will allow users to dive into and visualize their data.

Day Two – Celebrity Day

Day two of the Summit, also known as “celebrity day,” focused predominantly on stories about how enterprises are using Adobe’s products to deliver experiences and how those experiences can create an emotional response. During the general session, attendees heard stories from Adobe customers such as Pam EL, the CMO from the NBA, and David Fischer, the VP of Business & Marketing Partnerships at Facebook. Adobe also brought in guest stars, magicians Penn and Teller, Super bowl MVP Peyton Manning, and American actor Ryan Gosling to tell their stories of how they created their own brand and how they connect emotionally with their fans.

Day two ended with Adobe’s highly anticipated “Summit Sneaks” session hosted by American comedian and actress Kate McKinnon, most recognized for her work on Saturday Night Live. This was a lighthearted and unscripted session where Adobe innovation lab members, including engineers and specialists, went on the main stage to showcase their new ideas. Some of the ideas demonstrated during the session included involving personalized advertising in virtual reality (VR) where users would see relevant ads while using their VR headset, to artificial intelligence and customer journey mapping.

InfoTrends’ Opinion

It is clear from the announcements during this year’s Summit that Adobe is largely focused on cross-cloud and cross-solution integrations and will continue to implement this strategy going into the future. Adobe’s objective is to provide an all-encompassing platform solution to the market that enables enterprises to manage all aspects of customer engagement and customer experience (CX). The announcements and breakout sessions during the Summit demonstrate that Adobe has taken a further step toward achieving that goal.

Adobe announcements around new integrations and capabilities for Campaign—such as email personalization at scale, and integration with Microsoft Dynamics 365—show how Adobe’s solutions are moving toward a one-to-one personalized experience. We expect campaign management will further evolve from targeting of specific consumer segments to an individualized customer journey.

Overall, it was a great event and a great experience. We look forward to next year’s Summit!

Ashley Bilko

Consultant

InfoTrends, a division of Keypoint Intelligence, tracks developments in customer communications, including with personalized marketing communications and technologies. We will soon be launching our 2017 annual global business and consumer research for personalized marketing communications. For more information on how to influence the development of these surveys and to gain access to the results, contact Deanna Flanick today at deanna.flanick@keypointintelligence.com!