I’m here with a variety of Perficient folks from our User Experience and Adobe practices.  Their message this year is:

Digital has reinvented marketing. Summit helps marketers reinvent themselves. Join us and get the innovative strategies, expert insights, and hands-on experience you need to thrive in a world where everything is digital.

Which isn’t bad considering how much I see changing in the consumer world and Adobe’s focus there.
Brad Rencher, Senior VP of Digital Marketing, kicked off the keynote.
Stats

• 8 of top retailer
• 5 of top media company
• 9 of 10 of commercial banks
• 64% of Fortune 50
• 5 of 5 top automakers
• 6,500 people are at the conference
• From 33 countries
• Every tweet during the Kickstarter conference will give $5 to Kickstarter’s Scratch Junior project

Fitbit, Uber, Nest, and others are disrupting the consumer world and are forcing marketers to change how they work.  How are trends shaping the industry?

• Get on a smartphone, take a picture of a product, expect it to arrive in two days
• With friends, want to split the tab by clinking them together to exchange the funds.
• Land in Salt Lake City, checkin to hotel in the cab, receive a room number, pass the front desk and use my smartphone to open the door

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These shift are forcing enterprise level change.  Enterprises are bringing marketers into these changes.  This has created a fantastic opportnity to reinvent marketing.

Shantanu Narayen – CEO of Adobe

What is it like to be a senior executive today?  Every day there is a new something that’s trending. You could spend all of your time chasing every new trend.  The frenetic pace can overwhelm. But really, there’s one thing at the center of the business.  We all recognize a bad experience when we see it.  We all expect an updated web site that support mobiles. We don’t want a special on something we just bought when we visit that site.
Adobe wants to focus on the real time enterprise.  It’s the central nervous system that runs a business.  That’s driving new partnerships and product development.  But this doesn’t obviate the need for creativity which stands at the core of Adobe’s root.  Adobe wants to change the world through digital experiences.  Shantanu focused on the coming together of their creative and marketing clouds to help solve these problems.
Get past the buzz words and focus on the great customer experience.
Keyword: Reinvent  – already seen it 10 times and the conference is just starting.

Partner Announcement:  Adobe and SAP strike reseller agreement to tackle enterprise customer engagement

Dr Vishal Sikka came by to talk about the announcement.
It’s not your father’s SAP anymore.  Yes, they are a leading business and analytics company but they are building the next generation cloud. It’s all powered by the in memory database called Hana.  It’s the fastest database in the world.  All the data is dead unless there is a thread connecting it.  When you combine Hana that has a company’s customer information with the Adobe Marketing Cloud you bring together the data that drives a great customer experience.
This partnership guarantees that you can integrate Hana and the Adobe Marketing Cloud.  Given the need to craft a unique user experience based on what you truly know about a customer.

Unlearn Marketing

If you got rid of every marketing process, technology, or tool?  What would you do?  You would focus on the customer. The problem is that many processes are the end result rather than a means to an end with the customer.
Quote: Today we are laboring under decades of backwards compatibility needs because of analog marketing
Quote: Too often we spend a large amount of our time just supporting current patchwork systems
The Adobe Marketing clouds is being built to breakdown silos. The unified vision will continue to move the Marketing Cloud forward.
The cloud has six components

1. Analytics
2. Campaign
3. Experience Manager
4. Media Optimizer
5. Social
6. Targer

Every year 18 billion transactions are served up by the cloud.  The platform has a full set of API. (note the present tense).
How do you accelerate?  The next generation of the Marketing Cloud brings new capabilities

1. Profile Management – one common profile across the entire cloud and across solutions.  The centralized profile lets you bring together all information.  It lets you deliver a better experience. It was the number on ask from customers on the Marketing Cloud
2. Asset Sharing- One core service makes assets available across the entire cloud.  You can build campaign delivery on it. You can deliver web content from it.  You can share that content across the company.  Go to market faster, approve assets faster.
3. Marketing Mix Planning – leverage advanced econometric modeling to understand which marketing tactics are the most effective and what you should budget for in specific tactics.
4. Contextual Activation – This includes activation, context, and profile matching for the ability to identify and target a customer
5. Integration
6. Collaboration
7. User Management and Security
8. Tag Management – activation is a huge challenge for marketers. It’s accomplished by tags.  An average site has dozens and dozens of tags.  With core services you receive tag management. It gives you one common framework to manage tags.  Example, turn on live chat when a customer’s cart passes a certain $ threshold.  This will be a core part of the solution, not a service you have to pay extra for

Demo

• Customer starts at facebook and his feed takes him to a social site for the Brand. (REI was the brand used)
• They click from the social site (Adobe Social) to a site to buy a product.
• Marketer gets
  • Mobile
  • Region
  • the fact that it’s a social referal
  • Phone
  • city = Salt Lake
• Showed the Marketing Cloud dashboard
  • Let’s you see audiences and filter by things like location, facebook, etc.
  • The graphics are nice as they show cross-sections
• Back to the customer who returns in a few days
  • lands on offer page
  • System puts the customer into the fitness and technology audience because of how they responded
  • by looking at fitbit, they update the profile even further
  • When the user authenticates, that user becomes a person
    • Now have the original anonymous values
    • But now have average order value, name, birthday, REI member #, etc.
• If customer doesn’t complete the transaction, the marketer can capture that info and share it with Adobe Campaign
  • generate a nice target email to capture attention and bring them back to the site
• This also brings continuity of experience across channels like mobile and the users laptop
  • Can also extend to an in-store experience