Today, Adobe kicked off its annual Adobe Summit conference for digital marketing. This is an important year for Adobe as many of its competitors are trying to jump ahead of Adobe in this space. Adobe has excellent products and excellent vision, but still recognizes the need to reinvent their products for the evolving digital marketing landscape.
Brad Rencher, Adobe’s SVP for Marketing Cloud, made the argument to more than 7,000 people attending this year’s conference that customer experience is now the key part of your brand.
Brad Rencher
This makes Digital Marketing the epicenter of your digital transformation efforts. Of course, Adobe is at the epicenter for many brands and wants to be the epicenter of more customers.
Shantanu Narayen, Adobe’s CEO, talked about Changing the World Through Digital Experiences. Marketing is on a reinvention journey but fundamentals of marketing are not changing. The art of marketing creative is still a key pat of the equation. Science in the form of data analysis, behavior analytics, etc have contributed to elevating marketing to a new level. Real-time has impacted the enterprise is completely new and different ways.
This has led to the era of “Your Product is Marketing”, according to Shantanu. So now, you have to ask broader questions about your products and look at new ways to enhance the customer experience. This has impacted Adobe too and they are looking at how to enhance their own products into a unified experience through the Marketing Cloud.
Brad came back onstage to talk about consumer expectations around being consistency and continuous. The customer experience is the brand and marketing has to move beyond just marketing. Marketing has to take on the many customer experiences your brand has and make them consistent and continuous.
Coca Cola talked about their mission is to create happiness experiences for their customers. Their marketing efforts are not just about the logo, the colors, or even the product. By creating these happiness experiences they keep consumers connected to the brand. As an example, they created a “hug machine” for finals week at a college campus. When a student hugged the machine, they received a Coke in return. It was a fun and creative way to help students relieve stress and connect to the Coca Cola brand.
One way Adobe is developing a unified experience is through the Marketing Cloud. Adobe follows these these principles when looking at the Marketing Cloud:
- Comprehensive
- Integrated across channels both online and offline
- Actionable for both data and content
Brad fired off a bunch of announcements that will detailed out throughout the week at Adobe Summit. Briefly, here are some of those announcements that I could capture as Brad talked:
- Adobe Analytics announced Customer Intelligence (integrate customer data) and Predictive Analytics.
- Experience Manager is the backbone of content in the Marketing Cloud. AEM Assets provides asset management in a Saas environment. Adobe is also delivering a pre-built AEM to get smaller companies and departments running quickly.
- Campaign has been integrated across all the Marketing Cloud solutions. They also greatly enhanced the email marketing components of Campaign
- Target will deliver personalization beyond just web and mobile and into IoT.
- Social is mobile enabled so you can publish on the go.
- Media Optimizer has been rebuilt to be more programmatic.
Brad announced two new solutions:
- Adobe Prime Time – this puts the TV experience on any screen. Marketers can track usage. There is also continuous delivery from mobile to desktop to TV.
- Adobe Audience Manager connects audiences to programmatic features of the cloud and integrates across the Adobe Core Services.
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