This week I attended the Adobe Partner Cafe event in San Francisco, where I learned about the transformational visions Adobe has built into their digital experience solutions suite, Adobe Experience Cloud. Adobe Experience Cloud is a new omnichannel term Adobe introduced this year to more broadly serve all the digital marketing solutions they have, including Adobe Marketing Cloud, Adobe Analytics Cloud and Adobe Advertising Cloud, and continue to streamline their idea of digital marketing as an experience.
1. Beyond Mobile and Tablet
While mobile and tablet still play a key role in digital marketing and Adobe’s cloud suites, Adobe is trying to go above and beyond and build their technology to reach all the touch points people encounter. These touch points can be wearable devices like watches, smart home devices or chat bots like Google Home and Amazon Alexa. These touch points overall become Internet of Things (IoT), and are connected and can communicate to each other. How to simplify content creation and delivery, and have a consistent experience throughout the customer journey become very important.
Hence why Adobe created Content Services in Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) 6.3 and it enables developers to get content from AEM easily without deep knowledge of the repository technology stacks. For example, you just checked in a nice hotel room that’s equipped with Amazon Alexa (which I heard will be common soon). There’s a basketball game going on and you don’t bother to turn on the TV – you simply ask Alexa what the latest score is. While Alexa is smart enough to tell you the score, a personalized campaign offer stored in AEM can be exposed as a json through Content Services, and sent to Alexa, so she can tell you this exciting offer as well.
2. Your Brand’s Content + Livefyre (User-generated Content) = Compelling Connected Experiences
Social media provides a great platform for marketers to grow conversations about their brand, business or product. It’s fast, often in real-time. It’s interactive. It’s connected. Customers and users can also get on social media to speak their minds, provide feedback and have discussions with the business. The user-generated content enriches the customer experience and yields higher customer engagement.
With Adobe’s acquisition of Livefyre, which was a social media and marketing-focused technology company, in May 2016, it brought the ability to directly access user-generated content (UGC) in AEM assets, manage and publish it to the live site and much more. Now, marketers can integrate real-time social experiences into their content strategy, and create compelling connected experiences.
3. Fluid Experience
When customer touch points increase, the amount and type of content that needs to be managed also increases. Adobe Experience Cloud enables marketers to provide a fluid experience to end users for all touch points. That means the content should not only be easily exposed and transmitted between connected devices, but also should be optimized for each owned, earned and paid channel.
In AEM 6.3, marketers can create variations of Experience Fragments for each touch point. There can be one for Pinterest, one for Facebook, or one for mobile, one for desktop… or one for any unique experience you want to create. The Experience Fragments essentially serve as “mini site” and are managed in one location. And each component inside the Experience Fragment can be integrated with Adobe Target and Adobe Campaign to create a personalized and optimized experience for the customer.
4. Adobe Sensei: Adobe’s Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Technology
If you have not heard, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning have been named one of the top 10 trends that will transform digital marketing in 2017 by Forbes. Almost all the major technology companies are building their AI products or solutions, including Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft. The compelling part of AI and machine learning is that they have such powerful memory and calculation capabilities and can handle huge amounts of data. Humans working with AI machines may be the new normal in the near future. Even though AI and machine learning technology may be still be in its infancy, I think they have an unimaginable future and we’ll see substantial growth.
Adobe Sensei is the artificial intelligence and machine learning technology behind Adobe cloud products. In Adobe Creative Cloud, Adobe Sensei re-creates elements in photos where they didn’t exist by studying nearby pixels. In Adobe Document Cloud, it transforms paper into editable digital documents. In Adobe Marketing Cloud, it creates smart tags for photo assets uploaded to AEM and tells you what accuracy are those tags; it summarizes text inside content fragment so you can create optimized experience for each touch point.
5. Adobe I/O: Building a Brighter and Better Foundation for Digital Marketing Ecosystem
When Adobe made PDF file specification available to the public decades ago, a new standard was formed in the industry. It made electronic documentation clean and clear.
Adobe is looking to “wow” the world again with new standards and specifications for digital marketing, and that’s Adobe I/O. It provides developers and the community to learn and incorporate Adobe technologies into their applications and experiences. It’s data-driven, real-time and extensible. And they are the same technologies Adobe used to build their featured cloud products like creative cloud, document cloud and marketing cloud. Its goal is to define standard schemas for the whole ecosystem.
In summary, the Adobe Partner Cafe was successful and inspirational. It was a great opportunity to talk to managers and directors at Adobe directly, get a glimpse of what Adobe is focus and working on, network with other partners, provide the feedbacks and discuss how to make the Adobe Experience Cloud better for everyone.
