Adobe Summit has a wildly popular session called Sneaks hosted by Steve Hammond, senior director of strategy and innovation for Adobe. At this session, attendees are given the chance to preview some of the research and development work going on behind the scenes with brief overviews or “sneaks.” This year, Sneaks focused on the transformative power of artificial intelligence (AI).

Leslie Jones

To stir things up, this session has a co-host, and this year, the co-host was SNL regular and Winter Olympic guest commentator, Leslie Jones. Jones was able to lighten the mood by getting excited about the cool demonstrations and even going so far as calling several sneaks “hashtag dope.” Of course, she was able to help keep those who were presenting grounded, just in case they were not nervous enough already.
Unlike the other keynotes that were live-streamed, Sneaks is a session exclusive to those attending Summit in person. I have compiled three sneaks that I liked and share them below. Tell me what you think, are these features you would like to see in the Adobe solution in the next 6-9 months?

Sneak One: Video Ad with Artificial Intelligence

The first sneak I thought would be a key inclusion was the “Video Ad AI” presented by Vishy Swaminathan, from the Big Data Lab. This is a feature that leverages the power of Sensei to provide the opportunity to improve video performance. It uses the AI of Sensei’s predictive performance modeling and recommendations capabilities.
This was demonstrated by taking a video spot intended for several diverse social media platforms. Upon upload, the video is tagged for benchmarking via artificial intelligence, and then using additional artificial intelligence, it is assessed against past performance of similar content to generate an effectiveness score. The recommendations engine is then used to improve the effectiveness score through such changes as length or flow. The video may be compared to the original and edited further through Adobe Premiere Pro CC.
https://youtu.be/5hRl7eJ-r94

Sneak Two: Perfect Path

The next sneak I really liked was Perfect Path. The idea behind “Perfect Path” is to leverage Adobe Sensei to assist marketers in determining the most effective user journey for users. Through the use of AI, Sensei can assess the data of all your user journey and begin to analyze and suggest uniquely tailored journeys based on all historical patterns and behaviors. Sensei automatically creates a graphical interactive map or “experience graph” for every possible customer journey, objectives and target audiences. Thus creating the “Perfect Path.”
https://youtu.be/axN_pR_c7pE

Sneak Three: Launch It

The last sneak that caught my attention was AI-driven tag management analysis. Tag management allows content to be organized and measured for its effectiveness. The grueling task of analysis and strategic planning that goes into this current manual process is on par with getting your teeth cleaned or a cavity filled: important but something only done when required.
“Launch It” takes advantage of Sensei’s artifical intelligence and natural language processing to revolutionize tag management. Through this feature, you simply enter a URL to be scanned, and it will subsequently scan and inspect all content elements. From this scan, using the Sensei recommendation engine, an optimal tagging structure will be suggested. Since it has captured all the data in order to make the suggestion, it also can be run to implement the suggestions. This automates the tagging of content, which represents a significant achievement as now content is tagged. Reducing tasks that may take days, weeks or even months is now completed in minutes or hours.
https://youtu.be/MLHreLxC3KI

Conclusion

The obvious theme was Adobe Sensei and the power of artificial intelligence. It is not just for Hollywood or an abstraction; it is here in many different forms.
What of these three features would you be most interested in? How would it change the way you work?

One the key struggles that most business are struggling with is the creating an experience that is consistent across all channels. In this 2018 Adobe Summit session Haresh Kumar and Nick Whittenburg from Adobe lay the ground work for how Adobe cloud solutions allow your business to achieve a fluid experience across mobile journeys.
As users are adopting new and emerging channels, they are moving from device to device and channel to channel. The ability to seamlessly deliver consistent experiences across all these channels is complex and challenging. The “Secret Agent” ad is a great way to demonstrate how the disparate systems that happen as a business has data in siloes across various legacy and emerging systems impacts our users.
 
https://youtu.be/6RH-Y0RuHb4
The main ideas from this session were split between two key ideas:

1. Connected experience drives brand engagement.
2. Architect content for reuse across channels.

Connected experience drives brand engagement.

The connected experience is so much more than just web site. Since the inception of the Internet of Things (IoT) the ability to consume content an any number of devices has grown exponentially in the past ten years. As of last year, more than 50% of internet traffic comes from devices other than computers.
Consumers are not only connecting through many different devices, but they require content be contextual and personalized. Users found the following aspects in their experience to be unacceptable :

• 44% — The content was poorly written or too wordy.
• 42% — The content is not relevant to me or my situation.
• 33% — The experiences is poorly designed.
• 29% — The experience is not optimized for my device.
• 26% — The content is too personalized to where it is creepy.
• 24% — Content that is old or stale.
• 16% — The experience lacks rich media or images.

Two-thirds of users would not purchase from a brand if any of the annoying aspects where present in their experience.
These user are not just experiencing brand on a single device either, more 55% are either constantly or frequently on multiple devices versus the 27% who are sometimes or the 19% who do so rarely or never.

Customers are engaging on multiple channels throughout the purchase process as shown in this chart.

Architect content for reuse across channels

Content consumption is rapidly changing. This is being driven via new formats like; voice, VR, AR and 3D. And consumed via new channels like Voice IoT, chatbots, connected cars, and wearables, as well as, more mature channels like social media, customer support and the website.
To meet this challenges, content architecture must be fluid. The fluid experience is optimally delivered experiences across a wide range of touch points and formats including headless. The experience is multi-screen, multi-channel, adaptable and independent of form factor.
This spans:

• Digital
• Mobile & native
• Screens
• Off-site digital
• Field Sales
• Chat & voice
• Wearables
• IOT
• Anywhere commerce

The fluid experience is the foundation for hybrid delivery. This architecture is based on three core features of the Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) that provide the ability to ensure this fluid experience:

• Content Fragments — This concept calls for the design, creation, curation and use of page-independent editorial content with embedded or associated media.
• Experience Fragments — The group of components with layout that live independently.
• Content Services — This is the zero-code environment with access content from AEM to deliver to any channel.

Content Fragments

Content fragments are created and managed as page-independent assets. They allow the creation of  channel-neutral content, together with channel-specific variations.
Content fragments are:

• Editorial Content
  • Text written by copy writers
  • Elements, paragraphs & variations
• Mixed Media
  • Images in paragraph sequence
  • Images more strictly curated and relevant than with associate collections
• Summarization
  • Goal-based shortening of text
  • Editorial goals achieved with AI assistance

This is an example of the content fragment in practice.

Experience Fragments

Experience fragments are group of components that may include content and layout that can be referenced within pages.
Experience fragments are:

• part of an experience that in itself makes sense.
• one or multiple components with a layout within a paragraph system.
• may be combined with other Experience Fragments to a complete experience/page.
• may be reused, reordered and resized across pages.
• may have different variations and may share content and / or components.
• is based on a template to define structure and components.

This is an example of the experience fragment in practice.

Content Services

This is the zero-code environment where content is independent of layout and repository allowing delivery to any channel.
Content Services are:

• Channel agnostic reuse of content that may be in Assets or part of a Sites project
• Out of the box, extensible content models
• Automatically generated service endpoints

Through this model your content can no be repurposed without recreation. To fully realize this level of content actualization requires that there be an effect content strategy that take into account all the potential channels.

Conclusions

Through the use of the key features of Content and Experience Fragments paired with Content Services as the generate consistent content across many channels is the goal of the fluid experience.
Learn how Perficient Digital can help your organization realize the power of the fluid experience using Adobe solutions.
 
 

It is fun to see the new features of a well used product. The team of Elliot Sedegah and Joshua Ramirez did the classic “dog & pony” show featuring what is new in the Adobe Experience Manager Assets. In this 2018 Adobe Summit session, the Adobe product team highlighted the 10 feature areas that ensure you are getting the most out of your Experience Manager Assets investments.

1. User Experience
   • Search and view assets from Adobe Experience Manager or Creative Cloud
   • Better collaboration with commenting on version and window shade version comparisons
   • Improved lazy load on search results
2. Metadata
   • Addition of cascading metadata
   • More search facets by default
3. Smart Tags
   • The ability to use proprietary data to train smart tags with Adobe Sensei
4. Stock
   • Now the use with any design or authoring app that lets you import photos, illustrations, graphics, video assets.
5. Asset Link
   • The ability to drag and drop assets from search.
   • Additional a new seamless check-out and check-in interface.
6. Ecosystem: Local Marketing
   • Expansion of partner app ecosystem within the Stock interface
   • Specific example of ability for more dynamic interaction with the Distributed Marketing Templates via a third-party partner.
   • Stock templates are available from within the New Document dialog boxes in Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign.
7. Smart Crop
   • The expansion of the smart crop capabilities to include the new smart swatch.
8. 360 & VR Experiences
   • Ability to add panoramic view into experience fragments
   • Ability to add Virtual Reality experience into a fragment
9. Interactive Media
   • Ability to include more interactive media directly into Stock and Asset
10. 3D Experiences
    • Ability to manipulate 3D assets by combining assets
    • Ability to incorporate 3D experiences into fragments

There are great new features, as well as some subtle incremental changes, all intended to ease the work of designers. In 2017, when Adobe conducted the State of Creativity in Business study, respondents were asked, “How creatives are solving for the increase in content design and production?” A whopping 69% answered. “Using more or different creative tools.” The need for greater productivity is clearly the goal in some of this releases enhancements.
For the more visual here is a quick video that shows some of these improvements in action.

Silicon Labs Director of Corporate Marketing. Kamran Shah provided insights on how Silicon Labs used Adobe Experience Cloud to identify and covert high-value customers. In this 2018 Adobe Summit session he outlined three data-driven strategies to identify, prioritize, and optimize the high-value customer journey with the Adobe Experience Cloud.
This is achieved through moving beyond the analysis paralysis that often comes from information overload. To achieve success this effort was distilled into three tracks. First set goals, then analyze the customer journey and finally personalize.

Set Goals

First, Silicon Labs focused on tying the customer journey to business objectives. They developed their customer journey in order to ensure that they understood the different phases. From this a set of clear business objects were established. Objectives such as: increase number of wins, improve customer insight, and several others shown in the figure.

There was also effort given to better page design and aligning performance monitoring with the customer journey. Something as straight forward as the change from tabbed interface to a more direct navigation with scrolling yielded a 15% improvement to performance.

Analyze

Next, they went to work on tagging, analyzing and segment the content and user journey. During this process the emphasis was on tagging. A holistic strategy for tagging was developed and all key content in Adobe Experience Manager was tagged.

Once the tagging strategy was in place another level of analysis was performed on the analytics. This focused on conversion indicators and the creation of cohorts.
Here is the high level architecture of the Adobe solutions working to achieve the necessary analysis and customer experience.

Silicon Labs Tag Architecture

Personalization

Finally, personalization was built based on experience segments. Using the power of Adobe Target automate, the solution auto allocated traffic as the tests matured. It generated recommendations and generated automated offers on each visit as the customer interacted within the site. The power of advancements within the Adobe Cloud Platform leveraging the artificial intelligence capabilities of Adobe Sensei allowed Silicon labs to analyze more than personalization 60 scenarios, something that would have take a team months or years to achieve. With Sensei this was accomplished with a 1/4 time marketing resource.
Has your organization moved past analysis paralysis to achieve success leveraging the native power of Adobe Cloud? Perficient Digital can help transform your customer journey and experience.
 

How do we capture the essence of the Adobe Experience Cloud? This question is what Adobe’s Jim Rivera and Klaasjan Tukker, both directors of product management, looked to accomplish in a recent 2018 Adobe Summit session.

Where do we start?

High-level overview of the Adobe Cloud Platform.

Next Steps

The next step is the need for disparate data to be able to communicate to each other. The solution for this issue is the introduction of the Experience Data Model (XDM). Since it’s introduction, there are now more than 50 schemes to create a common semantic definition. This is part of an open-source standards-based with extensible evolving within an ecosystem. The goal is to continue to grow with partners through open source.
Now that we have data from multiple sources, there is the need for data governance and addressing GDPR. Ultimately, with all this data sourcing and creating data, this requires the ability to enable consumers to control their own data. The platform provides the three means for delivery data governance.

1. Labeling: classify the datasets appropriately based on your legal and corporate guidelines.
2. Policy Framework: Create data policies to ensure that data is used in accordance to legal and corporate guidelines.
3. Marketer Workflow: At the time of marketing action, data polices take effect providing feedback and guidance.

The Application

With these petabytes of data, the key is to apply Machine Learning to translate this into actionable insights. The goal is to open the ability to apply customer developed or open-source Machine Learning models within Platform.
There are three personas that Adobe Platforms is targeting to accelerate time-to-insights:

1. Data Scientists-delivers custom insights
2. Citizens Data Scientists-leverages pre-built models
3. Marketers-leverages insights.

There are three machine learning-based services within the Platform ecosystem

1. Ready-to use: Adobe developed model that require no training or configuration.
2. 2. Configurable: Adobe developed a model that allow customer configuration and may require training.
3. Custom: a model developed by a customer or partner

The newly announced Adobe Data Science Workspace is the place to derive these machine learning services.

End Goal

In the end, the goal of all of this activity is for driving the development and enrichment of the Unified Profile. This provides a view of the whole person. It creates a focus of consumer privacy and security, and is a single integrated segmentations experience.
Have you captured the essence of the Adobe Experience Cloud?

Dave Bilbrough spoke to partners at the 2018 Adobe Summit about how Adobe has been transforming experience through the use of enterprise big data within the Adobe cloud platform. As machine learning and artificial intelligence continue to evolve and shape customer experience, leveraging Adobe Cloud Platform to author, import or use pre-built intelligent services based on machine learning and AI technologies is the next technology frontier.

The Opportunity

The opportunity for truly unique data comes from combining data. The complete picture can only be drawn by taking all the data collected through the Adobe Cloud platform and marrying it to the enterprise data. Pulling all the pieces together from enterprise data stores, related to audience activation and campaign orchestration opens new avenues for capturing revenue and engaging users.
To demonstrate the power that this yields, Mr. Bilbourgh provided three case studies to show some of the possibilities from real-world scenarios; two examples from specific implementations with Time-Warner Cable (TWC) and one from T-Mobile. I will address only one of the Time-Warner Cable examples. Read all of the details below:

The Case Example

The case we seek to address is referred to as the “Promo Roll-off” case. This is when a customer has promo offer that has expired, and TWC would like to convert the promo offer into a sale.
The high-level data interaction followed this pattern:
1. The promo data was captured from an internal database and uploaded into Adobe Data Workbench.
2. Data workbench processed the data and forwarded the customer to Adobe Campaign.
3. The web session is brokered by Adobe Experience Manager with component targeting the specific user.
4. Campaign receives the call and executes the business rules and passes offer back to Experience Manager.
5. The user has presented the offer and can choose to act.
Some of the additional considerations were part of the solution:
-Marketing & Product Management define where the targeted interactions point were to be placed.
-Development of custom Experience Manager components to communication with Campaign.
-Campaign team defines and maintains the business rules.
-Experience Manager authors place a custom component on the page and maintains the page.

Results

Through the use of Data Workbench, the power of external data is leveraged to extend the knowledge of the customer and drive unique actionable content to them. The ability to extend this beyond just the inclusion of data, but to expand this to take advantage of Machine Learning or Artificial Intelligence in possible.
Did this case help you? Tell us how!

Microsoft position as a Leader in Gartner’s 2014 Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace has moved to the top.
The latest report released last week shows the Microsoft offering as the leader of the pack. Gartner details the change in position from SharePoint as the social platform to Yammer and Office 365. Gartner also calls out the future roadmap for social within the Microsoft offering to be focused on Yammer and not sharepoint. According to the report Gartner states, “Although Yammer and SharePoint will remain distinct but integrated products, Microsoft will concentrate its future social enhancements exclusively on Yammer, while focusing SharePoint on related capabilities, including document management, portal capabilities, application development, business intelligence and Web content management.”
 

The magic quadrant graphic is published by Gartner, Inc.

As Microsoft continues to blend and expand Yammer capabilities across the platform, they have retired Tags and Notes in SharePoint Online.
Key factor to note is that users can no longer create create or access existing tags or notes. The only option is for SharePoint Online admins to export all existing tags and notes via an archived csv files, from the SharePoint admin center. Also, for those using this feature, the webparts will start showing up blank.

Tags and Note UX in SharePoint 2013

In the past month, Microsoft has added two key new service capabilities to SharePoint Online and Rights Management that provide a more robust secure computing experience.  The first is the introduction of data loss prevention and the second is the improvements in protecting content across all platforms including OS X Support.

Data Loss Prevention

SharePoint Online now provides the ability to perform a legal audit to determine the amount of risk posed by data stored on SharePoint sites and OneDrive, commonly known as data loss prevention or DLP. This capability provides the ability to identifying 51 built-in sensitive information types such as credit cards, passport numbers, and Social Security numbers. Once discovered there is the ability to perform an audit and export a report with suspect content.
There is future capabilities for policy creation that automatically detects sensitive content and applies protection, such as deletion or quarantine for review.
For more information about Using DLP in SharePoint Online, review this TechNet article
For more information about the Using 51 DLP Information Types, review this TechNet article.

Rights Management

The Rights Management platform announced significant enhancements in the support of non-native Office formats.
The current Rights Management platform supports native Office 2010, Office 2013 and Office 365 however does not support anything else. To resolve this issue, there is now a “Share Protected” button. The Share Protected option shares and Office documents via email by sending recipients both an RMS protected version of the Office document and a protected PDF copy of the same file. When sending via the “Share Protected”, the email notifies of document use (or abuse). This provides insight into how the sensitive document is being used as intended.
For more information about the Using Rights Management on SharePoint Library, review this TechNet article.

Conclusion

These new capabilities ensure that sensitive information is securely stored and appropriately enforced through the DLP capabilities. Combined with the “Share Protected” capabilities, these improvements enhance the viability of SharePoint Online as a secure environment for collaboration.