For the first edition of its Digital Marketing Summit in London, Adobe has chosen the charming Battersea Park, right on the South Bank of the Thames, with joggers and tennis players nearby. 1,700+ attendees from 36 different countries gathered for keynote and breakout sessions on digital marketing, digital advertising and digital analytics. I was pretty lucky to attend the first day with a group of vibrant French bloggers.
At Adobe, the Digital Marketing division makes up a total of 1 billion dollars of revenue (25 % of total Adobe revenue), with a 20 % year-over-year growth.
Brad Rencher (@bradrencher), Senior Vice President & General Manager for Digital Marketing at Adobe, was the Master of Ceremony for the morning keynotes. Brad started to explain the theme of the Summit: the Digital Self.
Digital self is the combination of signals that consumers are constantly emitting: read, buy, post, etc... The more we - as customers - interact, the more deposits we make in the system, the more we expect back from brands in terms of relevance and real-time personalization. The power of digital self is small things that bring big meanings. This is the contract that we should hold with consumers. At the end of the day, the consumers will be the judges of how well we do as marketeers.
We keep sending signals on Spotify, Yelp, Linkedin, etc… Signals depict the picture of who we are. Privacy is taking a critical role. Transparency and ability should be provided to customers in order to protect their data. Privacy is a global issue. Adobe is agressively developing best in class solutions around privacy. For instance, the Adobe Tag Management solution has just been enhanced by integrating Evidon technology, so that control can be given to users on how their data is used online.
Personalization remains the focus of what we do in digital marketing.
In Adobe's vision, the Digital Self has gone from academic to actionable, with 3 core elements:
1. Data: at the core of every digital system
2. Content: elements that bring experiences to life
3. Optimization: making content relevant to the end user in milliseconds.
Adobe focuses on 4 main areas for its digital marketing solutions:
1. building personalized experiences
2. managing digital advertising
3. monetization
4. cracking the code on social marketing
Analytics is the basis and living data for all 4 areas, as well as what bring the web to life.
After this introduction, Chris Popple, Managing Director at the Royal Bank of Scotland, shared some very interesting insights on how to better manager customer experience and relationship in the digital world:
1. Combining transactional data with digital touchpoints: each interaction is an opportunity to decide whether this signal should be reused in another channel or not.
2. Making a difference by listening to consumers comments and complaints on social networks
3. Appointing "Journey managers", who own the customer experience from end to end for key patterns.
Regarding the latest innovations, several demos and announcements were made during the morning:
- Adobe Digital Index: tablet devices will generate more web traffic than smartphones by early 2013 and consumers find browsing websites on tablets nearly as engaging as on PCs. You can check out the full report here.
- Adobe CQ Cloud Manager: a Software-as-a-Service application that provides enterprises the ability to easily and quickly launch marketing initiatives in the cloud, as well as deep integration with SiteCatalyst. More info here.
- Discover v3: this new edition provides path analysis on any custom variable.
- Adobe Insight: ROAS by marketing channels, both on and off-line.
- Predictive analytics: acquired in January 2012, Efficient Frontier provides recommandations on how to spend budget on different channels according to budget objectives.
- Adobe Social: creation of a single platform for social advertising, monitoring, management and reporting with Adobe SocialAnalytics + ContextOptional + Efficient Frontier.
- Adobe Cloud Creative Services: all Creative Suite products and new services provided on a service model with 20 GB storage. Enables collaboration with others ; social community around. 49 $ a month. Still able to buy Creative Suite on a traditional lifetime licence model.
- CMO.com European Edition: launched today and available here.
In spite of careful planning and significant investment (100 Mbit/s pipe and 100+ hotspots), the Internet connection was unexpectedly slow during the morning keynotes and the wifi had to be shut down for at leat one hour in order to ensure smooth operation of the demos. It was not planned this way by Adobe, but it was a great moment of realization from the audience on how dependent we have become from the digital world. Later in the day, Arianna Huffington reminded us on how important it is to disconnect from our digital life in order to recharge.
In the breakout sessions in the afternoon, Shar VanBoskirk, Vice President and Principal Analytics at Forrrester, made a strong performance on the theme "How to thrive in the era of digital disruption". She started with a parallel between Henry Ford and Mark Zuckerberg, who have both revolutionized their industries. Disruption has always been part of business, but digital disruption is better, stronger and faster. In this new context, differenciating ideas expire quickly and are easy to replicate.
Marketers need to be customer obsessed: age of manufacturing (1900 – 1960)-> age of distribution (1960 – 1990) -> age of information (1990 – 2010) -> age of the customer (2010 - ?). In the age of the customer, empowered buyers demand a new level of customer obsession. Marketeers must invest in interactive tools to become customer obsessed.
How can you differenciate in the era of digital disruption?
1. shift to a customer focused orientation: thinking customer first instead of channel (search manager, affiliate manager, …). Instead : most loyal customers, new customers, etc… Customers specialists instead of channel manager. Metrics : customer engagement across channels instead of results from channel campaigns
2. prioritise multichannel automation and data support-> central hub & automation for optimization
3. focus you agency partners on the three "I": ideas, interactions and intelligence
4. manage digital employee lifecycles, not just hiring or recruiting. Attract (win top interactive marketers into you organization), Nurture : keep existing talent inspired and loyal, Activate : leverage value from former employees. Igniting an interactive marketer’s life cycle at your firm will encourage current and former employees to help recruit new ones.
After this presentation, I attended a panel on "Privacy vs Personalisation" with André Germinent, New Technology & Innovation team manger at Crédit Agricole, Meme Jacobs Rasmussen, Chief Privacy Officer at Adobe, David Dean, senior partner & managing director at the Boston Consulting Group and Dave Evans, group Manager, Business and Industry, ICO. All participants agreed on the need to be more transparent on how and why personal data is getting collected. While no one wants to be tracked, everyone wants to have a more personalized and relevant experience. Consequently, privacy and personalisation do not have to be necessarily in conflict, as long as we tell people what is going on. There is a huge gap between the perception of value of data between the marketing industry and end users. The latter should be getting more value if they give more personal data. On the Adobe side, privacy management is currently being built in the core of its products. Whatever the regulations, the bigger pressure may come from customers themselves. If nothing is being done regarding privacy, the current 8 % yearly growth of the Internet economy may be at risk in the coming years.
Scott Ulrich, Chief Marketing & Sales Officer at Responsys, keynoted on the “New School of Marketing”. According to him, there are two main types of companies: Acquisition First vs Relationship First. Acquisition First companies are obsessed with first purchase and use digital mainly to drive traffic. This implies cross-channel permission capture, in order to trigger lifecycle programs using web behavior. Automation and optimization become key with this approach.
Arianna Huffington, President and Editor-in-Chief AOL Huffington Post Media Group, performed an unexpected and moving keynote, on the need to learn to disconnect from technology to reconnect to ourselves. Peace of mind is required to be creative, and sleep is required to have peace of mind. Never sleep with your smartphone next to your bed and buy an alarm clock if you need one.
The day ended with a cocktail and a party until late!
- Day One at the Adobe Digital Marketing Summit EMEA 2012 on blogs.adobe.com by Neil Morgan
- Adobe Digital Marketing Summit EMEA: Relationship-First Marketing Goes To Head Of The Class, by Michael Nutley on CMO.com
- Arianna Huffington Keynote at #AdobeSummit on Storify by Gabrielle Laine Peters
- Adobe Digital Marketing Summit - Compte-rendu jour 1, by Fred Cavazza (in French)
- Adobe Digital Marketing Summit - Jour 1 suite et fin, by Fred Cavazza (in French)
