The EMEA version of the Adobe Summit started this morning at ExCeL London, a conference center based in the Docklands. This year's ediition gathered 2,500+ attendees from 38 different countries, a 40 % increase compared with last year's.
Brad Rencher, General Manager at Adobe Marketing, started the morning keynotes title "The Last Millisecond". According to Brad, Digital Marketing is becoming incredibly complex and fast. Digital Marketers are being asked to be doing more with more data. Ultimately there is more pressure on Digital Marketing. At the same time, customers expectations are changing every day. While 3-5 days shipping used to be acceptable for E-commerce, the new customer generation is expecting same-day delivery.
As a baseball fan, Brad Rencher explained that when Brad explained that from the moment a pitcher throws the ball, the batter has no more than 250 milliseconds to react and hit the ball cleanly. The same thing happens with digital marketing. Digital Marketers need to deliver on the last millisecond:
1. Listen to signals (behavorial information, third party information, entreprise data, point of sales systems, CRM systems, social data)
2. Predict behavior based on data
3. Assemble the data (pictures, pricing, product information, etc...)
4. Deliver on different screens and platforms according to the device being used by the user
All of this needs to be done in under 300 milliseconds every time a customer is taking a decision on a web site.
Adobe is focused on delivering this experience. Silos slows down digital marketers. Two hurdles : 1. systems in silos and 2. organization. Content supply chain has to be optimized. What needs to be done is not more tools, but existing tools that work together. Adobe is focused on integrating tools for a unified user solution.
From 27 solutions presented at last year's Summit, Adobe is unifing its Marketing Cloud offering around 5 solutions today:
1. Adobe Analytics (SiteCatalyst, Discover, ReportBuilder, DataWarehouise, Insight and Tag Manager): collecting, analyzing and sharing data
2. Adobe Experience Manager (DAM, Scent7, CQ5): content management and publishing + social community building.
3. Adobe Target (Test & Target, Recommandations, Search & Promote) : targeting of customers and content personalization
4. Adobe Social (Context Optional, Social Analytics) : social media measurement and optimization + prediction of popularity for Facebook posts
5. Adobe Media Optimizer (Efficient Frontier, SearchCenter, AdLens): media management
Brad Rencher recommends to create centers of excellence to break silos. To encourage collaboration and knowledge sharing, Adobe has developed a social user interface right in the heart of Adobe Marketing Cloud.
Philippe Baumlin, Global Digital IT Program Director at Chanel, shared his insights on how to overcome organizational challenges. Digital cannot be a department within a company. Digital should be spread throughout the organization. The whole company needs to become digital. Digital should be a project organization within the company while keeping the existing reporting structure. Digital resources in the same geographical space to foster collaboration. Steering committees with creative directors and CIOs in the same room. Digital is a new way for creating brand awareness.
Baumlin's presentation was followed by a comprehensive demo of the new 5 solutions of Adobe Marketing Cloud, that are also integrated with the Adobe Creative Cloud. While the features demonstrated were quite similar to last year's demos during the main keynote, what really stroke me were the huge improvements in terms of usability and integration between the different solutions. Also, users will be able to share creative assets between the Adobe Marketing Cloud and Adobe Creative Cloud applications.
The new interface is very inspired by Pinterest and other social medias.
In the next version of Adobe Analytics, an "Anomaly Detection Report" will be available to alert on significant and incoherent changes in the data.
Another great new feature is the ability to analyze contribution to an anomaly detection, as well as to create a segment based on contribution analysis. Once a segment is created, ability to reuse the segment to target users in campaigns.
Cluster Analysis is also a great new feature of the next version of Adobe Analytics.
In the new Adobe Social application, users will be not only able to manage and publish directly on Twitter and Facebook, but also to get measurement on impressions, engagement and revenue per social activity, like a Facebook post.
At the end of the demo which was very exciting, it was a little bit disappointing to learn that these new interfaces and features will not be available until next summer or fall depending on the applications (exact public availability dates to be announced).
Alessandro Colafranceschi, Global Head of Online and Mobile Banking at Unicredit Group, was the last keynote speaker of the morning. He shared very interesting insights:
1. The new territory for a bank is the Web
2. It is no longer a web site, it is the bank
3. Analytics has become the oxygen we are breathing in the online team.
4. Need both technology and skilled persons
MORE ON THE SAME TOPIC
- News Rundown at Adobe Summit EMEA – 2013, blogs.adobe.com
- Adobe Marketing Cloud Integrates with hybris + Lionbridge, cmsnewswire.com
- The Last Millisecond Keynote Video during Adobe Summit in Salt Lake City, tv.adobe.com
- #adobesummit 2013: the last millisecond, live.orange.com
- Adobe Updates Its Social Marketing Tools To Predict The Popularity Of Your Facebook Post, techcrunch.com
- Events : News from Adobe Summit EMEA including Predictive Publishing for Facebook, themarketingblog.co.uk
- Chanel: 'Digital should not be a department', marketingweek.co.uk
- Afternoon reflections & musings of #adobesummit, storify.com
- Adobe Summit 2013: Predicting the Last Milliseconds of Truth, socialmediatoday.com
- Samsung smartphones gain popularity with Europeans, blogs.adobe.com
