Web Analytics & E-commerce (EN)

Adobe Analytics Highlights during #AdobeSummit EMEA 2014

The 8th edition of the Adobe Summit took place at the Excel Conference center in London on May 15th, 2014.  3,800 persons attended the event from 47 countries (+ 40 % from last year).

Brad Rencher, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Digital Marketing Business Unit at Adobe Systems, opened the conference with a keynote on the Reinvention of Marketing. With the rapid pace of innovations (Uber, Fitbit, etc...), entreprises feel the pressure to change their approach. Marketers are put in the center of this transformation. Opportunity to reinvent the role of marketing.

Shantanu Marayeni, CEO of Adobe, continued by explaining that the frenetic pace of change is overwhelming. To succeed in this digital era, every business is challenged to transform their entreprise into the real time entreprise. This implies redefining the central nervous system. 

To become the real time entreprise, entreprises have to break down the silos. Ongoing dialogue with the customer every single day. How can entreprises can distingsh themselves? With creativity. Without imagination, no loyalty. Creativy and customer focus are the real engine of the real time entreprise. Marketing in the heart of this. Adobe is here to help by bringing the best of of creative services and marketing insights. Adobe has to ensure that all applications are integrated without silos.

Brad Rencher came back on stage by stating that "we must all reinvent ourselves to reinvent our entreprises".  The challenge as individuals is to unlearn. Unlearning is very hard. How do we as an industry unlearn? We need to focus on one thing: making a connection with the customer. Today in marketing, we are organized around the means, not the end goal. Today, we have the obligation to be backward compatible with the analog marketing from previous decades. This takes a lot of energy from marketers.

The vision for Adobe Marketing Cloud is to integrate all pieces of digital marketing without silos. In the next generation of Adobe Marketing Cloud, core services will be shared across all marketing cloud applications:

• Profile management: in the past profiles were asynchronous between solutions. A single profile will be shared accross all marketing cloud applications.
• Asset sharing: creative asset library shared with all marketing cloud solutions integrated with Creative Cloud.
• Marketing Mix Planning: enables simulation with cross-channel marketing
• User management and single sign on all across Adobe Marketing Cloud applications
  
• Tag Management
• Contextual Activation
• Integration
• Collaboration

According to Brad Rencher, there are 3 main areas to focus on :

• Whole Person: this is not only a data storage. We need to be able to take the data and strecht this into accountability in the last millisecond. Profile management is the ability to match an anonymous visit with an existing profile once the person has logged on. Then, Adobe Campaign enables to take the information from Adobe Analytics and makes it actionable. Over time, a more comprehensive view of the customer will be provided with the ability to link with off line world, direct mail campaigns and in store purchases.

 

• Burst of creativity: we need to reduce the drag of integrating pieces of applications to free up time with creativity. Adobe Experience Manager is central to making this possible. With the digital assets management capability, you can store assets and deliver across channels. Mobile apps are at the forefront of the innovation. Most successful apps like Instagram don’t have a website. Hence, the need to democratize mobile apps.Adobe Experience Manager 6.0 provides a drag and drop interfaces to build applications.

• Real-time entreprise

 

Regarding the positioning of analytics within the Adobe products, this year's opening keynote was quite consistent with the themes of the 2012 "Digital Self" and 2013 "Last Millisecond" opening keynotes:

• data has become the fuel of the digital marketing system,
• data need to be re-used in real time for personalization and targeting.

The main novelty of this keynote was the clear shift from digital to customer analytics, which seems to have accelerated with the acquisition of Neolane last year (now Adobe Campaign).

 

For more specific Adobe Analytics updates, I had the great chance to interview 4 Adobe Analytics experts during the Summit:

• Bill Ingram, VP Adobe Social & Analytics, on the future of Adobe Analytics
• Bret Gundersen, Group Product Manager Marketing, on Adobe Analytics Product Management
• Rudi Shumpert, Evangelist for Dynamic Tag Management, on Adobe Dynamic Tag Management
• Brent Dykes, Evangelist for Customer Analytics, on Digital Analytics Evangelization

 

The key points I've noted from these interviews regarding Adobe Analytics are:

• simplifying implementation with Tag Management and Processing Rules,
• democratizing access to data with improved user interface, users workflows and algorithms (without a PhD in statistics!),
• enriching digital data with off-line data in order to provide a more customer-centric.

 

FOR MORE INFORMATION:

• Adobe predicts a cloudy analytics future, by Helena Schwenk, IT-Director.com
• Adobe's Marketing Cloud Gets New Predictive Analytics Features, by Ann All, Entreprise Apps Today
• Adobe Announces New Analytics Platform Capabilities at Adobe Summit EMEA, by STUART PARKERSON, App Developer Magazine
• Adobe Analytics Expands Market Lead With Advanced Capabilities, Adobe Press Relase

5 questions on the future of Adobe Analytics to Bill Ingram, VP Adobe Social & Analytics

With more than 17 years of product management experience in the e-commerce and B2B industries, Bill Ingram oversees the strategic direction and development of Adobe Analytics and Adobe Social; two of the six solutions that comprise Adobe’s Digital Marketing Cloud. 

While at the Adobe Summit in London, I had the opportunity to interview him on the future of Adobe Analytics.

 

 

Nicolas Malo: How do you foreesee the evolution of the digital analytics market in the coming years?

Bill Ingram: Based on what we are hearing from our customers, and observing ourselves, I would expect to see analytics encompass all digital properties (websites, applications, TV, interactive kiosks, etc.) into consolidated analytics platforms that are enriched with customer data. We can already see that by 2015, we will be collecting more analytics data from mobile devices than from desktop devices.

The key shift is movement from a focus on visits and visitors to a purview that thinks more in terms of customers and channels. Today, digital analytics solutions are primarily used by web analytics and marketers to asynchronous run reports. At Adobe, our vision is that data should be immediately put to work to drive experiences not just reports. When you shift your thinking to this paradigm, you can see why analytics is the backbone of our Marketing Cloud solution and the fuel for personalization.

We believe also in the need to provide more visual ways to access analytics data. For instance, rather than simply showing the URL of a product page, think of how much more helpful it would be to see the actual images of theproducts in your analytics reports, dashboards and other visualization.

So the market will move from digital analytics to marketing analytics in the coming years as we evolve from “digital marketing,” to “marketing in a digital world.”

 

Nicolas Malo: Will digital analytics merge with business intelligence?

Bill Ingram: While it is true that there are overlaps in some aspects of what we do with business intelligence, I strongly believe that marketing analytics will stay independent as a market. Business intelligence is primarily used as an ex post facto snapshot view of the business, while digital analytics will provide live information to drive real time interactions.

 

Nicolas Malo: What are your current top priorities for enhancing the Adobe Analytics solution?

Bill Ingram:  I have three main priorities for my team:

• #1 : simplify the implementation experience by reducing the implementation time and complexity. With the number of similar customers we have in so many industries, there are a lot of things our experience has taught us that we should be incorporating into what we do when we help a new customer get up and running. In many cases, we can apply best practices by industry to new implementations to get customers up and running faster, and in a far more effective manner than doing everything custom for every customer.
  
  
• #2 : bring together the experiences with unified role-based workflows. We are creating thoughtfully-designed workflows for our most common user personas—we pay attention to more than 30—the primary personas, however are analysts, data scientists, marketers andexecutives. We think about this design from the perspective of foraging, curating and consuming the insights and analyses.
  
  
• #3 : make predictive analytics accessible to users who do not have advanced degrees and/or extensive training by making it easy to utilize statistical modeling andadvanced mathematical algorithms. The anomaly detection capabilities that we shipped in the Fall of 2013 are a great example of very sophisticated analytics that are very easy to use, and drive powerful insights for our customers.

 

Nicolas Malo: Which innovations have you released recently for Adobe Analytics?

Bill Ingram: We have just announced the following major innovations that will ship in our Spring release due out next week:

• Live Stream: a real time sub-millisecond data API with real time metrics (available right now for Adobe Analytics Premium customers). Live stream will enable marketers to do things like: leverage real time dashboards to display events as they unfold; implement in-session remarketing to help when consumers appear stuck in a browsing session; and build instantaneous traffic visualizations from a specific channel or referral site. We allow our customers to hook approximately 300 event metrics immediately after they reach our servers. There is an example of a dashboard made with our Live Stream API on this site.
  
  

 

• Unified Segment Builder: we are rolling out next week a brand-new UI for audience segmentation. These new segments, called "Audience Segments", are easily created by dragging and dropping key variables, such as gender, region, average order value, and others into the interface.The segments created in Unified Segment Builder can then be made available to any Marketing Cloud application to target that audience. It is also possible to apply any segments you have created to any report without limitations—we call this “stacking”.
  
  

• Decision Trees: this new visualization tool is the next generation of a pathing analysis. The reports will be based on users and not on pages or visits. Using new decision trees in Adobe Analytics, marketers can now predict the most likely decisions a customer will make. This helps marketers understand what influences whether they will make a purchase, watch a video, or take another desired action. Decision trees can enable a wide range of things fro marketers from defining the creation ofintelligent rules for website targeting and email offers, to assisting call center agents in personalizing customer conversations as they are happening.
  
  

Nicolas Malo: Do you intend to integrate more Social Analytics features directly into Adobe Analytics?

Bill Ingram: Advanced Social Analytics features are already available with our Adobe Social solution, which is focused not just on analytics—or listening—but also on the other aspects of managing your social marketing, including moderation, publishing application development and management and campaign management.

Customers who subscribe to Adobe Social and Adobe Analytics, can access the Social Analytics data directly in the Adobe Analytics interface.

 

Nicolas Malo: Do you have any plans for waking up the Adobe Analytics users’ community?

Bill Ingram: We have recently launched the Adobe Marketing Cloud Exchange in order to wake up the developer community around our products, including Adobe Analytics.

We are developing new forums, social discussion boards and community sites for fans, marketers and our user community. They will be available for all Marketing Cloud applications, including Adobe Analytics.

 

 Nicolas Malo: Thank you very much Bill for this interview!

 

ADDITIONAL INTERVIEWS:

• Bret Gundersen, Group Product Manager Marketing, on Adobe Analytics Product Management
• Rudi Shumpert, Evangelist for Dynamic Tag Management, on Adobe Dynamic Tag Management
• Brent Dykes, Evangelist for Customer Analytics, on Digital Analytics Evangelization

5 questions on Digital Analytics Evangelization to Brent Dykes, Evangelist for Customer Analytics at Adobe

Brent Dykes is the Evangelist for Customer Analytics at Adobe and is responsible for guiding and evangelizing the vision of Adobe’s analytics solutions. He has been focused on enterprise-level web analytics consulting for eight years, working with many industry leaders, including Microsoft, Sony, Dell, Comcast, and Nike. Dykes is also an author and recently published his first book, Web Analytics Action Hero, which outlines how to become a successful analyst who drives action from digital data.

While at the Adobe Summit in London, I had the opportunity to interview him on Digital Analytics Evangelization.

 

Nicolas Malo: What are the key areas where there still needs evangelization regarding Digital Analytics?

Brent Dykes: To start answering your question, I’d like to share the 5 different stages of Digital Analytics that I’ve noticed with our customers :

1. Basic Tagging: companies or organizations start collecting basic traffic and content information (visits, visitors, page views). Some companies never go beyond this stage, and really don’t get much value from digital analytics. Other companies start to ask more specific questions with requires more specific tagging.
   
   
2. Customized Tagging: companies or organizations need specific metrics and dimensions in order to answer specific questions for their busines. Answering one question may lead to new questions (which leads to the iteration). More custom implementation will be required to capture a richer and richer set of data. However, at some point, companies or organizations won’t be able to answer the next round of questions unless they merge the two words of online and offline data.
   
   
3. Enrichment with off-line data: by enriching the online data with offline data, we can see how digital initiatives are impacting the broader business. This is where not just the digital team within the business benefits from the digital data.
   
   
4. Feeding analytics data into other systems: here we want to improve the customer experience and the intelligence of our marketing systems.
   
   
5. Customer analytics: here the focus shifts from the channel to the customer. Digital analytics is just one of many channels or touch points with customers. When companies have a combined view of their customers, they will be able to better respond to their needs and interests. This is where your combined data can become a serious competitive advantage.

To go back to your question, there still needs to be evangelization regarding the need to build foundations and to learn from each stage. There is often the temptation to jump a stage but it may not be sustainable in the long run. Confidence and trust from executives will grow progressively from one stage to another.

 

Nicolas Malo: How do you envision the evolution of the Digital Analyst role within organizations?

Brent Dykes: The behavior of customers is changing dramatically and we can no longer look only at web data. We need to take into account already the mobile data as well as retail information with for instance iBeacon.

As the team of digital analysts grow within an organization, I really see the need for two different types for profiles:

• business analysts: they are in charge of the analysis and will still be required to be a little bit tech savvy,
  
  
• technical lead for Digital Analytics:  these persons will usually stay within the IT organization and will have a specialization in Digital Analytics. Most of the time, these ressources are changing from one Digital Analytics project to another, which makes it very difficult to keep a consistent implementation in the long run.

With this in mind, Tag Management tools will help the business analysts to better manage and control the quality of the digital data collection, without being too hands on in Javascript. I've written a post on this subject on my Analytics Hero's blog: http://www.analyticshero.com/2014/02/19/how-big-should-your-digital-analytics-team-be/

 

Nicolas Malo: What are the coolest features of Adobe Analytics that most users don’t use ? 

Brent Dykes: The mobile analytics application is a great new tool that we have launched last September. Digital experts need absolutely to look at it! The environnement has been designed entirely for app-centric measurement. Specific app-centric metrics are available like lifecycle metrics and cohort analysis. Sun burst visualization is also provided. This application is available as part of the Adobe Analyics package. To get started, you need to implement the SDK which is available on this page: https://marketing.adobe.com/developer/en_US/get-started/mobile/c-measuring-mobile-applications

They are a robust set of default app-centric metrics and dimensions that are enabled when someone leverages the new mobile app SDK (like for instance lifecycle metrics). Implementation work is also streamlined, so developers only need to focus on more custom aspects of their app (states, milestones, outcomes, etc.).

An other hidden gem is our Adobe Analytics iOS application which has been upgraded last year. This is a great way to share and democratize the information within the organization, especially if your company has a number of iPhone or iPad users.

 

Nicolas Malo: What are the main issues for Adobe Analytics adoption within organizations?

Brent Dykes: there are a number of issues for Adobe Analytics adoption (or any tool for that matter). Here are four that come to mind:

1. Executive sponsor: If you don’t have an executive sponsor, your digital analytics program won’t go very far. You need support from above to get the budgets, resources, and tools you need to be successful. This is the foundation for increasing adoption.
   
   
2. Training: You can’t expect people to dive into the tools on their own without some guidance and instruction. A cheat sheet of role-specific reports can be a valuable tool for users who are just trying to find their way. You’ll also want to build a community of users that can support one another with informal training and mentoring.
   
   
3. Menu customization: All of the reporting options in Adobe Analytics can be overwhelming for end users. However, there are ways to customize the menu so that it is less intimidating for users. It may also be helpful to show how to use the powerful search features of Adobe Analytics to quickly find the information they need.
   
   
4. Tag management: It can be challenging when users don’t have the right data they need. It can be difficult to implement new reports in a timely fashion when you have to battle IT to get simple updates made to your tags. Tag management tools such as Adobe’s DTM enable digital analysts to make more reactive changes to their implementation. Making the data more relevant and timely will help adoption.  

 

Nicolas Malo: What are the top tips & tricks that your recommend with Adobe Analytics ?

Brent Dykes: On top of my mind, I think of these ones:

1. Dedicated eVar for test cases: this is a tip I’ve showcased during the « Analytics Idol » session at the Adobe Summit in London. In order to verify your tests cases, I recommend using a dedicated parameter in the URL for each test case. Then, use the processing Query string parameter in processing rules to populate the value of your parameter directly into an eVar.
   
   
2. Page load time measurement: the Navigation Timing API is a W3C standard for all modern browsers that clients can leverage to get accurate page load data. This tip was also shared in the SLC and London Summits.   
   
   
3. Paid search query data: targeted keyword in Adwords can be collected in Adobe Analytics by passing the value in a parameter on the landing page. Then, use the processing rules to pull the query and populate into an eVar (ValueTrack parameter in Adwords). Here’s a link to info on the ValueTrack parameters from Google: https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2375447?hl=en. I’ll be doing a blog post on this topic shortly
    

Nicolas Malo: Thank you very much Brent for this interview !

 

ADDITIONAL INTERVIEWS:

• Bill Ingram, VP Adobe Social & Analytics, on the future of Adobe Analytics
• Bret Gundersen, Group Product Manager Marketing, on Adobe Analytics Product Management
• Rudi Shumpert, Evangelist for Dynamic Tag Management, on Adobe Dynamic Tag Management

5 questions on Adobe Dynamic Tag Management to Rudi Shumpert, Evangelist for Dynamic Tag Management

Rudi Shumpert is the Evangelist for Dynamic Tag Management at Adobe and is responsible for sharing the vision of Adobe’s tag management solutions. He has been focused on enterprise-level data collection for web analytics since 2000, working with various industry leaders, including AT&T, Home Depot, Staples, State Farm, & Turner Broadcasting.

While at the Adobe Summit in London, I had the opportunity to interview him on Adobe Dynamic Tag Management.

 

Nicolas Malo: What are the benefits of using Adobe Dynamic Tag Management (DTM) with Adobe Analytics ?

Rudi Shumpert: The immediate benefit is the speed of implementation. For one of our customer, it was taking 6 to 9 months for an Adobe implementation in the past. With DTM, this customer is now able to implement 2 to 3 new sites per week.

An other benefit is the activating process of new tags which do not require to be super technical. The user interface has been specifically designed both for marketing and technical audiences. Marketing audiences are able to set up new tags without using Javascript. Technical audiences are able to include custom code in Javascript when needed.

Some of our customers are using DTM progressively for their Adobe Analytics tagging. The old implementation is still in place while new features are implemented specifically with DTM.

We offer also the possibility to host the tags either by using Akamai (with an SLA by Adobe) or by self-hosting on your own servers (no SLA in this case by Adobe).

 

Nicolas Malo: What type of service can we expect from Adobe when using DTM?

Rudi Shumpert: Support for DTM is the same as for Adobe Analytics with Adobe ClientCare and Adobe Consulting. Support can also be gained from our Partner network.

We are planning a certification for DTM in the future.

 

Nicolas Malo: Is it possible to track mobile applications with DTM?

Rudi Shumpert: DTM does not work with true native mobile applications. If your application is an hybrid one, it will work. It is important to note that there is no such thing as true mobile TMS today. The solutions that claim to do this are using a web proxy service that gives the illusion of this happening. What they deliver is a diluted unstable solution. The reason that we do no have a solution yet is that if we built a system that allowed you  to change code on an app without having the user download the update it would be a violation of the terms of service of the app stores and would put your app at risk of being removed.

 

Nicolas Malo: Is it possible to manage deduplication with DTM?

Rudi Shumpert: Deduplication is possible with data elements based on pages, visits and cookies. A/B test split can also be based on data elements.

 

Nicolas Malo: What are the next enhancements planned for DTM?

Rudi Shumpert: We are regularly adding support to new tags. Support for Universal Analytics tagging has just been released. The marketing profile is also going to become a critical piece for DTM. We are also planning to release global opt-in for the different tags.
 

Nicolas Malo: Thank you very much Rudi for this interview!

 

FOR MORE INFORMATION:

• DTM Blog Posts: http://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/tag/dynamic-tag-management/
• Full DTM Demo..no slides…just live demo: https://outv.omniture.com/play/?v=B5ODcybDozpBfRAARKiVrQ7V9lMtrD1C
• DTM Help & Documentation: http://bit.ly/dtmhelp

 

ADDITIONAL INTERVIEWS:

• Bill Ingram, VP Adobe Social & Analytics, on the future of Adobe Analytics
• Bret Gundersen, Group Product Manager Marketing, on Adobe Analytics Product Management
• Brent Dykes, Evangelist for Customer Analytics, on Digital Analytics Evangelization

5 questions on Adobe Analytics Product Management to Bret Gundersen, Group Product Manager Marketing

Bret Gundersen is the Group Product Manager for the Adobe Analytics data management team. He’s been involved in nearly every major release of Adobe Analytics for the last 7 years.

While at the Adobe Summit in London, I had the opportunity to interview him on the Product Management of Adobe Analytics.

 

Nicolas Malo: What are the hot enhancement requests from Adobe Analytics customers?

Bret Gundersen: The most common requests I hear from customers tend to be in these areas:

#1 : cross-device visitor identification. Every company has the need for it right now with the explosion of tablet and mobile device usage.

#2 : connecting non-web data. Most companies are looking for an easier way to connect data from CRM systems and internal data warehouses to web data. This work is typically done by data scientists, but the demand for data scientists is about five times the supply.

#3 : statistical analysis : companies want Adobe to tell them what is happening that matters and what is going to happen for key metrics. This requires regression models, audience clustering, correlation with non-web data (for instance weather).

 

Nicolas Malo: Do you have any plans to enhance the attribution capabilities in Adobe Analytics?

Bret Gundersen: Of course, this is right near the top of our list! While we’re looking to add pre-defined models, we prefer to allow statistics to determine the best model. Most models allow a marketer or analyst to influence the outcome based on a human assumption. While that is important, especially with incomplete data, we’d prefer to provide ways for the data to speak for itself.

We are considering ways to include view-throughs and ad impressions as part of the attribution models, not just click-throughs.

Our vision is to move toward customer analytics. This requires that we recognize the same user across different devices as well as bridging that user profile with all marketing activities, whether online or not.

The ability to merge data across devices is what we call « visitor stitching ». Once visitor stitching is available, attribution is the next highest priority.

 

Nicolas Malo: What are you plans for cross-device identification or visitor stitching?

Bret Gundersen: We already allow a form of « Cross Device Visitor Identification » by allow companies to set the s.visitorID variable. Logged-in visits with the same s.visitorID value can be matched together, but I don’t recommend doing this in a primary report suite. Rather, it’s currently best to set the visitorID in a second report suite, one that contains a copy of the server calls used in the primary report suite.

As we consider what visitor stitching should allow, we see the need to include historical data in the stitched view. Most visits are anonymous before logging-in, sometimes for months. The campaigns that drive people to a site should be given credit for post-login conversion. This is exactly the problemmy team is working to solve.

Matching pre-login visits requires careful privacy considerations. Depending on the industry, marketing teams need the ability match data just back to the start of the visit, or farther back to when the visitor was first seen. Privacy is the first consideration with this feature and will be built into it from the beginning.

 

Nicolas Malo: There are still some limitations for processing rules (products variable unavailable, no support for regular expressions, etc…). Do you have any plans to remove them ?

Bret Gundersen: We have recently added some enhancements to processing rules :

• the limit has been upgraded from 50 to 100
• individual rules can be appended to other report suites (instead of replacing all rules)
• the « ELSE » condition is now supported (IF this THEN that ELSE something else)

We will be releasing sub-conditions next month (for example, triggering an event on the search results page, but only if there are no results for an internal search).

We are also considering adding products variable support, simple regular expression-like functionality, routing to other report suites, and a « do not set this event » feature.

 

Nicolas Malo: Do you have any plans to remove the limitations for props (75 max), eVars (75 max) and events (100 max)?

Bret Gundersen: We are working on it but we do not have an ETA yet. We are also working on ways to incorporate more offline data into Analytics, such as tying attributes at the visitor level. These projects will help reduce the need for extra props and eVars.

These projects are an example of what companies are going to see more of from Adobe. Our goals are to help our customers fully understand the effectiveness of their marketing activities, which means the analysis will need to account for much more than just web data to be complete.

 Nicolas Malo: Thank you very much Bret for this interview!

 

ADDITIONAL INTERVIEWS:

• Bill Ingram, VP Adobe Social & Analytics, on the future of Adobe Analytics
• Bret Gundersen, Group Product Manager Marketing, on Adobe Analytics Product Management
• Brent Dykes, Evangelist for Customer Analytics, on Digital Analytics Evangelization

5 questions to John Watton on the upcoming Adobe Summit in London (May 14-15, 2014)

For the third year, Adobe organizes the EMEA (Europe Middle East Africa) version of its Digital Marketing Summit in London on May 14-15th, 2014.

If you missed last year's edition, you will find a summary in these articles of my blog.

John Watton, Director Digital Marketing at Adobe, shares some insights about this year's edition hightlights in the interview below.

 

Nicolas Malo: Hello John, could you please first explain the concept of the Adobe Summit?

John Watton: Marketers today are facing more pressure than ever before. Digital media has completely reinvented the ways in which consumers engage with brands, seek information, and ultimately make their buying decisions—in turn forcing marketers to entirely transform the ways in which they plan, execute and track their marketing campaigns.

And research shows digital marketers are hungry—hungry for more education, knowledge-sharing and inspiration around the latest marketing strategies. As pressure increases to prove ROI on marketing spend, the lack of formal digital marketing training is starting to take a toll. Summit aims to target exactly these needs, and we bring together 3,000 of Europe’s smartest marketers to discuss, share and learn about the latest in digital marketing best practice.

 

Nicolas Malo: What are the hot topics for this year's edition?

John Watton: At a high level, the theme of Summit is “Revolution. Reinvention. Reimagination”, i.e. how marketers have to respond to the current revolution in consumer behaviour, reinvent their marketing and reimagine the future. To achieve this marketers need to think about their people, processes and technology. Do they have the right skills in their team? Do they have the right organisation? And is their technology fit for purpose? When it comes to people & processes we’ve seen benchmarking becoming increasingly important to brands. It’s about how you stack up against your industry and what steps can you take to improve your business. We’ll be sharing some approaches here.

And in terms of technology we’ll be covering the topics at the top of the CMO/CIO agenda – including Big Data, mobile, social & personalisation. The theme here is that 2014 is about turning the hype of recent years into reality.

 

Nicolas Malo: Who are the top speakers lined up?

John Watton: Attendees will benefit from an impressive lineup of over 200 speakers. In terms of industry luminaries we have the likes of Jez Frampton, group CEO of Interbrand; Amber Atherton of My Flash Trash; Michael Acton Smith, CEO of Mind Candy; Michael Aidan, Head of Digital of Groupe Danone; Mathieu Straat, Digital Director of L’Occitane en Provence; Pete Blackshaw, global head of digital marketing and social media for Nestlé; Dietmar Dahmen, chief innovation officer of ecx.io; Catherine Barba, founder of the CB Group; David Cooperstein, VP, research director of Forrester; David Edelman, principal at McKinsey & Company; Ann Lewnes, CMO of Adobe; and Brad Rencher, SVP and GM of Digital Marketing for Adobe.

I’m particularly looking forward to the keynote from actor Kurt Yaeger. Here is someone who suffered a life threatening accident and overcame adversity to recover & reinvent his career. Very inspirational.

 

Nicolas Malo: Which takeaways should expect attendees?

John Watton: What I love about Summit is that its designed to give delegates some concrete actions to come away with. As well as great content, we’ll be sharing some self-service business benchmarking & skills development tools too. Broadly we want people coming away with the feeling that they have seen the future of marketing, that they have the tools to reinvent themselves and that of course Adobe can help. Which means everyone should have at least 3 things to do once back in the office!

 

Nicolas Malo: How much does it cost?

John Watton: We have a number of ticket options. More details at http://summit.adobe.com/emea/