Adobe Summit 2017: Getting Down To Experience Business!
The fact that we haven’t attended Adobe Summit in a few years made it all the more exciting and special to see what technological revelations Adobe had in store as a leader in the digital experience realm. With promises to experience the future of digital with three full days of labs, sessions and top notch events, Adobe surely did not disappoint. This year’s Summit, hosted in Las Vegas, had over 100 partners on full display and the conference hosted well over 10,000 attendees from around the world.
The conference was indeed (almost) all business – The Experience Business. CEO Shantanu Narayen and GM & EVP took us on a fantastic journey, which allowed us to ride the next wave of enterprise transformation.
Reminded by CEO Shantanu Narayen that “preserving the status quote is not a strategy” Adobe pushed the boundaries of the previously unimaginable to deliver unparalleled experiences through their Marketing Cloud that promises:
- Fluid Experiences
- 1-Click Personalization
- Campaign and Creative Cloud Integration
- Rich Mobile Push Notifications
I think the video clip below captures quite beautifully what these experiences look like. Get ready to be amazed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_oPBDb2kLk
This three-day event provided valuable lessons and insights for everyone, whether it was hands-on labs for developers, customer experience and cross-channel marketing tracks for marketing executives and web strategists or the programmatic advertising track for advertisers, agencies and marketing decision makers.
Listening to guests from National Geographic and T-Mobile, who turned the entire mobile industry on its head, we learned how Adobe enables brands to “deliver the experiences consumers not only expect but demand today”.
Some of the session highlights I particularly enjoyed were:
The New Travel and Hospitality: A Digital Transformation presented by Mike Brunst, Hospitality Go To Market Lead for Accenture, and Barry Goldstein, CMO and Chief Digital Officer of Wyndham Hotel Group.
The digital revolution is transforming the entire hotel/hospitality industry and Wyndham is no exception to this phenomenon. This session explored Wyndham’s strategy for reinventing the customer journey “from booking to checkout and beyond”, and not just for the US market but, as Goldstein emphasized repeatedly, with the global customer in mind. Wyndham relaunched their new global website with fully localized language versions to cater to their multilingual clientele.
Start with Structure: Creating a Site for your Global Business was a hands-on lab led by Ian Reasor and Mathias Siegel, which provided step-by-step instructions for global website creation.
Engaging Everywhere: Delighting Global Customers with Localized AEM Sites. In this session attendees learned how Adobe Experience Manager’s native localization architecture can help leverage translation management tools seamlessly, and coupled with an agile translation strategy, render higher quality and expedited time-to-market, as showcased by global brands such as IHG and OCLC.
Day two’s general session revolved around The Emotion of Experience.
John Mellor, VP of Strategy, Alliances and Marketing, and CMO & EVP, Ann Lewnes showed us how an emphasis on the emotional aspect of designing meaningful brand experiences and great story telling transforms entire organizations and brands. Who better to exemplify these attributes than Pam El, CMO of the NBA, and Super Bowl MVP Peyton Manning?
Pam took us through a vivid journey of how the NBA became the most watched and followed brand globally by digitally engaging the 99% of the world’s population who will never have an opportunity to see a live NBA game. Pam brought the NBA’s new motto This Is Why We Play to life by bringing down the house – what a powerful and moving presentation!
Speaking of sports and great story telling, few can deliver a more authentic and sincere rendition of their journey than Peyton Manning. The audience listened intently as he recounted his many highs and a few lows of his long and illustrious career and the many lessons learned along the way, while never losing his sense of self, his humanity and humility, and of course his sense of humor. A real class act!
