- Request a demo
- United Kingdom
Even though I’m not physically at Adobe Summit, I committed my morning to soaking up the Adobe Summit keynote (2 hrs 45 min!) and I’m not mad about it. It was chock-full of compelling customer examples, new product features, insight on Adobe’s strategic direction and more. And as a marketer who has been involved in events, the execution of the entire thing was flawless. Not one apparent hiccup (that I could see at least).
Here are five of the top highlights from my perspective:
The fact that Adobe is going all in on the experience portion of the business was reiterated by the direction that the content took this morning. Adobe’s CEO, Shantanu Narayen, made a brief mention of the Creative Cloud and Document Cloud when he first got on stage, but the morning was almost entirely focused on innovations, partnerships, and customers surrounding the Experience Cloud. The Creative Cloud is no doubt the workhorse of the business, growing to $1.49 billion, as reported during Adobe’s last earnings call. However, Adobe clearly recognizes the massive opportunity that exists if they can help brands orchestrate every element of the customer journey to create an experience that’s personalized, consistent, and delightful for the consumer. The holy grail of sorts.
I thought this was a great way of encapsulating how businesses should be thinking about creating 1:1 experiences for customers. Shantanu was quick to note that achieving this is not an easy feat, especially for companies with legacy systems that can’t keep up with consumers’ high expectations for personalization. In industries like tech, retail, travel, and banking there are many organizational silos, but ultimately their ability to put the customer at the center of their strategy and orchestrate the journey for them will separate the leaders from the laggards.
When I heard that the Best Buy CEO was coming on stage, I yawned a little bit. I thought their brand was nearly obsolete given the fierce competition with Amazon. But it was actually really interesting and educational to hear about how they’re investing in the customer experience across digital and in-store. They are treating their stores as “showrooms” for all the innovations from consumer tech brands like Apple, Samsung, LG etc. and then adding value for customers by offering in-home advisors to help with electronics setup and support. It also seems they’ve invested a lot in shipping speeds and supply chain technology to keep pace with Amazon. And when it comes to media spend, 90 percent is on digital channels and they’re leveraging a customer database with over 12k attributes to do personalization. Overall, a very impressive Adobe customer spotlight!
From using voice-activated search within Adobe’s platform and generating AI-powered recommendations for campaigns to designing and publishing augmented reality experiences in digital stores — there is a lot of exciting stuff in development at Adobe. At Invoca, we’ve thought quite a bit about how voice plays into the customer journey, but I’m definitely looking forward to getting my head around how businesses will be taking advantage of AR in the future.
