Editorial
LAS VEGAS — Adobe has done plenty of talking at its annual digital marketing conference here at the Venetian Hotel.
Now it’s time to let some of the 12,000 Adobe Summit attendees share their views.
The Adobe Summit runs through tomorrow.
But today, we asked some customers and partners to share their takeaways about San José, Calif.-based Adobe's message so far.
Thoughts From Adobe Summit Attendees
Brennie Conkle, VP, Customer Strategy, Invoca
By moving to partner with Microsoft, Adobe is trying to fill some of the gaps. That was a really huge move for Adobe.
I know customer experience is overstated but Adobe is really trying to enhance it with data analytics and really driving toward automated experiences. It's going to be a huge move forward for marketers.
Rebekah Radice, Chief Marketing Officer, Post Planner
Consumers are not looking for more options at this point. They’re looking for the right options. And the experience is what is going to set you apart.
And Adobe has been talking about that for so long. And they really hit that home: seamlessly pulling it all together, which obviously revolves around the omnichannel experience.
They talked moving away from a product-based business to an experience business.
Carl Agers, Senior VP, Marketing Services, Hero Digital
There were two pleasant surprises. One was how far they’ve come in the Adobe Sensei in the overall thinking about how data gets activated. It’s a real challenge for most companies.
Most are not even going there because it’s so challenging to stitch together a number of applications. So I thought that was for me probably the strength of the (opening keynote).
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The other one big thing for me does not have to do with technology at all. This is my sixth time at the event, and I was really surprised pleasantly at the gender diversity on the stage.
It’s almost always been men, and (Tuesday) it was about 90 percent women. I don’t know if that was on purpose or not. If it was on purpose, it was brilliant because it speaks to the actual audience.
It’s dominated by a lot of women in marketing. If you look at tech companies, in general, they’re taking shots for lack of gender diversity so I thought that was very telling.
Pam Moore, CEO, Marketing Nutz
My key takeaway is that Adobe events are always inspiring. I think marketers should come to it to be inspired.
What are the possibilities for experience? Marketers know they still have to go back to the home base and corporate office and say, “OK this is going to inspire me. How am I going to architect this business and this team in marketing?”
Organizations have to work with different facets of their business to improve those experiences and there are areas for implementing new technology and getting quick wins. Everything Adobe’s done with advertising is amazing.
Adel de Meyer, Social Media, Branding Strategist
My takeaway was how Adobe is trying to simplify and make things easier and bring it all together for businesses so we can all get down to business and stop worrying about trying to make all our software and hardware work together and figure it out.
We are so disconnected because of all these solutions. They’re all separate and not integrated and it makes business complex.
So what really stood out is how they want to make it easy. They said advertising doesn’t have to suck. So for me all it’s about simplicity. I like the integrations. I love the new partnership announcements.
And the new Experience Cloud they just unveiled — I think that’s a great step forward for existing customers and potentially bringing on new ones. I love the new Adobe Spark where you can make quick videos and graphics on the go. You can’t sit around and play with Photoshop for an hour.
Brian Brassil, Director of Marketing, Audible
The most interesting one for me was the Advertising Cloud because I work on the paid media side, so I do acquisition marketing for Audible.
I work with a lot of our agencies. It’s really interesting to see what the capabilities are there. The things they talked about in terms of TV vs. digital — we’re doing all that now and are trying to measure it.
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