Adobe at dmexco: the overview

Last week, I attend­ed the world’s largest dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing con­fer­ence in Cologne. As a dig­i­tal mar­keter, you’re sure to know this is dmex­co. With over 30,000 atten­dees and 800 exhibitors, it’s a hub for dig­i­tal mar­keters to talk about all things great and good in the industry.

Adobe kicked off this two-day behe­moth with our inau­gur­al Thought Lead­er­ship Break­fast, of which I had the plea­sure of mod­er­at­ing our pan­el­lists. Shar­ing their thoughts on our up-to-the-minute study on mar­ket­ing trans­for­ma­tion with me were: Nicole Dufft, Inde­pen­dent Vice Pres­i­dent, Dig­i­tal Enter­prise at Pierre Audoin Con­sul­tants; Daniel Bar­ni­cle, Vice Pres­i­dent, Con­sumer Engage­ment Plat­forms Prac­tice Lead at Sapi­ent­Ni­tro; Mar­cus Rüb­sam, SVP, Strat­e­gy & Corp Dev hybris, a SAP com­pa­ny; and Sven Krüger, Head of Brand Com­mu­ni­ca­tions at T‑Systems.

With just under an hour to dis­cuss mar­ket­ing trans­for­ma­tion, it’s safe to say we bare­ly scratched the sur­face. Kick­ing off the dis­cus­sion, Daniel Bar­ni­cle dis­cussed the impor­tance of tech­nol­o­gy with­in mar­ket­ing, but also their depen­dence on each oth­er: ‘tech­nol­o­gy with­out con­tent is point­less.’ It was sur­pris­ing to learn that 61% of Ger­man CIOs do not think mar­ket­ing should be involved in their company’s dig­i­tal strategy.

Nicole Dufft spoke pas­sion­ate­ly about the need for great strate­gic plan­ning when embark­ing on dig­i­tal solu­tions rather than cre­at­ing a patch­work of projects, which leads to island solu­tions, com­pa­nies need to con­sid­er their over­ar­ch­ing strat­e­gy – some­thing all should con­sid­er, not just developers.

Mar­cus Rüb­sam tack­led the sub­ject of the ‘lone war­rior’, a defunct out­look if there ever was on. He shared the impor­tance of col­lab­o­ra­tion with­in both groups and with oth­ers in order to progress dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion. Final­ly, Sven Krüger addressed the issue if agili­ty. Speed is a cru­cial fac­tor for suc­cess and, for Sven, it’s impor­tant that com­pa­nies adopt a start-up men­tal­i­ty instead of cor­po­rate snail’s pace in order to survive.

Tak­ing cen­tre stage on the after­noon of day one, Brad Rencher, SVP and GM of Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing Adobe, shared an ener­getic as ever keynote on his love of data, what we need to do as mar­keters to keep up with the pace of change, and how, in this era of mar­ket­ing, ‘Nerd is the New Black’. He dis­cussed how we’ve seen inno­va­tion in the unlike­li­est of places from taxi ser­vices to ther­mostats, and how the likes of Uber and Nest have dis­rupt­ed entire indus­tries. He shared how mar­ket­ing tech­nol­o­gy has cre­at­ed solu­tions that do one thing, they help our social or they help our search, and by design they cre­ate mar­ket­ing groups that sit in silos.

Watch Brad Rencher’s keynote here: Nerd is the New Black

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Which is why Adobe is work­ing with Pub­li­cis Groupe to deliv­er the Always-On Plat­form, the first end-to-end mar­ket­ing man­age­ment plat­form that con­nects all your mar­ket­ing efforts. This is tru­ly a game-chang­er for the indus­try. This stitch­ing togeth­er of dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing ser­vices and solu­tions enables the Pub­li­cis Groupe net­work to cre­ate engag­ing and, quite impor­tant­ly, per­son­alised con­tent on scale with enhanced mar­ket­ing intel­li­gence and the abil­i­ty to track and mea­sure it all.

We also announced that our inte­gra­tion with SAP HANA® and hybris Com­merce Suite was live and ready for use. Both of these prod­ucts offer cus­tomers using SAP great flex­i­bil­i­ty and poten­tial to analyse mas­sive data and busi­ness process­es in real-time and pro­duce per­son­alised expe­ri­ences across mar­ket­ing channels.

Leav­ing the Con­gress Hall is some­thing that can eas­i­ly be for­got­ten about with such an impres­sive back-to-back speak­er line-up. But I was delight­ed to see our own booth packed for the whole two days – in fact we had hun­dreds of meet­ings sched­uled in advance with cus­tomers and prospec­tive cus­tomers, just going to prove that the major brands were out in force. Our Future of Mar­ket­ing pho­to booth also got some atten­tion from the dmex­co pop­u­la­tion. We invit­ed mar­keters to share their thoughts on the future of mar­ket­ing and have them immor­talised by our pho­tog­ra­ph­er – you can see what they had to say here.

All in all, it was a fan­tas­tic two days with intrigu­ing ses­sions, inspir­ing keynotes and a whole lot of net­work­ing. If you were unable to make it to dmex­co your­self, many mar­keters live-tweet­ed the event, includ­ing Adobe Mar­ket­ing Cloud, which should give you plen­ty of insight into what hap­pened on the ground.

John Wat­ton — Direc­tor, Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing EMEA