Personalisation & Optimisation at Adobe Summit EMEA 2015

I can’t quite believe I’m writ­ing this blog post – it seems like only a cou­ple of months ago that we were gear­ing up for the Adobe Sum­mit EMEA 2014 and now we’re already right in the thick of prepa­ra­tion for the 2015 event. We have a great line-up of con­tent, inspi­ra­tional and thought-pro­vok­ing speak­ers, net­work­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties galore and some bril­liant enter­tain­ment – includ­ing Bastille play­ing at the Sum­mit Par­ty. This year we’ve also got more break­out ses­sions than ever and we’re includ­ing con­tent ded­i­cat­ed to spe­cif­ic ver­ti­cals such as retail, finan­cial ser­vices and auto­mo­tive to name a few. I’m real­ly pleased to say that we’ve also ded­i­cat­ed one of the nine ses­sions in the Per­son­al­i­sa­tion & Opti­mi­sa­tion (PO) track to retail-spe­cif­ic con­tent and best practice.

We’re always look­ing for ways to improve the for­mat of the break­out streams, and this year we thought real­ly hard about how to cre­ate con­ti­nu­ity through­out the track – clear­ly, as track lead for PO, I want you to attend as many of these ses­sions as pos­si­ble, and this year I hope you’ll agree when you look at the track, that each ses­sion builds on the last and guides you from an intro­duc­tion to per­son­al­i­sa­tion, all the way to auto­mat­ed per­son­al­i­sa­tion and then on to some of the lat­est and great­est think­ing in guid­ed opti­mi­sa­tion. I should also point out that this is the first year that we’ve allowed atten­dees to reg­is­ter in advance for the ses­sions so once you’ve read this sum­ma­ry and checked out the full list on the Sum­mit site, please make sure you login and reg­is­ter for each break­out that you are inter­est­ed in.

So there are nine ses­sions in the track and here are some of my high­lights from those sessions…

“PO1 Per­son­al­i­sa­tion & Opti­mi­sa­tion: Where on earth do I start?” is a great place to start if you’re new to per­son­al­i­sa­tion, or if you’re keen to get some point­ers on a frame­work for per­son­al­i­sa­tion and the types of tech­nol­o­gy that you’ll need in order to deliv­er it. We’ve got Mar­tin Firth from RSA (Roy­al Sun Alliance) talk­ing about the steps that they’ve tak­en with the brand MORE>THAN to under­stand who their cus­tomers are, how they can recog­nise them across the var­i­ous dig­i­tal prop­er­ties and give them a rel­e­vant per­son­alised experience.

So many of the recent con­ver­sa­tions that I’ve had with cus­tomers and part­ners have focused on the three Ps of peo­ple, process and prod­uct, and more specif­i­cal­ly on peo­ple and process. Mar­ket­ing depart­ments are con­stant­ly look­ing to val­i­date that they have the opti­mal struc­ture inter­nal­ly to suc­ceed with their opti­mi­sa­tion efforts, and also to under­stand if there are bet­ter ways to do align them­selves. If you are one of those peo­ple or you work in, or with, a mar­ket­ing depart­ment, then ses­sion “PO3 Deliv­er­ing on the promise of the Opti­mi­sa­tion Organ­i­sa­tion” is for you. Blair Keen has a phe­nom­e­nal amount of exper­tise in the prac­tice and dis­ci­plines of per­son­al­i­sa­tion and opti­mi­sa­tion, and has worked with a great deal of peo­ple and organ­i­sa­tions (large and small). In this ses­sion he will share the ben­e­fits of this exper­tise and also dis­cuss some of the guid­ing prin­ci­ples of the Iter­a­tive Opti­mi­sa­tion Method­ol­o­gy made pop­u­lar by Adobe’s own Michael Krypel in his book, “Refin­ing Design For Busi­ness”.

Our retail-spe­cif­ic ses­sion “PO4 Clos­ing the gap: why it’s time for retail­ers to rethink per­son­al­i­sa­tion” sees Adobe’s Retail Indus­try Lead, Michael Klein, join us to present on the trends shap­ing atti­tudes to per­son­al­i­sa­tion in retail. Michael will present on the find­ings from a recent piece of research that Adobe com­mis­sioned in to US and Euro­pean retail­ers’ atti­tudes towards and adop­tion of per­son­al­i­sa­tion prac­tices and tech­nol­o­gy. Michael will also be joined by the vast­ly expe­ri­ences Roman Rock who has for a num­ber years been a lead opti­mi­sa­tion expert at a num­ber of the largest names in British and Euro­pean retail. This ses­sion will explore some of the tech­niques and tac­tics avail­able to retail­ers and include a look at the new Adobe Tar­get Rec­om­men­da­tions capa­bil­i­ties, which place advanced rec­om­men­da­tion algo­rithms in the hand over every marketer.

In ses­sion “PO6 Adobe Tar­get: The opti­mi­sa­tion engine of YOUR mar­ket­ing cloud”, Adobe’s Chris Akhurst will be show­ing you how you can com­bine test­ing and tar­get­ing capa­bil­i­ties with your con­tent man­age­ment plat­form, your cross-chan­nel mar­ket­ing tool and your data col­lec­tion and man­age­ment appli­ca­tions. This break­out will also fea­ture Sam Hill from BSkyB and Rob Jack­son from Adobe’s part­ner HAVAS/DBi, show­ing how BSkyB have suc­cess­ful­ly used Adobe Tar­get and Ana­lyt­ics to deliv­er per­son­al­i­sa­tion to over 2.7million cus­tomers and prospects on the Sky Shop and how HAVAS/DBi helped them to achieve this.

For those inter­est­ed in let­ting the machines do some of the heavy lift­ing when it comes to opti­mi­sa­tion and per­son­al­i­sa­tion, ses­sions “PO7 Dia­monds in the rough: Pow­er­ing up the machine to find your mar­ket­ing gems” and “PO8 Guid­ed opti­mi­sa­tion: Help me help you” will give you some insight in to how to get start­ed and the types of ben­e­fits you can expect from these advanced opti­mi­sa­tion tech­niques. Giles Richard­son from Roy­al Bank of Scot­land (RBS) and Pradeep Javan­gu­la, Adobe’s Head of Engi­neer­ing for Adobe Tar­get, are con­sis­tent­ly vot­ed some of the best speak­ers at the event and I expect their ses­sions to fill up fast, so make sure you reg­is­ter for them now. You can find out more about Giles’ ses­sion in an upcom­ing inter­view that I con­duct­ed with him recent­ly that will be pub­lished on the blog very shortly.

Oth­er things to look out for include a com­pe­ti­tion to col­lect badges from 4 or more of the ses­sions in order to be entered in to a prize draw and win one of a num­ber of great prizes, the chance to get up close and per­son­al with senior Adobe Tar­get prod­uct man­age­ment and dis­cuss future roadmap and our vision for the solu­tion, and a sur­prise vis­it by a “super” new addi­tion to the Tar­get mar­ket­ing team – I can’t say any more about his at the moment but keep your eyes peeled at the event. This is of course in addi­tion to all of the oth­er great things that go on at Sum­mit like the Sum­mit par­ty, the net­work­ing events, the part­ner-spon­sored talks and events. And remem­ber that Sum­mit is a social con­fer­ence so please get involved in the con­ver­sa­tion both at the event itself and on twit­ter with the hash­tags: #Ado­be­Tar­get #Opti­miza­tion­Super­hero #Adobe­Sum­mit.

If you haven’t reg­is­tered for the event there is still time to do that here: Sum­mit Reg­is­tra­tion and if you have reg­is­tered but you haven’t select­ed your break­out ses­sions yet [this is a new fea­ture this year], then you can do that here: Login to reg­is­ter for ses­sions. I can’t wait to see you at the event on the 29th and 30th of April.