Top 10 highlights from Adobe Summit EMEA 2015

As we say good­bye to the 2015 Adobe Sum­mit I just want­ed to share a cou­ple of high­lights from the event. This has been my first Sum­mit with Adobe, but I’ve attend­ed in pre­vi­ous years as a speak­er and a del­e­gate and it’s amaz­ing to see the scale to which it has grown and how much has been packed into the two days. So the task of only choos­ing 10 high­lights has been quite dif­fi­cult, well to get some per­spec­tive not as dif­fi­cult as Kevin Jorgeson’s Dawn Wall climb… but as far as col­lat­ing a list goes, pret­ty tricky. I think just from the two keynote ses­sions alone I think I could get eas­i­ly get 10.

1) Adobe & Microsoft Partnership

Now I can’t think of a bet­ter place for us to announce a part­ner­ship than at Sum­mit. Adobe’s Mar­ket­ing Cloud solu­tions will be inte­grat­ed with Microsoft’s Dynam­ics CRM, open­ing up an excit­ing oppor­tu­ni­ty for mar­keters to con­nect cus­tomer insight into the core of their mar­ket­ing process­es. There’s been some great buzz around this announce­ment, and if you’ve got some time I’d rec­om­mend hav­ing a read of our Adobe EMEA Pres­i­dent, Mark Zablan’s blog post on the announce­ment.

2) Coca-Cola AEM Screens Demo

A live demo in front of 4000+ peo­ple, now I think that would get my heart pump­ing (wifi please be good to me!), but if you’re also chang­ing the adver­tis­ing in real time at Pic­cadil­ly cir­cus, then that’s a whole oth­er lev­el. That’s exact­ly what saw with the Coca-Cola adver­tise­ment being updat­ed live on stage using Adobe Expe­ri­ence Man­ag­er (AEM) Screens. So when David Nueschel­er said ‘Pray with me, I hope it changes’ he meant it. If you’re inter­est­ed in find­ing out more about AEM Screens, Loni Stark has writ­ten a great blog post on the sub­ject: Intro­duc­ing New Adobe Expe­ri­ence Man­ag­er: Inno­va­tions for Dig­i­tal Experience

3) Chelsea F.C.

500million peo­ple glob­al­ly fol­low Chelsea foot­ball club, so how do you pro­vide a dig­i­tal expe­ri­ence at this scale? As Jer­ry New­man, head of dig­i­tal and CRM, Chelsea Foot­ball Club put it: “It’s extreme­ly impor­tant that we have a rela­tion­ship with our audi­ences beyond the turn­stiles, so that a fan in Bangkok feels as close to the foot­ball club as a fan in Put­ney.” As a keen Chelsea fan him­self, I’m sure this was one of Mark Zablan’s per­son­al high­lights to have Chelsea on stage talk about their dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion. For more infor­ma­tion, please see Mark’s blog, Chelsea F.C. mar­kets beyond bor­ders.

We also had the priv­i­lege of giv­ing away a signed Cesc Fàbre­gas shirt, which we gave to the best self­ie at Sum­mit, great fun for all involved but the win­ner had to go to Steven for his effort.

4) Bri­an Cox & the universe!

The day 1 keynotes fin­ished with Bri­an Cox, who put every­thing in per­spec­tive with a fas­ci­nat­ing talk about their use of data at CERN to unrav­el the mys­ter­ies of the uni­verse. Maybe we can start coin­ing the term Super Mas­sive Data, ‘Big Data’ now seems a bit small.

6) #Sum­mitRocks

The cel­e­bra­tion is fan­tas­tic every year, and this year was no dif­fer­ent. Great food, net­work­ing, and of course Bastille. Take a look at the pic­tures below:

7) Code Club

Clare Sut­cliffe from code club was on stage and shar­ing the great work Code Club do sup­port­ing after school Code Clubs for chil­dren to teach them how to code in fun and inter­est­ing ways. To raise mon­ey and aware­ness of this great ini­ti­ate we pledged to donate £2 for each tweet men­tion­ing the #Tweet4Code hashtag.

8) Bene­dict Cumberbatch

Our Senior Vice Pres­i­dent and CMO, Ann Lewnes had the envi­able task of inter­view­ing Bene­dict Cum­ber­batch. I have to say look­ing at the response from the del­e­gates and fans of Bene­dict in the lead up, I was wor­ried we might over­load Twit­ter or the livestream! I wasn’t wrong about the vol­ume! We had Bene­dict Cum­ber­batch trend­ing on Twit­ter, and for­tu­nate­ly the livestream han­dled the vol­ume fine as peo­ple joined to watch what was a fas­ci­nat­ing insight to his per­son­al transformation.

9) Sum­mit Sneaks

I love the sneaks! We get a sneak peak into all the work that goes on in our labs. I have to say my per­son­al favourite was #Bench­mark­er, pre­sent­ed by Tama­ra Gaffney, the Prin­ci­pal Ana­lyst for Adobe Dig­i­tal Index (ADI). The con­cept of Bench­mark­er is that it allows con­tex­tu­al data on indus­try per­for­mance from ADI to be pre­sent­ed side-by-side with your own business’s data allow­ing you to under­stand where your per­for­mance stands. Don’t wor­ry if you missed them, we’ll be pub­lish­ing a sum­ma­ry of all the sneaks on the blog.

10) Best of the Best panel

#Bench­mark­er leads me on nice­ly to the ‘Best of the Best’ EMEA report. This ADI report aims to help Euro­pean mar­keters find their place in the dig­i­tal “big pic­ture”. The report uses six key per­for­mance indi­ca­tors to estab­lish aver­age and top 20% per­for­mance bench­marks across the web. As well as launch­ing this report at Sum­mit, we also had a tru­ly inter­est­ing CMO.com pan­el discussion.

Now that’s my top 10, it would be great to hear what your high­lights were. And before I sign-off the post I’d like to men­tion two per­son­al high­lights at Sum­mit (aside from trend­ing world­wide!). This year we had an excit­ing new addi­tion to the Adobe stand to the com­mu­ni­ty pavil­lion and launched an inter­ac­tive mobile expe­ri­ence, where you nav­i­gate around the social world, inter­act­ing with insights and user gen­er­at­ed con­tent. We had over 5000 unique play­ers with the aver­age com­ing back to play 3 times. So thank you to all those who joined in the expe­ri­ence.

My final point, it was a delight to join Bri­an Solis on the Sum­mit Live stage and dis­cuss mil­len­ni­als and mar­ket­ing. We streamed the Q&A live on Periscope and also the Sum­mit Live stream, with no bet­ter host than TV tech­nol­o­gy pre­sen­ter David McClel­land. Stay tuned, as we’ll share the record­ing along with some insights on CMO.com.

For an in depth look at the what hap­pened at this year’s Sum­mit, please head over to CMO.com where there’s a com­pre­hen­sive list of the arti­cles pub­lished in their cov­er­age of the event.