Adobe at dmexco – Highlights

Anoth­er year, anoth­er great dmex­co expe­ri­ence with a lot of great moments. We, of course, were there with the Adobe stand (take a look), as well as with a num­ber of ses­sions. First with Jean-Michel Pit­tet, Vice Pres­i­dent Engi­neer­ing, host­ing an Ele­va­tor Speech on ‘Mar­ket­ing beyond Mar­ket­ing’. We also had Andreas Helios, Senior Group Man­ag­er Enter­prise Mar­ket­ing Cen­tral Europe, speak­ing on ‘Mar­ket­ing in the Eye of the Tor­na­do’. Final­ly, Karl Isaac, Head of Brand Strat­e­gy and Inno­va­tion led a ses­sion on ‘What a Brand wants’.

These are obvi­ous high­lights for us, but there was plen­ty more going on and we sum­marised what we think were the key high­lights this year. It would be great to hear yours, let us know on Twit­ter @AdobeMktgCloud.

Customer experience is the new brand

Just before dmex­co, we pub­lished a new blog post on how cus­tomer expe­ri­ence is the new brand and how the best brands define them­selves by the expe­ri­ence they deliv­er across all channels.

Too much of what con­sumers do, how and where they do it, is now chang­ing and it’s chang­ing quick­ly. With the inevitable mobile rev­o­lu­tion, which sparks the veloc­i­ty at which con­sumers inter­act with brands, means that mar­keters have more oppor­tu­ni­ties to delight cus­tomers at every turn — as well as dis­sat­is­fy and dis­ap­point. In short, there is a mas­sive trans­for­ma­tion hap­pen­ing in which cus­tomer expe­ri­ence has become the brand of your organ­i­sa­tion and the best gauge of your success.

If you’re inter­est­ed in read­ing more about how cus­tomer expe­ri­ence is the new brand, you may want to read John Travis’ blog post ‘Is Cus­tomer Expe­ri­ence the New Brand?’, as well as John Watton’s piece from our break­fast event ‘dmex­co 2015: Build­ing the Bridge Between the Cus­tomer and the Brand’.

Cus­tomer expe­ri­ence is key — @karlisimo #dmex­co pic.twitter.com/gHaxqEecwn

— Mar­ket­ing Cloud (@AdobeMktgCloud) Sep­tem­ber 17, 2015

Adobe unveils the industry’s most advanced programmatic advertising platform

Yes­ter­day, Adobe announced the most advanced pro­gram­mat­ic ad plat­form for adver­tis­ers and media pub­lish­ers lever­ag­ing ful­ly inte­grat­ed solu­tions in Adobe Mar­ket­ing Cloud. Pow­ered by Adobe Media Opti­miz­er, the new ‘self-ser­vice’ tech­nol­o­gy allows adver­tis­ers for the first time to take direct con­trol of auto­mat­ed ad buy­ing for search, dis­play and social media across ad exchanges and media net­works from key part­ners like Google, Face­book, Yahoo, Rubi­con Project, Index Exchange and more.

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If you want to know more about the future of pro­gram­mat­ic adver­tis­ing, read on the full announce­ment.

Customer experience is team play

Excel­lent cus­tomer expe­ri­ence is only achieved if silos are bro­ken down and every­one across the organ­i­sa­tion con­tributes. But accord­ing to the lat­est study, ‘Holis­tic Cus­tomer Expe­ri­ence in the Dig­i­tal Age’ from ana­lyst firm Pierre Audoin Con­sul­tants (PAC) that’s not what’s real­ly hap­pen­ing across more than half of the com­pa­nies sur­veyed. We dis­cussed the report and where the oppor­tu­ni­ties lie for mar­keters who want to deliv­er the best cus­tomer expe­ri­ence at our thought lead­er­ship break­fast. Clear­ly there is room to work together.

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If you want to learn more about the PAC study on cus­tomer expe­ri­ence, head over to Nicole Dufft’s overview blog post.

European marketers are tracking ROI on more channels than ever

We live in a mul­ti-chan­nel world and mar­keters need to adapt. We all know that. What was sur­pris­ing (in a very good way) was the main find­ing from a recent Adobe Dig­i­tal Index report, which showed that an ever-grow­ing num­ber of choic­es has left Euro­pean mar­keters track­ing an aver­age of 10 chan­nels, up 10% in the past two years and two chan­nels more than their US counterparts.

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If you want to learn more about this ADI report, CMO.com has the full cov­er­age and results.

#dmexco Social Experience

All mar­keters love good insights, but the way in which you deliv­er those insights can make the expe­ri­ence much rich­er. With that in mind, we’ve set up an inno­v­a­tive way to engage with the top insights being shared at dmex­co – we’ve cre­at­ed a mobile game that feeds from the entire event con­ver­sa­tion and key insights, visu­alised through a big screen on the ground with which you can inter­act through your mobile phone!

CMO.com coverage

Before and dur­ing dmex­co, CMO.com pro­vid­ed full cov­er­age of some of the key insights that were shared at the world’s biggest dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing con­fer­ence. One of those pieces, ‘dmex­co 2015: Euro­pean Firms See CX As Strate­gic, But Only Half Have Strat­e­gy’, high­light­ed that over two-thirds of medi­um to large-sized com­pa­nies across the UK, France and Ger­many feel that cus­tomer expe­ri­ence is a strate­gic issue for them, and that it’s being addressed by the top man­age­ment of their com­pa­ny. But we also know that in order to achieve a great cus­tomer expe­ri­ence you need to break down organ­i­sa­tion­al silos, and while a ded­i­cat­ed CX posi­tion can help stream­line that process, the ques­tion remains: ‘Do New Job Titles Help Or Hin­der Dig­i­tal Transformation?’

On a more region­al lev­el, CMO.com cov­ered a few inter­est­ing insights around the Russ­ian mar­ket. In a nut­shell, the Russ­ian ecom­merce oppor­tu­ni­ty is grow­ing as shop­pers move online – in fact, the Russ­ian ecom­merce mar­ket dou­bled from 2013 to 2015, which sig­nals the great oppor­tu­ni­ties that lie ahead in this region. Speak­ing of oppor­tu­ni­ties, we all know how big mobile has become and will con­tin­ue to be, but we can also all agree that there is still a long way to go before we deliv­er tru­ly excel­lent, mobile-first cus­tomer expe­ri­ences. CMO.com also has an insight­ful piece on that that will help you under­stand and tack­le these chal­lenges: ‘Trust, Cre­ativ­i­ty And Out­dat­ed Approach­es Are Key Bar­ri­ers To Mobile Ad Growth’.

With all this in mind, these are great times that we live in and mar­keters have more than enough rea­sons to feel excit­ed about where the future of their indus­try lies. While this CMO.com arti­cle sug­gests that telling sto­ries cre­ates cul­tur­al prob­lems for brands and agen­cies, that’s main­ly due to the per­sis­tent (but impor­tant) debate about what tru­ly con­sti­tutes a sto­ry and how do dif­fer­ent tech­no­log­i­cal ele­ments feed into it. We’ll back AOL Pres­i­dent Bob Lord’s insight on this one: “Peo­ple have to under­stand how to tell a sto­ry, but they also have to under­stand the tech­nol­o­gy. With­out tech sup­port your sto­ries will be very lim­it­ed”. But beware: as UPLOAD Mag­a­zin high­light­ed in ‘The next 10 years of dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing — a sur­vival guide for mar­ket­ing in 2025’, in order to invent the future we need to beware of the ‘T‑Ford Effect’.

dmexco in a nutshell (or a couple)

To give you a bet­ter impres­sion of what dmex­co was about, we’ve also pre­pared a short video that cov­ers the main high­lights and espe­cial­ly the huge amount of ener­gy that we saw this year.

And because social media was a big part of the dmex­co expe­ri­ence, we’ve also col­lect­ed some of our key moments in tweet form through a cus­tom Twit­ter Collection.

Adobe @ dmex­co 2015

If you were there, this will serve as a good reminder of the expe­ri­ence that dmex­co 2015 was. If you weren’t, per­haps you’ll join us in 2016?