Video: Digital Transformation Can Mean Changing Almost Everything About Marketing

Digital transformation means accepting change. According to Adobe Systems Europe VP EMEA marketing John Travis, for Adobe that meant changing almost everything about marketing.

Digital transformation means businesses have to embrace change. In Adobe’s case, that meant change to almost everything about marketing.

So said John Travis, VP EMEA marketing, Adobe Systems Europe, speaking in an interview after his session at Adobe’s Symposium in Paris towards the end of last year (Adobe is CMO.com’s parent company). Describing the results of the company’s decision five years ago to embrace digital, he said: “We had to rethink the entire marketing process, the people that we hire, and the way we work.”

Travis highlighted three main areas of change: from campaigns to always-on; from perfection to testing and optimisation; and from outsourcing a lot of functions to bringing them into the marketing department.

“We brought a lot of stuff we would have previously given to agencies in-house, as that’s the only way we can respond 24/7,” he explained. The whole transformation was underpinned by data, according to Travis.

“We had to think about how we utilise the data at our disposal,” he said. “Instead of having data spread across the company, we consolidated data into one organisation in marketing. That enabled us to spend less time arguing about the data and more time focusing on what are we going to do about the learnings that we’re discovering about our marketing.”