Leading the Experience Business Wave: Announcing the General Availability of the New Adobe Experience Manager

The success of businesses today indisputably centers around the experiences they deliver to their customers, both online and offline. A company’s product or service is only as good as the interactions associated with it; customers crave personalized, relevant and real-time digital experiences, no matter where they are or how they happen to be interacting with a particular brand. The savviest brands are working hard to accelerate their digital transformation from traditional business models, disrupting these models and sometimes even entire industries.

Innovations within Adobe Experience Manager
We’ve achieved a major milestone in this shift toward the Experience Business, as our digital technology innovations continue to transform the way brands provide seamless and connected digital experiences across the customer journey. We’re excited to introduce the next generation of Adobe Experience Manager, our industry-leading unified content management solution to drive digital transformations, that offers enhanced simplicity, scalability, security and search capabilities to business users from one single solution. Experience Manager now goes even further to enable businesses to drive and manage real-time and personalized digital content across all connected devices and physical experiences.

We’re all about empowering our customers to provide their customers with the best possible experience. If you’re a marketer in the travel and hospitality industry, for example, and you’re preparing for upcoming Memorial Day promotions, your campaign may need to span across your website, app, direct emails, etc. Different channels require different images and videos, but finding the best content for the right channel is no easy feat. Our new Smart Tags feature uses image recognition software to automatically create keywords for images, enabling marketers to quickly and easily discover images.

Coca-Cola’s Digital Transformation
At the recent Adobe Summit in Las Vegas, I was struck by how many of Adobe’s customers are now fully immersed in enabling a connected and always-on lifestyle via the Internet of Things (IoT). While many discussions at our 2015 conference centered around brands’ ambitions to enter the space, many have since identified their strategies and have even brought to market new products and solutions that offer consumers more ways to tap into the interconnected IoT and gain more insight and utility from everyday devices.

Our customer, Coca-Cola, is one such example of a 130-year-old brand that is evolving to meet quick-changing consumer trends and preferences by providing hyper-personalized and innovative new experiences. With a growing segment of health-conscious consumers, Coca-Cola has reinvented itself with its acquisitions of Odwalla and Vitaminwater and now provides an even broader array of taste experiences for everyone. Add to that its Freestyle machines that enable consumers to mix and create their own combinations of drinks with over 100 different options illustrate how Coca-Cola has disrupted a business model that previously relied on stocking bottles and cans on shelves and redefining what it means to “grab a Coke.”

Yet, Coca-Cola wasn’t content to just stop there. It continues to embrace consumers’ desire for constant connectivity and innovation, yet also autonomy, individualism and freedom of expression. As part of Coca-Cola’s efforts to push the boundaries when it comes to customer experience, the iconic brand leverages Experience Manager as a core part of its technology stack to enable “smart” Freestyle machines.

These smarter machines deliver real-time personalized content on screen, monitor analytics data based on beverage consumption, beverage creation and social network sharing, as well as integrate with its mobile drink apps to allow consumers to create and share even more. Experience Manager even manages multi-channel content for the iconic brand across its .com sites, Freestyle machines and mobile apps, ensuring it is always in sync and up-to-date. By tapping into the latest technologies, Coca-Cola has:

Experiences Drive Loyalty and Continued Success
As evidenced by Coca-Cola’s latest strides, building a strong digital strategy and technology ecosystem helps serve as a strong foundation for your business, helping to future-proof it for growth in the years to come. With the ubiquitous connectivity of consumers today and the “devicification” of seemingly everything, IoT and other emerging technologies will extend existing business while opening up whole new industries. The possibilities are endless. We are all going to be part of the Experience Business wave whether we like it or not, and the more we understand how technology can help our business evolve, the better we can connect with our audiences at every turn.

Adobe is fortunate to be at the forefront of this shift, helping brands deliver, define and disrupt their business and industries, with Adobe Experience Manager’s latest innovations helping customers take a big step further in this direction.

Adobe Experience Manager 6.2 is now generally available. For more details on the latest release’s capabilities, please check out this post from my colleague, Loni Stark.