Adobe Summit EMEA 2016 Highlights

Adobe Sum­mit EMEA is over for anoth­er year now, and we can safe­ly say this year was our largest so far, with over 5000 atten­dees descend­ing on ExCeL for two jam-packed days. With two packed keynotes, over 100 ses­sions, and a busy com­mu­ni­ty pavil­ion there was def­i­nite­ly not a dull moment. Now it’s all over, let’s take a look back at some of the highlights!

News from Sum­mit: Key Announcements

We kicked off Sum­mit this year with key announce­ments advanc­ing Adobe Cloud Plat­form. Plus, we launched the lat­est Adobe Dig­tial Index report, _“EMEA Best of the Best”, _which bench­marks what the aver­age and top com­pa­nies are doing across a num­ber of met­rics by analysing Adobe Mar­ket­ing Cloud data, and includes insight into the online habits of over 5,000 con­sumers across Europe.

To read more on our news, see below. To read more, check out the below links:

• New data sci­ence capa­bil­i­ties span­ning Adobe Mar­ket­ing Cloud, Adobe Cre­ative Cloud, and Adobe Doc­u­ment Cloud.
• **New dig­i­tal adver­tis­ing capa­bil­i­ties **in Adobe Media Opti­miz­er.
• The Adobe Part­ner Ecosys­tem is grow­ing to include part­ners across Europe such as Dig­i­tasLBI France, Ensem­ble Sys­tems, The App Lab and Netcentric.
• Adobe Expe­ri­ence Man­ag­er (AEM) will soon be avail­able to UK pub­lic sec­tor organ­i­sa­tions as a man­aged ser­vice, pow­ered by Ama­zon Web Ser­vices (AWS).
• Adobe Dig­i­tal Index “EMEA Best of the Best” report, found only 40% of Euro­pean con­sumers think brands are doing a good job at pro­vid­ing a con­sis­tent expe­ri­ence across devices, plus a ton of oth­er insights

Day 1 Keynote: Becom­ing an Expe­ri­ence Business

The theme for the Day 1 Keynote was “Expe­ri­ence Busi­ness”, and for brands to thrive in today’s dig­i­tal busi­ness envi­ron­ment, they need to become an “Expe­ri­ence Busi­ness”. The keynote dived into how com­pa­nies need to cre­ate a per­son­al­ized, com­pelling cus­tomer expe­ri­ence at every link of the rela­tion­ship, from web­sites and mobile apps to retail envi­ron­ments. If you want to know how that relates to the pic­ture below with a Tes­la drop­ping from the ceil­ing in front of a dunk­ing donuts sign, I’m afraid you’ll just have to watch the recording:

You can watch the record­ing on Sum­mit Online: http://summit.adobe.com/emea/

Day 2 Keynotes: Inspiring Expe­ri­ence Through Creativity

The theme for the Day 2 keynote was “Inspir­ing Expe­ri­ence Through Cre­ativ­i­ty”. Adobe VP of Strat­e­gy John Mel­lor and CMO & EVP Ann Lewnes took to the stage as we learnt from oth­ers who are bold, who are dri­ving effec­tive change and who have great sto­ries. Ann had the plea­sure of inter­view­ing Col­in Far­rell live on stage, which includ­ed some great mus­ings on the democ­ra­ti­za­tion of dig­i­tal media as well as Colin’s own thoughts on human­i­ty, pur­pose, and art.

The won­drous 3 star Miche­lin Chef Hes­ton Blu­men­thal expand­ed on the mer­its of liq­uid nitro­gen for cook­ing — and on curios­i­ty and risk-tak­ing as the essen­tial ingre­di­ents of creativity.

Sneaks

Def­i­nite­ly a crowd favourite, each year at Sum­mit we get a sneak peak into all the work that goes on in our labs. This year Davina McCall was our co-host, with our own Steve Hammond. They intro­duced five projects that ranged from a look at the future of the shop­ping expe­ri­ence (#Adap­tive­Store), to tech that makes design­ing and build­ing apps faster than ever (#AEMXD) – and they def­i­nite­ly had some fun along the way!

The only ques­tion is was Davina’s favourite part of Sum­mit the Sneaks… or her self­ie with Col­in Farrell!?

You can read more about this year’s sneaks on the dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing blog: Adobe Sum­mit EMEA 2016 — Sneaks.

Davina with the win­ning Sneak: #Adap­tive­Store

Live­fyre

We were very excit­ed to have the lat­est mem­ber of the Adobe fam­i­ly, Live­fyre, at Sum­mit. Not just in per­son with Live­fyre CEO Jor­dan Kretch­mer on stage, but also with the tech­nol­o­gy inte­grat­ed into your Sum­mit expe­ri­ence. Last year we had the social screen, this year we added a new ‘dimen­sion’ and Live­fyre was dis­played on the large social cubes in the com­mu­ni­ty pavil­ion. (Well tech­ni­cal­ly, rec­tan­gu­lar cuboids… but let’s go with cubes).

#Sum­mitChat

New for 2016 we start­ed our #Sum­mitChat live twit­ter chat, which cov­ered ‘Becom­ing an Expe­ri­ence Busi­ness’ on Day 1, and ‘the Future of Mar­ket­ing’ on Day 2. I’m pleased to say this vir­tu­al ses­sion had great par­tic­i­pa­tion and some fan­tas­tic insights; from cus­tomer expe­ri­ence, to the role of con­tent, or the role of AI in marketing. If you weren’t able to join dur­ing the event, stay tuned for our sum­ma­ry on the chat where we’ll pull out the key insights.

Sum­mit Celebration

The cel­e­bra­tion is fan­tas­tic every year, and this year was no dif­fer­ent. Great food, net­work­ing, and of course Djan­go Djan­go. Take a look at the pic­ture below as we trans­formed the ExCel, with plen­ty of neon:

Thank you all to those who attend­ed this year, and for those who didn’t we hope that you’ll join us next time!