Adobe APAC Symposium 2016: Becoming an Experience Business

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I was fortunate enough to have an opportunity to say goodbye to San Francisco for the summer and head to Sydney to work with my APAC colleagues to support Adobe Symposium Asia Pacific. This annual event, whose theme was the Experience Business, comprises two sessions – one in Sydney and the other in Singapore. I was also part of the team for Adobe Summit in Las Vegas in March, where we kicked off the Experience Business story, encouraging brands to work hard at creating a personalized, engaging customer experience. It was fascinating for me to see how much that message continues to resonate in Asia Pacific; it really is a global challenge for brands everywhere.

This year’s APAC Symposium saw nearly 2700 attendees in Sydney and Singapore, living up to the moniker of the largest digital marketing conference in the southern hemisphere. APAC President Paul Robson introduced a cavalcade of executives including CEO Shantanu Narayen, as well as Executive Vice President and GM, Adobe Marketing Cloud, Brad Rencher. The keynote speakers emphasized the importance of placing the customer at the center of the brand. As Paul, Shantanu, and Brad discussed, we are in the experience business; digital experiences can transform every aspect of our lives. On-stage demos including Smart Tags and Adobe’s new acquisition of Livefyre only proved how much we continue to invest in the economy of experiences.

We were also delighted by appearances from Olympic Gold Medalist Drew Ginn and popular Singaporean media personality Michelle Chong. Drew inspired the Sydney audience with stories of motivation, encouraging people to belief in themselves and their teams. In Singapore, popular comedian Michelle brought the laughs in conversation with Adobe Senior Director Steve Hammond during Sneaks session, a first-look at potential products incubating in Adobe’s labs.

Adobe’s Footprint in the Experience Business

The Experience Business continues to evolve and change the way we expect to interact with businesses and government and so too does what we develop and offer to the industry to meet customer demands. At Adobe Symposium, we were excited to host journalists across the region as we announced a number of new capabilities across Adobe Marketing Cloud. They included:

Jordan Kretchmer, senior director and GM for Adobe Experience Manager Livefyre, and Michael Stoddart, director, digital media, APAC, hosted a special luncheon for journalists in Sydney and Singapore. Michael discussed momentum for online, personalized viewing experiences and Adobe Primetime, while Jordan presented on the impact of user-generated content on brands and their customers. In fact, UGC was omnipresent at both Symposia. Sydney and Singapore featured Livefyre-powered social walls displaying Instagram, Twitter and Facebook posts generated by attendees at both locations.

One example of how a company is adopting UGC is News Corp Australia’s partnership with Livefyre, part of Adobe Experience Manager, to create a social media hub for the Rio Olympics. This is expected to be a rich and timely addition to News Corp’s event coverage and its support of the Australian Olympic team.

Working Together to Build Experiences

Year after year, we’re privileged to work with some of the most influential global brands on making our events as engaging as possible for our attendees. In addition to News Corp Australia, several game-changing brands in the region led sessions focused on their experiences on the challenges and rewards of building an integrated, exceptional customer experience, including Coles Supermarkets and Sydney Opera House.

Coles shared how the company consolidated its digital analytics efforts that paved the way for an enterprise-wide analytics strategy. The Coles analytics team shared that this best practice helped the supermarket chain gain the clearest, most unified view of the customer, which helped boost online sales. Sydney Opera House CEO Louise Herron talked about the iconic venue’s decade-long transformation journey to modernize both its physical and digital presence to engage current and new patrons to the opera house.

Our partners including Deloitte Digital, BizTech Enterprise Solutions, VML Southeast Asia, and Mirum Southeast Asia helped us put on a great show in Singapore and Sydney. We were excited to announce the winners of our annual Partner of the Year Awards for ANZ and Singapore. BizTech Enterprise Solutions and VML Singapore were recognized as the top performing digital marketing partners for ANZ and Singapore, respectively.

This year we also partnered with two noteworthy charitable causes – Tour de Cure in Sydney and Billion Bricks in Singapore – as part of our annual Tweet-For-Good campaign. Each tweet tagged with specific hash-tags recognizing each cause raised $12,580 AUD in Sydney for Tour de Cure, and $10,000 SGD in Singapore for Billion Bricks.

See You Next Year!

2017 promises to be an especially exciting year for Adobe Symposium, as the iconic Sydney Opera House will be the event venue, from May 23-24, 2017. Be sure to visit here to sign up for updates! If you’d like to see the keynotes and lock-notes from this year’s festivities, visit this page.