Adobe Summit EMEA 2017: Redefining Customer Experience

Today in Lon­don we kicked off Adobe Sum­mit EMEA, our annu­al dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing con­fer­ence which attracts over 5000 mar­ket­ing and IT Pros from across the region. Sum­mit is now one of the largest con­fer­ences of its kind in Europe and we’re excit­ed to join some of the industry’s lead­ing lumi­nar­ies to dis­cuss the lat­est trends in dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing and the future of our industry.

Every aspect of a company’s busi­ness, from oper­a­tions and mar­ket­ing to infra­struc­ture, is now impact­ed by Dig­i­tal. Dig­i­tal is also empow­er­ing con­sumers, and rais­ing their expec­ta­tions, like nev­er before. In this new world, lead­ing busi­ness­es under­stand that deliv­er­ing excep­tion­al cus­tomer expe­ri­ences is crit­i­cal to cre­at­ing long-term rela­tion­ships with cus­tomers. Brands are, in effect, no longer just in the busi­ness of deliv­er­ing prod­ucts or ser­vices – they are in the busi­ness of deliv­er­ing expe­ri­ences. Cus­tomer expe­ri­ences dif­fer­en­ti­ate mar­ket lead­ers from laggards.

Sum­mit this week will be all about the impact of this trans­for­ma­tion on busi­ness­es. As well as show­ing off some of the lat­est inno­va­tions of the Adobe Expe­ri­ence Cloud, the con­fer­ence will play stage to sev­er­al big names in busi­ness and entertainment—among them the actor Col­in Firth and ex-Pre­mier League foot­baller Frank Lampard—who will share how dig­i­tal has impact­ed their per­son­al brands and careers. We’ll also be hear­ing first hand from some of the industry’s top brands on their own jour­neys to become Expe­ri­ence Busi­ness­es. Speak­ers include Dr Rain­er Feur­er, senior vice pres­i­dent of BMW Group; Nick Drake, senior vice pres­i­dent of Dig­i­tal at T‑Mobile; and James Som­merville, VP of Glob­al Design at The Coca-Cola Company.

In this new era of the “Expe­ri­ence Busi­ness”, the sin­gle biggest chal­lenge for busi­ness­es is how to har­ness vast amounts of data and con­tent to per­son­al­ize cus­tomer expe­ri­ences, and doing this at scale: For enter­pris­es this requires more than incre­men­tal change; it takes a fun­da­men­tal rethink of their whole busi­ness, both orga­ni­za­tion­al­ly and technologically.

At Adobe, much of the work you’re see­ing us do on our Expe­ri­ence Cloud plat­form is designed to solve pre­cise­ly this chal­lenge for cus­tomers. This is under­pinned by three main efforts: Cre­at­ing a uni­fied tech­nol­o­gy envi­ron­ment for both con­tent and data across the plat­form (every­thing needs to speak one lan­guage!); invest­ing in AI and machine learn­ing (Adobe Sen­sei) right across the plat­form; and open­ing our plat­form to oth­ers to build on and inno­vate. All of this is pow­er­ful because it means cre­at­ing an expo­nen­tial abil­i­ty for our cus­tomers to scale the deliv­ery of expe­ri­ences across cus­tomer touchpoints.

At US Sum­mit we recent­ly announced a series of advance­ments to our Cloud Plat­form along these lines. And at Sum­mit EMEA we will be intro­duc­ing some more. These include new inte­gra­tions across Mar­ket­ing Cloud and Cre­ative clouds that enable mar­keters to bet­ter search, orches­trate and man­age con­tent (includ­ing the great new inte­gra­tion of Adobe Dreamweaver and Adobe cam­paign); the com­mer­cial avail­abil­i­ty of Flu­id Expe­ri­ences, a Sen­sei-pow­ered capa­bil­i­ty that helps mar­keters sur­face the right con­tent just when and how a cus­tomer needs it (and which we’ll be show­ing off at our Retail Expe­ri­ence Area at Sum­mit this week – come and check it out); and a great new capa­bil­i­ty in Ana­lyt­ics Cloud called Vir­tu­al Ana­lyst, which uses machine learn­ing to con­tin­u­al­ly ana­lyze cus­tomer data and alerts mar­keters when there are sig­nif­i­cant changes—or ‘anomalies’—in the data so that they can eas­i­ly adjust campaigns.

Fol­low­ing the unveil of Adobe Adver­tis­ing Cloud in March, this week at Sum­mit we’ll also be con­tin­u­ing our con­ver­sa­tion on adver­tis­ing – includ­ing how we can help bring down tra­di­tion­al silos in media plan­ning between TV and dig­i­tal, and how this is pan­ning out in Europe. We’ll also be releas­ing the results of our ADI State of Dig­i­tal Adver­tis­ing report, which exam­ines trends in dig­i­tal adver­tis­ing invest­ment and con­sump­tion in West­ern Europe based on a sur­vey of 1000+ con­sumers and 300 mar­keters. One of its most inter­est­ing find­ings is that, while only one-third of Euro­pean con­sumers believe adver­tis­ers have improved their abil­i­ty to deliv­er com­pelling ads in the last two years, there is sur­pris­ing­ly high con­sumer appetite for ad per­son­al­iza­tion: More than half of mil­len­ni­al con­sumers express pref­er­ence for con­tent that is tai­lored to their inter­ests. Per­son­al­iza­tion remains a huge oppor­tu­ni­ty for brands to dri­ve brand loy­al­ty in Europe.

And of course, Sum­mit would not be Sum­mit with­out us show­ing off our new tech­nol­o­gy “Sneaks”. At our ded­i­cat­ed “Sum­mit Sneaks” ses­sion on Thurs­day, we’ll be pre­view­ing (as a first for our Euro­pean audi­ences) new tech­nol­o­gy in areas includ­ing AI, VR and IoT. Sneaks offer our Sum­mit audi­ence an unprece­dent­ed – and enter­tain­ing – look into the future, show­ing brands how they can reimag­ine their cur­rent cus­tomer expe­ri­ences and busi­ness process­es. If you can’t make it, then fol­low along on the livestream: https://summit.adobe.com/emea/

The next decade will bring even more dis­rup­tive changes in how brands cre­ate, immerse and engage their cus­tomers in their expe­ri­ences. In this future, brands will have to adapt to an era of true ‘expe­ri­ence mobil­i­ty’ – one where high­ly per­son­al­ized expe­ri­ences are con­tex­tu­al­ly aware and deliv­ered in real-time, regard­less of the device, time or loca­tion. From a tech­nol­o­gy per­spec­tive we’re ready­ing our­selves for this future, as we’ll be show­ing at Sum­mit this week. We’re only just get­ting started!