Latest Adobe Experience Manager Leads Innovations in Cloud and Content Intelligence

Adobe Stock / chombosan

Consumers’ relationship with digital content continues to evolve with heightened experience expectations. Whether a consumer is engaging with a brand on its website, on social media, walking into a store, or on an IoT device – the experience is now critical to business success. This is why brands must source and manage content in ways that make it possible for them to deliver the types of experiences consumers desire with increasing velocity. And it’s why Adobe is so focused on continuing to innovate in the areas of cloud agility and machine learning to power personalized customer experiences.

Today, I am excited to announce the latest version of Adobe Experience Manager. Over the years, Experience Manager has evolved into the leading solution for marketers and IT to design, anticipate and deliver rapidly adaptable experiences across web, mobile and any end-point in the customer journey. We work with brands of all sizes, ranging from Nissan and Hyatt, to Morningstar and Progrexion.

Study Shows Personalized Content is Increasingly Important to Consumer Engagement

Consumers spend about the same amount of time sleeping as they do engaging with digital content – an average of 7.8 hours daily! This is one of the findings from Adobe’s 2018 Consumer Content Survey, reinforcing why content velocity is so important for marketers.

Our study also provides further validation of the ever-evolving relationship that people have with digital content:

• People are spending on average 1/3 of their day engaging with digital content. They’re not just binge watching the latest episodes of Game of Thrones, but engaging with content on websites, social channels, mobile apps, and this latest year, the growing number of home voice assistants and connected appliances.
• People are rejecting poor experiences with 2/3 saying they rank content that is personal and in-context of mid or high importance. This is also impacting their decision-making with 2/3 also saying they won’t purchase from a brand if annoying situations such as if the content is not relevant to them.
• People are all over the place in the entire customer journey from pre-purchase, purchase to post-purchase. The top three channels consistently, however, are a brand’s website, in-store and social channels, predominantly shared opinion/content from friends and family.

While this data is specific to individual consumers, I advise both B2C and B2B brands to heed these trends as businesses are ultimately made up of individuals too.

So how should brands respond to consumers’ content demands? How will the latest Adobe Experience Manager help?

Innovations in Cloud Agility & Security

Brand image and integrity is hard to achieve and even harder to keep. Downtime, privacy concerns and security issues can come from anywhere, anytime. Experience Manager offers proven Service Level Agreement (SLA) management, enterprise grade security, architectural guidance and testing best practices to help ensure that brands’ presence and integrity is always on.

For the first time, we are making a new Experience Manager application available to all Managed Services customers – Cloud Manager. An application for IT professionals within brands, Cloud Manager accelerates Experience Manager deployments and updates through capabilities such as Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD). It enables them to quickly update websites and reduce risks, so customizations are deployed in a matter of hours or days, versus months.

Innovations in Machine Learning to Power Personalized Experiences

There are an incredible number of features leveraging machine learning/ AI innovations powered by Adobe Sensei in this latest release of Experience Manager across Sites, Assets, Forms and Screens. Many of these innovations make it faster and easier for marketers to do their jobs with automation. For example, Smart Crop automatically detects and crops the focal point of image and Smart Tag recognizes a company’s image attributes and adds relevant tags.

However, there is one innovation in particular that gives us a glimpse into the future of machine learning and content management – Smart Layout. With Smart Layout, machine learning is used not just to speed up a marketer’s work, but to achieve something that previously was impossible with content personalization.

Smart Layout automatically generates the most effective layouts and assets for individuals and audience segments with Adobe Sensei. Users select a set of assets/content and the set of personas, individuals or audience segments. Then Smart Layout uses data insights on past engagement of the target groups to generate personalized experiences using the content from the set that would be most engaging. Brands can further personalize these experiences by using Adobe Target to optimize these recommendations. For instance, if two customers are interested in booking a hotel, one may select a hotel based on golf, whereas the other places equal weight on spa amenities, the pool and gold. With Smart Layout, the golfer may see one offer that’s golf-centric, whereas the second customer may see three offers to sway both to book the hotel.

An early vision of this capability was showcased in Adobe Summit 2017, during “Adobe Sneaks.” It is amazing to have this as a capability now as part of Experience Manager.

These are a few of the highlights of Experience Manager 6.4. You can delve into the new features in more detail here and continue to check out articles on this site from the Adobe team as we continue to unpack this latest release and what it means for your business.

Get up close with AEM6.4 at these upcoming events:

• Adobe Summit North America March 25-29, 2018 | Las Vegas
• Adobe Summit EMEA May 3-4, 2018 | London
• Adobe IMMERSE ’18, The Enterprise Developer Conference June 12-14, 2018
• Don’t forget to RSVP for the Experience Insider Webinar to see What’s new in AEM6.4.