What I Learned at Adobe’s Vegas Summit

It’s been a week since Adobe’s US Sum­mit in Vegas kicked off in a blaze of Beck and black­jack. While oth­ers have been busy hunt­ing for East­er eggs and enjoy­ing their choco­late, I’ve been busy focus­ing on even sweet­er things—the key insights that emerged from the conference.

Here are my top five takeaways:

1. Busi­ness­es Need to Become Expe­ri­ence Businesses

This mes­sage was at the heart of US Summit—from the open­ing address by Adobe’s CEO Shan­tanu Narayen, and woven into many sem­i­nars and ses­sions. To cap­ture the hearts, minds and loy­al­ty of cus­tomers, brands can no longer rely sole­ly on the effi­ca­cy of their prod­uct. They need to pro­vide a com­pre­hen­sive, enjoy­able and intu­itive expe­ri­ence to main­tain their mar­ket share. This is not nec­es­sar­i­ly about bricks-and-mor­tar sales or cus­tomer ser­vice. It can mean approach­es such as devel­op­ing an easy-to-use app to save cus­tomers time and help them avoid lengthy queues, either on a mobile device or in per­son. Alter­na­tive­ly, it could be the devel­op­ment of facial recog­ni­tion tech­nol­o­gy, remov­ing the need for cus­tomers to go through end­less secu­ri­ty ques­tions when try­ing to access their own con­fi­den­tial information.

2. AI is the future

These inno­va­tions require the pow­er of AI and machine learn­ing. Adobe Sen­sei, Adobe’s unique AI tool, cur­rent­ly pow­ers more than 30 fea­tures across our prod­ucts, with more in devel­op­ment as we speak. This is not about replac­ing peo­ple in the work­place; it’s about del­e­gat­ing data-heavy, mun­dane tasks to tech­nol­o­gy, which enables employ­ees to focus on the big­ger pic­ture. It’s also about mak­ing a customer’s expe­ri­ence more intu­itive and less time-consuming.

3. One plat­form to rule them all

Avoid infor­ma­tion silos, start­ing now, thanks to the launch of Adobe’s new Ad Cloud Cre­ative prod­uct. It lets you utilise Adobe’s mar­ket-lead­ing Cre­ative Cloud to cre­ate an ad, then imme­di­ate­ly inte­grate it into your adver­tis­ing pro­gramme for deliv­ery. You can change the ad cre­ative mid-cam­paign, or get Sen­sei do the work for you, tai­lor­ing it to par­tic­u­lar mar­kets. Ad Cloud Cre­ative makes all of this—and more—possible.

4. Hyper-per­son­al­i­sa­tion should be hyped

With Ad Cloud Cre­ative, hyper-per­son­al­i­sa­tion is even more achiev­able. Cre­at­ing mul­ti­ple ver­sions of ad cre­ative can be cost­ly, dull and time-con­sum­ing. Your cre­ative team doesn’t want to do 17 minor copy edits or change the back­ground hue of a ban­ner ad six times to var­i­ous shades of green. Adobe Sen­sei can cre­ate ads by draw­ing from the data of small­er and small­er cus­tomer groups to ensure that ads they’re see­ing are rel­e­vant and engag­ing. With the use of ad block­ers on the rise, and com­pe­ti­tion as fierce as ever, hyper-per­son­al­i­sa­tion becomes even more para­mount. Let your cre­ative team ditch the tedious tasks that a com­put­er can do in sec­onds to focus on what they love—creative ideas and content.

5. Data, data, data

Data leaks and ques­tions about how com­pa­nies use cus­tomers’ data dom­i­nate the head­lines. And GDPR leg­is­la­tion comes into effect next month. US Sum­mit held numer­ous ses­sions dis­cussing how we are help­ing cus­tomers become GDPR com­pli­ant, and how our prod­ucts are meet­ing stan­dards. Be pre­pared to see a lot about data on the infor­ma­tion dock­et for EMEA Sum­mit in just a few weeks’ time.

That’s my Sum­mit report done and dust­ed. Do I get a gold star?