Highlights from the Top-Rated Personalization Sessions at Adobe Summit 2018

Image source: Adobe Stock / Jakub Jirsák.

With both the 2018 U.S. and Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) Adobe Summits in our rearview mirrors, it’s always interesting to discover which sessions in the personalization track resonated most with attendees. Thanks to our surveys, we’ve identified the top five Adobe Summit sessions from the U.S. event and the top two from the EMEA event. Each session described below is well worth your time listening to and watching. Without a doubt you will walk away with a deeper understanding of:

The top U.S. sessions

#1: Making It Personal: Moving from Communications to Conversations

Jeriad Zoghby of Accenture kicks-off this session by explaining how businesses across industries risk becoming commoditized — that is, disappearing into the woodwork because they present themselves digitally just like every other business. He then describes and gives great examples of the three areas of personalization that businesses need to address to move away from talking at a customer to holding real conversations with them: personalized shopping, personalized merchandise, and personalized advisor. Listen and get inspired to create an innovative conversational framework in these three areas that sets your brand apart.

#2: Humanizing the Digital Experience with AI & Personalization

As digital marketers, it’s easy to forget that all those clicks and conversions we’re after are actually people whom we’re pushing through our sales funnels. So how do we humanize their digital experiences? And counterintuitively, can AI help us do that? With $1.6 trillion being lost by U.S. companies each year as customers switch due to bad experiences, these are important questions. In this session, Kevin Lindsay, former director of product marketing for Adobe Target discusses why this matters. Voice of Customer (VoC) expert Ernan Roman from ERDM explains findings about the human experience from tens of thousands of one-on-one customer interviews. Finally, head of Digital Analytics at Sky UK Rob McLaughlin provides examples of how Sky UK is humanizing its digital experiences, including how it’s using AI to do that.

#3: B2B Personalization at Adobe: Show Me the Money!

Personalizing in B2B presents more challenges than B2C. Yes, like B2C you’re challenged by the need to personalize across multiple channels. But in B2B, you must also please multiple buyers, personalize in the context of a complex and lengthy sales funnel, and work with siloed marketing and sales teams. In this session, Brittany Chandler, principal digital strategist at Adobe, and George Sadler, senior director of marketing customer insights at Adobe, discuss key learnings about B2B personalization uncovered through consulting with customers, and as Adobe faces these very same challenges when personalizing for its business customers. In particular, the session discusses shifting from an account-based marketing mindset to an account-based experience one to switch the focus to the customer and solve challenges.

#4: Personalization Tales from our Adobe Experience Business Awards Finalists

Each year for the past few years, we’ve held a contest to solicit stories from Adobe Target customers that showcase innovative, unique, and ultimately successful ways that they’ve used the solution to personalize and optimize. This year the contest expanded to include multiple Adobe Experience Cloud solutions in several categories. Adobe Target users could submit their stories to two of those categories: Excellence in Business Impact Through Optimization, and Excellence in AI-Powered Personalization. Listen to the session and learn new personalization and optimization approaches and tactics from the five finalists from well-known companies CarMax, Grainger, Rosetta Stone, SAP, and Sky UK.

#5: The Future of Experience Optimization

With data science and AI, experience optimization is making some major shifts. In this session, learn from Adobe senior leaders in data science, product management, and platform engineering just where they see the future of experience optimization going. Specifically, they’ll discuss what experience optimization is and the problems we’re trying to solve in that space. They’ll also discuss some of the technical and other challenges faced today in doing experience optimization. Finally, they’ll describe some machine learning and AI technologies that are really pushing the boundaries of what seems possible, but hold great promise for advancing experience optimization.

The top EMEA sessions

For those of you who attended EMEA Summit, check out these top sessions too.

EMEA #1: The Road to a Global Optimization Program by BBVA

It’s not every day that you see an optimization program start from scratch and reach high-program maturity levels in just two years. But it easily could happen, and BBVA, one of Europe’s largest banks with over 7 million customers, can show you how. In this comprehensive session, members of BBVA’s Optimization team, its Digital Strategy and Acceleration team, and a senior solutions consultant from Adobe describe how they accomplished this through creating a successful governance model for optimization, defining the key business drivers around optimization to promote the program internally, and pacing the program’s growth in a way that allowed them to learn and grow from each activity they ran.

EMEA #2: DER Touristik’s Revolution: Democratizing Optimization to Increase Revenue Using Adobe Target

DER Touristik, the travel division of major German retailer Rewe Group, has been seeing huge success using Adobe Target. But the Digital Analytics team for DER Touristik wanted to make some changes that would allow them to scale this success. At the time, the team was pushing the limits of its ability to meet the demands of the business for optimization. They wanted to democratize parts of the optimization workflow so that they could focus their efforts on the aspects of the workflow that tapped into their data expertise. They also wanted to meet customer expectations for great customer experiences by displaying relevant recommendations without that momentary flicker that can occur with a client-side implementation of a personalization and optimization solution. In this session, learn the changes they made to accomplish this vision.

I hope that reading about these sessions has persuaded you to watch the session recordings and get more detail on the great things our customers are doing with Adobe Target in their personalization and optimization programs. And remember, Adobe Summit 2019 is now just 11 months away. It’ll be here again before you know it.