Unveiling the New Adobe Experience Manager

In the age of the empow­ered con­sumer, the strug­gle for com­pa­nies to man­age expe­ri­ences that are per­son­a­li­aed and ever-chang­ing in response to the con­text and pref­er­ences derived from data-dri­ven insights is complex.

Dig­i­tal is also dis­rupt­ing con­sumer behav­iour at an accel­er­at­ing pace. In fact, in our annu­al con­sumer con­tent sur­vey we just released, the num­ber of mil­len­ni­als with four or more devices increased by 130% year over year. And among the 3.75 bil­lion Inter­net users world­wide in 2019, 86.2% will use a mobile phone to go online. Our ques­tion of “what chan­nel?” has mor­phed from a sim­ple ques­tion to a state­ment declar­ing the futil­i­ty of think­ing chan­nel-cen­tric. Dig­i­tal is now nat­u­ral­ly omnipresent – like the air we breathe. The study’s find­ings on per­son­al­i­sa­tion is also telling. Con­sumers have come to expect more than per­son­al­i­sa­tion from brands; they require com­pa­nies to nav­i­gate the fine edge between being rel­e­vant and not creepy to win their loy­al­ty. Con­sumers demand that brand’s dig­i­tal expe­ri­ences have the EQ of the most social­ly evolved humans.

That’s because con­sumers val­ue and buy expe­ri­ences, and con­tent is the soul that pow­ers these expe­ri­ences. It is why at Adobe, we con­tin­ue to think and inno­vate deeply in the area of con­tent and the data insights that empow­er organ­i­sa­tions to syn­the­sise, scale, deliv­er and opti­mise valu­able expe­ri­ences. Adobe Expe­ri­ence Man­ag­er is the key solu­tion for this; pre­cise­ly why we are the indus­try leader in dig­i­tal expe­ri­ence man­age­ment for web con­tent man­age­ment, dig­i­tal asset man­age­ment and cus­tomer com­mu­ni­ca­tions. Expe­ri­ence Man­ag­er has helped com­pa­nies speed up asset cre­ation by 47%, has dri­ven an aver­age 20% increase in team pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and increased rev­enue through improved dig­i­tal expe­ri­ences year after year (source: IDC, The Busi­ness Val­ue of Adobe Expe­ri­ence Man­ag­er Sites, Feb­ru­ary 2018).

Today, I’m excit­ed to announce the lat­est ver­sion of Expe­ri­ence Man­ag­er and share some of the inno­va­tions that will help brands con­tin­ue to lead in Cus­tomer Expe­ri­ence Man­age­ment (CXM) and dif­fer­en­ti­ate on the expe­ri­ences they deliv­er to their cus­tomers. Expe­ri­ence Man­ag­er 6.5 fur­ther enhances the abil­i­ty for mar­keters, IT and devel­op­ers to work smarter and faster. New inno­va­tions pow­ered by Adobe Sen­sei helps users to intel­li­gent­ly per­son­alise every touch­point along the jour­ney. Addi­tion­al­ly, we con­tin­ue to extend Expe­ri­ence Manager’s capa­bil­i­ties for mid-size organ­i­sa­tions, so com­pa­nies of all sizes can bet­ter com­pete and win cus­tomer loy­al­ty at the scale of enterprise.

Let’s take a clos­er look at the inno­va­tions that address the chal­lenges organ­i­sa­tions of all sizes have in trans­form­ing the dig­i­tal cus­tomer experience:

Content velocity

To keep pace with increased expec­ta­tions to deliv­er per­son­alised cus­tomer expe­ri­ences, brands must stream­line and speed up con­tent cre­ation and opti­mise videos for any channel.

• With Adobe Asset Link gen­er­al­ly avail­able, cre­ative users can find, edit and reuse dig­i­tal assets that reside in Expe­ri­ence Man­ag­er Assets direct­ly with­in Pho­to­shop CC, Illus­tra­tor CC and InDe­sign CC.
• A new high-speed asset trans­fer in Expe­ri­ence Man­ag­er Assets’ brand por­tal accel­er­ates asset sourc­ing and two-way dis­tri­b­u­tion, with a faster, more flex­i­ble way for mar­ket­ing teams to man­age assets with col­leagues globally.
• Inter­ac­tive Com­mu­ni­ca­tions in Expe­ri­ence Man­ag­er Forms enable authors to quick­ly author and per­son­alise mul­ti­chan­nel cus­tomer com­mu­ni­ca­tions at 1:1 scale.

Fluid experiences

Our unique com­bi­na­tion of pro­file data and con­tent helps brands man­age and devel­op expe­ri­ences with agili­ty across owned, earned and paid end-points.

• Adobe’s new Sin­gle-Page Appli­ca­tion (SPA) Edi­tor in Expe­ri­ence Man­ag­er Sites enables devel­op­ers and mar­keters to pre­view, edit, and man­age con­tent in-con­text and in one place for faster collaboration.
• A new HTTP REST API for Con­tent Frag­ment deliv­ery in Expe­ri­ence Man­ag­er Sites pro­vides devel­op­ers more sup­port for head­less con­tent delivery.
• Advance­ments to Expe­ri­ence Man­ag­er dig­i­tal sig­nage extends mar­keters’ abil­i­ty to design, deliv­er and opti­mise expe­ri­ences on dig­i­tal dis­plays in phys­i­cal venues, such as in-store screens or kiosks. This includes sup­port for mas­sive scale sig­nage net­works, and pow­er­ful pub­lish­ing and approval work­flows to speed up deliv­ery and con­sis­ten­cy of in-store cam­paigns. Inte­gra­tion with Adobe Ana­lyt­ics makes it easy to opti­mise expe­ri­ences by dynam­i­cal­ly per­son­al­is­ing sig­nage content.
• Advanced chart­ing func­tion­al­i­ty, sim­pli­fied data inte­gra­tions and author­ing usabil­i­ty improve­ments in Expe­ri­ence Man­ag­er Forms enables organ­i­sa­tions to embed inter­ac­tive con­tent in wel­come kits, let­ters and state­ments to cre­ate cus­tomer com­mu­ni­ca­tions across chan­nels faster than ever before. Deep­er inte­gra­tion with Adobe Sign Cloud Sig­na­tures, part of Adobe Doc­u­ment Cloud, now empow­ers cus­tomers to dig­i­tal­ly sign doc­u­ments, while meet­ing reg­u­la­to­ry requirements.

Experience intelligence

It’s nev­er been eas­i­er to man­age and dis­cov­er the right assets and deliv­er engag­ing expe­ri­ences with dig­i­tal sig­nage thanks to Adobe Sen­sei and Adobe Expe­ri­ence Platform.

• Visu­al Search, pow­ered by Adobe Sen­sei, helps mar­keters using Expe­ri­ence Man­ag­er Assets find sim­i­lar images to a spe­cif­ic asset in a mat­ter of seconds.
• Expe­ri­ence Man­ag­er Assets’ Smart Tags now extends to video, using Adobe Sen­sei to auto­mate the process of video dis­cov­ery with intel­li­gent tags that cor­re­spond to actions, attrib­ut­es and objects in videos.
• Smart Crop for video, pow­ered by Adobe Sen­sei, auto­mat­i­cal­ly iden­ti­fies and crops the most impor­tant parts of a video in Expe­ri­ence Man­ag­er Assets to ensure a great video expe­ri­ence for users no mat­ter which direc­tion they hold their phones.
• Auto­mat­ed Forms Con­ver­sion accel­er­ates digi­ti­sa­tion and mod­erni­sa­tion of data cap­ture expe­ri­ence through auto­mat­ed con­ver­sion of lega­cy print forms to device friend­ly and respon­sive Adap­tive Forms in Expe­ri­ence Man­ag­er Forms.

Cloud agility

The cloud is all about agili­ty and inno­va­tion, enabling brands and their IT teams to sup­port dynam­ic busi­ness and mar­ket­ing needs.

• Autoscal­ing keeps IT on top of their game by auto­mat­i­cal­ly adding capac­i­ty dur­ing high user traf­fic, ensur­ing the end user expe­ri­ence is not impact­ed by oper­a­tional limitations.
• Qual­i­ty gate enhance­ments expe­dite time to mar­ket and reduce risks by imple­ment­ing engi­neer­ing best prac­tices to test and launch cus­tom code.
• Fric­tion­less Upgrades will reduce time and com­plex­i­ty of upgrades, pro­vid­ing teams access to the newest Expe­ri­ence Man­ag­er fea­tures even quick­er and with min­i­mal downtime.

I appre­ci­ate the con­tin­ued part­ner­ship of brands I great­ly admire for the trust they have placed in the Adobe team and Expe­ri­ence Man­ag­er to be a cor­ner­stone of their dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion strate­gies. We wouldn’t be able to do this with­out the sup­port of our long-stand­ing and grow­ing ecosys­tem of agen­cies, tech­nol­o­gy and sys­tem inte­gra­tor part­ners. There are many here at Adobe who have worked incred­i­bly hard on this lat­est release and will con­tin­ue to so because we are here for the long-run, with you.

I encour­age you to explore the new capa­bil­i­ties avail­able in Expe­ri­ence Man­ag­er 6.5 here. You can also reg­is­ter for a webi­nar to learn more about what’s new here.