Customers Big & Small Can ‘Expand The Experience’ With Adobe + Magento
It is truly a momentous time to be in commerce.
It is truly a momentous time to be in commerce, said Gary Spector, VP, Commerce Sales & Customer Success, Experience Business at Adobe, who kicked off the Monday evening keynote session at Adobe’s Imagine 2019 event in Las Vegas.
“We’re seeing changes in the way people shop and the way they interact with brands,” he told the audience of approximately 3,500 attendees. Customer expectations are rising, he said, “and the expectations are that the experience will be personal and you’ll meet people where they are and whenever they want.”
That is precisely why Adobe acquired Magento just under a year ago, Gary said, bringing Magento Commerce into the Adobe Experience Cloud suite of cloud services, alongside Adobe Analytics Cloud, Adobe Marketing Cloud and Adobe Advertising Cloud.
“We need to use insights to drive real-time relevance and personalized experiences,” Gary said. “It requires even greater openness and collaboration–to reach across functions within and beyond our organizations to create one cohesive experience for customers. It calls us to continue challenging each other, pushing each other to innovate even more, and to keep this community thriving.”
And, he said, it also requires the commerce industry to look ahead at emerging technology such as AI and VR, i.e. “skate to where the puck is going to be next.”
“In every sense, it requires us to ‘Expand the Experience,’” he said.
With that, Gary invited attendees to expand their knowledge and enhance their relationships, as well as their experience with Magento, Adobe and also with one another. Because, he boasted, the universe of creative options from a commerce perspective have exploded now that Magento is part of Adobe. And he’s right: There’s so much opportunity for Magento customers in how they collaborate as well as how they create experiences.
The future of Magento
The question attendees get to explore at this year’s Imagine, along with Adobe, is how to expand the experience for customers, together, as a community. Gary challenged attendees to think about how creating experiences will evolve.
With that, Gary introduced Gloria Chen, SVP of Strategy & Growth for Adobe, and the woman who was instrumental in bringing Magento and Adobe together. According to Chen, the reason why Adobe decided to purchase Magento is because we knew that commerce is important to our customers, large and small.
After all, she said, Magento is a leading open-source platform that spans B2C and B2B. And behind it is a large and active community of hundreds of thousands of developers contributing to new capabilities and extensions, which is helping to accelerate innovation. As a company, she said, Adobe’s really excited about the growing SMB and midmarket community of customers. And finally, Magento’s strong vision for experience-driven commerce was what really helped seal the deal.
“Magento has brought many strengths to Adobe family,” Gloria said. “We are committed to nurturing and building on these strengths – the platform, the community and the SMB market”
Gloria made an interesting statement that seemed to ring true to the room full of CX professionals. She said that consumers are increasingly consuming digital content. And, she said, there’s a good chance that every one of those experiences is made by one of Adobe’s customers, using one of our tools.
“Our technology levels the playing field and empowers you to break through, stand out and achieve your vision,” Gloria said. “We’re transforming Creative Cloud into the platform that powers creativity for all. That means all of us here in this room can design like the pros!” We’re working to make [Adobe] Document Cloud the platform for digital documents, enabling you to create, review and collaborate on documents —wherever you are”
And, she said, our company is also transforming how businesses compete by giving companies of all sizes the ability to create and deliver personalized experiences for their customers wherever they are. And, Magento is an important part of Adobe’s ability to deliver an end-to-end experience.
In fact, Adobe customers have asked for commerce technology for years, Gloria said. And Magento’s digital commerce, order management and predictive intelligence capabilities enable shopping experiences across a wide array of industries.
“I’m excited to see how a deeper integration with Adobe Experience Cloud and our Adobe Experience Platform will enable a whole new wave of experiences,” Gloria said. So whether you’re a digital-native retailer or a 100-year old global brand, you can make every moment personal and every experience shoppable.”
What’s new with Magento + Adobe
Jason Woosley, VP, commerce product & platform, Adobe, came on stage to discuss the commerce opportunity with Adobe + Magento. Jason expects that real-time insights will enable merchants to optimize and run their entire business as a customer experience engine.
“Your marketing, merchandizing, pricing and supply chain can be optimized in real-time for outcome metrics [such as] retention, margin, engagement, and life-time-value,” he said. “This is incredibly powerful and sustainably differentiating. And it’s only possible when you unify behavioral data, derived from interactions with your content, and transactional data – the dollars and cents behind the relationship.”
This tremendously powerful combination of content, data, marketing, and now commerce, applied over the entire customer journey is what we at Adobe call, “experience-driven commerce.” And it’s something that we’re now enabling for merchants of all sizes.
At Adobe Summit in March, we announced Adobe Commerce Cloud to serve the needs of large enterprises that want to unify and manage the customer experience they deliver across all their channels, end to end. Adobe Commerce Cloud is built on Magento Commerce. It uses the strengths of the Magento platform and the fact that it is architected for rapid change and growth, with limitless flexibility to customize and scale, to support any use case, in any industry, globally and across B2C, B2B and hybrid sales models. These commerce capabilities are natively integrated, enhanced and managed within the Adobe Experience Cloud platform.
“Adobe Experience Cloud integrations support the entire customer journey delivering superior customer experiences and accelerating time to market,” Jason said. “Combining data, content, and commerce creates a powerful platform effect that optimizes experiences, drives efficiencies, and enhances business outcomes.”
Jason also announced the next generation Magento Commerce, which now uses Adobe Sensei (our AI and machine learning framework) to power recommendations. He also spoke to the availability of Google Ad Channel and Amazon Sales Channel, which will empower merchants to target new audiences and easily reach more customers. Click here to see the full lineup of announcements made on stage.
“As we near the 1-year anniversary of the acquisition, we are well ahead of our integration goals,” Jason told the audience. “We’re driving greater value for our stakeholders, accelerating our product roadmap, leveraging Adobe’s scale to serve more customers across every industry, and advancing our mission of using technology to connect and empower more merchants than ever before.”
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