Meet the 2019 European Experience Makers

Serv­ing as a fit­ting cur­tain call to yet anoth­er incred­i­ble Adobe Sum­mit, last night saw an elite group of mar­keters earn the right to tell their clients, their co-work­ers, and even their mums, “I’m THE Expe­ri­ence Maker”.

Recog­nis­ing nine pio­neer­ing brands, the Adobe Expe­ri­ence Mak­er Awards cer­e­mo­ny marked the cul­mi­na­tion of a rig­or­ous nom­i­na­tion and eval­u­a­tion process and, of course, out­stand­ing cus­tomer expe­ri­ence cre­ation and deliv­ery over the past year.

With so many entries rep­re­sent­ing the very best in dig­i­tal and cus­tomer expe­ri­ence, pio­neer­ing inno­va­tion and stand-out results, select­ing nine win­ners from such a dis­tin­guished group was, need­less to say, a dif­fi­cult task.

But ulti­mate­ly, the win­ning brands were those that great­ly exceed­ed expec­ta­tions, deliv­er­ing excep­tion­al expe­ri­ences to delight their cus­tomers, while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly deliv­er­ing tan­gi­ble busi­ness val­ue. So with­out fur­ther ado, the win­ners of 2019’s Adobe Euro­pean Expe­ri­ence Mak­er Awards are (drum roll, please)…

Best Audi­ence-Dri­ven Expe­ri­ence: NOW TV

To sup­port the online stream­ing service’s inter­na­tion­al expan­sion and steer users quick­ly towards con­tent they love, NOW TV’s Data Intel­li­gence team cre­at­ed lead­ing-edge Python automa­tion scripts, enabling them to deliv­er audi­ences at scale across every sin­gle paid and owned dig­i­tal touch point, in one go.

Adobe Audi­ence Manager’s API was the bedrock, sav­ing the team a huge amount of time, improv­ing cam­paign veloc­i­ty and reach as part of their omnichan­nel audi­ence strat­e­gy. This inte­gra­tion enabled them to tap into their data lake – Google Cloud Plat­form — to unlock data pre­vi­ous­ly not action­able and deliv­er tai­lored expe­ri­ences to even more users.

Best Com­merce Expe­ri­ence: Helly Hansen

In 2016, the com­pa­ny launched on Magen­to Com­merce via an inte­gra­tion with POS solu­tion Magen­to Order Man­age­ment, rep­re­sent­ing the biggest project host­ed in the Magen­to Com­merce Cloud to date. 35 stores now oper­ate on the cloud instal­la­tion, span­ning sev­en lan­guages, host­ing a vast cat­a­logue of 35,000 prod­ucts per store, each of which pos­sess­es spe­cif­ic lan­guage options, pay­ment meth­ods, ship­ping rules, localised con­tent and prod­uct availability.

Last year saw some remark­able results, includ­ing an increase in users and new vis­i­tors, and a sig­nif­i­cant increase in trans­ac­tions and revenues.

Best Dig­i­tal Expe­ri­ence: Philips

Con­tent local­i­sa­tion is undoubt­ed­ly one of the most time-con­sum­ing tasks fac­ing con­tent authors. Cre­at­ing a top-notch piece of con­tent takes a huge amount of care and craft as it is, but painstak­ing­ly trans­lat­ing and refin­ing said con­tent to appeal to dif­fer­ent coun­tries and cul­tures can length­en the process exponentially.

The Philips.com plat­form allows con­tent authors to man­age and build new expe­ri­ences for var­i­ous coun­tries and mar­kets. It’s capa­ble of han­dling around two mil­lion pages across over 90 locales, in more than 35 lan­guages, with around three to four thou­sand changes made dai­ly, while boast­ing a component/template re-use ratio of about 99%. Using Adobe Expe­ri­ence Man­ag­er solu­tions, Philips.com push­es the lim­its with com­pli­cat­ed work­flows, end-to-end dig­i­tal enroll­ment, and high con­tent velocity.

Best Expe­ri­ence-Dri­ven Cam­paign: DNA

In order to cre­ate a high­ly per­son­alised buy­ing expe­ri­ence, Finnish telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions com­pa­ny DNA teamed up with Adobe Cam­paign to cre­ate an auto­mat­ed, mul­ti-chan­nel expe­ri­ence for cus­tomers who are in the pur­chase win­dow of a new phone.

DNA uses Adobe Cam­paign to cre­ate auto­mat­ed mes­sages that are trig­gered by a data-dri­ven AI pre­dic­tion mod­el, which eval­u­ates and sig­nals when a per­son is in the pur­chase win­dow of a smart­phone. These mes­sages are high­ly per­son­alised, includ­ing con­tent such as the pre­dict­ed phone mod­el that the cus­tomer is like­ly to buy and the reim­burse­ment val­ue of their cur­rent phone. The results of this per­son­alised approach speak for them­selves: with an open mes­sage rate of up to 68% and units of phones sold to tar­get groups up to 200% high­er in com­par­i­son to a con­trol group.

Best Inte­grat­ed Adver­tis­ing Cam­paign: Car­ni­val UK, P&O Cruises

The paid ad world can be an unfor­giv­ing land­scape. Only the most cre­ative and human brands are the ones who thrive and sur­vive. Using Adobe Adver­tis­ing Cloud Cre­ative across two sep­a­rate cam­paigns, cruise oper­a­tor Car­ni­val UK has deliv­ered a num­ber of high­ly-tar­get­ed and cre­ative ads against their key audi­ences to increase CTRs by an impres­sive 1.4% across stan­dard dis­play formats.

What’s more, the cam­paigns have yield­ed valu­able insights into which audi­ences are respond­ing to which cre­atives, mean­ing Car­ni­val UK has access to price­less insights that can inform which spe­cif­ic top-per­form­ing cre­ative, and dur­ing which spe­cif­ic time­frames, the com­pa­ny should be throw­ing its mus­cle behind. Its most recent cam­paign has dri­ven over one thou­sand clicks in just two weeks, demon­strat­ing the val­ue of relevance.

Best Per­son­alised Expe­ri­ence: Tele­graph Media Group

Much was said when the UK’s biggest media pub­li­ca­tions began intro­duc­ing pay­walls and sub­scrip­tion ser­vices adapt to an increas­ing­ly dig­i­tal-first news world. But by using Adobe Sensei’s machine learn­ing capa­bil­i­ties with­in Adobe Tar­get, the Tele­graph Media Group is ensur­ing it’s deliv­er­ing the right offer at the right time to each indi­vid­ual. The result is that the com­pa­ny is enjoy­ing increas­es in sub­scrip­tion rates upwards of 15%, while also boost­ing the yield of the pay­wall per dis­play by around 10%.

Pow­ered by smart machine learn­ing algo­rithms, the frame­work _The Telegrap_h has since devel­oped is enabling the media out­let to con­tex­tu­alise ele­ments and test per­son­alised offers, with results avail­able almost instant­ly to con­tin­u­al­ly tweak per­son­al­i­sa­tion and ensure its award-win­ning jour­nal­ism is con­sumed far and wide.

Best Doc­u­ment Expe­ri­ence: GSK

To meet changes in glob­al reg­u­la­tions and cre­ate inno­va­tion, GSK needs to elec­tron­i­cal­ly and dig­i­tal­ly sign doc­u­ments. By imple­ment­ing Adobe Sign, it makes it eas­i­er for users to cre­ate, sign and print doc­u­ments both inter­nal­ly and exter­nal­ly; from any device.

Addi­tion­al­ly, sus­tain­abil­i­ty efforts are becom­ing more impor­tant to organ­i­sa­tions includ­ing reduc­ing their foot­print and impact on the envi­ron­ment. To ensure GSK is more envi­ron­men­tal­ly respon­si­ble by reduc­ing exces­sive paper waste, specif­i­cal­ly unnec­es­sary and out­dat­ed paper-based work flows, the glob­al health­care com­pa­ny has deployed Adobe Sign, Adobe Doc­u­ment Cloud and Adobe Cre­ative Cloud.

GSK has seen a man­aged rolled out of elec­tron­ic and dig­i­tal ‑Sig­na­ture through­out the organ­i­sa­tion, with the user base of the ser­vice grow­ing from 1500 users in 2018 to 5000 Users so far in 2019.

Audi­ence Choice Award Win­ner: Siemens (Net­cen­tric, A Cog­nizant Dig­i­tal Business)

Tasked with imple­ment­ing a new ded­i­cat­ed assets man­age­ment sys­tem for tech­nol­o­gy inno­va­tion com­pa­ny Siemens, dig­i­tal expe­ri­ence busi­ness Net­cen­tric used Adobe Expe­ri­ence Man­ag­er Assets sys­tem to migrate mil­lions of assets, ensur­ing a seam­less UI that would allow users to search and fil­ter all con­tent with ease.

After migrat­ing a stag­ger­ing 12 ter­abytes of assets (which equates to 12,000 giga­bytes), Siemens is now equipped with an entire­ly new and sep­a­rate dig­i­tal asset man­age­ment user inter­face, which acts as a reli­able and clean sin­gle point of truth for content.

Best Data-Dri­ven Expe­ri­ence: Man­ches­ter Unit­ed & HCL Technologies

As one of the most wide­ly-recog­nised foot­ball clubs in the world, Man­ches­ter Unit­ed FC has mil­lions of fans glob­al­ly and over 150 mil­lion social media con­nec­tions across 16 platforms.

Using Adobe, the Dig­i­tal plat­form col­lects mil­lions of data points, which form the basis for sophis­ti­cat­ed, 360-degree insights on fans. The infor­ma­tion mined from Adobe Ana­lyt­ics helps the club to bet­ter design tar­get­ed cam­paigns, help­ing to con­tin­u­al­ly enrich the fan experience.”

Win­ning at the Dig­i­tal Experience

The final­ists and win­ners in this years’ Expe­ri­ence Mak­er Awards go some way in high­light­ing the incred­i­ble work Adobe cus­tomers are doing right now, and how that work is dri­ving their busi­ness­es forward.

Even bet­ter, we know these lev­els of cre­ativ­i­ty, pas­sion, and com­mit­ment aren’t just reserved for win­ners. We con­tin­u­al­ly hear, and expe­ri­ence first-hand, the bril­liant cam­paigns exe­cut­ed by a diverse audi­ence of cus­tomers and part­ners. It’s inspir­ing to see organ­i­sa­tions – and their expe­ri­ence mak­ers – embrac­ing the tran­si­tion from cus­tomer-cen­tric busi­ness trans­for­ma­tion to true cus­tomer expe­ri­ence management.

Until next year, keep iter­at­ing, keep inno­vat­ing, and keep push­ing ahead.

See more sto­ries from Adobe Sum­mit and get inspired to become an excep­tion­al expe­ri­ence maker.