5 questions with Peter Davis, Adobe APAC’s digital media sales leader

Peter Davis, senior director of digital media consumer & SMB sales for Asia Pacific, recently celebrated his 10-year anniversary at Adobe and a lot has changed during that time. We sat down and spoke with him about Adobe’s Digital Media business, where he gave us insight into how it has been able to grow, how businesses are using our products and some key learnings from 2020.

1. 10 years at Adobe is an amazing accomplishment. Can you tell us about your Adobe Life so far and a bit about your current role?

When I joined Adobe, I was focusing on online sales through our Adobe dot com business when the company had only just made the decision to shift from what was then a perpetual business to an all-in subscription business. It was clear the business had big plans given that they had already piloted a subscription model in Australia and the vision was strong.

My role has expanded over the last 10 years to also focus on the SMB channel partner business. From there I became the APAC lead for the go-to-market business as we made a transition from just a sales team function to be more integrated into the business. So, in the early days it was very much around acquiring customers to adopt the new subscription model. But where we are today is very much because of our dedication to focusing on the stages of customer journeys—across markets, products and countries—which has made our business more complex and exciting than ever before.

2. Tell us about how the APAC digital media business has been able to grow so significantly over the past few years.

Adobe has really embraced the need to be much more internationally focused, and recognizing there is huge potential and opportunity in many markets outside of the U.S. We’ve made choices to invest in very particular areas in Asia to prove that there is massive opportunity, especially in places like Korea.

The focus and priority really is accelerating growth and customer experience. And in order to grow an active member base we can’t just adopt a cookie cutter approach. We are really developing our plans to be much more tailored to the needs of each market. I like to call it our “go local” approach.

3. How are businesses using our digital media products to impact their own businesses?

We have for a long time served our creative apps to businesses in so many different types of industries and sizes—from very small micro business all the way up to super large enterprises. Not only that, we also have industry standard Document Cloud products, including Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Sign. And we have obviously seen a huge acceleration from businesses adopting the need to be focusing on areas like paperless and digital productivity. The last year has accelerated that even more, with businesses having to adapt to a pandemic with things like remote working and hybrid workplaces, so our business segment has been supercharged by a combination of great products and industries making changes in the current environment. It has been a great opportunity for Adobe to help more and more businesses improve their productivity, realize more value, and make them more competitive as well.

4. What are some common misconceptions of our digital media business?

I would say that Adobe has fantastic products like Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Lightroom and document applications like Acrobat. I personally love using Lightroom for my passion in photography. What is amazing is that these applications have really developed from being just desktop solutions to being effective across multiple services across the web and mobile. We have shifted from being very much single application focused to now being multi-application focused and integrating into other incredible third-party applications as well. For example, Adobe Stock is now integrated into Photoshop and some of our apps are integrated into Microsoft products. Our goal is to really make these integrations seamless, so that our customers can be more productive wherever they are.

5. What were some of the key learnings from 2020?

Last year showed us that our customers are very resilient, and we know that they really value what Adobe brings to their businesses. We have seen some of our offerings really accelerate due to working from home and it’s become clear that creativity is still a vital part of people’s lives even if they aren’t in a physical office. People always need to be creative and productive no matter where they are working. The last year has been challenging, but Adobe remains a great place to work and the resiliency shown by our team and our customers was extraordinary.