Now and Then: Adobe Summit 2016

I come to the Adobe Digital Marketing Summit from the old Omniture SiteCatalyst perspective which took place for many years in Salt Lake City. In the space of two years, this event has changed a lot.

The older event was anchored on analytics which formed the core of the Omniture product set, now called Adobe Analytics. It was early data-driven marketing. The newer event is anchored on creative experiences through digital marketing, which let's be honest, synchronizes better with the Adobe product line.

One of the most exciting events at Summit is upcoming product innovations called Sneaks. Symbolic of this change, two years ago Adobe Sneaks were presented to the entire crowd of 7000 strong and were biased toward analytics improvements. This year a crowd of 10,000 people watched Adobe Sneaks designed to delight and amaze the audience with cross-device conveniences. Separately, Adobe Sneaks for Analytics was presented to a crowd of about 100 in a tucked-away conference room.

Adobe Summit pushed the "Experience Wave" which just smacks of "Content Marketing" repackaged. In both cases, analytics is by far the 4th step, not the driver. In today's data-driven marketing, shouldn't analytics be the 1st step to create hypotheses about what should work and why, develop creative, release the test and measure the results?

Well, yes and no.

Although the summit went too far toward the creative mark, in my opinion, it's important to remember as an industry, we need both. With analytics we can easily surface confused customers, find logical tests and recommend fixes, but we still need people to dream beyond the data. To ask "what if" based on nothing but an instinct.

Like Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock, we should never shut out innovation because we do not have the data. But when we do have the data, we should not shut out analytical insights either.

Other worthwhile tidbits:

  • General ROI for analysts is $13.01 per $1 spent. Take this aggregate with a grain of salt. Source: Nucleus Research.

  • Experience manager integration lab with Adobe Analytics, Target and DTM

  • Marketing ID cloud service that knits all devices together.

  • The power transfer to Adobe Analytics Analysis Workspace from Ad Hoc Analysis. This is good as the Ad Hoc and ReportBuilder both tend to crash. More "GA-like" features coming.

  • Cross-device retail demonstrations via Kinect, IOT bag carts into phone app, Tesla drive through demo. See Adobe keynote videos above.

  • Presentations from Mattel CEO Richard Dickson who talked about Barbie's reboot, empowered Olympic gold-medalist Abby Wambach, Giles Richardson Royal Bank of Scotland where 80% of executives log in and launch tests then watch the results, Alma Derricks Cirque du Soleil where their initiatives are around creating smaller, intimate experiences.

  • Getting updated on vendor technology from Observepoint, LiveRamp and Decibel Insight.

  • Checking out additional vendors TMM Data, Platforma, Invoca.

 The labs I attended were well structured and valuable. The overall Adobe message seems to be come and have fun, and you might even learn a little.

 What about you? Will you attend next year?

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