What we learned at Adobe Summit 2019
While some of the Space 48 team headed to Las Vegas for Magento’s Annual Imagine Conference (read the roundup), we also made our inaugural visit to the EMEA Adobe Summit at London’s Excel. Billed as the Digital Experience Conference we were joined by 6000+ fellow digital, marketing, commerce and communications professionals from both client and services companies for the 3 day conference.
As Magento Commerce becomes more closely aligned to Adobe this will bring opportunity for Magento customers to take advantage of the wider Adobe product suite. As a long time partner of Magento, we were keen to learn how this commercial and technology alignment might benefit our customers. Alongside that, the speaker list included some of the brightest digital experience professionals from a wide range of industries. The message that bled through and seemed to be reinforced over the 3 days was the concept and importance of ‘Customer Experience Management’. This theme was everywhere throughout the 150 talks across the 12 tracks.
Today’s consumer is seeking new types of relationships with brands and it is incumbent on business today to understand these new relationship dynamics. What is certain is that there is a need to create a more personal relationship with customers. This relationship is no longer conducted on the brand’s terms, but rather it is on the consumer’s terms. In a world of multichannel marketing, endless content and multiple devices the challenge of nurturing that relationship through personalised, timely interactions from exploration to purchase and beyond is becoming harder. Through the announcement of the Adobe Commerce Cloud combining Magento, Experience Manager, Target and Analytics at Summit, Adobe is attempting to bridge that gap by enabling brands to provide an engaging experience through personalised content-driven commerce.
At every Adobe Summit the Adobe product teams get a chance to showcase some of the cool new technologies they have been working on in a part of the Summit called ‘Sneaks’. This was one of the most engaging segments of the conference, made all the more so as it was facilitated by comedian Jack Whitehall. Every year a number of the ‘Sneaks’ teased by Adobe Labs gets commercialised. Here’s the list…
- Expert Assist uses Adobe Sensei’s Artificial Intelligence capabilities to help collaboration tasks. The example shown on stage showed automatic image editing and collaboration in Slack.
- Intelligent Agent uses text recognition and voice control to interrogate and search documents to find the relevant information and then compare against other documents.
- Data Unbound brings data from Adobe products into other apps. The example on stage showed Adobe Analytics data sets and visualisations being imported into Powerpoint and being maintained as a live data feed ensuring the data is always current.
- Journey Genius utilises Adobe Sensei to predict future customer behaviour and suggest interventions to ensure a smooth experience.
- Car Smarts leverages in car data to help drivers make better driving decisions.
- Augmented Offers creates a personalised Augmented Reality experience at the airport which engages customers with offers and promotions in-store.
Finally to further underscore the importance of the customer experience there were a number of key takeaways from the Adobe Summit all unsurprisingly centred on this theme;
- The prospect of connecting the newly launched Adobe Commerce platform (Magento) with the powerful data and analytics, targeting, campaign management and content management Adobe suite of products will be a game-changer for brands, retailers and manufacturers looking to create meaningful customer experiences.
- All business strategy needs to be customer experience centric, and that flawless execution against customer experience design is driving digital platform decisions.
- Any digital transformation needs to be delivered in an agile way. It must be people centric and it must use technologies that are flexible and adaptable to fast changing customer demands.
- People buy experiences, not products. Own, manage and improve your customer experience end to end, everyday.
We are already looking forward to attending the combined Summit and Imagine in Las Vegas next April.
