Adobe Summit 2018 Day 2 - Part 1 - The Keynote

Part 1 covered the sessions for the partner day .

The Adobe Summit proper kicked off today with the Keynote. As Keynotes go, it was a pretty rocking affair with astounding visuals, live social media walls , great music – and that was even before CEO Shantanu Narayen got on stage to kick things off!  Overall, I believe that with this summit, Adobe have provided some much needed cohesion and substance to the narrative of bringing together all the acquisitions made during the last decade or so under a unified offering.  

While there is a lot of work yet remaining to actually realise the cross product integrations , I think we have a promising start! This blog will cover the overview of the keynote session as well as main takeaways as of Day 2

Adobe Summit 2018 – Key Takeaways ( so far )

These are not necessarily the final takeaways . I’ve put the most important ones on top and at the end of the summit we will revisit them to see if there is any shift.

1.    Become an Experience Business – Align your enterprise to the customer journeys and the touch points. While deceptively simple, I cannot stress this enough! This was the number one common factor in all major companies that were taking center stage in the keynote or during the breakout sessions, talking about their successful milestones in their digital transformation 

2.    While digital transformation may seem daunting at the sheer scope, the most difficult aspect is infact transformation of the mindset and vision– the people and processes - breaking down silos, re-wiring the enterprise and learning new ways of working – the rest is ‘just’ tech and tools that are meant to serve your vision

3.    The rise of Voice as a means of engagement will provide new opportunities and unique challenges that if met can reap significant rewards

4.    The vision from Adobe having a unified store of data and providing a unified customer profile provides a compelling vision but will still face significant challenges to implementation by way of low agility legacy data sources, data protection and data sovereignty requirements and data privacy issues. Adobe is not going to solve the problem , but can help and will require bespoke consideration by the enterprises themselves

5.    Immersive experiences was a common repeated theme from past summits – pervade all touchpoints and focus on hyper personalization - but I wonder how that will actually playout in the light of recent data privacy scandals and new data protection laws around the globe.

6.    The Adobe Experience Cloud is positioned as a possible central system of record for experiences

7.    Adobe Sensei is the generational bet for Adobe – Machine Learning and AI via Sensei have been featured in almost all of the sessions throughout the summit so far – They’re betting big on this one and a lot of integration work will need to happen before it can manifest.

8.    Form drop-out , cart abandonment and nudge communications are still the most common use cases for digital marketing of seeing all this tech work together in practice – It would be interesting to see how the platform adopts for more advanced use cases, e.g. propensity scoring across life-stages

9.    The Summit featured a significant amount of integration in the Adobe Ecosystem, e.g. Analytics to AAM and back again, or Analytics Cloud, AEM and Creative Cloud

Major new Stuff announced

1.    Adobe Auditor – Sneak Peek announced 2017 , now available for free to all existing customers

2.    Attribution IQ – being able to tweak attribution models and experiment with different use cases

3.    Adobe Creative Cloud, Analytics Cloud, Experience Manager integration

4.    Heap of Adobe Sensei Capabilities , including smart tagging, auto content variation creation, auto experience generation, Data Workspace

5.    Adobe Sensei Agents and Sensei Graphs

6.    Adobe Experience Data Model ( 50 odd base models being made available on github )

Summary of the Keynote and sessions

Shantanu Narayen set the initial context. Apart from emphasizing the need for enterprises to make experiences their business as well as to wire their companies up for data driven intelligence, he also talked about the need for a new kind of enterprise business architecture. One that is aligned across customer journeys across all channels, something that is critical and will also require commitment and multiple years of deep investment.

Adobe’s vision is for the Adobe Experience Cloud to be at the heart of this new enterprise architecture.

Brad Rencher – Changing the World Via Digital Experiences

Key components that will allow companies to make experiences their business are

1.    Modernisation of Tech

2.    Talent

Modernisation of Tech - CRM and ERP systems were essential to centralize records but are not equipped to deal with the experience wave the volume of data it brings and the velocity of insight it demands.

A new system of record is needed – An Experience System of Record. Its Key components would be

•  Data Lake , Standardised Data Models and also Data Pipelines from multiple systems – allowing for connecting data across silos to create a unified profile
• Semantics and Control – A common dictionary , vocabulary and also governance model to allow for ease of leveraging data for different purposes.
• Machine Learning and AI capabilities – to help in real-time on attribution analysis, audience scoring, auto segmentation and journey prediction – all on that common unified profile
• A framework allowing for the above insights available for unified action via channel
• Content Pipeline and workflows taking advantage of the above to execute personalization at scale

Talent - The people that will actually leverage and deliver success on that modern tech. Brad mentioned the formation of an Adobe Experience League to assess current skillsets in individuals and help guide them with training, 1on1 facilitation to help them become experience makers and also help realise complete value of the products they use. Am quite excited about this one and looking forward to what it brings for me and my team: Experienceleague.adobe.com

Client Testimonials

Next up were case studies from prominent brands from across the world. Through these all, the underlying theme was the focus on the customer and their journey and how their business pivoted around that. Again, these are mentioned here in Summary form.

Tourism Australia on their transformation 

1.  Have a very clear marketing process and goals – new visitors and repeat visits
2. Provide an experience through marketing – start with something familiar and then pivot to the new ( This was exemplified beautifully in this brilliant campaign  - you must watch it!  
3. Leverage your partners and their data for new touchpoints for conversions or for providing customer delight, in this case partner airlines
4. Support your team with the right tech and enablement and empower everyone to use it
5. Explore new capabilities like VR and AR to bring digital and physical together

Marriot

Their main challenge was siloed data and lack of a unified setup for Data, Content or customer profile. Here is what they used

1. Adobe cloud auditor for tag management and ensuring all their digital properties had the right pipeline setup
2. Adobe Launch – streaming data from different digital touchpoints into a single space
3. A common data model designed for actionable insight through XDM 
4. Leveraging of semantic and control elements of XDM to mark fields as sensitive and/or restrict access
5. Relieve data scientists from cleansing and ETL of the data and allowing them to focus on machine learning capabilities of Sensei
6. Executing the experience through the availability of the unified customer profile accessible to various digital touchpoints via APIs 

NFL

Their main focus was to personalize experience and delight die hard fans. Here’s what they used

1. The use of voice in customer experience - integrating SIRI into their app and using sensei to answer complex queries
2. Increased capabilities in Adobe Analytics for metrics on audio listened
3. Attribution IQ – analyses of different models ( first touch, last touch, mid funnel ) to find out the perfec channel for a segment
4. Integration of AA and AAM for creation of new segments and overlay with 2nd party data respectively and then subsequently send the segment down to DSPs
5. Using Sensei for creating anticipatory segments

Hersheys

Using Adobe Advertising Cloud and the integration with Adobe Creative Cloud and Experience Manager to allow personalization at scale , tailored for different channels but still maintaining the consistency of a Hershey’s experience

1.  Using decision tree capabilities for creating audiences, segments and targeting, including being able to add on second party data to enrich this tree
2. Direct integration to the creative cloud to modify / tweak campaigns for different audiences and channels from within the Advertising Cloud for different
3. Manage and Publish the above campaigns across different platforms from a single place
4. Leverage Sensei for creating cross screen campaigns by automatically creating suitable experiences for those channels ( and allowing for human review of said variations )

Mercedes

With such a global brand and presence, their main focus was at achieving high content velocity and also personalization at scale

Content Velocity

1. Adobe XD design and prototyping solution for cross channel content
2. Collaborative workflow between AEM DAM, Creative Cloud ( Photoshop ) and Marketing Cloud for seamless collaboration cutting down time to market significantly

Personalization at Scale

1. Using Adobe Sensei smart cropping ( based on focal point ) to suggest experiences for different layouts
2. AEM integration with Target to export experience fragments as offers to the Marketing Cloud
3. Using Adobe Sensei to auto target based on behavioural data , offline data and CRM data
4. Pushing Adobe Campaign data directly into Adobe Analytics

Coca-Cola

Coke deals with almost 18% of humanity every-day. They have themselves been on transformation journey from being a brick and mortar company to a digital world. That journey is still going on but today it’s redefining what it means to be an experience.

Here are some of their key points

1. Paying homage to their roots, using iconic campaigns and images from the past and updating it for the present
2. Using digital to invoke the physical
3. Using AR on packaging , cans, caps, straws
4. Rising engagement levels with voice is a bit of a strange animal for them as it removes the brand and packaging from view
5. Looking for different ways to engage with fans – eGaming events, Coke Studio for example
6. Driving co-creation through the general public.

The biggest challenge for them in their transformation journey are a couple of key soft features. Experience and operational transformations were the no-brainer and straight forward to understand and work towards.

The business transformation – disrupting themselves before someone else does it , and the cultural transformation – understanding they are not just a cpg company anymore , are the hardest

Sneak Peek into the Future – Adobe Sensei

It is about bringing Art of Content and the Science of Data together. AI will transform the world of enterprise architecture and Adobe doing massive investment into this space

Sensei is purpose built for providing ai in 

1. Creative intelligence - understanding concepts such as animation, design, video, imaging and illustration

2. Content intelligence  - e.g. through smart tagging, recognizing shapes and features, smart cropping

3. Experience intelligence - being able to automate creation of experiences, enhance and provide insights on customer satisfactions, forecasting and journey management

Three tiers in which Sensei is going to be available are

1 .Sensei experiences ( authors and marketers ) 

2. Sensei services ( devs) 

3. Sensei frameworks and tools ( data scientists ) 

Sensei ecosystem primarily comprises of

1. Data scientists – working in the data scientist workspaces to work on content model and recipes

2. Developers & Partners - Content intelligent services and data services allowing the use of the data models and recipes in intelligent ways

Additional ( but awesome! ) features

Sensei Agent – based on what was shown , permeating every Adobe product from creative cloud to AEM to analytics – think the Microsoft paperclip except actually helpful - being able to augment your capabilities in a product, eg. In Photoshop , automatically creating masks of images , in AEM suggesting image background based on your initial request , creating variations for different screens though voice command, in analytics, suggesting reports or metrics that you didn’t explicitly ask for , suggested experiences in target

The pervasiveness of this will depend on how the APIs are able to surface up ML and AI learning for use in the Adobe ecosystem

Sensei Graph – represents the semantic of the process of creation – all decisions made in creating the content and subsequent choices are captured and available. They are available for review, going back in time, tweaking parameters and allowing Sensei to do the rest for future steps to create all those variations – this sounds too good to be true and it probably is, but even if it is 50% of what was ddeomstrated, it will be very useful and a truly impressive way of showcasing the AI potential

 

That’s it for part 1 of this day’s coverage. Coming up is Part 2 – focusing on the breakout sessions