Adobe Summit 2018 - Sir Richard Branson Inspires and Leslie Jones Sneaks Around! - Day 3 Part 1

Check out Partner Day Coverage here, and Day 2 coverage here ( Keynote) and here ( digital transformation sessions )

Experience Maker All Stars

Featuring talks leaders from across the Industry and one of the most visionary people I know of, Sir Richard Branson ! Let’s get into it! I've also included links to the sessions online from Adobe Blogs and Summit online website where available.

Jenson Huang - CEO NVidia

This was a pleasure to listen to - Mr. Huang is charismatic , passionate CEO and his passion and drive for technological innovation is visible. He mentioned the key to transformation was to intuitively understand the implications to the world of any technology.

3D graphics is the driving force of computing and the processing power we have these days allow us to do ray tracing ( lighting in simple terms ) in real time! – This is a big deal - a very big deal. If we co-relate this to the rising use of AR, and VR, coupled with this massive boost in computing power, well , then the future is already here.

The use of AI was demonstrated with a Sensei Agent running within the Witcher 3 Game recognizing objects shapes from computer generated images even emotions of characters based of rudimentary facial expressions. Very Impressive!

Link to session : https://summit.adobe.com/na/sessions/summit-online/#22048

JJ Watts & the power of good

A heartfelt session from the celebrated NFL Defensive end player for Houston Texans. The session covered his journey of how he planned for and continues to aim for his dreams, right from planning his daily routine for the better part of his college term in order to get drafted , to ensuring how he can leverage the platform for the general good.

Case in point, Watts was able to raise $37 Million Dollars for victims of Hurricane Harvey through social media. His initial plan was merely $200,000!

A humbling session, Watts stated that people want to be part of something positive. They want to help but may not know where to go. It’s up to us, the companies and individuals to leverage our platforms , to shine the light on the good and live with a positive mindset and help each other lift each other up.

The Future of Social Media

A panel discussion with executives from LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. Things got a bit awkward when Facebook had to address the elephant in the room and recent debacles with respect to breaches on their user

Nevertheless, all agreed that the next big thing for engaging experiences is going to be video. For digital marketers and content producers, it’s a new muscle that needs to be trained before they become proficient in using it .

Marketing departments are more and more responsible for curating and managing content and are becoming more like publishing houses tapping into their own employees for some great content.

It was also mentioned the need for a common set of metrics or at least concepts to measure engagement across platforms , but that is still quite a way away if at all.

Finally on the issue of brand safety , machine learning is increasingly being employed along with people and processes to give advertisers control on which content their ads will go.

Link to Session: https://summit.adobe.com/na/sessions/summit-online/#22050

Sir Richard Branson 

An honest, straight from the heart, deceptively simple chat from one of the world’s leading visionaries. Sir Richard Branson, mentioned what it meant for him to be an entrepreneur, i.e. to bring about change for the better.

In terms of customer experiences, it’s simple – if customer experiences are frustrating, then improving that is the way to go. It was with that vision he established Virgin Atlantic, competing with 1 plane against fleets of British Airways and other airlines.

The key is to listen to people’s experiences, really listen to small signals they give out wherever they interact with us. Addressing such seemingly small things is the key to long term success.

He also advocated treating people with flexibility, trust them to deliver value and build a work-environment that is respectful of their life’s need - he mentioned his company offering unlimited paid leave, with the result of greater productivity , as an example.

Link to session : https://summit.adobe.com/na/sessions/summit-online/#22051

Adobe Sneaks with Leslie Jones

What an entertaining and informative session – we got a sneak peek of some of the most awesome capability that could be coming our way. Oh, and Leslie had everyone pretty much in stiches throughout the session – what a performer!

Link to Adobe Blog with the sessions : https://theblog.adobe.com/watch-sneaks-shown-stage-summit-2018/

Note: A lot of the sneaks leverage Machine Learning and AI ( via Adobe Sensei ) to impressive effects. It will be interesting to see what state such capability will be available to implement. Nevertheless , the Sneaks below are a very commendable demonstration of very relevant use cases. Enterprises will also have to consider their data sovereignty if they do decide to leverage Sensei for their purposes as no on-prem version exists for Sensei.

Here are the sneaks in brief

Photoshop – Content Aware Fill

A very useful tool to allow cropping of pictures and filling in with either parts of the same picture ( making intelligent decisions on lighting and shading ) , or using sensei to suggest other pictures from stock to do the same. Very cool use of AI in content creation!

Experience Analytics

Pretty much consume any data set and visualize and measure anything including bringing out detailed pathing - from coming with up with detailed metrics on which co-star Leslie Jones likes the most on SNL to ingesting CRM data from Microsoft Dynamics and matching which customers that responded to online campaigns actually came into the store.

Master Plan

A very clever and impressive demonstration of how AI can be leveraged to orchestrate many aspects of a multi-channel campaign and providing a central location for marketers to plan , refine and execute From centralizing the location for creating a campaign brief to reviewing Adobe Sensei’s recommendations for tagging up images, smart audiences, or image variations. I can see this become really useful very quickly! 

Perfect Path – Hyper personalization at scale

An impressive demonstration of how Adobe Sensei Agents can be leveraged in real-time to suggest next best optimal action for the campaign including what audience to target and which channel to push the message on by analysis of segment data and past campaign performance ,

e.g. if the segment is more likely to respond to an email at 5PM or a targeted offer next time they visit the website.

This was really impressive! With Sensei graph, marketers may be able to play around with options, varying different information points and having Sensei provide revised recommendation and options.

This use case is also reflective of the way AI and Machine Learning is heading – being able to suggest based on pattern recognition on enormous amount of data and reducing the initial burden of work for us humans.

Shoppable Images

Adobe Scene 7 demonstrated shoppable viedeo in the last Summit , this seems to extend that concept into images – being able to have Sensei match products in the images to the SKU, embedding that in the images and to convert static images into purchasing opportunities no matter where they are used - on your own website , or a partner or even a blog.

This was an interesting one but I am a bit skeptical on its universal applicability – e.g. you don’t want to put a buy button everywhere the image is being used , especially in contexts where the audience don’t expect to have a product pushed to them.

Content Insights

Having Adobe Sensei analyse content and analytics data to make recommendations to marketers on what type of content is working with what channel and what audiences . This would help digital content curators and marketers work more closely together in identifying how to optimize customer experiences through content .

Video Ad AI

An impressive display of having Sensei analyse content ( in this case video ) and to provide actionable insights in terms of suggested content tagging, and cross channel considerations, e.g. predict watchability, whether to auto-play or not or video length for optimal conversion ( suggesting a summary on the fly ), and even ad relevant metadata.

Truly impressive and potentially one of the harder tasks for AI to pick up in terms to have an understanding of the content - the final say is of course going to be on the marketer. They will also have the chance to edit , tweak suggestions before pushing out to the channels – this Sneak also demonstrated ‘seamless’ integration with Adobe Premier Pro for editing the video

LaunchIt

The best for last ? – Maybe – at least on the immediate applicability across a wide set of activities. Using machine learning to scan a site to understand what to tag and how to tag with a complete set of recommendations including whether to include cross sell options on product pages it has identified. 

The AI us using Natural Language Processing to understand the site and make recommendation, while Adobe Launch is used to implement those recommendations 

This was really great ! – This has the potential to also change the job profile slightly of WCM Devs and digital marketers in taking off the basic initial setup off their hands such that they can focus on refining and adding value on top of the basic setup.

Again, that is also in line with the general trend of AI in complementing our capabilities, reducing the drudge work involved in hard analysis, and setting up , and allowing us to focus on the value creation.

That’s it for Part 1 - Coming up next will be Audience Hacking in Part 2 of Day 3

Let me know what you've been liking so far - make sure you check out the full video sessions - they are truly worth a watch !