Virtual Innovation at Adobe Summit

The current Coronavirus pandemic has decimated the spring events calendar. Widespread social distancing measures led to the cancellation of many physical events before government enforced lockdowns forced the cancellation of their online replacements. Oracle, Google and Cisco have all scrapped virtual events after stay at home orders made it impossible to record them from a studio.

The travel restrictions haven't deterred Adobe, who launched their first digital Adobe Summit last week. With recording studios out-of-bounds, they hosted it entirely from the homes of their senior executives. The planned keynotes and over 100 breakout sessions have been made available for free on the event site, covering the entire experience cloud portfolio. Watching it is a surreal experience in many ways, precisely because it has been recorded from the desks and hallways of the speakers, just like a regular video conference.

Digital-First Economy

Seeing the makers of Photoshop and Premiere launch a homemade virtual event underlines the strangeness of the current situation. There was nothing unusual about the content though. Customer Experience Management and Digital Transformation were the themes of the event, while AI was pitched as the means to deliver them. A lot of emphasis was placed on digital disruption and making the most of difficult times.

An economic downturn has looked on the cards for some time but was narrowly averted last year. Not so now. Some retail and leisure businesses are already using the pandemic as an opportunity to restructure. Many companies won't receive the support they need to survive the next few months, despite the best efforts of governments. The winners will be those companies, such as Zoom, who are best placed to benefit from the lockdown enforced pivot to the digital economy. In sectors such as health care and retail, the shift to digital-first business models will survive long start the pandemic has ended.

To measure this shift, Adobe announced the digital economy index, a new economic metric that measures the prices and purchasing patterns of online goods across major economies, including the US and UK. This complements the existing offline indices used to measure inflation in the broader economy. The data will then be used by governments and central banks to fill gaps in existing inflation measures, thereby aiding policy making.

An Evolving Playbook

Consumers and businesses need similar support to assist in their decision making. To guide organisations through this rapidly evolving digital landscape, Adobe launched their CX Playbook at the Summit. The playbook is a personalised self-assessment tool, which generates a list of business priorities and the strategy needed to achieve them. Naturally, Adobe solutions play a big part in the recommendations but there is a lot of good content in the final report. In particular, it focuses on the data, people and processes that need to be put in place to make the most of Adobe solutions. This is often overlooked by both vendors and marketers until it becomes a problem. Getting ahead of these things when business is quiet, can lead to significant benefits down the line.

From a B2B perspective, there was plenty of talk about changing operating models and taking advantage of difficult times. Disruption forces firms out of their comfort zone. Business as usual is no longer possible, requiring new solutions to existing challenges and new ideas to face new challenges. With many customers closing their doors temporarily and others going out of business entirely, times are tough. Adapting to totally different customer needs and adopting new technologies is Adobe's answer to the challenging environment for B2B firms.

Intelligent Services

For Adobe, AI plays a big part in any solution. They place a lot of emphasis on their Sensei AI framework, describing it as a service layer which sits underneath their entire portfolio. There were several major AI announcements at the Summit, the most interesting of which is the upcoming Leads AI. This is their entry into predictive lead scoring space, but also extends that capability into lead routing. The pitch is that AI will ensure leads are always sales ready and are routed to the right sales rep. In doing so, it extends predictive scoring beyond its traditional scope.

Leads AI is one of 5 new intelligent services that sit underneath the entire Adobe Stack. The others cover the full range of audience segmentation, content selection, journey orchestration and campaign attribution requirements that marketers often struggle to scale. They provide the bridge between the Adobe Experience Platform CDP and the individual applications and marketing channels that sit within the Adobe Experience Cloud. There is a clear desire to shift much of the data management and omni channel execution within the Adobe portfolio into Experience Platform, and out of the individual applications. Marketo Engage is not exempt from this, but is still in the early stages of integration with the broader Experience Cloud.

Marketo Engage

Adobe have a clear vision for Marketo Engage as the hub for B2B cross channel campaigns. Adobe refer to this as Account Based Experiences, and consider them separate from B2B ecommerce business models run from AEM and Campaign. Cross channel lead nurtures have been a key part of the Marketo pitch for months, and have been extended with enhanced AEM and Ad Cloud integrations. Faster email sends are being rolled out, as well as additional AI capabilities through predictive event audiences and adaptive ABM.

Deeper alignment with Microsoft was expected to be a major benefit for Marketo after they were brought by Adobe. We are starting to see some of the benefits in terms of an enhanced Dynamics integration. The first fruits of that were included in the last Marketo release, but long overdue parity with the Salesforce Integration has been promised. Both CRM integrations will benefit from enhanced Sales Insight (MSI) dashboards. The campaign feed from Sales Engage will make its way into Sales Insight, showing the leads that last responded to campaigns. An additional tab has been added to the Lead and Contact view within MSI. This shows activity in a timeline view, as well as related activities by other contacts at the same account. It also shows upcoming campaigns and scheduled email sends for the first time, as Sales can react appropriately ahead of time.

Digital Transformation

Sales enablement is an increasingly important part of marketing's responsibility. It can also be one of the most contentious. Strong relationships between marketing and sales can make or break campaigns, particularly with much of the regular marketing calendar cancelled or delayed. So it is good to see Adobe incorporating it into their product roadmap and Account Based Experiences pitch.

With budgets constrained by lockdowns, marketing will need to work closely with other areas of the business to generate revenue and prove value. An interconnected digital business needs marketing and sales to jointly deliver revenue, marketing and IT to jointly build the digital platforms that power the customer experience, and Marketing and Finance to jointly report on the business impact of these initiatives on the bottom line. All of these are essential frameworks within Adobe's Data Driven Operating Model, that can act as an inspiration for everyone else. Adapting to a changing is a challenge, using robust data foundations and a world class customer experience makes it much easier.