Next week, 20,000 marketers, content creators, and experience makers will descend on Las Vegas for Adobe Summit—which has grown to become not just one of the premier marketing platform showcase events, but one of the top digital marketing conferences on the annual calendar.
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Are you experienced?
“Experiences” has been the dominant theme for Adobe for the last few years and we expect that to continue at this year’s Summit. Across the entire suite of Adobe solutions—from Creative Cloud to Document Cloud to Experience Cloud—there is an intense focus on giving marketers and creatives the tools to create outstanding customer experiences.
Customer Experience Management, or CXM, is about orchestrating and personalising the end-to-end customer journey across every touchpoint. We’re anticipating a rallying cry to CXM as the next evolution of Customer Relationship Marketing (CRM).
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The evolution of Adobe Experience Platform
As CXM emerges, we expect this year’s Summit to focus on Adobe’s Experience Platform. One of the core strengths of the solutions within Adobe’s overarching Experience Cloud is the integration between products—for instance, the ability to define segments in Analytics, augment them through Audience Manager, and activate them through Ad Cloud. The Experience Platform serves as the connective tissue across these applications. As it becomes a more potent engine, it has increased the value and expanded the possibilities for marketers working with multiple solutions within the Adobe suite to achieve meaningful CXM success.
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New members of the family
In 2018, Adobe made two significant acquisitions to bolster their Experience Cloud: Magento and Marketo. Magento gives Adobe a foothold in e-commerce, one of the critical areas of marketing technology that had previously been a gap. We’re interested to see how Adobe is able to connect Magento and Experience Manager to create commerce-enabled, content-driven experiences.
Marketo, on the other hand, provides new marketing automation capabilities, especially for B2B brands. We’ll be looking to see how Marketo and existing products like Adobe Campaign come together to help marketers create integrated, cross-channel outbound and inbound campaigns. While Summit 2019 may be a little early to learn exactly how these new acquisitions will be fully integrated into the Experience Cloud, there will certainly be exciting announcements to follow over the course of 2019 and 2020.
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Responding to the competition
Over the last few years, Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) have grown in capability and penetration with top brands. In some ways, CDPs have encroached on space within the marketing technology stack that Adobe could own. At Summit, we’ll be looking to see how Adobe responds to the rise of CDPs (perhaps with an announcement of their own CDP solution?).
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The best brand storytellers
Informative, inspiring breakout sessions are one of the hallmarks of Adobe Summit, especially those featuring clients telling their own stories about how they’ve succeeded (and sometimes failed) in creating experiences via Adobe. Some brands we’re excited to hear from this year are Hertz, Walgreens, Rogers, Anheuser-Busch, Telus, and Crocs.
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A-list headliners
The main session headliners are always another highlight of Summit, with recent speakers including Sir Richard Branson, Peyton Manning, Ryan Gosling, and JJ Watt. This year, we can’t wait to hear what Drew Brees has to say following the New Orleans Saints’ heartbreaking defeat in last year’s NFL playoffs. Mindy Kaling leading the always-fun Summit Sneaks is sure to be something special, and, most of all, Reese Witherspoon, one of the most powerful actors/directors/producers in Hollywood today, is certain to inspire.
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New connections, new possibilities
Finally, it wouldn’t be Adobe Summit without some great networking events. We’re looking forward to meeting with all our existing clients, great new brands, Adobe product experts, industry analysts like Forrester, and other great service providers. We’ll be hosting lunches and happy hours over the course of the week—so, if you’ll be at the Summit, we’d love to have you join us. Just fill out the form below to get in touch!
