Adobe Summit London 2014 : 5 key trends to watch

Par : HUB Institute

22 mai 2014

Temps de lecture : 5 min

A few days ago, the 8th edition of the « Digital Summit », Adobe’s famous marketing conference, took place in London. Gathering about 4000 digital experts from 47 countries across EMEA, it’s one of the major annual meetings for the digital marketing field. This conference was all about adapting marketing to customers and companies new language, using new tools, provided by the Adobe Marketing Cloud, updated processes and management. The SaaS company is now imposing itself as a leader in terms of digital marketing solution. Without much surprises, the topic that was developed this year and presented as Adobe’s vision was the « Reinvention of Marketing ». How can brands and corporate efficiently use the new plateforms, especially social ones ? How to get the best out of metrics to provide effective campaigns ? How can companies integrate consumers’ new behaviors and adapt relevantly ? In this paradigm, it seems necessary to standardize certain aspects of the digital marketing strategy and campaign to help brands and corporate better understand and moving forward with their digital transformation.

It is in this mindset that Adobe delivers marketing insights, expertise, and inspiration for and by marketing leaders, built to help CMOs and senior marketers lead their brands in the new digital world. To make a point, Adobe has decided to use their own products to amplify their own strategies. A marketing action that has brought them a lot of publicity. The company now dedicates 74% of its marketing budget to digital. In the light of the different interventions that took place during this couple of days, and thanks to the interwiews that we conducted with Adobe’s executives, we manage to identify 5 key trends:

#1-The Mobile revolution

One thing is sure: mobile usage is taking the path on desktop and smart devices are now a key factor in terms of consumers’ behavior. Adobe proposes two complementary features to face and integrate those behaviors :

Mobile app analytics: marketers can now tie mobile app downloads to campaigns and attribute actions taken in the app to measure the success of the campaign. Mobile app analytics enables marketers to redirect their customers from mobile websites to high-loyalty app experiences and attribute app usage activity to their campaigns.
Apple iBeacon support: Adobe is the first mobile provider to measure and respond to user engagement in mobile apps connected to iBeacons in external venues. Analytics for Apple iBeacon enables marketers to deliver personalized content to consumers on their mobile devices while they are moving through the environment connected to iBeacons.

#2-IT and Marketing departments are merging

Big Data concerns and challenges are leading to a phenomenon of merger between IT and marketing silos for more efficiency. During the summit, both Adobe’s VP and CEO stressed out the fact that consumer behavior has become a central concern for modern companies. Mark Phibbs insists on the fact that bringing support to the marketing department is going to be a big part of the IT’s role in the upcoming months and years. This shift may be happening at the expenses of the IT department.

#3-Analytics

Analytics have become the key weapon of the marketing field during the past few years and are now intrinsically linked to social and mobile usage. Therefore marketers need the latest and most efficient tools and services. The Marketing Cloud set offers now a complete range of solutions:

Live stream: It will enable marketers to leverage real-time dashboards displaying events as they unfold, in-session remarketing to help when consumers appear stuck in a browsing session, and instant traffic visualizations from a specific channel or referral website.
Predictive analytics: Using new decision trees in Adobe Analytics, marketers can now predict the most likely decisions a customer will make and influence whether they will buy a product or service, watch a video, or take another desired action.
Unified segment builder: Marketers can now quickly discover, create, preview and manage high-value audience segments through the new, segment builder. Once created, these audience segments can be shared across solutions through Master Marketing Profile, and enable marketers to tailor their campaigns across multiple workflows.

#4-Customer experience management

Emi Hofmeister, Director of Product Marketing, Adobe Social, explained the company’s vision concerning customer experience. Adobe social helps their clients understand what content is performing best in terms of ads and online campaigns, in order to use the relevant data out of it (engagement, conversion, etc.) to help inform what content is most effective in terms of achieving the brands marketing goals. Some of the challenges for the solution provider will consist in orienting its customers towards new platforms, new screens and looking into IOT that are the best suited to their business. Therefore they aim at partnering more closely with the main social platforms. They also aim at becoming highly scalable for global organizations. Guest speaker, Tim Waters, principal analyst at Digital Clarity Group, made a point by stressing out the importance of customer experience management during his speech.

#5-Personalization

By using real-time data visualization, marketers can then personalize live offers to reach their customers with the right information at the right time. According to Mark Phibbs, VP for EMEA Marketing, his company has a role to play in helping marketers and creatives to move forward in the shifting digital world. It doesn’t only consist in providing the technologies but also in sharing the experiences ; « it’s about the process, the people and the technology ». With cloud and apps, brands now have a constant relationship with customers and know who they are. And thanks to insights from analysis they can offer hyper personalized experiences to consumers and « in that it’s the mega-trend to come ».

These trends are to be enlightened by a recent study conducted by Edelman Berland for Adobe, Digital Roadblock: Marketers Struggle to Reinvent Themselves, European Edition. More than a half (54%) of European marketers expect their own roles to change in the next years. They consider expanded numbers of channels and platforms to reach audiences as the most important driver (65%), followed closely by new ways of thinking about audience engagement (59%) and new technologies for analyzing marketing effectiveness (54%). « Capturing and applying data to inform and drive marketing activities and creativity is the new reality ».

To sum up, this conference leveraged many questions about marketing’s new role(s) in a company’s strategy and about CMO’s new position in the organization. In other words, marketing is industrializing itself. According to Michael Aiden, the reinvention of the enterprise gives marketers the opportunity to renew themselves entirely in the most innovative way possible.