Analytics
Nordic Morning - Adobe Summit 2019 recap
Customer experiences are serious business for Nordic Morning. So it’s no surprise then, thatwe sent a large team of 16 specialists to the Adobe Summit 2019 in London to get the inside scoop on the latest trends, strategies, tools and processes to transform our clients’ businesses and deliver personal and engaging customer experiences.
It all began with Partner Day on Tuesday May 14, where we joined a record number of 1,200attendees. Adobe’s Partner ecosystem is growing as a consequence of their own transformation. It used to be software on physical media in a box, but now it’s different services in the cloud in an open infrastructure ready for partners to contribute. I guess the newly acquired e-commerce platform Magento is the best proof to that. With it’s open sourcelegacy, Adobe has a community of more than 200,000 developers working on the platform.
At Partner Day, we learned more of the strategic direction with the introduction of ExperiencePlatform and Adobe I/O. These initiatives will provide marketers with a lot more flexibility, while also potentially requiring more dependence on a Certified Partner, like Nordic Morning,with deep technical skills.
Key takeaways from Adobe Summit 2019
With the recent acquisitions of Marketo and Magento (both of them billion dollar deals), you might have expected to hear more about these products during the Keynotes. But times have changed at Adobe, and while the communities from the two products were welcomed and some early integrations were showcased, there is simply so much innovation going on across the ecosystem that they had to share the spotlight with the entire Adobe family.
It wasclear that acquisitions alone don’t give you special treatment: innovation is where the spotlight firmly lies. The Adobe Experience PlatformI’ve already mentioned the Adobe Experience Platform, and it was definitely the major focus point of this year’s Summit. It’s introduction during the event perfectly summed it up:
“An open and extensible platform that stitches data across the enterprise, powering real-time customer profiles enhanced through experience intelligence and governance, which activates content to deliver real-time personalized experiences”.
Yes, it does sound like a Customer Data Platform (CDP) but this was only one of the capabilities that the Experience Platform has under its hood. It will also provide a Data Science workspace and it will be a platform for application development. It’s still early days but it shows a clear direction where the experience business is heading.Customer Experience ManagementIn the digital world, you are never short of alternatives.
Adobe continues to emphasize the importance of delivering great experiences and focus on the customer journey and CustomerExperience Management. This can not happen without data and intelligence, and it should not happen without trust and transparency. Adobe showed us how they have transformed in the way they explore the customer journey, not only by looking at KPIs and taking informative decisions around different actions, but also by building that customer profile in real-time so that they can provide a better personalised user experience based on the data.
My reflection on this is that we need a better balance between the goal to attract and acquirenew customers and the opportunity to serve our existing customers in a better way.
Great Personalisation cases
We have all heard about the huge rewards companies have when they work with personalisation. But the reality is that often the most personal thing you see is when you get ads for a product that you recently purchased, maybe even as a gift for your mom. In the past there have been a few examples here and there during Summit breakouts, but this yearPersonalisation formed its entire own track with great presenters from a number of big brands.
And at the same time as the Adobe CDP capabilities were announced, there were already lots of things going on with Adobe Audience Manager, which is the Data Management Platform (DMP) working in cooperation with Adobe Target, the personalisation, test and recommendation tool. There were great cases from companies like Natwest, Seat, TUI and Saint Gobain.
You might wonder what the difference is between a CDP and a DMP is and the short answer is that the CDP is more real-time.Adobe Sneaks: #dataunbound shinesDuring the Sneak session at the Summit, Adobe likes to show us innovations that are still in the lab. Most of them actually make it into future products, and “Data Unbound” was such a genius concept that I am sure we will get access to it in the not-so-distant future.
When was the last time you heard of something that truly democratizes data to people without any analytics skills? Data Unbound focuses on the data within Adobe Analytics and allows for accessibility outside of the console.
To start, a Microsoft Powerpoint plugin has been createdto allow for seamless integration of workspace dashboards and visualizations via an API. Additionally, with “Open Data Links” dashboards can easily be passed over to applications like Excel, Tableau, Power BI and Terminal with a simple “copy and paste” methodology. But there’s even more to it!
One of the largest pain points outside of data accessibility are dynamic actionable insights. This is normally where an analyst comes in, owns the report/dashboard creation and the evaluation of reports in order to insert comments about the insights. Data Unbound (with the inclusion of Adobe Sensei) breaks the chains for this formality and now inserts explanations and insights of the data component that is being viewed in real-time. Frankly, I want this now!
How hard can it be for Adobe and Microsoft in their close cooperation to add a button in Powerpoint and just let me ease the pain for all companies that have chosen Adobe Analytics? The benefits will be enormous.
Join our Partner Breakfast with Adobe
If you are as excited as I am and want to hear more insights from the 2019 Adobe Summit, Nordic Morning is hosting a series of upcoming Partner Breakfasts with Adobe across the Nordics including our offices in Helsinki, Malmö and Stockholm.
Find the dates and locationsbelow, and click the link to register your participation.
