President and CEO, Adobe, calls for focus on ‘experiences’, design and intelligence; AI expected to be more powerful an entity than the Internet was at its advent
BY SRABANA LAHIRI
Experiences’ was the buzzword at the high-energy Adobe Summit held in Las Vegas, with Shantanu Narayen, President and Chief Executive Officer of Adobe, declaring that “people today buy experiences, not products”, and that for brands and consumers, “experiences rise above everything else”. “Businesses must now deliver great experiences to win in this increasingly competitive world,” Narayen said, explaining, “When you look at the big moments in your life, all the experiences that really stand out; your favourite trip, your make-or-break product launch, the birth of your first child - you might remember over time some of the details, but it is the overall experience that stays with you, evoking feelings that create these lasting memories. These feelings enforce the choices we make, how we spend our money and time. We are all seeking these phenomenal experiences.”
Talking of brands such as Coca Cola and Tourism Australia that have partnered with Adobe to create ‘experiences’ and were sharing the course of their journey at the summit, he said, “Our mission is to change the world through digital experiences... together.”
Design was the second point of focus for Narayen, as he said, “You must design for brilliance, as great experiences begin with great design.” Creativity and design have always been at the heart of Adobe, he observed, adding that focus on experience design is absolutely important, and that the entire exercise must be rewired for intelligence, as “intelligence is going to turn data into insights”.
Interestingly, figures from a Forrester study on the business impact of investing in experience cited at the Summit showed 1.6x brand awareness, 1.5x employee satisfaction, 1.9x average order value, 1.7x customer retention, 1.9x return on ad spend, 1.6x customer satisfaction rates and 36% faster revenue growth rates, bearing out the significance of Narayen’s focus on experiences.
‘AI WILL BE MORE POWERFUL THAN INTERNET’
At the summit, Adobe Chief Technology Officer Abhay Parasnis spoke of driving the innovation agenda aggressively in the marketplace with massive investments in Artificial Intelligence (AI), a new enterprise reality based on immersive experiences and hyper personalization, and focusing Adobe Sensei – which powers intelligent features across all Adobe products - on experience challenges. “We are making massive investments in AI to take on the future, to deliver real time insights and actions in an AI-powered world. AI will be even more powerful than the advent of the Internet,” Parasnis said.
Day 2 of the Summit saw Narayen in conversation with Jensen Huang, founder of technology and computer graphics major Nvidia, and the announcement of a partnership between the two companies to deliver new AI and deep learning services. While computer graphics took months and years to develop, the dream is to do it in real time, using AR and VR, Huang said. “We’re excited to partner with Nvidia to push the boundaries of what’s possible in creativity, marketing, and exciting new areas like immersive media to deliver higher-performing AI services to customers and developers more quickly,” Narayen said, calling it the “intersection of arts and science”.
THE HYPER-PERSONALIZATION VS PRIVACY DEBATE
Also at the centre of conversations was Adobe’s new unified customer profile, a purpose-built technology that can manage both data and content. “Different parts of a business may generate different sets of data for the same customer. These four sets of data may be seen as four different people by the company, therefore there is a need to connect the data to create a unified customer profile, an experience system of record, to capture the totality of the customer’s experience,” explained Brad Rencher, EVP and GM of Adobe Experience Cloud, speaking at the summit. However, in the light of Facebook’s recent data leak controversy, the spotlight was also on a consumer’s privacy versus hyper-personalization, brought about by unified customer profile and other data sets in the marketplace, with Narayen himself being asked to clarify what Adobe is doing to protect use of data where a customer is unwilling to be targeted on the basis of it. Adobe supports the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a privacy law that harmonizes and modernizes data protection requirements, Narayen said, and is working on enhanced capabilities to enable customers to control their personal data.
HOW MARKETERS CAN NOW CREATE ADS ON-THE-GO
Advancements in Adobe’s Advertising Cloud will now allow brands to target customers in a cost-effective way, putting marketers in the driver’s seat with greater content velocity across ad platforms, and customization of the ad experience. At the Summit, Adobe announced several additions to Adobe Advertising Cloud, including a new Advertising Cloud Creative and an expanded integration with Adobe Analytics Cloud.
“Designers are spending more and more time rebuilding and resizing ads across different platforms,” said Zarpana Kabir, Director, Business Operations, Advertising Cloud at Adobe. “Advertising Cloud Creative will function as a self-serve platform for marketers and allow them to modify ads on the fly, so that designers spend more time making impactful experiences, and less time just resizing ads.” Advertising Cloud Creative offers marketers control over design elements, advertising copy and assets used in display ads, to allow rapid rollout of new messaging and design without starting the design process again from scratch. Marketers can optimize/target their display advertising across ad sizes and make simple changes to their ads themselves, without needing to go back to their agency.
Kabir demonstrated how images can be dragged and dropped into different ad formats, automatically rendering the correct sizes, with Adobe’s Sensei helping to intelligently select the most impactful parts of an image. Adobe is also bringing analytics to the Advertising Cloud, providing marketers access to data including time-spent, page views, conversions and custom metrics for best use of media for the ads.
According to a statement from Adobe, the enhanced Advertising Cloud: 1. Personalizes ad experience at scale; 2. Unlocks TV’s full potential with programmatic and TV everywhere; 3. Breaks through media and data silos with people-based advertising.
WHAT’S NEW@ADOBE?
• Tighter integration of the Experience Cloud platform and an increasingly important role for Adobe Sensei, the company’s advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning platform.
• New capabilities for Advertising, Marketing, and Analytics Clouds, as well as the Adobe Experience League, designed to empower users of Adobe products to bring about digital transformation in their companies.
• Adobe Analytics for streaming audio, giving brands a way to gain insights into both online and offline audio. It empowers brands to understand how a listener is interacting with podcasts, streaming music, audio books and more.
‘We are yet to conquer the greatest experience of all, and that’s going to space’
Disruptive business methods are synonymous with entrepreneur and philanthropist Sir Richard Branson, who in the 1980s took on the might of established players in the airline business to set up Virgin Atlantic, and now describes his spaceflight company, Virgin Galactic, as “an experience of seeing the world with different eyes”.
Speaking at the Adobe Summit, Sir Richard said, “From my very first steps as an entrepreneur, my primary goal has always been to figure out ways of making people’s lives better, understanding people’s experiences, the good and the bad. That guides everything we do - offering experiences to enjoy or experiences to relate to, or experiences you can aspire to. With that in mind, we quickly became quite good at disrupting established businesses and particularly the entrenched ones. If the customer experience is full of frustration, creating a newer and better experience is the way to go. And the airline industry is a good case in point. In the early 1980s, the big flag carriers that dominated the airline business had no incentive to improve, let alone innovate. So, when we launched Virgin Atlantic, we had one long jumbo jet, and that was competing with the fleet of 400 British Airways and 300 TWA and 250 PAN planes. No one really gave our curious little airline a fighting chance. Lord King, then chairman of British Airways, said we were ‘too old to rock and roll, too young to fly’. And yet we survived and we thrived, because we changed the experience of flying, from boredom into excitement and fun. We re-imagined check-in, we re-imagined entertainment, food and comfort and ensured all these experiences made your flight memorable.”
According to Sir Richard, “The greatest experience of all is one we are yet to conquer, and that’s going to space. Virgin Galactic is a dream that we have been working on for 14 years. Its significance resonates far beyond the experience of flights on the spaceship. Sending people to space is a journey that carries with it the hopes and the dreams of all those who worked with us over the years. And it has not only expanded understanding of science, but taught us amazing things about human ingenuity, psychology and physiology. It’s also a journey that only begins to answer the many challenges we face in sustaining life on our beautiful fragile planet. From space, it is clear that there is much more that unites and divides us. Virgin Galactic’s experience is all about seeing the world with different eyes.”
