Adobe Summit Day One: Adobe Touts Major Upgrades to Campaign and Experience Manager; Introduces Two Solutions for Its Marketing Cloud (Video Demonstration)

Salt Lake City—There was no shortage of announcements on day one of the Adobe Digital Marketing Summit here Tuesday. Senior vice president of Adobe Brad Rencher kicked off the keynote presentation before a crowd of roughly 7,000 attendees, and quickly zeroed in on the focus of this year's conference. "Gone are the days when marketers came up with a unique value proposition that could be broadcasted so often and so loudly that it could change behavior. That doesn't happen anymore," he said. "Customer experience has become the brand of your organization, and the gauge for your success. Marketing has been leading this transformation," he added.

It has been only about five years since Adobe entered the digital marketing space, and the last year alone has been crucial. The company was recognized by both Forrester and Gartner as a leader in digital marketing, earning a top spot on Gartner Magic Quadrant and Forrester's Wave Report. But Adobe isn't finished innovating, CEO Shantanu Narayen said. "Marketing is on a reinvention journey. More people are connecting to the Internet from something other than a computer. We're in the era now where the product is the marketing," he said.

Customer expectations continue to grow, Narayen pointed out, but in their most basic form, they can be summed up as the need for "consistent and continuous experiences," Rencher explained. "Marketing doesn't finish when someone clicks on an advertisement and buys a product. Marketing continues in the store, online, in the call center and beyond.... At each touch point, we either win or we lose," Rencher said.

Consistency and continuity were the driving forces behind the new enhancements to the Adobe Marketing Cloud, which Rencher promised is now more "comprehensive, integrated, and actionable" than ever. Though each of the six existing solutions within Adobe Marketing Cloud received a number of updates to improve functionality and integration, Adobe Campaign and Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) received the biggest facelifts.

Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe's digital asset management and delivery tool, now offers a complete cloud delivery model, enables creative teams to connect directly to AEM assets, and includes 30 new asset management features. The solution integrates with Adobe Analytics and Adobe Target to leverage analytics and personalization capabilities in a single product experience within AEM for digital experience delivery, and has added capabilities for marketing in brick-and-mortar locations. With the introduction of AEM Screens, brands can use the same digital experiences they create for responsive sites or mobile apps to launch displays on digital screens at physical venues.

"We're talking about taking an interaction that a customer is having with a brand through their mobile device and sending it to a screen in a retail location with a single flick of their finger," Loni Stark, senior director of strategy and product marketing at Adobe Experience Manager, explained in a separate session. "It's just like dragging and dropping something from one tab to another on a desktop, except you can do it from one device screen to another," she said.

In an AEM Screens demonstration, Jody Giles, senior vice president of product integration and commercialization at Under Armour, used his smartphone to drag images off of his device and onto large display screens (demonstrated in the video below).

The implications of this new functionality are vast, Giles explained. For example, customers that have already found the item they want on their mobile device can flick that item onto the large screen to show in-store employees, which makes for a more seamless online to offline transition. Customers can also use the technology to send selfies or other images onto the screen for brands to use in marketing campaigns. "For us, this is all about transforming concept into customer experience," Giles said.

Adobe has significantly upgraded its Campaign solution as well, introducing... 

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