Adobe Summit 2018 Las Vegas Day 1 Announcements

Adobe’s annual jamboree for marketers is on once again in Las Vegas and B&T is once again there to cover it for you. Here’s the major announcements from day 1.

Make Experience Your Business – Adobe’s Call to Action at Summit 2018

Adobe Unveils Innovation Across Adobe Experience Cloud and Adobe Cloud Platform; Launches Experience League

Today, Adobe kicked off Summit 2018 with new innovations across Adobe Experience Cloud, including advanced capabilities in Advertising Cloud, Marketing Cloud and Analytics Cloud. Adobe also announced significant technology enhancements to Adobe Cloud Platform, as well as a comprehensive new customer enablement program designed to empower customers to become the architects of digital transformation at their companies.

In addition to showcasing Adobe’s latest technology advancements, the conference will feature keynotes from individuals who have used powerful experiences to transform their businesses, including Virgin Group founder Richard Branson, Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang, as well as senior executives from Coca-Cola, Facebook, LinkedIn, Tourism Australia and Twitter. Also headlining will be Sports Illustrated’s 2017 “Sportsperson of the Year” J.J. Watt, who used the power of social media to raise $40 million for Hurricane Harvey victims, and Leslie Jones of “Saturday Night Live” (SNL), who will emcee Adobe Sneaks, the company’s annual showcase of bleeding edge technology from the Adobe Research labs.

Next-Generation Cloud Platform

Adobe today introduced its next generation Adobe Cloud Platform – the Experience System of Record –which includes a new unified customer profile, Adobe Sensei services and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) readiness. Adobe Cloud Platform enhancements will make it easier to unify data from disparate systems into an Experience Cloud Profile, enable data scientists and developers to better customise Adobe Sensei capabilities to suit their organisations’ needs and speed the deployment of custom code and workflows (see separate press release below).

Adobe Advertising Cloud

The industry’s first end-to-end platform for managing advertising across traditional TV and digital formats, Adobe Advertising Cloud will now help bridge the divide between today’s creative and media professionals. Adobe’s new Advertising Cloud Creative is a self-serve platform that significantly expands Adobe’s Dynamic Creative Optimisation (DCO) offering by giving marketers control over basic design elements – including advertising copy and assets used in display ads – to allow for the rapid rollout of new messaging and design without the painful and expensive steps of re-trafficking or starting the design process from scratch. Creative assets that are designed in Adobe Creative Cloud will be automatically available in Adobe Advertising Cloud Creative, so marketers can edit, target and optimise personalised display advertising across ad sizes (see separate press release below).

Adobe Analytics Cloud

Adobe Analytics Cloud is the leading system of intelligence for the modern enterprise, integrating rich analytics capabilities with data management and audience syndication. At Adobe Summit, Adobe unveiled Adobe Analytics for streaming audio, giving brands a way to gain deep insights into online and offline audio, including understanding listening behaviors, streaming quality and monetization opportunities. Adobe also unveiled general availability of Adobe Experience Cloud Device Co-op, a core service of the Experience Cloud.

Leveraging the power of Adobe Analytics Cloud and Adobe Sensei, the Device Co-op aggregates anonymous device data from participating Adobe customers, enabling individual brands to recognise actual consumers, not just devices, across digital touch points. All this is done while ensuring the highest level of privacy and transparency. More than 60 global brands have joined the Device Co-op so far, enabling them to reach over 300 million consumers across 1.8 billion devices in the U.S. and Canada.

Adobe Marketing Cloud

With the latest release of Adobe Experience Manager, the company unveiled new Adobe Sensei-powered content capabilities in Experience Manager including intelligent image discovery, allowing the tailoring of images for different screens and automated personalization of content. Additionally, native support of Experience Manager from within Creative Cloud applications unify creative and marketer workflows for the first time. Innovations in Adobe Campaign include a new creative designer to simplify email creation as well as email templates pre-built with Adobe’s Behance that marketers can leverage. Adobe also announced marketers and data scientists can now customize their algorithms in Adobe Target, unlocking the power of artificial intelligence for personalization.

Introducing Adobe Experience League

Great technology alone isn’t enough to transform a business. Today, Adobe is introducing Adobe Experience League, a new customer enablement program that provides guided learning to help customers get the most out of their Adobe Experience Cloud investment. Experience League provides training materials, one-to-one support from experts, as well as the ability to connect with a thriving community of fellow professionals. As part of this, Adobe introduced today Adobe Experience Index, a self-assessment tool to help participants determine where they are in their development journey and what they need to do next.

Technology Previews

Adobe will preview technology coming out of its R&D labs at Adobe Sneaks. Hosted by SNL’s Leslie Jones, Sneaks offers the Summit audience an exciting—and entertaining—look into the future. Sneaks is a perennial highlight of Summit and audience favourites often become part of future product offerings.

Adobe Cloud Platform Innovation Showcased at Summit

New Experience Cloud Profile, Partner Integrations and Intelligent Services Help Scale Personalized Experience Delivery

Adobe today introduced the next generation of Adobe Cloud Platform, the underlying, cross-cloud architecture that unifies content and data and is powered by Adobe Sensei, Adobe’s advanced AI and machine learning framework. Advancements include a new unified customer profile that combines data across an enterprise, intelligent services and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) readiness. These and other new capabilities will solve key challenges facing marketers, data scientists and developers. Adobe Cloud Platform is used by thousands of partners worldwide and receives over one billion API calls per day through Adobe I/O, Adobe’s cross-cloud developer portal.

“We are entering a new era for the enterprise. Today’s modern enterprise needs a new system of record – one that can manage and make sense of the high volume of content and data,” said Brad Rencher, executive vice president, Digital Experience Business, Adobe. “In response to this, we’re introducing our next-generation Adobe Cloud Platform – the Experience System of Record – that brings together the power of data, content and intelligent services, as well as an open ecosystem, to help each enterprise in their journey toward becoming an Experience Business.”

Adobe Cloud Platform advancements for marketers include:

New Unified Customer Profile

Adobe introduced an industry-first Experience Cloud Profile that unifies all customer data across the enterprise. This includes back office data (like CRM data in Microsoft Dynamics 365) and combines it with data available across Adobe Experience Cloud (including online behaviour, device use and ad exposure data) to create a complete, real-time view of customers along their journey.

Data is unified through Adobe’s Experience Data Models (XDM), a common data language, and allows faster, more intelligent decisioning through Adobe Sensei. Adobe Cloud Platform also now enables Experience Cloud customers to be GDPR-ready.

Adobe Exchange Updates and Partner Integrations

Adobe announced several new additions to Adobe Exchange Marketplace, its central hub for thousands of third-party applications that connect into Adobe Experience Cloud, Creative Cloud and Document Cloud. Adobe also announced new partner integrations available today with Hootsuite, ObservePoint, Branch, Digital River, Elastic Path, Informatica, SnapLogic, TMMData and new Adobe Cloud Platform Launch extensions for Microsoft Bing and Microsoft Dynamics.

Expanding to new constituents including data scientists and developers:

Data Science Workspace

Available as a preview, this new workspace allows data scientists to build their own custom data models within Adobe Cloud Platform. Data scientists can now access their vast data sets in Adobe Cloud Platform to create and train custom models. Data scientists will eventually be able to bring their own pre-built data models and algorithms into Adobe Cloud Platform.

Adobe Sensei services. With these new services, enterprise developers can now access, via application programming interfaces (APIs), pre-built Adobe Sensei algorithms and train them specific to their needs. The first Adobe Sensei service available in preview today gives developers access to algorithms that increase the speed of content delivery, asset production and content personalisation, such as automatic image tagging and image cropping. Three additional Adobe Sensei services will be available in preview in the coming months and will focus on attribution, customer journeys and customer profiles.

Developer Updates

The private beta of Adobe I/O Runtime, Adobe’s serverless platform, provides developers with a modern, seamless way to run custom code on Adobe Cloud Platform. Benefits include increased performance and reduced time to deployment by eliminating server setup and maintenance. Developers can now support new business processes and deliver experiences across channels with the industry’s first set of flexible and customisable commerce microservices, built on Adobe I/O Runtime. The general availability of Adobe I/O Events lets developers create pre-defined, event-based integrations that only trigger when a meaningful event, like a file upload or customer action, happens.

Adobe Announces Significant Partner Momentum at Summit 2018

New Partner Integrations Available From Informatica, SnapLogic, Invoca, Unifi Software, ObservePoint, Hootsuite and Branch

At Adobe Summit, Adobe today announced major advances to its global partner ecosystem, which now includes more than 5,000 agencies, systems integrators and technology partners. The company also announced new partner integrations, 40 new Adobe Cloud Platform Launch partner extensions and several additions to its Adobe Exchange marketplace—its central hub for brands to access third-party applications across Adobe Creative Cloud, Document Cloud and Experience Cloud.

In order to deliver the best possible customer experiences in today’s data-rich, high content-velocity world, enterprises need a robust platform that supports their existing systems yet provides pre-built and custom integrations. Adobe Cloud Platform connects enterprise systems that are critical to delivering a unified and complete customer experience and enables developers to create new integrations. At Adobe Summit, Adobe showcased hundreds of these applications that help customers solve key business challenges, including best-in-class Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) options, integrating commerce and social media insights and combining online and offline data.

“We believe that data and content are the building blocks of any great customer experience and only Adobe offers an open platform and rich ecosystem to help with both,” said Amit Ahuja, vice president, Experience Cloud Partners at Adobe. “More and more partners are joining Adobe in its mission to make Experience Business a reality. At Adobe Summit we are showcasing how, together, we are creating more value for our customers and accelerating innovation.”

The Adobe Exchange marketplace applications allow brands to:

• Integrate Commerce Insights: Create engaging digital shopping experiences on web and mobile properties, while removing the complexity of risk and compliance with leading commerce solutions from commercetools, Digital River, Elastic Path, Magento and others.
• Connect Social Data: Bring social data to omni-channel campaigns to measure the impact of social interactions throughout the customer journey with Hootsuite.
• ETL and Validate Data: Access, blend, transform and enrich data from critical sources with data integration and data preparation partners like Informatica, SnapLogic, TMMData and Unifi Software.
• Build Client-side Extensions: Since the release of Adobe Cloud Platform Launch, Adobe’s next-generation tag management solution, over 40 new extensions have become available. For example, new extensions with Microsoft enable brands to easily deploy and manage Microsoft Bing and Microsoft Dynamics 365 tags across their websites. With ObservePoint, brands can also automatically validate digital data and gain confidence in the numbers that drive critical business decisions.
• Integrate Behavioural, Mobile and Campaign Analytics: Augment existing web and mobile analytics data in Adobe Analytics Cloud with heat map, video session replay tools from Clicktale, ContentSquare, Decibel and ForeSee. Incorporate mobile-app attribution, mobile measurement, and deep-linking metrics from AppsFlyer and Branch, as well as real-time interaction data with Thinfilm.
• Expand Audiences through Third-Party Data and Data Modelling: Augment the highest quality audience segments through third-party data providers like Acxiom, Dstillery, Infogroup, oneAudience and V12 Data.
• Bring together Online and Offline Customer Data: Get a unified customer view by bringing online and phone call data together in one location through call attribution integrations with DialogTech, Invoca and Marchex. Streamline the localization and translation process directly within Adobe Experience Manager through translation partners like Lionbridge, Smartling and Translations.com.