My Takeaways from Adobe Summit 2022

 

I've been attending Adobe Summit every year for years and it never fails to disappoint. This year was no exception. Whether your cup of tea is shorter 30-minute sessions or longer 2-hour training workshop-style immersion sessions (my personal favorites) or the not-to-be-missed Summit Sneaks (cutting-edge innovations) hosted this year by the entertaining Kristen Bell, there's something for everyone.

In the following paragraphs I'll highlight the key takeaways I came away with and point you to some of the must-watch sessions.

Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) is clearly the future and was at the center of a bulk of the sessions. AEP is much more than the Real-Time Customer Data Platform (RT-CDP) you see in the typical sandbox. This is where most of Adobe's next-generation products are being incubated. Although the CDP is foundational, several products sit atop the CDP and leverage it's near-real-time 360 view of the customer to deliver their magic. Customer Journey Analytics (CJA) is the next-gen Adobe Analytics (AA, or Omniture, for you old school folks). Journey Orchestration (JO) is the cross-channel glue on top of Adobe Campaign (AC) and Adobe Target (AT). Whereas AC would typically react to events like an abandoned shopping cart with an email or SMS/text message reminder for you to complete that unfinished order, JO goes a lot further with nudges like an alert on your phone reminding you that Starbucks is just around the corner just in case you're eager for a late afternoon pick-me-up on your way to that critical client meeting.

Adobe's licensing model continues to mystify with it often being unclear to customers whether they have access to features like Offer Decisioning and machine learning (via Adobe's Sensei) and what throughput they can count on when ingesting historical third-party data into the CDP to get it going. However, learning to ask the right questions remains the customer's best bet when trying to pin down those details. That's where working with a trusted Adobe Partner (such as One North) can come in handy.

Another aspect of the Adobe Experience Cloud (AEC) that often baffles customers is the constantly changing and heavy use of terminology and nomenclature. For example, if you're confused about the difference in AT between auto-allocate, auto-target, and automated personalization, the session on Multivariate Testing might be just what the doctor ordered.

Workfront is the newest kid on the block as Adobe continues its highly successful strategy of growth by acquisition. The first few years after any acquisition can be a bit volatile as Adobe works to integrate the product into their family of products and gives the new acquisition a facelift and a new UX consistent with AEC. Workfront is Adobe's project management tool (think Jira for digital marketing). Where Adobe shines is in its ability to leverage and build on its strengths to create an ecosystem of capabilities that is nearly impossible for its competition to grapple with. 

Workfront creates a much needed bridge between the creative and development ends of a digital marketing project by providing integrations and workflows that connect Adobe's Creative Cloud products (Illustrator, XD, Photoshop, Premier Pro, Lightroom, InDesign, to name a few), collaboration tools like Slack, and AEC, specifically Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) where most of the creative content eventually lands in AEM Assets (aka the Digital Asset Manager or DAM). The Workfront session at the Summit was particularly notable because it didn't just focus on how to use the product but also on vital collaboration strategies that are a key to success on any project. 

Adobe's strong push to AEM as a Cloud Service (AEMaaCS, or just CS) was also well represented in sessions and workshops. Adobe has done a great job of appealing to the mid-market by bundling CS with starter versions of their other foundational products (AA, AT) to create what they call the Foundation license. Innovation on the AEM front has continued at a frantic pace with significant advances in AEM's Headless capabilities with the introduction of the SPA Editor (for integrating with React or Angular-based SPAs) and a GraphQL layer to fine-tune the content you wish to syndicate from AEM to other consumers and channels in support of the Content as a Service (CaaS) model.

Finally, Adobe Summit always includes plenty of content on current generation products so that no one feels left behind. A great example was the turbo-charged session on Email Deliverability, which should be of tremendous interest to AC customers. I have shared this session with many of my clients and they've all been super grateful for the callout on a topic that doesn't have a lot of good material in the public domain!

Hope you found this recap helpful and are motivated to dig through at least one of the links I've shared above to continue your learning journey into Adobe's ever-growing stack of digital marketing products and capabilities!