The next evolutionary wave in enterprise software will require companies to reinvent themselves as “experience businesses,” Adobe said today upon unveiling several new offerings during the kickoff of its Summit 2016 digital marketing conference in Las Vegas.
Experience businesses are organizations that can “create a personalized, compelling customer experience at every link of the relationship, from Web sites and mobile apps to retail environments,” according to Adobe.
Among the new products Adobe announced today to support that trend were an updated Adobe Marketing Cloud with a “Device Co-op” network, improvements to its Adobe Cloud Platform and partner/developer program, a new over-the-top offering for TV programmers and new data science capabilities for digital marketing.
Customers Expect Personalized, Synchronized Experiences
As part of the kickoff to the summit, which runs through Thursday, Adobe released a study based on two online surveys it conducted earlier this year of device owners and digital marketers. The “Marketers, It’s Time to Get Personal,” study found that 76 percent of consumers want mobile and Web-based apps that “are automatically personalized to fit their needs when they use them.”
Adobe’s surveys also found that 79 percent of consumers — and an even higher proportion of millennials (90 percent) — switch from one device to another at some point while engaging in online activities. Two-thirds of respondents said they found it frustrating when the content they accessed was not synchronized across devices.
According to Adobe, we are now in the third deployment wave of enterprise software, which involves rolling out personalized and digital services. The first two waves were for back-office (payroll, accounting, etc.) and front-office (data streamlining for customer interactions) applications.
“Every company should be obsessed with the quality of the experiences they are delivering to their customers,” Brad Rencher, executive vice president and general manager for Digital Marketing Business at Adobe, said today in a statement. Adobe’s goal is to enable its customers to “create consistent, personalized stand-out experiences for their customers,” he said.
New Support for Digital Connections, Algorithmic Apps
Among the new features unveiled today for the Adobe Cloud Platform were updates to Adobe Exchange, which hosts apps such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM, DemandBase, Acxion and BrightEdge; the launch of a new developer portal called Adobe.io; and new Adobe Certified Metrics to enable users to more accurately measure their digital audiences.
The new Adobe Marketing Cloud Device Co-op, meanwhile, is designed to help companies work together to “better identify consumers across digital touch points while ensuring the highest level of privacy and transparency,” the company said. Early results from the co-op indicate it could help member companies market via as many as 1.2 billion devices around the world.
“Without first knowing the links among devices, marketers will come up short in their attempts to understand their customers and measure the reach and impact of campaigns,” 451 Research analyst Scott Denne said in the Adobe statement. “The Adobe Marketing Cloud Device Co-op will help marketers identify their consumers across digital touch points so they can deliver more personalized experiences across devices.”
Adobe also announced a new global partnership with the marketing measurement firm comScore, an end-to-end offering called Adobe Primetime to help drive television audience acquisition and engagement across multiple devices and platforms as well as expanded services for its global partner program and new data science-driven capabilities for digital marketing.
Those capabilities include support for facial recognition and content-aware technologies in Adobe Photoshop Creative Cloud; algorithms for PDF boundary detection and perspective correction in Adobe Document Cloud; and new functionalities for contribution analysis, anomaly detection and shoppable video in Adobe Marketing Cloud.
Image Credit: Adobe (2016 Adobe Summit keynote video).
