Adobe Kicks Off Digital Marketing Summit With Digital Marketing Suite Additions

Adobe Systems opened the Adobe Digital Marketing Summit, where more than 4,000 digital marketers and representatives from leading systems integrators, technology companies, advertisers, publishers, and agencies gathered together to learn the latest about digital marketing trends, share best practices, and network.

Keynote presenters at the event here included Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen; Arianna Huffington, founder of The Huffington Post; Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter; and Brad Rencher, senior vice president and general manager of Adobe’s Digital Marketing business.

Momentum continues

Adobe’s digital marketing business continues to demonstrate significant momentum, the company said. In the company’s most recent earnings announcement, Adobe reported 30 percent year-over-year growth in its digital marketing business.

In November 2011, Adobe announced plans to restructure to focus the company on two primary areas: digital media and digital marketing. The Adobe Digital Marketing Summit represents the pinnacle of what Adobe has accomplished in its digital marketing push since last year.

“The Adobe Digital Marketing Summit is quickly becoming digital marketing’s premier event, gathering the best and brightest minds in the industry,” Rencher said in a statement. “This year, we have almost doubled in size, with 4,000 attendees who will connect with experts and peers, get direct access to case studies and best practices, and have great opportunities to network and socialise. Summit is also a chance to get a first peek at the latest digital marketing innovations from Adobe and our partners and to help guide the future of our Digital Marketing Suite.”

At the summit, Adobe will introduce several additions to the Adobe Digital Marketing Suite, including Adobe Social, Rencher told eWEEK. A new product within the Digital Marketing Suite, Adobe Social combines social publishing and engagement with monitoring, social ad buying and analytics that can attribute social activity to business results.

Adobe is giving those with social marketing responsibilities – digital marketers, community managers, customer service, public relations, ad buyers, analysts and others – a single platform to align and collaborate around the management, measurement and optimisation of their social media strategies, and do so in the context of all other digital marketing efforts, the company said.

Also new to the suite is a predictive marketing capability. Within the Adobe Digital Marketing Suite, these reduce the complexity of uncovering hidden behavioral patterns in big data. These advancements will help marketers more quickly sort through an increasing amount of data to find the most impactful insights as well as leverage vast amounts of historical data to predict future results, Rencher said.

In addition, Adobe is adding enhanced personalisation features to the suite. Adobe announced a major update to its Web Experience Management (WEM) solution, part of the Adobe Digital Marketing Suite that helps marketers drive engagement by delivering more consistent, contextually relevant experiences on the Web, mobile devices and social media.

At the heart of the WEM solution is Adobe CQ 5.5, the latest version of the company’s Web Content Management software that is now deeply integrated with several other products in the suite, such as Scene7, Search&Promote and SiteCatalyst.

The Adobe Digital Marketing Suite offers an integrated and open platform for online business optimisation, a strategy for using customer insight to drive innovation throughout the business and to enhance marketing efficiency. The suite consists of integrated applications to collect and unleash the power of customer insight to optimise customer acquisition, conversion and retention efforts, and the creation and distribution of content.

For example, marketers using the suite can identify the most effective marketing strategies and ad placements as well as create relevant, personalised and consistent customer experiences across digital marketing channels, such as on-site, display, email, social, video and mobile. The suite enables marketers to make quick adjustments, automate certain customer interactions and better maximise marketing ROI, which, ultimately, can positively impact the bottom line, Adobe officials said.

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