Again, it is this time of the year: It is time for Adobe Summit. 

Unfortunately, the Summit is online. Fortunately, it is free for everybody to watch the 458 sessions. 

Nevertheless, Summit started with a keynote hosted by Adobe President and CEO Shantanu Narayen, which held quite a few surprises.

Instead of his living room like last year, Mr Narayen welcomed the audience from the lobby of an Adobe corporate building. 

The style reminded us of Apple keynotes, but Narayen did not take us to a walk at Apple Park but came directly to the topic. 

Of course, the pandemic was responsible for one of the biggest disruption corporates faced: the fast move to digital. 

Digital experiences shape how we live, learn and play, Shantanu said and added that there is no going back: Every business has to be a digital business. 

E-Commerce made a huge step forward. In 2020, 844 Billion Dollars were spent through e-commerce, almost twice as much as in the year before.

Therefore, it is simple to understand that the new winners in this digital economy are companies that can drive business growth with personalization because the digital economy runs on customer connections. 

Exciting innovations at the Adobe Summit 2021

Anil Chakravarthy took over to present exciting technology innovations in the Experience Cloud after reiterating that every business had to move to digital, fast. And Adobe can help. 

Not only has Adobe recently acquired Workfront, a marketing planning and work management (resulting in a new product called Adobe Workfront). 

Another significant change is the declining relevance of third party cookies: First-party data has never been more relevant. 

This fact is the motivation behind many smaller and bigger innovations in all solutions of the Adobe Experience Cloud: 

Adobe Experience Platform

There are several improvements to the Adobe Experience Platform, including 

• AEP Collection Enterprise, a new client-side tagging mechanism (and the new name/replacement of AEP Launch); 
• AEP Segment Match that allows multiple companies to share their data while staying compliant with the data protection laws; 
• and the announcement of the beta release of the real-time CDP – for B2B.

Adobe Journey Optimizer

The biggest announcement is a new Adobe Journey Optimizer solution that looks like a child of Adobe Campaign with Adobe Analytics. 

Adobe Journey Optimizer is a new implementation based on the Adobe Experience Platform that allows personalized experiences across the entire customer journey (including multiple channels) based on real-time CDP data – all in a single application. 

We will give more details about Adobe Journey Optimizer as soon as they become available. 

AEM as a Cloud Service

Some of the newly announced features of Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) are already available in AEM as a Cloud Service. 

• The possibility to use AEM as a headless CMS based on the API-first Content Services, support for GraphQL and content optimization functionality based on Adobe Sensei, Adobe’s AI. 
• AEM Forms is now available as a Cloud Service, with AEM Screens coming to the cloud in the very foreseeable future. 
• Furthermore, AEM Assets Essential is a new service available in all of Adobe’s solution, based on AEM Assets, of course. 

The new features will be available in the on-premise variant of the CMS later on. So if you cannot wait, it’s time to move your AEM to the Cloud.

Adobe Commerce

Last but not least, significant advances have been made in Adobe Commerce (a.k.a. Magento): 

• Intelligent visual recommendations recommend products based on images; 
• Sensei-based new intelligent Live Search
• And the integration with Adobe Sign that lets shoppers digitally sign their orders. 

Similar to AEM, Adobe Commerce supports now headless E-Commerce based on an API-first approach using GraphQL.

These new functions reflect the fact that digital is “the new normal” – our lives have changed dramatically, and we as marketers have to take advantage of it if we want or not. Now, every day is Black Friday. 

Inspiration from Leaders

Adobe would not be Adobe if they would not give a lot of room for business experts and thought leaders to provide insights and inspiration that are not primarily product related.

Adobe’s CEO interviewed one of the most important CEO’s at the moment, Pfizer’s Albert Bourla.  

Bourla said that Pfizer would not have created the COVID vaccine if they were not prepared: They started in May 2019 – half a year before the pandemic outbreak – with a radical digital transformation: One can only transform a company if one transforms the culture. 

By using digital analytics and big data, a study that would typically take 18 months could be finished within 18 hours – this speed was the key to invent the vaccine: “It is the culture that invented the vaccine.”

Deborah Wahl, CEO of General Motors, laid out a strategy to phase out gas and Diesel engines until 2035 and be carbon neutral in 2040. 

This shall be done by a combination of Altrium, the new battery-chassis concept that shall become the foundation of 30 or more different car types of all the company’s brands; and VIP, their concept for personalized objects that shall bring a completely new experience to car ownership. 

GM relies heavily on the Adobe Experience Cloud to provide an omnichannel customer experience. It includes AI, Machine Learning and GM’s dealers – independent franchisees – in the marketing concept, as these dealers know their community way better than GM does. 

FedEx has digital in its DNA, being the inventor of tracking and tracing packages in 1978, and today scanning each of the more than 20 million packages shipped each day more than 20 to 30 times. 

They had to become a digital company more than a logistic company and had to take advantage of what they call “logistic intelligence”. 

Not only had FedEx scaled their business from a 5-day network to a 7-day network, but the e-commerce boom of last year put a heavy load on the more than 600’000 employees. 

In addition, FedEx is responsible for transporting COVID vaccines – an IoT device is packaged into each vaccine package, which allows for a 99.9% accuracy in worldwide delivery. 

Adobe and FedEx announced a partnership that shall result in “logistic intelligence” functionality for small and medium enterprises that use Adobe Commerce. 

And now we’re back to digital marketing, which – according to Adobe – consists equally of science and art. 

And if you want to know more about Adobe’s current and new offerings, let us know. 

Michael Grob

Senior Consultant Digital Marketing