Adobe has set out its plan to reinvent the digital marketing industry with the unveiling of several new products which it hopes will cause "a bit of a revolution"
Brad Rencher, the company’s Senior Vice President of Digital Marketing, said "the marketing game is changing" and introduced a suite of tools designed by the company to combat this.
Revealing updates to its Adobe Marketing Cloud platform, Rencher set out how the company was looking to assert itself as a key player in the industry.
"There is no non-digital world anymore," he told a crowd of nearly 4,000 at a summit in London today. Rencher described how shifts in consumer behaviour towards mobile devices have given marketers an unparalleled opportunity to reinvent both themselves and their industry.
"A customer sees a product today, photographs it with his phone, and wants it delivered to his home tomorrow," he said. "This is not an app problem, this is a business problem."
Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen echoed this, calling for the end of the ‘silo mentality’ and a new age of faster, more collaborative industry based around "the real-time enterprise".
"The frenetic pace of keeping up with trends is exhausting," he said. "To succeed in this digital era, you need to deliver on the expectations that every business has been challenged with – to transform their enterprises into the real-time enterprise."
Change of pace
Although traditionally famous for its creative software such as Photoshop and Acrobat, Adobe is now heavily focussing on the digital marketing sector, with its marketing cloud division recording revenues of over $1bn last year.
This progress was highlighted by the company also revealing that its Adobe Analytics offering had officially been classified as a leader in the space by analyst house Forrester Research, achieving top scores in 66 out of its 75 overall criteria.
According to the company, Adobe Analytics now has 140,000 users worldwide, and saw a 63% increase in the number of clients who spend more than $1 million annually with the service.
And in his presentation, Rencher announced a series of major updates for the service, which now features a live stream function to provide real-time data for information such as clickthroughs and app downloads.
The service also now includes a new predictive analysis function and support for Apple’s iBeacon technology, meaning companies using the software will now be able to target customers with push notifications or tailored mobile offers.
Adobe also unveiled a new version of its Adobe Media Optimizer software for marketing campaigns, which will use new big data forecasting algorithms to predict their success. Using these algorithms, the company believes it can improve the performance of campaigns across search, social and display channels by as much as 25%.
Creative flash
In a presentation featuring guest spots from partners including Danone, L’Occitane and fashion brand MyFlashTrash, the company highlighted how ‘bursts of creativity’ are now a crucial part of the marketing process, with mobile interaction a particular focus.
The importance of mobile apps was particularly highlighted, with David Nueschler, Adobe’s VP of enterprise technology, introducing the audience to the company’s PhoneGap service, which is able to greatly speed up and streamline the app development process.
In an impressive demo, he was able to quickly alter the landing page of an app using the PhoneGap service, with the changes appearing nearly instantaneously across a board of devices running various operating systems.
"It’s time to transform mobile apps from a blackhole into a gold mine," Nueschler said, highlighting that by 2020, up to 50% of the workforce at many companies will be millennials who have never used a traditional desktop PC to make changes or access data.
Marketing can be the centre of business re-imagining, concluded Rencher, stating that, "new ideas inspire us – but also disrupt us," and Adobe will be hoping that its new services will be the catalyst for a major revolution in the digital marketing space.
