The success of any marketing campaign boils down to choices decision-makers must make every day. From the most simple to the most complex, digital marketers have a myriad of decisions to make that have the potential to define, or in more dramatic cases, redefine best business practices. These decisions include two of the most essential indicators of marketing success:

1) Engaging with customers in a personal and authentic way
2) Driving real and measurable business impact

An area of marketing where this is most clear is digital advertising.

Digital advertising is like having a bunch of spinning toy tops to manage. Which one should be tended to first – search, display or social media? Which will provide the best bang for your advertising buck? How do you keep multiple channels going at the same time? The challenge of effectively managing online ad campaigns across multiple channels is one I have heard our customers complain about for years – one that is exacerbated by new, bright and shiny digital channels. Just take social media for example. According to an article yesterday in the Wall Street Journal, Facebook’s world-wide ad revenue alone is expected to hit $3.8 billion with its share of display ad revenue growing 16.3% in 2011 and 19.5% in 2012. (In case you haven’t heard, social media could be big.) And social media is just one of the dozens of channels the marketer must consider to keep their advertising campaigns humming along.

What’s more, marketers must take into account fundamental changes in the industry as ad budgets continue to shift rapidly to digital channels which are projected to be 26% of ad spend in 2016 according to Forrester Research. To justify and even accelerate this shift to digital, marketers must clearly understand and prove the business impact of their digital initiatives.

Taking the guesswork out of digital advertising is the task we enthusiastically tackle with today’s news of Adobe’s definitive agreement to acquire Efficient Frontier, a leader in optimizing multi-channel and auction-based digital advertising across search, display and social media. With Efficient Frontier, Adobe takes another step towards being the standard for the way marketers create, manage, execute, measure and optimize their marketing and advertising campaigns. Efficient Frontier technology will provide an automated, highly customizable, and algorithmically driven solution to help our customers make better, faster, and more informed decisions to drive effective advertising campaigns.

For our customers, this is nothing short of fantastic news. We are empowering the marketing team to optimize paid search, make informed social ad buying decisions, see the real ROI of social media channels through a social engagement platform from Context Optional, and harness the power of real-time bidding technology for display advertising. In the end, our customers will be able to standardize their digital advertising initiatives on our independent platform for digital ad buying and optimization – making the task of managing those spinning tops easier than ever.

I couldn’t be more excited to offer marketers this powerful solution for managing search, display and social media in today’s digital world. The Efficient Frontier team will be welcomed to the Adobe family as a key addition to the world-class team and help us continue to build on the strong technology stack that makes up our powerful Adobe Digital Marketing Suite and our customers will reap the benefits.

-Brad

Our new Adobe sales office in Beijing, China recently received a LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Gold certification from the USGBC. It is particularly distinctive as: Adobe’s first LEED certification outside of the United States; being one of only 24 LEED certifications in Beijing; and being one of only 160 LEED certifications in all of China. The certification of our Adobe facility in China underscores the company’s commitment to the sustainability of our global operations.

To reach Gold certification, the team in China worked closely with facilities in the United States to innovate on increasing our sustainability in the Beijing office:

• Reducing water consumption by 88%
• Realizing a 26% savings on lighting energy
• Reducing CO2 emissions by 2,772 KG/year
• Reusing furniture and lighting fixtures as much as possible
• Using “Cool Carpet” to reduce greenhouse gas emissions
• Implementing green housekeeping with green-sealed products and recycling
• Using low-emitting construction materials to maintain a favorable indoor environment

There is always more to be done and we’ll continue to partner with experts from around the world to learn, innovate, and continuously evolve.

2,000 people, 9 countries, 5 languages, over 2 months…

Our hugely successful European launch of Adobe SocialAnalytics reached the end of the line at the St.Pancras Hotel in London last week!

With growing pressure on Marketing Executives to demonstrate value from their social media efforts, we expected strong interest in these launch events. That being said, the sheer volume of registrations and high turnout rates at all the events surpassed our expectations. Thank you to everyone who joined us, we hope you’ve been inspired to take your social media marketing to the next level.

Over the last few months, we have been collaborating with Facebook and were delighted to welcome them as the guest speaker at our German, French and UK launches. Many people requested a copy of the Adobe & Facebook white paper on ‘Best practices for measuring and optimizing the business impact of the Facebook Like button’. Click here if you would like to receive a copy.

If you were unable to attend your country launch but would like to find out more, listen to Neville Hobson interviewing Chad Warren about Adobe SocialAnalytics in this FIR podcast.

There have also been a number of reviews and articles published about the launch events which are worth checking out:

The Social Analytics era is upon us, Clive Roach, cliveroach.tumblr.com
Lanceringen af Adobe Social Analytics, Martine Gjede, atcore.dk
ADOBE DÉVOILE SOCIALANALYTICS : QUE VOUS RAPPORTE VOTRE PRÉSENCE SUR LES RÉSEAUX SOCIAUX ?, François Guéno, labecommerce.com
Social Analytics Tools are Finally Getting Serious, Tac Anderson, newcommbiz.com
How to Market Using Facebook – According to Facebook, Tac Anderson, newcommbiz.com
Adobe SocialAnalytics aims to quantify business benefits of Facebook and Twitter, Khidr Suleman, v3.co.uk
Adobe and Facebook collaborate to prove monetary value of Likes, Lara O’Reilly, marketingweek.co.uk

And make sure you take a look at the photos on Facebook (feel free to tag yourselves!):

4 October 2011 – Amsterdam
6 October 2011 – Copenhagen
18 October 2011 – Zurich
20 October 2011 – Stockholm
26 October 2011 – Madrid
2 November 2011 – Milan
8 November 2011 – Hamburg
9 November 2011 – Paris
10 November 2011 – London

Keep your eye on www.social-optimisation.com for the latest information on connecting social media to business results. We’ll also be updating the site with videos, blogs, case studies, insight from industry leaders and more.

In the meantime, stay in touch with us via @OmnitureEMEA and #AdobeSocial.

Check out John Nack’s blog where there is a video of Adobe VP Paul Gubbay showing off early looks at some technology that will help designers and developers create better HTML5 animations:

Included are demos of:
- Animating in the new Adobe Edge app (on Adobe Labs)
- Turning that output into an app using PhoneGap
- Using Flash Professional to export animation as HTML
- Running CSS Shaders in WebKit
- Enabling “liquid layout” from InDesign

Go to John’s blog now and watch.

Also, check out a recording of last week’s Financial Analyst meeting to see where these demos were intially shown and to understand how they fit into Adobe strategy moving forward.

On Tuesday, we made some big announcements about our business moving forward:  Our strategy to double-down on the two growth markets of Digital Media and Digital Marketing, and an update on our expected Q4 revenue and restructuring our business.

The decision to restructure our business was a difficult one, and it has been tough for me as well as all our employees.  But it’s essential that Adobe makes the right moves now to ensure we’re positioned right for the long-term.

At the highest level, here are the big takeaways:

• The future of the Internet comes down to content – creating it and monetizing it.  This is where our customers rely on Adobe, and it’s what is shaping our strategy moving forward.
• Digital Media – creating and publishing content across media and devices, and Digital Marketing – managing the impact and return from content, are two enormous areas of market opportunity, and Adobe is in the sweet spot for both.
• To double-down in our investments in these two markets, we’re focusing our resources and energy into the areas where we can make the biggest impact:  reimagining the creative process through touch and in the cloud; building a billion-dollar digital marketing SaaS business; and taking digital publishing to a new level for consumers and content creators.

This is a transformative time for Adobe as well as the industry.  The pace of change in the digital landscape is accelerating, and we intend to be there with the solutions and expertise to help our customers profit from it.  Adobe is a company reinvented — consistent in our mission, but updated for the customer opportunities and business models ahead.

I’ve never been more excited about Adobe’s future.

At our recent MAX conference, we announced the Adobe Creative Cloud – a groundbreaking initative that we believe will radically redefine the creative process. We’re excited about this new offering – it brings immense value to our customers allowing them to continue creating amazing things in whatever environment they choose.

The Adobe Creative Cloud consists of:

• Desktop Applications — Every tool that is currently in Adobe Creative Suite Master Collection, such as Photoshop®, InDesign®, Illustrator®, Dreamweaver®, Premiere® Pro, After Effects®, as well as innovative new tools that are currently in beta, such as Adobe Edge and Muse.
• Touch Apps – Starting with the six Adobe Touch Apps announced at MAX , 2011 – Adobe Collage, Adobe Kuler, Photoshop Touch, Adobe Debut, Adobe Proto and Adobe Ideas.
• Services – A version of Adobe’s Digital Publishing Suite for delivering interactive publications on tablets, a tier of Adobe Business Catalyst for building and managing websites, and access to cloud-based fonts for website design from our acquisition of Typekit.
• Community –Collaboration features that allow members to share their creative work with other Creative Cloud members and forums to discuss and inspire new ideas.

We are excited to announce that membership to the Adobe Creative Cloud will be available in the first half of 2012 at a price of $49.99 per month for individuals and $69.99 per month per seat for workgroups, both for an annual plan.

Our move to this membership model allows us to keep our customers up to date with the latest Adobe innovations in our tools and related services. Creative Cloud will provide maximum flexibility, offer lower cost of entry, and add cutting-edge innovation on an on-going basis to keep our customers ahead of the changing technology and device landscape.

For customers who prefer to remain on the current licensing model, we will continue to offer our individual point products and Adobe Creative Suite editions as perpetual licenses. With regards to upgrades, we are changing our policy for perpetual license customers. In order to qualify for upgrade pricing when CS6 releases, customers will need to be on the latest version of our software (either CS5 or CS5.5 editions). If our customers are not yet on those versions, we’re offering a 20% discount through December 31, 2011 which will qualify them for upgrade pricing when we release CS6.

There is a tremendous shift happening around content creation, distribution and monetization. The Adobe Creative Cloud initiative has the potential to transform creativity as designers and developers look to create the best experiences across devices and platforms, while integrating tablet devices and cloud-based services into their workflows. I’m very excited about what this means for Adobe and our customers and look forward to providing the latest tools and services that enable them to express their creativity in new ways.

David

Adobe is all about enabling designers and developers to create the most expressive content possible, regardless of platform or technology. For more than a decade, Flash has enabled the richest content to be created and deployed on the web by reaching beyond what browsers could do. It has repeatedly served as a blueprint for standardizing new technologies in HTML.  Over the past two years, we’ve delivered Flash Player for mobile browsers and brought the full expressiveness of the web to many mobile devices.

However, HTML5 is now universally supported on major mobile devices, in some cases exclusively.  This makes HTML5 the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms. We are excited about this, and will continue our work with key players in the HTML community, including Google, Apple, Microsoft and RIM, to drive HTML5 innovation they can use to advance their mobile browsers.

Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores.  We will no longer continue to develop Flash Player in the browser to work with new mobile device configurations (chipset, browser, OS version, etc.) following the upcoming release of Flash Player 11.1 for Android and BlackBerry PlayBook.  We will of course continue to provide critical bug fixes and security updates for existing device configurations.  We will also allow our source code licensees to continue working on and release their own implementations.

These changes will allow us to increase investment in HTML5 and innovate with Flash where it can have most impact for the industry, including advanced gaming and premium video.  Flash Player 11 for PC browsers just introduced dozens of new features, including hardware accelerated 3D graphics for console-quality gaming and premium HD video with content protection.  Flash developers can take advantage of these features, and all that our Flash tooling has to offer, to reach more than a billion PCs through their browsers and to package native apps with AIR that run on hundreds of millions of mobile devices through all the popular app stores, including the iTunes App Store, Android Market, Amazon Appstore for Android and BlackBerry App World.

We are already working on Flash Player 12 and a new round of exciting features which we expect to again advance what is possible for delivering high definition entertainment experiences.  We will continue to leverage our experience with Flash to accelerate our work with the W3C and WebKit to bring similar capabilities to HTML5 as quickly as possible, just as we have done with CSS Shaders.  And, we will design new features in Flash for a smooth transition to HTML5 as the standards evolve so developers can confidently invest knowing their skills will continue to be leveraged.

We are super excited about the next generations of HTML5 and Flash.  Together they offer developers and content publishers great options for delivering compelling web and application experiences across PCs and devices.  There is already amazing work being done that is pushing the newest boundaries, and we can’t wait to see what is still yet to come!

(We have closed comments on this blog post. Please feel free to leave comments and questions about this post on the Flash Platform blog:)

Henry Ford advocated his “one size fits all” strategy on Model T production when he said, “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black.”*

Eighty-nine years later, companies are embracing the idea that each customer is unique and deserves relevant, personalized experiences and product options. What’s driving this? We are living in what Forrester Research calls the Age of the Customer, where consumers are empowered with technology to obsess over their desires, and the successful companies obsess over those too. In this recent webinar, Forrester pairs up with Adobe customer – leading U.K. automobile manufacturer – Renault to discuss embracing customer obsession with customization and vivid digital experiences.  Renault even shares successful tactics of its own using Adobe Scene7.

Product customization can be a powerful differentiator and represents an opportunity to deliver greater value, build loyalty and develop one-to-one customer relationships.

“Roll over, Henry Ford. Today, you can have any color you want, as long as it’s the one you want.” — James Gilmore and B. Joseph Pine II, 2000

*Source: Henry Ford and Samuel Crowther, My Life and Work, Garden City Publishing, 1922

The following press releases crossed the wire today:

Adobe Reaffirms Fourth Quarter FY2011 Revenue Target, Restructures to Align Business around Digital Media, Digital Marketing

Adobe to Outline Growth Strategy at Financial Analyst Meeting

For more insight and information, watch the Financial Analyst meeting on Wed 11/9.

The results are in! Congratulations to the winners of the 2011 Educators’ Choice Awards! These awards recognize the most innovative teaching and learning resources created by Adobe Education Exchange members. I thank all of the
Adobe Education Exchange members who participated – your entries, ratings, and votes helped make the 2011 Educators’ Choice Awards an overwhelming success.

The grand prize winners are:

• Higher Education Digital Arts and Media – Thomas Giannattasio, The Battle to Learn Adobe Flash
• Primary/Secondary Digital Arts and Media – Kris Fontes, The Shrine Down the Hall
• Higher Education Cross-Curricular – Erika Veth, Take Action!
• Primary/Secondary Cross-Curricular – Ross Cooper, Ross Boss Projects: Pinball Wizard

The grand prize and runner-up winners all received prizes such as laptop computers, tablets, digital cameras, and the new Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 to help them continue to create innovative learning experiences for their students.

Please check out all the winning work from the contest (including the honorable mention winners), and gain inspiration for using Adobe software in your teaching! For additional inspiration and examples, join or sign in to browse the resources on the Adobe Education Exchange. Also, be sure to follow @AdobeEDU, for the latest updates about the Adobe Education Exchange.

Thank you again for your incredible dedication and work!