We’ve just released the results of our 2013 Digital Marketing Optimization Survey, after compiling data from over 1,800 respondents around the world. Based on the premise that engaging customers online and optimizing their digital experience across channels can mean millions in revenue, the survey was designed to find out if digital marketers are implementing programs to maximize investment or, in some cases, still just talking about it.

Some of the findings are eye-opening, like data showing a majority of the companies surveyed spend 5% or less of their marketing budget on optimization activities. Five percent or less, even though it’s also clear from the data that companies investing more get more in return. For example, companies allocating more than 25% of marketing budgets to optimization are twice as likely to see high conversion rates.

With data like that, it’s logical to ask, “what’s holding companies back”, and almost half of respondents indicated two primary challenges are budget and resources. While companies are starting to invest and advance in digital marketing optimization, there still is much to be done, as indicated by data showing more than half of respondents are unaware of the impact of site search techniques beyond the baseline functionality of keyword matching. Nearly half do not optimize their recommendation strategies and rely significantly on manual updates, with only 18% using an automated approach.  And, even though Adobe Analytics saw a doubling of traffic from mobile devices last year, 45% of marketers still do not have a mobile-optimized site.

The results of the Survey provide insight into areas where digital marketers need to excel – key areas like testing, optimized targeting, leveraging consumer data, social, site search, and automated recommendations.  It doesn’t matter if a company is just getting started with basic optimization practices or mapping out complex strategies to maximize conversion, it’s never been easier – or more necessary – for business to up their game.

To learn more and understand how you compare with your marketing peers around the world, check out our Kevin Lindsay’s post with further details and download the full survey here.

Adobe Summit EMEA, The Digital Marketing Conference, opened in London today at 9:00 a.m. local time with a keynote address by Brad Rencher, senior vice president and general manager of the Adobe Digital Marketing business.  Over the course of the two day event, Summit participants have the opportunity to learn from the industry experts and network with savvy professionals who continue to push the boundaries of digital marketing and advertising, ultimately making their businesses more successful.  Keynote speakers from high-profile brands like UniCredit Group, Nike Global, AKQA, Nissan Europe, Deloitte digital, BBC, SAP and SapientNitro DACH highlight the agenda, and record-setting Austrian skydiver and BASE jumper, Felix Baumgartner, will open the general session on Thursday.

We released several news announcements at Summit today including:

1. News about a powerful new capability in Adobe Social that predicts social content performance on Facebook to maximize engagement and ROI.
2. Details of an expanded global partnership that integrates Adobe Marketing Cloud with SapientNitro’s EngagedNow platform.
3. An efficient means to conquer the webinar process from within Adobe Experience Manager.
4. Results of the Adobe Digital Index State of Mobile Benchmark Report 2013, including detail on 1) how Samsung smartphones are gaining popularity with Europeans and 2) how iOS has re-emerged as a leader in US smartphone browsing and dominates on tablets.

Adobe Marketing Cloud has fast become the solution that helps marketers get from data to insights to action, faster and smarter than ever. Here are some expanded highlights:

Adobe Social Unveils Predictive Publishing for Facebook

This powerful new predictive publishing capability for Adobe Social, which predicts social engagement on individual pieces of content and automatically suggests ideal timing to improve how that content will perform, will offer Facebook integration with the initial version.  Additional social platforms will be added later in the year.

Adobe and SapientNitro Expand Global Partnership

Adobe and SapientNitro’s expanded global partnership includes integration of the Sapient EngagedNow^SM platform with Adobe Marketing Cloud.  This integrated offering provides a solution for creating, delivering and optimizing consumer experiences across Web, social, mobile, and digital displays. NASCAR, E.ON and VISIT FLORIDA are among the organizations already seeing significant results using EngagedNow with Adobe Marketing Cloud.

Additional benefits for customers include:

• Complete hosted and managed services for Adobe Marketing Cloud solutions from SapientNitro with EngagedNow
• Ready-to-use integrations built specifically for key verticals, including travel, sports and entertainment, retail, and financial services, that help make development and deployment more efficient
• Built-in operational efficiencies from the integration of EngagedNow and Adobe Marketing Cloud that streamline creative, delivery, and measurement workflows for better performance and cost savings

Conquering the Webinar Process – from within Adobe Experience Manager

Adobe Experience Manager webinars, powered by Adobe Connect, helps marketers 1) easily create targeted webinar landing pages that drive registration; 2) deliver immersive online events that engage audiences, build brand and drive demand; and 3) deliver post-event analytics via capabilities from Adobe Analytics.

Adobe Digital Index State of Mobile Benchmark Report

The report analyzes 150 billion visits to 1,500+ websites to provide an overview of how consumers are using mobile devices worldwide.  In addition to trends in social media, video content consumption and ecommerce from the past 12 months, the study features key findings on which mobile operating systems and device manufacturers are helping drive the most web traffic globally.

Samsung smartphones gain popularity with Europeans

In the 19 European countries analyzed, nearly 30% of all smartphone browsing now occurs via a Samsung device – up 9% from last year.

iOS has re-emerged as leader in US smartphone browsing and is dominant amongst tablets

The iPhone has been gaining ground since being offered on the Verizon network (February 2011), and again became the primary driver of smartphone browsing in the US during Q4 2012, after trailing Android phones for two years. In addition, iPads accounted for nearly early 80% of all tablet browsing in the US in February 2013, up 10 percent from last year.

Today, we’re excited to announce that Adobe Primetime (formerly “Project Primetime”) is now available, offering the industry’s most advanced TV publishing and monetization platform for programmers and pay-TV service providers. Comcast Cable and NBC Sports Group have signed on as first Adobe Primetime customers and we’re collaborating with dozens of industry leaders to pave the way for TV content across every connected screen. Ecosystem partners include Akamai, Amazon Web Services, Cisco Systems, Elemental Technologies, Envivio, Harmonic, iStreamPlanet, RGB Networks, thePlatform and others.

Adobe Primetime integrates Adobe’s video publishing, player, DRM, advertising and analytics solutions to help eliminate the complexity of reaching audiences across screens and to create great digital video experiences while also offering new monetization opportunities for programmers and pay TV service providers. The seamless tie-in with ecosystem partners offers an unprecedented, highly scalable and reliable solution that can be implemented consistently across devices and platforms.

The Adobe Primetime Player is available for Windows, Mac OS, Android, iOS, and will support connected TVs as well as gaming platforms such as Roku and Xbox in 2013. To learn more about Adobe Primetime and how we’re helping content owners and distributors more efficiently bring more content to more devices, see our press release and blog post.

Additionally, given the rise in digital video consumption, we also published The U.S. Digital Video Benchmark report. The Adobe Digital Index team looked at 19.6 billion video starts on media websites from 2012 to confirm the growth of broadcast video consumption across connected devices. A few key findings include:

• TV Everywhere adoption increased 12-fold
• Mobile video viewing grew by 300%
• Facebook users are seeing twice the level of engagement with video over non-video content

Check out our animated infographic below and see the full report on the latest video trends for device use, ad placement, social media, and more.

Earlier today, Forrester Research, Inc. published “The Forrester Wave™: Web Content Management For Digital Customer Experience, Q2 2013” report. Adobe was among the select companies Forrester invited to participate in the independent report, which evaluated 10 Web content management (WCM) products across 100 comprehensive criteria such as vendors’ current offering, strategy and market presence.

Adobe CQ, part of Adobe Experience Manager within Adobe Marketing Cloud, was recognized as the Leader in the report. We’ve posted to our Experience Delivers blog to provide more detail and perspective and have also distributed a press release on the same.

Finally, we encourage you to check out a complimentary copy of the full Forrester report, which we’ve made available here.

The best part of my job is hitting the road to hear about what’s on the minds of our customers, partners and employees.  In the past two months I’ve clocked more than 34,000 air miles doing just that.   From the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas to the World Economic Forum in Davos, from London to Sydney to New York, Digital Marketing has been on the mind of every CEO I meet. It has definitely gone broadly into the mainstream and into the boardroom, well beyond the confines of the web team.

Most recently, we had three terrific days in Utah at the annual Adobe Digital Marketing Summit where 5,000 people gathered to hear about the latest innovations in digital marketing solutions. Every company needs to become a digital-first organization and I spoke about the three marketing mandates that I believe all companies need to focus on:

1)      Engage everywhere – Gone are the days when your digital strategy is just about driving customers to your website and converting them. Whether it’s app stores or retail stores; on Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest; on a PC, phone, or laptop; you have to go to your customers or they won’t come to you.  Successful marketers are integrating all channels to engage their customers wherever they are.

2)      Embrace rocket science – Every business is swimming in data, and many are struggling just to get backward-looking reports.  But the real value of data is predictive, harnessing math and machine learning to take marketers’ intuition to a whole new level.  Many of our customers are already doing this with Media Optimizer today, where you can predict the optimal media mix and automate the buying across display and search advertising. The next frontier is to take all of your marketing – across social, mobile, web, real-time, historic, qualitative, quantitative – and reliably predict and execute the perfect campaign to maximize sales.  That is rocket science becoming real.

3)      Connect the dots – Organizational change needs to happen internal to every company in order to thrive in this new digital age.  I live this every Monday morning at 9 am when I have the team report to me on their metrics. The product organization, marketing organization and sales and finance are working together to drive the results in a way that never used to happen.

Thanks to everyone who made Summit such a great event.  Next up: Adobe MAX in LA.  I’m excited to hear what our community has to say about the future of creativity!

I just passed my one-month mark after rejoining Adobe to head up corporate strategy and mergers and acquisitions.  It’s a unique perspective, having spent 14 years helping build Adobe’s creative business and then going off to lead teams in consumer internet, social and mobile companies before returning here.  Adobe is the great company that I remember:  incredible innovation, talented people, and the coolest customers anywhere.  But it’s a company that has changed in many ways. As I come back in with fresh eyes, I thought I would share some of my observations.

It’s a whole new world when it comes to the creative professional and their work.  Back in “the day” in our creative business, we spent most of our energy building kick-ass applications that helped creative professionals move from traditional to digital workflows while navigating the complexities of the desktop Mac and Windows platforms. Our customers were primarily focused on delivering great print or web content.  Now with the explosion of mobile, creatives need to make sure their experiences scale to hundreds of smartphones and tablets, not to mention TVs, car dashboards and in-store kiosks.  The challenge is staggering, both for creatives and Adobe, but there has never been more demand for compelling content.  (That’s a good thing!)  And with the advent of powerful mobile platforms, EVERYONE wants to be creative as they capture, enhance and share their daily experiences.

Enter the cloud.  With cloud computing, customers are quickly learning (and expecting) to engage with us 24/7 and need our product offerings to go further in addressing a broader range of challenges, well beyond content creation.  As a former product manager, I remember the team’s frustration when they were forced to hold back features to fit our 18-month Creative Suite product cycle.  It was very difficult to deliver new innovations “off-cycle” due to our delivery and accounting model. (Every desktop software company struggles with this same challenge.)  Nothing is more satisfying to one of our talented engineers than getting a new product feature into the hands of customers quickly, and now we can.

But Creative Cloud is so much more than a mechanism for getting new product features in the hands of customers faster.  It will be the hub for creativity worldwide and enable you to work when and where you want.  It will be where creative communities gather to be inspired by each other’s work and collaborate on projects.  Our recent acquisition of Behance, the leading online social media platform for creatives, accelerates Adobe’s strategy to bring great community features to Creative Cloud.  You’ll see us begin to integrate Behance with our creative tools in the next few months and in the meantime Behance will continue to be a key showcase for creativity.   Check out their awesome blog highlighting some of the coolest creative work out there.

Some customers have given us their perspective on Creative Cloud in the video below and we promise that we’ve only just started.   Indeed, all the innovation that we have planned for Creative Cloud will make Adobe MAX, the Creativity Conference, a must-attend event.   It’s in Los Angeles May 4-8.  We hope you can join us.

Finally, it’s been exhilarating to get involved with a whole new set of customers with Adobe Marketing Cloud.  We have long focused on content creation for the world’s leading marketing departments.  Now we’re extending that value to helping marketers manage and optimize consumer experiences across every touchpoint, from their websites to the social realm. Last week I attended our Summit conference and spoke to dozens of digital marketing customers about the possibilities as our Creative Cloud and Marketing Cloud come together for better collaboration across teams and agencies.  This is really where the creative rubber hits the road, from my perspective – showing the business return from all the amazing content created with our tools.

With my little “walkabout” behind me, I can honestly say that I’m thrilled to be back in the saddle at Adobe and am particularly excited to engage with our new customers and see how many familiar ones are still with us on this journey!

On Day 2 at SXSW Interactive, we switched gears from the conversations we had about creativity on day 1 to talk all about digital marketing.

We started off the day with a demo and vision of Adobe’s Marketing Cloud, where the audience got to see the cloud in action.

Then, we hosted a lively debate to a packed house on the subject, “Is Marketing B.S.?” Moderated by Mashable‘s Todd Wasserman, our panelists, which included BJ Mendelson, Thor Muller, Jeff Feldman, and Christian Waitzinger, shared their opinions about social marketing and advertising, the intersection of marketing with customer support, social media ROI, and more. To wrap up the day, the audience got a good laugh with comedian Baratunde Thurston, who took the stage right after the panel to provide a comedic recap of the debate. You can catch our favorite moments from the day in the video below.

And of course, thanks to everyone who helped us drive a conversation around #AdobeSXSW throughout the festival. For each mention of our hashtag, we donated $1 to STEM to STEAM, a movement that integrates art and science into education curriculum. We’re still tallying the final numbers and will share with you once we have them!

It was great to meet everyone at SXSW. Thanks for coming out; we hope you had a safe journey back home. See you next year!

Day Two of Adobe Summit is in the books now and it was a day full of excitement and emotion.

In our morning keynote, we were excited by Felix Baumgartner’s first-person account of how he successfully managed risks and stood on the edge of Earth’s atmosphere. We were moved by Sal Khan’s story of how the Khan Academy came to be; so much so that Khan received a standing ovation, something extraordinarily rare at Adobe events.

Another round of breakout sessions kept people’s brains full, and then it was time for the capstone of Summit — Sneaks. Our guest host, the wonderful Carrie Brownstein, shared her love/hate relationship with the Internet and then we all enjoyed ten fantastic sneak peeks of possible new product features (but sadly I can’t share anything more about them here).

Social conversation has been a part of Summit for a few years now, but this year the conversation went to a whole new level. The #AdobeSummit hashtag trended across the United States several times during Summit and a number of Sneaks hashtags trended nationally as well.

We also produced two new videos sharing how Summit keynotes get made and getting feedback on the popular Predictive Analytics session today:

People know Adobe for many reasons, many of which revolve around our technologies that help creative professionals bring their ideas to reality and that enable marketers to create and drive industry-leading campaigns based in smart math. At Adobe Summit this week in Salt Lake City, we are talking about our technologies and the future of the industry, and we have specials guests sharing some incredible stories of overcoming tremendous personal and professional challenges to do something amazing. But we also had the opportunity to share a side of Adobe that isn’t talked about as often as our technology.

Today, at our Digital Marketing Summit, we heard from a great mind – Sal Khan about the idea of breaking down barriers to revolutionize whatever you are passionate about. His work and the vision for the Khan Academy, a not-for-profit with the goal of changing education for the better by providing a free world-class education for anyone anywhere, inspired us and evoked a standing ovation from the Summit crowd. In one of those rare moments where I had the opportunity to proudly represent all Adobe employees, I announced that Adobe is donating $50,000 to the Khan Academy to further its groundbreaking approach to education and community change.

That was an incredibly special moment to be able to share with our customers and partners. Beyond our technologies, Adobe has a philanthropic side that does meaningful and inspirational work, but that at times takes a backstage to Adobe’s business initiatives. Adobe Youth Voices represents this side of Adobe, and was created to ignite creative confidence in youth, empowering them to find their voice and make it heard. To date, Adobe Youth Voices has created opportunities for over 120,000 youth. We have a vision of a world where the future creative and mathematical minds of tomorrow are not hindered by circumstance but have endless opportunities to succeed.

Beyond Adobe Youth Voices, our broadly reaching Adobe Foundation is funded by Adobe to leverage human, technological, and financial resources to drive social change and improve the communities in which we live and work. The Adobe Foundation supports innovative programs that further its mission and goals, and we are proud to support Khan Academy as a partner in creating opportunities for the world’s youth. I’m pretty excited about it and speak for all 11,000 Adobe employees in saying that we believe the work we do to better humanity is the most important work we can do.

Ok yes maybe I work at Adobe and ok yes maybe I’m a tad biased, but I’ve been going to Adobe Summits for I think four years now and dare I say this one is the best? Yes, the food at the opening night party was good. Yes, from an event team’s standpoint things are running smoothly, but from the overall “relevance” standpoint, this year’s Summit has started off super strong.

The social conversations from the event are unparalleled, growing more than 50% when compared to the same timeframe last year. Over 8500 conversations in just the first day put #AdobeSummit at the top of trending Twitter hashtags.

Brad Rencher kicked it all off with the opening keynote session (watch now), which included a thorough demo of Adobe Marketing Cloud by David Nueschler and folks from all five of the Marketing Cloud’s solutions teams. Need a rundown of what’s coming in Marketing Cloud? Check out this week’s news.

The day’s second keynote had its moments too. After Bill Briggs of Deloitte Consulting implored everyone to go beyond “mobile first” and think of “mobile only,” John Battelle interviewed Adam Bain of Twitter about Twitter growth, and paid social media vs organic social media. Good stuff. And the conversation continued to prove to this social marketer (me) that Twitter might be a brand’s best bet for proving ROI in social — paid and organic. Happy to discuss further in the comments.

Need some visuals of what the first full day of Summit was all about? Watch the videos below. Short and to the point, with quick looks at what Summitees are experiencing here in Salt Lake City, and be sure to follow all tomorrow’s action: @AdobeSummit and #AdobeSummit.