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.

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:

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.

This week at Adobe Summit – The Digital Marketing Conference, more than 4,500 digital marketers and senior leaders representing the world’s top brands are coming together in Salt Lake City to learn the latest about marketing trends, network and share best practices with each other.

At the conference, we are making a series of news announcements to address growing industry needs that include:  1) helping marketers iterate and act more quickly to better meet consumers’ expectations; 2) staying on top of the mobile explosion and delivering better mobile experiences; 3) simplifying the complex task of delivering the right experience or content to the right person at the right time.

Keynote presenters this year include Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen and SVP and GM of Adobe’s Digital Marketing Business, Brad Rencher, along with record-setting stratospheric daredevil Felix Baumgartner; Adam Bain, president of global revenue at Twitter; and Sal Kahn, founder of Khan Academy.

You can watch the keynote live today, Wednesday, March 6 from 9am-11am MST.

Our news today highlights major new Adobe Marketing Cloud capabilities, including:

New Touch Interface and Mobile Marketing Capabilities 

Adobe today unveiled an innovative new UI for Adobe® Marketing Cloud that surfaces data and insights to marketers and business leaders so they can easily gauge the impact of their marketing dollars.  Through this visually rich, touch based interface, Adobe Marketing Cloud, which marketers use to understand how campaigns are performing, now links with Adobe Creative Cloud™, which agency creatives use to build and deliver those campaigns.  In addition, every solution within Adobe Marketing Cloud has been upgraded with new mobile marketing capabilities, including new mobile capabilities for analytics, advertising, social app development, targeting content on smartphones and tablets, and mobile content management and delivery.

Adobe Social Goes Mobile 

Adobe today upgraded Adobe Social®, part of Adobe Marketing Cloud, with a completely redesigned user interface focused on interpreting and presenting social data in a more digestible format that helps social marketers prove business results.  Adobe also debuted Adobe Social for mobile phones and tablets.  Social marketers now have a marketing tool that’s as mobile as they are.

Delivering Personalized Experiences across Mobile and Social 

The static website is long gone.  Personalizing and optimizing your customer’s experience is essential.  Adobe today announced a major update to Adobe Experience Manager, part of Adobe Marketing Cloud, which introduces new responsive design, social communities and video capabilities that deliver a fully personalized experience to customers. In addition, Adobe today introduced a new Digital Asset Management offering within Adobe Experience Manager.  Adobe has re-imagined digital asset management with both marketers and creatives in mind, giving organizations unprecedented capabilities to deliver consistent, high-quality experiences anywhere.

New Digital Advertising Solution for Media Agencies and Marketers 

Adobe today unveiled a standard version of Adobe Media Optimizer, part of Adobe Marketing Cloud. Media Optimizer is Adobe’s digital advertising platform for campaigns across search, display and social media. The new edition, Media Optimizer Standard, delivers a rules-based bidding solution that improves the performance of search engine marketing campaigns through seamless integration with Adobe Analytics. Media Optimizer Standard is designed for media buying agencies, search engine marketing (SEM) agencies and direct advertisers seeking more control and transparency over their campaigns at an economical price point.

Taken together, these groundbreaking new solutions and capabilities are all designed to help our customers deliver the right online experience to the right person . They also offer the best way to tie social media activities to business results. And finally, they enable customers to achieve the greatest return on investment from online advertising.

Adobe Summit, THE digital marketing conference, is set for March 4-8 in Salt Lake City Utah. If you need help to convince your boss to get you there, we have a letter you can use, or just send her this video. It’s a good reminder that Summit is all about adding to your skillset, and not about building your buzzword dictionary.

“You can’t prove advertising really works.”  “Marketing is all gut, there’s no science to it.”  “The marketing department is a cost center, not a revenue driver.”  As marketers, we’ve been hearing this for decades.  And even as new marketing channels and technologies have arrived on the scene – including many that savvy digital marketers see as game-changers – new doubts and stigmas have arrived with them.

There’s never been a better time to be a marketer.  That’s how I see it.  The creative tools we have at our disposal make it easier than ever to turn a great idea into something real.  New technology has given us new ways to connect with customers and measure the impact of our work. Marketing matters more than ever.

But not everyone is convinced.  According to a recent study by The Fournaise Marketing Group, more than 70% of CEOs believe marketers are too disconnected from business results.  The view from consumers isn’t much better.  A new study just released by Adobe shows 68% of those surveyed find online ads “annoying.”  “Distracting,” “invasive” and “creepy” were not far behind.  What’s more, a recent article making the rounds in marketing circles calls for the death of the CMO position because, among other reasons, “Marketing impact is often hard to measure… …to know whether all those millions of dollars spent have led to an increase in real sales.”

This is nonsense. And Adobe is calling BS.

Today, we launched a brand new marketing campaign we’re calling “Metrics, not myths.” Our approach is to identify top myths about digital marketing that plague brands, agencies, chief marketing officers and CEOs and turn them on their head — with irony, humor, a provocative point of view and proof.

Our first myth, “Marketing is BS” runs in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and numerous online outlets today.  Other myths – like “Social Media is Worthless” and “Marketers Hate Big Data” – will roll out in the coming days and weeks. The whole campaign will be bolstered with a robust social campaign, some fun videos and more.

I hope you’ll pardon our French, but we want this campaign to be honest in capturing both the passion and genuine frustration marketers feel when their contributions are undervalued and they’re told the impact of their work isn’t measureable.  As a company that’s served marketers and designers for 30 years, Adobe feels their pain.  As a CMO who spends 74% of her own marketing budget on digital, I know better.  Marketing’s impact can be measured. Creativity and data can work beautifully together.  We’re willing to prove it.

Digital marketing can work.  More importantly – with so many eyeballs and so much opportunity moving online, to mobile, to social – digital marketing has to work.  As a career marketer, I feel strongly about this. If you agree, I hope you’ll join the conversation.  After all, there’s never been a better time to bust a few myths.  There’s never been a better time to be a marketer.

Ann Lewnes is Chief Marketing Officer at Adobe.  Follow her on Twitter at @alewnes

For More Information:

• See Adobe’s Click Here: The State of Online Advertising Survey
• Read about Adobe’s vision for Marketing & Creativity in the Cloud from Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch
• Learn more about Adobe’s Marketing Cloud and Digital Marketing Solutions from Brad Rencher
• See the “Metrics, not myths.” campaign in action.
• Join the conversation and help bust a few myths #MetricsNotMyths

Adobe Social, available today, will transform how companies use social media as a digital marketing channel. Read some thoughts from Brad Rencher, senior vice president, Digital Marketing Business, about social’s need to grow out of awkward adolescence and into a mature digital marketing channel. Lawrence Mak, product marketing manager for Adobe Social, shares three things about demonstrating social media business impact that will get digital marketers excited, while freecreditscore.com’s Johanna Riggle Segesser has an Adobe Social Q/A.

Is there real value there in social media? See what people have to say:

Building upon the NBC Olympics announcement that we made earlier this month, Adobe today announced that the BBC has become one of its first broadcast partners to use key components of Project Primetime in their live and video on demand (VOD) coverage of the London Games. The mobile content is being delivered through a new, HTML5 app built with Adobe PhoneGap, Adobe’s tools and framework for creating cross-platform HTML5 apps for smartphones and tablets. Visit the Digital Media blog to find out more.

Today, the Adobe Digital Marketing Summit kicked off in full force in Salt Lake City Utah with more than 4,000 digital marketers joining us from the world’s top advertisers, publishers, agencies, systems integrators and technology companies. Brad Rencher, senior vice president and general manager of Adobe’s Digital Marketing business announced some exciting new innovations on stage that broaden the capabilities of the Adobe Digital Marketing Suite and help our customers better measure, manage and optimize their digital marketing investments.

Some of today’s news included:

Adobe Social – A single platform combining social publishing and engagement with monitoring, social ad buying and analytics, helping attribute social activity to business results.

Predictive Marketing – New capabilities within the Digital Marketing Suite that reduce the complexity of uncovering hidden behavioral patterns in big data, identifying the most impactful insights quickly and leverage historical data to predict future results.

Multi-Channel Campaign Execution – Technology acquired from Efficient Frontier is now available as part of the Digital Marketing Suite, providing a unified view of social, search and display campaigns to uncover which channels and campaigns have the largest impact on conversion and revenue.

Personalization – A significant update to Adobe CQ 5.5, the company’s Web Experience Management (WEM) solution that helps marketers deliver more consistent and contextually relevant experiences across the web, mobile devices and social media. We also announced a partnership with hybris, a leader in multi-channel commerce software, to deliver comprehensive commerce capabilities to marketers.

Please visit our online press room for more details and to access the Digital Marketing Suite press releases issued.

Calling all digital marketers, advertisers and publishers! Want to learn how to gain a competitive advantage, strengthen customer relationships and extend brand value – and top it off by hitting the slopes? Then you’ll want to book a trip to Salt Lake City, Utah for the Adobe Digital Marketing Summit (formerly Omniture Summit) from March 20-23, 2012!

Attend Summit 2012 to take advantage of up to four days of informative sessions, insightful keynotes from industry leaders, training workshops and numerous networking opportunities exploring the latest trends around social, mobile and web analytics, site conversions, audience and advertising optimization, Web Experience Management (WEM) and implementing multi-channel marketing. More than 70 breakout sessions across eight tracks (Analyst & Reporting, Media Monetization, Mobile, Web Experience Management, Multi-Channel Campaigns, Personalized Engagement, Social, and Tech Track) will focus on real-world customer case studies and how digital marketing data can drive business decisions.

Summit 2012 will also include a customer and partner showcase, opportunities for attendees to connect with Adobe’s Digital Marketing teams, a Summit Bash with a surprise headliner concert and a ski day at the end of the week. Thousands of marketers, advertisers, publishers, agencies and developers across industries will come together to better manage, measure and optimize digital experiences so don’t miss out. Register today and lock-in early bird before Friday, January 13, 2012. Visit the registration, pricing, and accommodations page for more information about special discounts and group passes.

Check out today’s announcement for more details and visit the Summit 2012 website. We hope to see you in Utah next March!