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!

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

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

According to the National Retail Federation (NRF), the average shopper plans to do 36% of his or her holiday shopping online this year – up 33% from last year! What are you doing to ensure that these purchase-minded shoppers are going to have the most relevant and efficient experience possible on your website and complete their business with you rather than your competitor? We’re now well into our second decade of selling and buying products online, it’s time that digital shopping experiences delivered more – both for the shopper and the retailer. It’s time for informed, intelligent targeted merchandizing.

Merchandising is a well-established, even fundamental aspect of retail marketing. It comprises the many activities surrounding the efforts to accelerate a potential buyer through the purchase funnel to the point where money is exchanged. In a recent white paper written by Sue Aldrich of the Patricia Seybold Group entitled “Success with Best Practices for Targeted Merchandising”, Sue sums it up by saying, “Merchandising is the practice of maximizing sales by leveraging product design, packaging, pricing, display, and most importantly, selection.” Corporations spend tremendous amounts of money and time working to put the right products, information or incentives in the right place at the right time to inspire a purchase – whether it be a large-ticket item or a spontaneous addition to a buyer’s shopping cart.

Although a fair amount of science has emerged from the collective experience of merchandisers, in the offline world, there is always an unavoidable element of inefficiency involved when merchandising strategies are deployed. Because few specifics are known about a customer, a merchandiser needs to cast a pretty wide net in hopes of attracting potential buyers who are prepared or interested in the products or offers presented them.

Targeted merchandising is a form of personalization – the creation of a unique sequence of relevant digital experiences, targeted to an individual or like-minded group of people to inspire them to progress towards a purchase or some similar success event. But whereas we think of personalization as being of primary benefit to the visitor or shopper, turn the tables and think of targeted merchandising as delivering personalized experiences in a way that not only satisfies customer goals, but optimizes the experience for the merchant as well.

In the digital world, the details and data available to a merchandiser open up several opportunities to remove or minimize the inefficiencies of merchandising to a largely generic audience. The data that an online retailer has access to from a digital analytics product such as Adobe SiteCatalyst or a multi-channel analytics product like Adobe Insight, can infuse online merchandising efforts with loads of intelligence regarding online customers’ and prospects’ interests and intentions.

Combining this intelligence with products like Adobe Test&Target, Adobe Recommendations, Adobe Scene7 and Adobe Search&Promote, merchandisers are now capable of delivering targeted content, messaging, cross-sells and offers to the anonymous, yet highly predictive profiles that analytics data provides. Targeted merchandising is all about leveraging these universal profiles – that signal implied and expressed interests and intentions – to present customers with timely and relevant content and offers. For example, with the latest release of Adobe Recommendations, merchandisers can arrange that a shopper who is viewing a specific brand of shoes will see targeted product recommendations for only shoes from that same brand. The product will even help you determine where on the page those recommendations perform the best.

So as shoppers start hitting your site in these crucial weeks to come, think “targeted merchandizing” and remember these three simple things:

• Don’t assume that what works for one shopper works for all
• Let your metrics guide the relevance (and flexibility) of your merchandising
• And, most importantly…pay attention to shopper intent and deliver personalized digital experiences that meet your merchandising objectives.

For an excellent overview of targeted merchandizing best practices, click here to download a copy of Sue Aldrich’s paper, “Success with Best Practices for Targeted Merchandising”.

After a steady period of in-house incubation and private pre-releases, we are pleased to open up Project Adthenticate to the wider online advertising community. This public beta, to help streamline the ad validation and trafficking process for creators and publishers, marks another step in Adobe’s renewed focus on advertising workflows.

I want to use this post to offer some insight into Project Adthenticate and how it came about. Several web media publishers had approached Adobe about friction in getting online advertising campaigns launched. Specifically, there were workflow issues between ad agencies and publishers on campaigns that involved premium inventory and rich media ad creative. As we spoke with various people in the online ad ecosystem, we heard different angles on the same core issue: advertising assets were not built to the appropriate asset specifications. Each side had a different reason for why the ads weren’t built with the correct specifications but the end result was the same — lots of churn between ad creators and publishers which resulted in delays, higher costs, make-goods and lost revenue.

So we put together a small team that conceptualized and implemented an ad validation service that aims to solve the problem of creating ads to the proper specifications needed across the online ad workflow. For online media publishers, the service enables ad operations teams to test advertising assets against their customized ad specifications. The validation service is unique in that it actually executes the content in a sand-boxed environment that captures CPU usage, memory, network requests and scripting commands. The results are then compared against what the publisher can allow for that ad format.

Web service APIs allow the Project Adthenticate service to be integrated into tools and technologies across the online ad workflow: from publisher-side ad servers to ad creation toolkits from rich media vendors and Adobe Creative Suite as well.

The Project Adthenticate public beta is available for the entire ad community to use at adobe.com/go/adops. We look forward to your feedback and to continue making online advertising workflows easier and efficient for the entire ad community.

Today we made some big news with the acquisition of Auditude, a leading ad serving solution for premium Internet-delivered video.

Adobe has great analytics tools in the Adobe Digital Marketing Suite to help marketers and advertisers optimize and measure their campaigns with real-time data and analysis on content usage. The Auditude acquisition goes the next step, offering an innovative video monetization platform that will be a key component of Adobe’s Media Solutions — enabling premium video content owners to maximize the value of their content while providing an optimal experience for consumers wherever that content is viewed.

Audiences are demanding TV-like experiences on their smartphones, tablets and other connected devices, and yet, to date, this really hasn’t come to pass. Today, less than 5% of professionally produced video content is available online.

Now, an integrated Adobe authoring, publishing, monetization and measurement system, will create a dramatically better consumer experience across Internet-connected devices. This is an exciting time for all of us who want to watch more of our favorite TV shows, movies and other premium content online across our Internet devices.

Why hasn’t this happened before? While there have been technical challenges for this migration, these are largely being overcome as advancements in technology continue. What remains are challenges primarily associated with the current business model for online content. Complexities associated with rights management, distribution agreements, data collection and activation, have made online premium content workflows difficult. The new integrated workflow with Auditude’s technology will help tackle these issues and online distribution and consumption of content will be significantly accelerated.

Adobe has a long history of working with publishers and media companies — we’re a trusted provider of tools and technologies that are used to create and deliver rich content and amazing digital experiences. The Auditude acquisition makes perfect sense by helping us provide a more integrated workflow for publishers and media companies to create, deliver, monetize and measure premium online video content.

Additionally, with expected support of mobile, smartTVs, game consoles and desktop devices, Adobe will provide our publisher and media company customers with access to new audiences, through devices that leverage either HTML5 or Flash technology for in-browser and app experiences.

Once Auditude technologies are integrated, the workflow will be easy. Publishers using Adobe InDesign and Digital Publishing Suite products will simply manage advertising within their tablet apps, to drive greater yield and deliver a more customized experience for people. Publishers using Adobe Flash Media Server will be able to deliver both Flash and HTML5 video experiences, seamlessly integrating in-stream video advertising with the premium content on the server side without sacrificing the benefits that come from client-side technologies. This will make the online viewing experience remarkably better, and enable publishers and media companies to automatically adapt to the complexities of a multi-device market.

Big welcome to Auditude where together we will help publishers and media companies create a single workflow so they can increase the amount of great content, reach maximum revenue and ultimately give all of us web video viewers greater access to amazing digital experiences across all of our devices, wherever we are.

We commissioned an independent study that surveyed marketing directors across Europe on their attitudes and behaviour towards social media marketing measurement.

Here are some of the key findings:

• 58% feel that “deciding how to measure social media investment” is the top priority in social media marketing.

• 36% are measuring the impact of social media marketing on revenue, but not doing so accurately.

• 55% of European Marketers say we need an industry standard for ROI in social media.

Take a look at the full report:

Learn how to connect social media marketing to real business results at the European launch of Adobe SocialAnalytics: www.social-optimisation.com

Find out more about Adobe SocialAnalytics: www.omniture.com

I just returned from Cannes Lions: a weeklong gathering of many of the top creative minds in communications, advertising and marketing. The digital revolution is at the center of the conversation here at Cannes. As Adobe does for digital advertising what we’ve already done for digital marketing, the discussion at Cannes is clearly relevant to our daily focus.

Here are my top 10 lessons learned as a Cannes Lions neophyte:

1. Don’t ever schedule a 9 am meeting with anybody you actually want to talk to.

2. The digital conversation among the movers and the shakers at Cannes is shaping advertising and publishing.

3. The world’s leading digital experiences would truly be lackluster without Adobe.

4. The blend of creative/art and measurement/science is creating big opportunities. With our creative legacy and strength in digital measuring and monetizing, Adobe empowers brands to better express themselves like no one else can.

5. The advertising industry of tomorrow is dependent on a strong digital strategy that includes social and mobile.

6. When they say Cannes is a social event – believe them.

7. People at Cannes get the power of data – smart creative leads are looking at the ways digital innovation shapes better experiences.

8. Data-driven insights around digital campaigns are creating new disciplines in social and mobile and so much more is yet to be discovered.

9. Top discussion of the week is the creative-scorned “traditional vs. digital” debate.

10. Creative innovation that steps up to the challenge of digital deserves to be recognized in a category all its own – like our first ever creative effectiveness award at Cannes Lions.

Number 10 was probably the highlight of my trip. With Adobe’s focus to help our customers not only create and deliver their content, but also measure and optimize its effectiveness, we were proud to sponsor this brand new category. Kudos to all the contestants who were able to prove the ROI and business impact of their creative campaigns.

Meeting with the top ad execs and discussing the future of digital advertising and publishing, I see incredible opportunities for our partners and customers to create new playbooks of business success in the digital landscape. The industry is watching to see what’s next and we are excited to help brands better express themselves though digital experiences.

Already looking forward to Cannes 2012,
-Brad

Congratulations to all our winning partners who picked up awards of recognition at this year’s Adobe Omniture Summit EMEA. Here’s why!

Best Overall Partner – Bitbang
Bitbang was founded in 2003 in Italy with a focus on web analytics. They became an Omniture partner in 2008 and expanded their scope to cover online optimisation. With 10 certified consultants they are autonomous in driving sales cycle and implementation. They have shown great ability to cross-sell to existing accounts and drive business with solutions like Test & Target. Bitbang is a premier partner who has contributed significantly to our leadership position in Italy during 2010.

Giovanni Lorenzoni, CEO of Bitbang, collecting the award

Best Technology Partner – Searchmetrics
Searchmetrics delivers the most comprehensive, integrated suite of search analytics available to help companies move their brand into the top positions of all leading search engines. They understood early on, the vision and benefits of integrating organic search and web data, and joined the Genesis Program almost a year ago. The deep integration is now in beta with first German customers and on a 1:1 basis is already generating a huge demand for both companies.

Searchmetric’s CEO, Dr. Horst Joepen, collecting the award

Fastest Growing Partner – Swordfish Inc.
Swordfish Inc. is a Swedish start-up founded in Q1 of 2010 with just three employees. Since then it has grown to a team of 12 professionals working from Stockholm and covering the whole Nordic region. Swordfish is completely aligned with Adobe technology, centering innovative services around the Adobe Online Marketing Suite. Swordfish help customers with all aspects of digital marketing and have shown leadership in customer acquisition and conversion strategies across different industries.

Swordfish realised Adobe technology could be used as a fuel for growth, a company that brought $300k in revenue to Adobe in its first nine months of business and continues to drive customers and revenue throughout 2011.

Mattias Ward, CEO, Per Lönnqvist, Sales Director, and COO Mr Gordon Savage collecting the award

Best Search Agency Partner, EMEA – WPP – GroupM
GroupM is a media investment management operation, part of the WPP group and serving agencies such as Mindshare. In 2010, SearchCenter was implemented by GroupM for customers such as LG in 22 countries. In Italy, the agency has started to use SearchCenter to run campaigns for Fiat Group. GroupM has demonstrated their ability to optimise the adspend of their customers by using SearchCenter to improve the ROI of their campaigns.

Simona Petti , Head of Search for Mindshare in Italy and Riccardo Scali, Adobe, collecting the award in GroupM’s absence

Best Value Added Partner, EMEA – Adversitement
Adversitement successfully ran 150 Omniture projects in parallel, during peak time in 2010, handling implementations, measurement, reporting, data analysis and optimisation for 200 local and multi-national companies.

They have embraced our multi-product suite strategy as nobody else has, demonstrating competencies on SiteCatalyst, Discover, Insight, SearchCenter, Survey, Genesis, Test & Target, Test & Target 1:1 and Adobe University. These efforts led, in 2010 alone, to revenue under management of $2.25m.

Bob Nieme & Nick Wood from Adversitement collecting the award

Best Professional Services – Acceleration
This is a brand new award, introduced this year to highlight the ever-increasing requirement from clients to work with our partners to provide support and services in order for clients to maximise their investment in Adobe software.

Acceleration provide support and services across multiple OBU solutions in multiple regions including Middle East, Africa and UK.

Stephan Pretorius, Grant Keller and Jon Tate of Acceleration collecting the award