On Saturday, May 19, Adobe’s CEO Shantanu Narayen delivered the commencement address at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.  MBA graduates, family, friends, faculty and staff gathered in the Greek Theatre for the event.  You can check out the video and text of his speech online.

As the core of his message, Shantanu shared three secrets to thriving in the midst of constant change:

1) The answer isn’t in a spreadsheet (rely on your gut)

2) Know your Zen (understand and stay true to yourself)

3) Surround yourself with people smarter than you (build a team that brings out your best)

Through the course of the address, Shantanu shared a number of personal and Adobe stories, from the downpour at his own Haas graduation through the advice that Adobe co-founder John Warnock gave him when he took the CEO job:  “If you don’t like your job, you have only one person to blame.”

Congratulations to all the Haas MBA graduates!

Are people living up to their creative potential? In a word, no.

This week, Adobe released global research in a State of Create report to uncover how people feel about their own creativity as well as its role in the economy, society, the workplace and our educational institutions.  The findings were enlightening.  A few highlights from the data:

• 8 in 10 feel that unlocking creativity is critical to economic growth
• Only 1 in 4 believe they are living up to their own creative potential
• 75% said they are under growing pressure to be productive rather than creative at work
• More than half feel creativity is being stifled by the education system – and that feeling rises to 70% in the US
• Only about half of Americans would describe themselves as creative (global average is even lower at 39%)

We call this separation between the importance and the day-to-day reality of creativity the “creativity gap.”  That gap is pretty sobering.

So, what can we do to close the creativity gap?  First, we need to make time for creativity as well as provide the necessary technology tools and training.   Productivity and creativity should not be mutually exclusive – we all need to find ways to create at work, rather than considering it a weekend hobby or luxury for those with more time.  As for our educational institutions, they need to foster the growth of the entire child, with more opportunities to participate in arts programs and foster “out of the box” creative thinking.  Most importantly, we all need to think of creativity more broadly – it’s not just the domain of professional designers or artists.  It’s a critical capability in a successful society and one that is in all of us.

Please check out the full report online, and let me know what you think either in the comments section or on Twitter (@alewnes).

There’s immeasurable power in personal expression.  It’s the reason that, since its inception, Adobe Youth Voices has worked to encourage personal expression and creativity in students around the world and – along the way – empower them with 21^st century digital communication skills.

Shantanu, CEO, announces the Adobe Foundation Creativity Scholarships

Adobe is especially passionate about this mission, not only because creativity is our business, but because we know that outlets for creativity and expression for students aren’t a given.  In fact, according to a new “State of Creativity” benchmark study just released by Adobe, nearly 60% of those surveyed globally feel that creativity is actually being stifled by their education systems.

This statistic has to change.

So today, the Adobe Foundation proudly announced the creation of a $1 million Adobe Foundation Creativity Scholarship initiative, giving select Adobe Youth Voices students the chance to go to college and pursue a creative arts field.  We hope our scholarship recipients will be ambassadors for a more creative culture, finding creative ways to improve their communities, and becoming role models for the next generation of the creative workforce. We plan to announce more details on the scholarship application process later in the year.

Now more than ever, this investment in young people and in creativity is critical.  We’re honored to play a part.

Today we are announcing two remarkable offerings… Adobe Creative Suite 6 and the all new Adobe Creative Cloud.

Creative Suite 6 is a killer release with hundreds of new capabilities rolling up to four focus areas:

• Application Performance. The Mercury performance work we started a couple years ago has now made its way to our imaging, video and illustration tools.
• Enhanced User Interface. Our tools are increasingly enabling direct, on-canvas editing of your content.
• Efficient development for Multiple Devices. Our tools are taking a practical approach to creating responsive content, so your web sites or apps look great regardless of the device or orientation they’re viewed in.
• Adobe’s unique secret sauce. The stuff that make things previously impossible suddenly possible.

Our customers helped us shape Creative Suite 6 and with it now in their hands, we will all experience things on the web and with mobile apps that we could never have thought possible. We’re going to see some incredible things.

It’s also important to realize we’re in the middle of a transformation in how content is built and delivered. With over 500 million smartphones selling each year, 400 million tablets expected to sell by 2014, nearly 1 billion people on Facebook and over 40 billion apps expected to be downloaded this year – the creative process is undergoing a significant shift. And we believe the Creative Cloud will help our customers go from idea to finished work more efficiently and with better results.

Creative Cloud Members will get:

• Great Tools. Members can download and install all of our CS6 tools and can use them even when disconnected from the internet. Members also get access to Muse (our new HTML5 tool for designers) and Edge Preview (our new HTML5 tool for interaction designers). They also benefit from deep integration with our touch tools like Photoshop Touch and Adobe Ideas.
• Storage and Sharing. Members content can be automatically synchronized across of their PCs, mobile devices and the cloud. The files are accessible from anywhere, on any device and easily shared with colleagues or clients.
• Publishing Web Sites and Apps. Members are able to host up to five websites for free and will be able to create and deploy digital brochures and catalogues to the iPad and iPhone.
• Ongoing Innovation. We view the Creative Cloud as a journey and intend to update its services often. Members will be guaranteed to always have access to the most up-to-date products and services all included as part of their membership.

We hope you’ll join us Monday morning online as we unveil more details about these technologies.

We couldn’t be more excited about both these releases and can’t wait to see what you do with them.

-David

Today, we announced a significant milestone, bringing free eSignature capabilities to Adobe Reader. Now, you can sign, send and manage your important documents from anywhere, from a desktop or an iOS or Android device.

With today’s release, the days of printing, signing and faxing back documents are truly numbered. We’ve tightened the integration between Adobe Reader and Adobe EchoSign eSignature service, so you and your customers can gain real-time visibility into the signature process and status of contracts – giving you greater assurance and control over the management of all signed documents. We’ve also streamlined the desktop experience and added features that give you more choice and greater functionality.

Thanks to Adobe Reader for mobile, you can electronically sign a document by simply drawing your signature with your finger on a touchscreen, making it easy to conduct business while on the go.  Additionally, you can connect to Adobe EchoSign to get others to sign documents electronically, letting you track and manage the status of documents online. And, because the signed contracts are archived in the cloud, you can easily retrieve documents from anywhere, at any time, via a web browser.

We didn’t stop there, though. Adobe Reader for mobile also adds new capabilities that let you interact with PDF documents directly from your iOS or Android devices, including annotation, comment and forms fill. And, of course, the highly intuitive user interface provides an efficient PDF viewing experience regardless of the device.

With Adobe Reader and EchoSign, we’re making it easy for anyone to send important contracts to customers so that they can quickly and easily sign and send them electronically – and get the deal done faster. Give Adobe Reader with EchoSign a test drive on your next deal.

Kevin M. Lynch, SVP and GM, Acrobat and Document Services, Adobe

The hits keep coming for Adobe Youth Voices. Today, the Adobe Foundation announced that it has joined forces with MTV, Dell and Samsung as supporting partners of the Adobe Youth Voices Aspire Awards.

Launched just this year, the Aspire Awards are a first-of-their-kind online youth media competition and festival showcasing creative media from teens ages 13-18 worldwide. The awards honor youth who creatively communicate a vision for change in their communities and lives through video, print and audio projects. 

We’re thrilled to have the support of MTV, Dell and Samsung for the inaugural AYV Aspire Awards. As part of its involvement, MTV is presenting a special award to recognize one young person whose exceptional video content leverages music, and provides a clear call to action for the audience. The recipient of this award will win a trip to MTV studios in New York City!

Students are invited to participate in partnership with an educator, who will submit media on behalf of their students in eight media categories ranging from documentaries to graphic design. Entries will be evaluated by a global panel of teen peers, youth media professionals, educators, media industry experts and filmmakers, including Neil Bennett, Sarah Kay, and Robert Kenner. MTV Act, which celebrates young people who take action to make things better, will feature Aspire Awards winners on the MTV Act website.

Submissions must be made by April 20^th and we’ll announce the semifinalists on May 4^th.  So spread the word to a creative student and visit our Aspire Awards website for more details.

Last week was full of exciting news for Adobe in Europe.  We were named to the Sunday Times 100 Best Companies to work for list in the UK and ranked as the 10th best workplace in Germany by the Great Place to Work Institute. These two prestigious employer recognitions really capture the essence of what makes Adobe an exceptional place to work – our people, values and culture. It gives me great pride to know that wherever in the world our employees work, the unique qualities that make us Adobe are the same.

As our teams celebrated this recognition, many blogged about why they enjoy working for Adobe – and they also raised a champagne glass or two. If Adobe seems like an environment where you’d like to work, we invite you to learn more and contact us.

One of the highest compliments that we could receive is an Adobe employee who says our company is a great place to work. That’s exactly what’s happened today – on an immense scale. For the 13^th time, Adobe has made FORTUNE’s 100 Best Companies to Work for list. We ranked 41, a 59 percent improvement over last year’s ranking.

Given the quality and number of companies considered for this list, I couldn’t be more proud and humbled by this recognition. It’s a direct reflection of our incredible employees and the enthusiasm they bring to work every day. Although Adobe has grown and changed significantly since its founding nearly 30 years ago, our values and commitment to creating a great place to work remain constant.

When I learned about our ranking on the list, I paused to think about what I like best about working for Adobe… I have to say it’s our 10,000 creative, passionate and innovative employees. Read what other Adobe employees have to say about working here on the Life@Adobe blog.

Today, Adobe solutions are central to how digital marketing and advertising are created, managed, executed, measured and optimized. Our focus on market leadership in the digital marketing space has driven some dramatic changes at Adobe including the recent acquisition of Efficient Frontier, a leader in multi-channel and auction-based digital advertising optimization across search, display and social media.

With Efficient Frontier, Adobe delivers an industry-leading independent platform for digital ad buying to our customers. With this addition to our Digital Marketing Suite, we offer a more powerful solution for managing search, display and social media to better answer the needs of our customers. Even more importantly, we add the expertise of over 300 talented Efficient Frontier employees to our team.

The several key areas of technology and expertise Efficient Frontier brings to Adobe’s Digital Marketing Suite include; 1) leading portfolio optimization algorithms and platform for paid search, 2) real-time bidding technology for display advertising that is placing millions of dollars of bids today, 3) Context Optional, a social engagement platform that Efficient Frontier recently purchased that is managing content for major brands on both Facebook and Google+, and 4) the ability to forecast future returns and model media mix options to drive business results from multi-channel campaigns. These additions to our already strong offerings significantly advance our capabilities in the market and, in many cases, accelerate our existing roadmap to give our enterprise and agency customers new ways to manage digital marketing.

What this means for both Adobe and Efficient Frontier customers – the marketers behind some of the world’s largest brands – is new and better ways to understand, and make impactful business decisions around digital ad buying and engagement. Both Efficient Frontier and Adobe customers are making tremendous investments in advertising and must make complicated and real-time decisions about where, when and through which channels they will place ads.

We understand that the marketer is on the hook to report back to the CEO on return-on-investment and lessons learned from their choices and allocation of resources of any other marketing campaign. This is no small task. Our customers trust and expect Adobe to be the strategic partner to help them exceed their business goals. With Efficient Frontier, we continue to make customer-driven business decisions as we build a powerful and comprehensive digital marketing platform to drive business impact through the marketing department.

It’s clear through Adobe’s investment strategy and the $2.4 billion worth of acquisitions we have made since 2009, that we are committed to winning in Digital Marketing. The acquisition of Efficient Frontier joins a strong list of recently acquired businesses including Auditude, a video ad management leader, Day Software, a leader in web content management, digital asset management and social collaboration solutions, and Demdex, a powerful data management platform to power multi-channel strategies, among many others.

With these players as part of Adobe, we help our customers optimize multi-channel advertising spend, giving them the means to place the right ads and offers at the right time and place, and then identify high performing campaigns to replicate for best business results. Adobe’s Digital Media and Digital Marketing platforms continue to intersect with these recent acquisitions, providing increased value for our customers.

The completion of Adobe’s acquisition of Efficient Frontier is great news for both businesses, for our customers and for a fast-growing industry in need of breakaway leadership. With it, Adobe is poised to win.

-Brad Rencher, SVP & GM, Digital Marketing & David Karnstedt, VP & GM, Advertising, Digital Marketing

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