Marketing, at times, can be a blunt object. It can be in your face, intrusive and repetitive. But as more marketing has gone digital, marketers have access to data and insights that allow us to understand our customers better. This brings an opportunity to learn more about our audience and deliver more personalized customer experiences that are better tailored and better timed.

Last week, I had the opportunity to discuss the challenges and opportunities for customer insights and analytics with fellow CMOs John Boris of Shutterfly, and Heidi Melin of Plex Systems, at a Churchill Club talk here in Silicon Valley. A few key takeaways:

• People want personalized experiences – Consumers want to receive information that is relevant to them and they value personalized experiences.
• Collaboration is key – It is now more important than ever for organizations to work cross-functionally. We formed a Marketing Insights and Operations group to be a “single source of truth” for customer data and marketing performance here at Adobe. This group consists of Adobe employees from sales, customer support, global marketing and product marketing, and meets to align all marketing data collected across the company.
• The right data, not just ‘big data’, is a huge opportunity – We use data at every single point in our marketing campaigns to understand campaign effectiveness, mix modeling, media and website optimization, and overall impact and ROI. Developments to customer insights are evolving, and they aren’t slowing down anytime soon. That means big opportunities for innovation. It’s important to know what you’re looking for before you start collecting data to make sure that data is actionable. I like what Fatemeh Khatibloo of Forrester Research, the moderator of our talk, said – “It’s not about big data, it’s about the right data.”

The impact on brands is huge when marketing is personalized for the consumer and online experiences are rewarding, and I believe it makes all the difference. A replay of last week’s talk is below – or you can view it here.  Take a look and let us know what you think.

Earlier today, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to send the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) Amendments Act of 2013 (S. 607) to the full Senate—an important milestone in advancing the privacy of communications stored “in the cloud.”

If law enforcement wants access to communications you have stored in a file cabinet in your home or in your office, the Fourth Amendment requires that they obtain a search warrant issued by a judge upon a showing of probable cause. But, under ECPA in its current form, some communications you store in a cloud service receive these same Fourth Amendment protections while others do not. If you leave communications stored online for more than 180 days, they become available to law enforcement with just a court order or a subpoena on the theory that you have “abandoned” them. Court orders and subpoenas are easier for law enforcement to obtain than a search warrant. This may have made sense in 1986, long before the wide-spread adoption of cloud-based email and storage solutions. It does not make sense today.

At Adobe, we believe our customers’ private communications should receive full constitutional protections, regardless of whether they are stored at home, at work or in our cloud. That’s why we have been pleased to support, along with the many other technology companies and organizations who are part of the Digital Due Process Coalition, the ECPA Amendments Act introduced by Senators Leahy and Lee. Section 3 of the Act would amend ECPA so that government access to any communications stored online is subject to a single, clear and constitutional legal standard: a search warrant issued upon probable cause. The Act also sets forth clear rules about when a cloud provider can (and cannot) tell its users about a government request for access to communications.

This legislation is critical to consumer and business confidence in adopting cloud services, and we will continue to work to help ensure it is signed into law. More information, along with ways to show support for amending ECPA, is available via the Center for Democracy and Technology website.

Printers, overnight mail, scanners, and fax machines are killing business productivity. More and more organizations are moving away from paper-based approaches to their critical business processes to reduce costs, improve security, and limit environmental impact.  According to a recent Adobe study, “Paper: An Endangered Species?” the majority of managers surveyed had overwhelmingly negative attitudes toward paper-based processes and cited productivity, security, attracting talent and going green as the benefits of a completely digital workflow. The research is based on interviews with 1,051 U.S. managers in small, medium and large businesses that are responsible for creating or working with contracts.

Going Digital: Improving Business Processes

Adobe’s research shows that more than half of managers surveyed believe that digital approaches simplify work. Further, companies slow to adopt fully digital practices are at a disadvantage when it comes to growing their businesses and ultimately attracting new customers. For example:

• 51% of respondents said that a digital workflow makes filing and managing documents easier
• 61% of managers said working digitally saves on costs
• 32% said a digital workflow is more efficient, giving them an edge with client work and ultimately helps win new business

Paper-Based Contracts: a negative impact on trust

Our study also showed that paper impacts the trust that businesses have with partners, vendors and customers.  Unfortunately, this is particularly acute when it comes to the sanctity of contracts, the heart of business agreements:

• More than two-thirds believe that paper-based contracts are prone to defacing
• 60% of managers believe that password-protected electronic documents are more secure than paper documents locked in a safe
• 56% cited the fear of losing a paper document as the top “con” of using paper

Attracting talent and going green

Our study also pointed out a growing attitude among people that it’s more prestigious to work for a company that is mostly digital:

• 76% of respondents said they are impressed by companies that have a strong digital presence
• 71% said they wish their company was more digital
• 68% said that it is important for a company to operate mostly electronically versus on paper when they are deciding where to work

The last mile: moving to electronic contracts

While the vast majority of business processes – from small companies to large enterprises – have already gone digital, contracts represent the last mile for companies to go paperless. Our study showed that the tipping point for more businesses to transition to digital contracting may be on the horizon – respondents noted they would be highly interested in using an automated Web contracting tool that makes it easy to electronically sign, track and secure contracts:

• 98% of respondents noted they still use paper in their transactions involving contracts
• Only 18% having made the switch to purely digital methods when signing contracts
• 72% said a digital tool, such as an eSignature service, would fulfill a critical business need
• 73% of managers affirmed that life would be easier if all contracts exchanged at work were done digitally

Digital Contracts Streamline Business

Adobe believes that now is the time for all organizations to immediately evaluate how and if they can shift to digital approaches for contracting. eSignature technologies are easy, secure, and readily available. Organizations that use eSignatures are seeing a dramatic decrease in the time needed to close deals, reduced contract negotiation times, faster “quote-to-cash”, and a safer, more secure way to track and store some of their most critical business documents.   And all eSignatures are backed by the federal ESIGN Act, ensuring the legality of the contract, which should put the customer at ease.

For your “signees,” signing a contract is simple and easy.   They can sign from their mobile phone, their iPad, or any device connected to the Web – no more waiting by the fax machine or for that overnight envelope to arrive.

It’s easy to get more digital. Just check out Adobe EchoSign here for a free test drive.

Paper: An Endangered Species? (Study PDF)

Twitter: @jon_perera

Note: This post is cross-posted from Mike Dillon’s personal blog. 

Silicon Valley. It’s a place emulated around the world as a continuous source of innovative thought spawning new products, companies and industries. More importantly, this innovation is a powerful economic and job-creation engine for the Digital Age.

Unfortunately, there are a group of individuals and entities that are constantly siphoning fuel from this engine. They go by a variety of names. Some people describe them with polite terms like “non-practicing entities” or “NPEs”; others refer to them with more subtly negative names like “patent trolls”. I prefer to be more blunt: they are leeches; leeches that divert capital investment and innovative energy away from job creation and, instead, to litigation.

Much has been written on this subject, but in general this is what is happening. An individual or small group of investors purchases a patent on the open market. Often it is a weak patent that shouldn’t have been issued by an overworked examiner at the U.S. Patent Office or it could be a strong patent that may have been interpreted incorrectly in the judicial process. The owners of these patents then file lawsuits against any company where they can even remotely make a claim of patent infringement. In years past, the focus of these suits was primarily technology companies, but that is no longer the case. Recently, on a single day, more than twenty retail companies, including J.C. Penny, Dick’s Sporting Goods, Men’s Wearhouse, Walgreens and Pier 1 Imports were all sued for patent infringement in this type of case.

Every company that I have worked for has been on the receiving end of these lawsuits.  Most of these cases begin with a demand letter in which the plaintiff doesn’t even bother to specify the allegedly infringing feature of the product, or the precise part of the patent that is claimed to infringed. The letters just list one of many patents, refer nebulously to a company’s products, and say “pay up.” And, when you don’t, your company finds itself receiving a visit from a process server, delivering a similarly vaguely worded complaint and lawsuit.

Recently, for example, one of these entities filed suit against comedian Adam Carolla, alleging infringement of a patent that appears to describe a way of disseminating episodes of content in a serialized fashion. First question: Really? You can patent that? Second question: Why are they suing Carolla, a comedian who is best known for his free podcast?

The answer is that it’s all about economics.  In the U.S. we have a judicial system in which each party pays its own legal costs and attorney fees.  The plaintiffs in this type of case uses this to their advantage. They know that when faced with even a specious patent infringement lawsuit, a company will be inclined to settle because if it wins the case, it loses from a financial standpoint. On average it cancost between $3 – $5 million to defend a patent infringement lawsuit. So, if a company wins at trial, it gets nothing other than a large legal bill and a verdict of non-infringement. Thus, it’s a financially rational decision to raise the white flag as long as the settlement amount is less than the anticipated legal cost of going to trial. Knowing this many companies elect to settle as soon as they face one of these lawsuits and incur significant costs in defending it.

Now, you may ask, why don’t companies use their own patents and sue these entities as a form of deterence? Good question. This intellectual property equivalent of “mutually assured destruction” is the reason that patent litigation between competitors across all industries is relatively rare. If you intend to sue a competitor over a patent, you had better be prepared that your company will face the downside risk of being sued for infringement in response. What’s different in these cases is that the entities that file them don’t actually make anything. They are instead, just litigation shell companies. Because of this, their tactics can’t be used against them – i.e. they have no products that a company can claim are infringing.

This all plays to the plaintiff’s benefit because if they file enough cases, some percentage of companies will settle. The proceeds from these settlements are then used to fund litigation against other companies and the purchase of additional patents to be used in future lawsuits. In order to obtain an ROI, plaintiffs only have to cast a broad net and manage their legal costs efficiently.

Often the plaintiffs defend their actions by saying that they are “standing up for the sole inventor.” Well, we like sole inventors. Adobe was founded by two guys in a garage. (The name of the company originated from a creek near where they lived.) But the plaintiffs in these cases are not standing up for quality patents, and getting meaningful value for these patents. They are, instead,  just holding companies up for the cost of litigation. It doesn’t even matter what the patent is about. The only people getting wealthy from this system are the lawyers (and that’s coming from one).

At Adobe the vast majority of the litigation against our company are patent infringement cases of this type. We fight all of them because, quite frankly, they’re bullshit.

But this doesn’t mean it’s an easy decision because we don’t measure our defense costs in dollars; we measure them in jobs. When we fight a case through trial it is the equivalent of 15 to 20 forgone engineering positions. Positions that could be creating additional innovation and job growth.

Now, what if in this area of litigation only, we changed the economics? What if instead of each side paying their own fees and costs, we changed to a “loser pays” system as it is in much of the rest of the world? This wouldn’t prevent anyone from bringing a patent infringement suit, they would just have to be very confident that they would prevail at trial.

Last year, Congressmen Peter Defazio and Jason Chaffetz introduced a piece of bipartisan legislation called the SHIELD Act (Saving High-tech Innovators from Egregious Legal Disputes Act). Although various business, legal and government constituencies are still negotiating the details, in concept it is as I have described above – a shifting of economic incentives so that in this type of patent litigation, the losing party would be required to pay the prevailing party’s fees and costs. Under this system, the true “garage” inventors would still be able to use the courts to enforce their patents,  but plaintiffs would face more risk when they bring a poorly founded lawsuit.

While not a perfect solution, the SHIELD Act would go a long way to helping companies spend more on creating jobs, rather than fighting litigation. It’s legislation that matters to employers, shareholders and consumers.  For more information and to show your support contact Congressman Defazio 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!

This week’s widespread debate over the pros and cons of telecommuting has created quite a bit of water cooler talk about implications for other companies and what it means here at Adobe. It’s been interesting reading the passionate points of view on both sides of the issue. I agree that working side-by-side yields huge benefits in terms of innovation, relationship building and speed. But I also think it’s important to offer employees and their managers flexibility to determine the working arrangements that work best for them and the business.

I get great energy from the constant interaction and spur of the moment brainstorming that happens in my open workspace. I recognize, though, that others do their best thinking in different ways. Telecommuting can be effective for some types of roles and not for others, and managers have preferences as well. It takes a whole different kind of management to engage a distributed team, including those who work remotely. I’d like to believe that at Adobe we build the capability of our managers so we can attract and retain the best people, no matter where they are located.

I recall a time when there was active debate on whether people could really be productive outside the office. Today, great advances in technology have clearly made that possible. Moreover, telecommuting has enabled us to manage our personal lives and the demands of a global business, and continue to reduce our carbon footprint.

At Adobe, there’s no one size fits all solution.  We hire the best people and trust them to work when, how, and where makes the most sense for them and their teams.  Simply put, we seek to create a company where people can do and be their best. I invite you to learn more about us by visiting our Adobe life blog.

– Donna

Note: This post is cross-posted from Mike Dillon’s personal blog. 

I’m in the 5^th grade.

For weeks, I’ve been working on paper mache model of a volcano. With my father’s assistance I discover that a mixture of baking soda and vinegar produces a simulated volcanic eruption. Sweet! I just know that I am going to dazzle everyone at the Edison Elementary School (Alameda, California) science fair and grab first prize. Thinking about it causes me to tremble with excitement as I meticulously paint my volcano and add finishing touches like bits of moss and dirt to heighten the realistic effect.

On the appointed day, I arrive with eager anticipation and proudly place my volcano in its designated spot and set up the cardboard backdrop explaining the principles of volcanology.  Then I stand by and wait for the crowds to assemble and marvel at my work.

But, they don’t.

Instead they are huddled around Frank Rodgers’ project which has something to do with the effect of zero gravity on plankton and Jennifer Taylor’s working demonstration of water desalination plant. What the heck is “desalination”?

Looking with embarrassment at my volcano, I made the decision on the spot – I was not cut out for science or engineering.

This week, I renewed my deep appreciation for people who followed those career paths when I attended the Adobe Technology Summit. This is an annual internal company event where members of our engineering community meet in person to share information about current and future products and technology.

I love attending these types of events as they force you to pull yourself up from the day-to-day and take a look at the what’s coming over the technology horizon. For example, are you ready for 3D printing? How about using your fingers as simulated paint brushes to create beautiful art on a tablet computer? Or taking a photograph with your mobile device and having it create a color palette for use with any creative project? What if you could push a key on your computer and bring into focus a blurry digital photograph that you snapped at a friend’s birthday party?

At each session I saw mind-blowing advances like these in the way people will express themselves creatively in the digital world to come (or, will be able to express themselves creatively – sooner than we think).

It’s way more fun than paper mache volcanoes.

Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen is in Davos, Switzerland this week, chairing the Media, Entertainment and Information Governors Meeting at the World Economic Forum.  This blog is cross-posted from the Forum Blog.

We are living in a world of “big data”; every day, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data that flows to and from smartphones, PCs, tablets, TVs and innumerable other connected devices. As chair of the Media, Entertainment and Information (MEI) Governors Meeting in Davos this year, I’ve been reflecting on what this may mean for our society in the future.

We know more, we do more, we’re more connected.  We have real-time access to content and information we never could have imagined.   And yet, I’m concerned that lost in this rising tide of data is the essence of what makes us human:  Creativity.  It goes far beyond the traditional world of art and music.  Creativity is the essence of invention and inspiration, and it is what fuels our economy.

Indeed, global research we conducted in 2012 showed that 8 in 10 people feel that unlocking creativity is critical to economic growth and nearly two-thirds of respondents feel creativity is valuable to society.  But only 1 in 4 people – a strikingly low percentage – believe they are living up to their own creative potential.   Respondents revealed that productivity, not creativity, is what employers currently demand.

How did productivity trump creativity?   Macroeconomic conditions have certainly created pressure on companies to produce results.  But has more emphasis on technical skills, operational improvements and hard numbers devalued creativity in the workplace?  Or does it start much earlier, in our schools, where the race to improve science, technology and math (STEM) abilities in students has overtaken time once spent on “softer” subjects?  Are we stifling our children’s imagination?

In a follow-up study we conducted in the United States, nearly three-quarters of respondents said creative thinking should be “taught as a course – like math or science.”  We as business leaders should advocate for this type of thinking both in our schools and our companies as we grow our next generation of employees.

Companies like ours who are in the business of content must also take responsibility for encouraging creativity.  All of us in the MEI community need to encourage creativity among our young people and in our enterprises large and small.   Whether it’s investing in small businesses with big ideas, entrepreneur in residence programs or educational scholarships like the Adobe Youth Voices Creativity Scholarship, we must keep creativity front and center.

We live in an extraordinary time where a treasure trove of content—data, photographs, books, music, video—can be made by and shared with the world.  Today, everyone can be a creator.   Everyone can share their creations and gauge the impact of that creativity whether it’s financial, cultural or societal.  What a gift to us all.

This month we celebrate our 30^th anniversary, a major milestone for technology companies.  We are in very rare company of those who have thrived over such a period by both making the billion-dollar-a-year and billion-dollar-a-quarter milestones.

This success over the past 30 years is as a result of a relentless focus on innovation and customers first set by our founders, John Warnock and Chuck Geschke. Our impact on every form of communication has been profound – every magazine, every newspaper and web site, images that you encounter,  video and application on mobile devices – chances are Adobe has played a major role in its creation.

As we continued to evolve our company, we decided that as all businesses moved mobile and online, we needed to expand our offerings beyond creation to management, measurement and monetization.  Through organic innovation and targeted acquisitions, we’ve aligned our strategy around Digital Media – the creation of content, and Digital Marketing – the business of content.  Our goal is to make every digital experience across every device a high-impact experience.

The single biggest reason this vision is possible is our employees around the world.  We are a truly globally diverse company with over 10,000 employees.  Our core values of genuine, innovative, exceptional and involved are what set Adobe apart.

Happy anniversary, Adobe, and here’s to many more great years to come!