We were excited to not only be a Leadership sponsor at Sundance 2012, but to also sponsor the NEXT category of films at the festival. NEXT films stretch limited resources to create impactful art and truly embody the spirit of independent filmmaking.

We got a chance to catch some of the talented directors and producers in the NEXT category during Sundance. Watch the video below to hear their thoughts on what it means to be a NEXT category filmmaker. Congratulations to all of the filmmakers for their nominations, and a special congratulations to the category winner, Mike Birbiglia, for “Sleepwalk with Me.“

We’re excited to be a one of the Bay Area Hubs for Social Media Week San Francisco taking place February 11-17. As a part of this, we’re hosting an all-day series focused solely on social data and analytics. Join us Monday, February 13 at our Adobe San Jose office for a day dedicated to not only teaching attendees the value of social data, but also sharing best practices on how to leverage this data to impact your organization’s social media efforts in a big way. We’ll discuss everything from using data for decision making, down to the tools and technologies needed to get started.

WHAT TO EXPECT

For a look at what’s to come, check out our team’s quick interview with Social Week Media Week along with a few highlights and a sneak peek below.

Session highlights and sneak peeks follow and include:

More information on other sessions from our full-day event will be shared over the course of the next couple of weeks. Attendance is free, but be sure to pre-register (required) today.

HOW TO REGISTER

Be sure to register now for each session of interest* at the Social Media Week San Francisco website.

*NOTE: If you would like to attend the full day events at Adobe, you must register for each individual session separately. No registration needed for the breakfast, lunch and reception.

WHERE TO GO

Adobe Systems Incorporated
345 Park Avenue
San Jose, CA 95110-2704
Get Directions

CONNECT

Be sure to follow us on Twitter (@Adobe) and Facebook, as well as the Adobe Conversations blog, for the latest on Social Media Week 2012 happenings. Join our Social Media Week San Francisco conversation on Twitter by using the hashtags #SMW12 and #Adobe.

We might be back home from Sundance in sunny California, but the highlights from our trip keep coming! On Friday January 19^th, we hosted a panel titled “How Technology is Impacting Storytelling and Film.” The panel featured talented filmmakers and artists such as Vincent Laforet (Revelry, Mobius), Rob Legato (Academy-award winning VFX Supervisor), and Jacob Rosenberg (Waiting for Lightning). Moderated by Sharlto Copley (District 9), the panelists shared how technological advancements have impacted the way they approach filmmaking and shared their biggest lessons for budding filmmakers in the audience.

Watch the highlights below, and the full panel here.

Today at the GreenBiz Forum 12 in San Francisco, Adobe announced another step toward becoming Net Zero with the installation of two-200 kilowatt Bloom Energy fuel cells at our San Francisco offices. The fuel cells are expected to provide 35 percent of Adobe SF’s on-site power needs, the equivalent of powering 320 homes.  Net Zero buildings can be independent from the energy grid supply and have zero carbon emissions annually.

Fuel cells offer a high level of efficiency by reducing power lost in traditional energy transmission. Today’s news marks Adobe’s third major renewable energy installation.  At our San Jose headquarters, we installed 12-100 kilowatt Bloom boxes in the summer of 2010, which provide 30 percent of Adobe SJ’s total power.  In December 2009, we installed 20 Windspires, which harness wind power to generate clean electric energy on-site.

With the completion of this project, Adobe remains on the forefront of incorporating impactful, leading-edge clean technologies to our operations in an effort to reduce our environmental footprint. Over the next 10 years, Adobe expects to reduce its carbon footprint by approximately 121.5 million pounds, the equivalent of taking 1,810 compact cars off the road annually.

On Day 3 here at Sundance we focused on gathering feedback from attendees on Main Street. Folks shared with us the best Sundance moments so far, their favorite Adobe products (!), and what the future of digital looks like to them. Saturday included quite the snowstorm, so many thanks to our video crew and all the people who stopped by to speak with us! Check out the video below (I have to say my favorite interviewee was the guy in the kilt who was braving the cold!).

In addition, we have a few special congratulations to shout:

• Julia Pott, an Adobe Design Achievement Award (ADAA) 2011 Animation Finalist, was accepted into the 2012 Sundance Film Festival Short Film Program for her work, “Belly.” Julia has created an exceptional coming-of-age animated film. Julia, the Adobe teams wish you the very best at your screening during the festival!
• Also congratulations to Columbia University and UCLA on the acceptance of their alumni, student and faculty films to Sundance. Columbia has an amazing 14 films from their alumni, students and faculty screening at Sundance. Three of the films are part of the Adobe sponsored NEXT Category.

Next up for Adobe at Sundance: a case study on Wednesday with Vincent Laforet on modern storytelling. Stay tuned here as we’ll provide a recap.

Friday was a long (…but I won’t say ‘hard’) day in Park City. It was our first full day to show you the variety of reasons Adobe is at Sundance, one of which is to host two panels with filmmakers about technology and storytelling. We’ve got some snippets of our first panel below – look for the full panel on Adobe TV in the near future. Adobe is also a sponsor of the NEXT category of filmmakers, and we have a clip of one of our red carpet interviews below (more NEXT filmmaker interviews coming up in its own video, as well). Of course, we caught a few celebs too … Can you find them?

Finally the Adobe teams are arriving in Utah for this year’s Sundance Film Festival! Jumping around on the free shuttles (Wow — all free? Yes, indeed. Thanks Park City), finding our way from the Egyptian Theater on Main Street (iconic image below the video), to the Sundance Film Fest HQ, we’ve already met loads of people uber-excited for this year. We met the kind folks from Indiewire who invited us to a party (though other engagements, sadly, kept us from attending). We also met two guys from Canada who, seeing our Adobe logos, lauded After Effects and Production Premium – that was a nice little pick me up for the team. We of course got some footage of that.

Then we made our way over to Eccles Theatre for the Day 1 Screening of The Queen of Versailles where the crowd was buzzing with excitement. Robert Redford kicked off the screening,  noting his vision for Sundance and support for independent filmmakers. The documentary itself was fascinating, capturing David Siegel and Jacqueline Siegel’s story of riches to “rags.”

We ended our night at the Day 1 Party, bumping to some good music and meeting some fun fellow attendees.

We put together this teaser video of what you can expect to see over the next few days – check back tomorrow. It’s Friday morning, snowing a ton, and word on the street is that today is the real kick-off. Come back daily for the next episode, yes?

We’re uploading all of our photos over at Facebook, so be sure to check back in regularly. Hopefully we’ll have some cool celeb sightings to share!

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

Check out John Nack’s blog where there is a video of Adobe VP Paul Gubbay showing off early looks at some technology that will help designers and developers create better HTML5 animations:

Included are demos of:
- Animating in the new Adobe Edge app (on Adobe Labs)
- Turning that output into an app using PhoneGap
- Using Flash Professional to export animation as HTML
- Running CSS Shaders in WebKit
- Enabling “liquid layout” from InDesign

Go to John’s blog now and watch.

Also, check out a recording of last week’s Financial Analyst meeting to see where these demos were intially shown and to understand how they fit into Adobe strategy moving forward.