Last night the great and the good of New York’s media, publishing and creative industries gathered, with Adobe, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.  The occasion, a reception to celebrate Adobe’s sponsorship of a unique exhibition – Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop.

Adobe’s chief marketing officer, Ann Lewnes, kicked things off before CEO Shantanu Narayen welcomed everyone and introduced Thomas Knoll, co-inventor of Photoshop and Adobe’s newest Digital Imaging Fellow.

Shantanu and Photoshop co-inventor Thomas Knoll

The exhibition is a reminder that the urge to manipulate photos – for good and for bad, for art and for propaganda – has been with us since the medium itself was invented. The exhibition also reminds us of the profound impact that Adobe Photoshop has made on our visual culture.  Creative people all over the world have pushed publishing, art, and visual media forward using techniques that were either too complex or simply not possible before Photoshop.  Because of this, controversy is never far away from Photoshop.

One of our core values at Adobe is to conduct ourselves in a responsible, socially conscious manner. As we continue to evolve the interaction of art and science within Photoshop, we look forward to the incredible visual content our customers will continue deliver and the positive influences it may have in our shared human experience.

“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

At Adobe, art and creativity are ingrained in the company’s DNA, so I’m excited to share the re-launching of San Jose Semaphore, a major public artwork by noted digital artist Ben Rubin, on display at Adobe’s San Jose headquarters. On Thursday, October 18 at twilight, four 10-foot high disks on top of the 17^th floor of Adobe’s Almaden Tower will begin transmitting a new coded message.

San Jose Semaphore was first introduced in 2006 and based on the semaphore telegraph system developed in the 18^th century. Commissioned by Adobe and the City of San Jose, it features LED-lit disks, which rotate to display a series of simple geometric symbols that spell out a complex coded message. Rubin created the artwork’s coded message using algorithms similar to those used in World War II-era cryptography. San Jose Semaphore’s initial coded message was deciphered later that year by two San Jose area research scientists, who revealed the encrypted message to be the complete text to Thomas Pynchon’s 1966 novella, The Crying of Lot 49.

We’re passionate about helping to make Silicon Valley a world class creative community, which is why we have renewed the artwork, including a restoration of the work’s LED light system. San Jose Semaphore is an example of how businesses and public arts organizations can work together to enhance the urban experience, injecting creativity and new energy into areas where people work and live.  Adobe’s commitment to the arts can be seen through art on display in and around our offices, as well as throughout our local communities. In 2010, Adobe sponsored eCLOUD, the sparkling chandelier-like art installation in between gates 22 and 23 in the North Concourse concession area of San Jose International airport.

For San Jose Semaphore, artist Ben Rubin has developed a new code and challenged the public to a code-breaking competition, sponsored by Adobe. Check out the San Jose Semaphore website to learn more about the project and challenge. Get your creative thinking caps on and happy solving.

Ann and Steve discussing the CORE solution

While here at Cannes Lions, Ann Lewnes, our SVP of Global Marketing met up with Steve Plimsoll, CTO of Mindshare, to talk through their launch of CORE. CORE is a data-driven marketing intelligence platform that empowers both analysts and non-technical users to make informed marketing spend, audience targeting and creative optimisation decisions across all touch points in real-time.  It brings together data sets such as CRM, sales and supply chain data, with media channel spend, social, audience profiles and real-time trading information and reveals consumer actions and insight at a granular level, taking away the guesswork, latency and siloed nature of marketing-spend decision making.

The digital marketing team, here at Adobe, has been working closely with Steve on CORE, with Adobe Insight, part of the Digital Marketing Suite, powering the user interface for data visualisation, modeling, data mining and reporting.

In an age where the amount of data available to marketers has never been greater, the value of all this data lies in the ability to deliver actionable insight in real-time.  It was great to see CORE in action!

We just wrapped up day 2 at Cannes and so far, so great! Yesterday, the festival kicked off with a cocktail sponsored by Adobe, and we got a chance to interview attendees about their thoughts on creativity, Then and Now, and whether or not today’s increasing focus on data is killing or cultivating creativity. Watch highlights from our favorite moments below.

This morning, we hosted a panel to a full house, titled “Is Data ‘Killing or Cultivating Creativity?” The panel was moderated by our SVP of Global Marketing, Ann Lewnes. She was joined by fellow panelists Jon Vein, Linus Karlsson, and Jim Stengel who shared their thoughts on how we need to strike a healthy balance between focus on data and our own gut and intuition.  During the panel, scriberia artists illustrated the conversation. Check out the cool scribe illustration below and stay tuned for panel highlights and a full recap, which we’ll post tomorrow.

Scribe illustration of panel created by scriberia artists

And don’t forget, each day we’re asking you a different question about creativity, Then and Now. Today’s question is, “What’s your competitive edge? Data or Creativity?” Tweet your answer using #ThenAndNow and we’ll feature it on our digital billboards here at the festival. You can also vote in our daily polls on Facebook. Believe it or not, the response to yesterday’s question, “How do you prefer to communicate, through the phone (Then) or Twitter (Now), was tied! 50% of people chose to communicate via phone while 50% chose Twitter.

If you’re at the festival, be sure to stop by the Adobe booth and get your picture taken with the Adobe ampersand as a souvenir of your visit.

Example of a photo souvenir at the Adobe booth

Signing off for now – more tomorrow! In the meantime, enjoy the highlights below.

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.

If you were anywhere close to downtown San Jose on Saturday night, you’ll have to excuse us if we had the music turned up a little too loud.  But there was good reason to celebrate as we wrapped up a fantastic week with the Adobe Youth Voices Live! party at the California Theater.

The mission of Adobe Youth Voices is to provide youth in underserved communities the opportunity to create media that express their emotions and concerns about issues that are affecting them and our world.  To date, The Adobe Youth Voices program has impacted 150,000 youth and 4,000 educators in more than 40 countries.  The celebration on Saturday was the grand finale of our second international Adobe Youth Voices Summit, a four-day conference which brought together more than 90 AYV students and educators from 16 countries around the world.  Their stories are amazing and so are they.

The week’s highlights included a moving keynote from journalist Laura Ling, who you might recall was held captive in North Korea for nearly five months while on an assignment covering refugee movement between the China/North Korea border.  On Saturday, the Adobe Foundation joined forces with the Black Eyed Peas Peapod Foundation to open the newest Peapod Adobe Youth Voices Academy at Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana (MACLA) in San Jose.  MACLA joins the growing network of academies in New York, Los Angeles, Oakland and Redwood City, California.

But Saturday night was all about celebration with performances by AYV students and a special appearance from Fergie, apl.de.ap, and Taboo of the Grammy Award-winning Black Eyed Peas.  Photos from the AYV Summit can be seen here.

Fergie of the Black Eyed Peas, center, dances with members of the Peapod Adobe Youth Voices Academy during the Adobe Youth Voices Live! celebration

MAX 2010 got off to an inspiring start last night in Los Angeles. The skill, imagination and raw talent of dozens of art and design students from around the world were on display as we recognized the finalists and winners of the 10th annual Adobe Design Achievement Awards (ADAA).

For a decade, the ADAAs have honored the most talented and promising student graphic designers, photographers, illustrators, animators, digital filmmakers, developers and computer artists from the world’s top higher-education institutions. Since the ADAAs began in 2001, close to 20,000 students across 52 countries have participated in this competition.

This year’s finalists were, in a word, phenomenal. I was completely blown away by the sophistication and power of all the finalists’ entries and the graciousness of the winners as they accepted their awards. Since words can’t quite do it justice, I’d encourage you to check out the ADAA Gallery, a digital compilation exhibiting the work of all the past winners and finalists from the last decade.

If you missed the event, we invite you to look through the 2010 Program Guide that highlights our partner, Icograda; our prestigious judges and Master of Ceremonies; and our student finalists. For a full list of the winners and a recap of the evening click here. There’s also a video that reflects on the importance of events like ADAA.

We feel fortunate that the ADAA competition attracts the best student designers in the world, and that we have been able to shine a light on these future creative leaders.

Adobe’s corporate social responsibility programs – which include everything from our conservation efforts to how we contribute to the communities where we do business – are something we take quite a bit of pride in.

That’s why this week we were thrilled to learn that Adobe moved up to number seven on Newsweek’s 2010 Green Rankings – an annual list of the top 500 most environmentally conscious U.S. companies.  Out of a possible score of 100, Adobe’s Green Rankings green score came in at an impressive 94.15. Other well known companies in the top 10 include Dell, HP, Intel, Johnson & Johnson and Nike.

Newsweek teamed up with three leading environmental research organizations to compile the most comprehensive rankings possible. To view the Newsweek Green Rankings in their entirety, click here: Green Rankings: U.S. Companies.

Environmental responsibility is a priority for Adobe and is part of the fabric of our corporate culture. We are proud of our multiple US Green Building Council LEED® certifications and of our continued efforts to lead in the adoption of green technologies for our building operations [See recent post: Fired Up About Fuel Cells].

Thanks are in order for Adobe employees worldwide who have helped us achieve this recognition through their ideas, ongoing participation in sustainability programs and commitment to going green!

Fuel Cells at San Jose Headquarters