Adobe Summit EMEA, The Digital Marketing Conference, opened in London today at 9:00 a.m. local time with a keynote address by Brad Rencher, senior vice president and general manager of the Adobe Digital Marketing business.  Over the course of the two day event, Summit participants have the opportunity to learn from the industry experts and network with savvy professionals who continue to push the boundaries of digital marketing and advertising, ultimately making their businesses more successful.  Keynote speakers from high-profile brands like UniCredit Group, Nike Global, AKQA, Nissan Europe, Deloitte digital, BBC, SAP and SapientNitro DACH highlight the agenda, and record-setting Austrian skydiver and BASE jumper, Felix Baumgartner, will open the general session on Thursday.

We released several news announcements at Summit today including:

1. News about a powerful new capability in Adobe Social that predicts social content performance on Facebook to maximize engagement and ROI.
2. Details of an expanded global partnership that integrates Adobe Marketing Cloud with SapientNitro’s EngagedNow platform.
3. An efficient means to conquer the webinar process from within Adobe Experience Manager.
4. Results of the Adobe Digital Index State of Mobile Benchmark Report 2013, including detail on 1) how Samsung smartphones are gaining popularity with Europeans and 2) how iOS has re-emerged as a leader in US smartphone browsing and dominates on tablets.

Adobe Marketing Cloud has fast become the solution that helps marketers get from data to insights to action, faster and smarter than ever. Here are some expanded highlights:

Adobe Social Unveils Predictive Publishing for Facebook

This powerful new predictive publishing capability for Adobe Social, which predicts social engagement on individual pieces of content and automatically suggests ideal timing to improve how that content will perform, will offer Facebook integration with the initial version.  Additional social platforms will be added later in the year.

Adobe and SapientNitro Expand Global Partnership

Adobe and SapientNitro’s expanded global partnership includes integration of the Sapient EngagedNow^SM platform with Adobe Marketing Cloud.  This integrated offering provides a solution for creating, delivering and optimizing consumer experiences across Web, social, mobile, and digital displays. NASCAR, E.ON and VISIT FLORIDA are among the organizations already seeing significant results using EngagedNow with Adobe Marketing Cloud.

Additional benefits for customers include:

• Complete hosted and managed services for Adobe Marketing Cloud solutions from SapientNitro with EngagedNow
• Ready-to-use integrations built specifically for key verticals, including travel, sports and entertainment, retail, and financial services, that help make development and deployment more efficient
• Built-in operational efficiencies from the integration of EngagedNow and Adobe Marketing Cloud that streamline creative, delivery, and measurement workflows for better performance and cost savings

Conquering the Webinar Process – from within Adobe Experience Manager

Adobe Experience Manager webinars, powered by Adobe Connect, helps marketers 1) easily create targeted webinar landing pages that drive registration; 2) deliver immersive online events that engage audiences, build brand and drive demand; and 3) deliver post-event analytics via capabilities from Adobe Analytics.

Adobe Digital Index State of Mobile Benchmark Report

The report analyzes 150 billion visits to 1,500+ websites to provide an overview of how consumers are using mobile devices worldwide.  In addition to trends in social media, video content consumption and ecommerce from the past 12 months, the study features key findings on which mobile operating systems and device manufacturers are helping drive the most web traffic globally.

Samsung smartphones gain popularity with Europeans

In the 19 European countries analyzed, nearly 30% of all smartphone browsing now occurs via a Samsung device – up 9% from last year.

iOS has re-emerged as leader in US smartphone browsing and is dominant amongst tablets

The iPhone has been gaining ground since being offered on the Verizon network (February 2011), and again became the primary driver of smartphone browsing in the US during Q4 2012, after trailing Android phones for two years. In addition, iPads accounted for nearly early 80% of all tablet browsing in the US in February 2013, up 10 percent from last year.

Ok yes maybe I work at Adobe and ok yes maybe I’m a tad biased, but I’ve been going to Adobe Summits for I think four years now and dare I say this one is the best? Yes, the food at the opening night party was good. Yes, from an event team’s standpoint things are running smoothly, but from the overall “relevance” standpoint, this year’s Summit has started off super strong.

The social conversations from the event are unparalleled, growing more than 50% when compared to the same timeframe last year. Over 8500 conversations in just the first day put #AdobeSummit at the top of trending Twitter hashtags.

Brad Rencher kicked it all off with the opening keynote session (watch now), which included a thorough demo of Adobe Marketing Cloud by David Nueschler and folks from all five of the Marketing Cloud’s solutions teams. Need a rundown of what’s coming in Marketing Cloud? Check out this week’s news.

The day’s second keynote had its moments too. After Bill Briggs of Deloitte Consulting implored everyone to go beyond “mobile first” and think of “mobile only,” John Battelle interviewed Adam Bain of Twitter about Twitter growth, and paid social media vs organic social media. Good stuff. And the conversation continued to prove to this social marketer (me) that Twitter might be a brand’s best bet for proving ROI in social — paid and organic. Happy to discuss further in the comments.

Need some visuals of what the first full day of Summit was all about? Watch the videos below. Short and to the point, with quick looks at what Summitees are experiencing here in Salt Lake City, and be sure to follow all tomorrow’s action: @AdobeSummit and #AdobeSummit.

This week at Adobe Summit – The Digital Marketing Conference, more than 4,500 digital marketers and senior leaders representing the world’s top brands are coming together in Salt Lake City to learn the latest about marketing trends, network and share best practices with each other.

At the conference, we are making a series of news announcements to address growing industry needs that include:  1) helping marketers iterate and act more quickly to better meet consumers’ expectations; 2) staying on top of the mobile explosion and delivering better mobile experiences; 3) simplifying the complex task of delivering the right experience or content to the right person at the right time.

Keynote presenters this year include Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen and SVP and GM of Adobe’s Digital Marketing Business, Brad Rencher, along with record-setting stratospheric daredevil Felix Baumgartner; Adam Bain, president of global revenue at Twitter; and Sal Kahn, founder of Khan Academy.

You can watch the keynote live today, Wednesday, March 6 from 9am-11am MST.

Our news today highlights major new Adobe Marketing Cloud capabilities, including:

New Touch Interface and Mobile Marketing Capabilities 

Adobe today unveiled an innovative new UI for Adobe® Marketing Cloud that surfaces data and insights to marketers and business leaders so they can easily gauge the impact of their marketing dollars.  Through this visually rich, touch based interface, Adobe Marketing Cloud, which marketers use to understand how campaigns are performing, now links with Adobe Creative Cloud™, which agency creatives use to build and deliver those campaigns.  In addition, every solution within Adobe Marketing Cloud has been upgraded with new mobile marketing capabilities, including new mobile capabilities for analytics, advertising, social app development, targeting content on smartphones and tablets, and mobile content management and delivery.

Adobe Social Goes Mobile 

Adobe today upgraded Adobe Social®, part of Adobe Marketing Cloud, with a completely redesigned user interface focused on interpreting and presenting social data in a more digestible format that helps social marketers prove business results.  Adobe also debuted Adobe Social for mobile phones and tablets.  Social marketers now have a marketing tool that’s as mobile as they are.

Delivering Personalized Experiences across Mobile and Social 

The static website is long gone.  Personalizing and optimizing your customer’s experience is essential.  Adobe today announced a major update to Adobe Experience Manager, part of Adobe Marketing Cloud, which introduces new responsive design, social communities and video capabilities that deliver a fully personalized experience to customers. In addition, Adobe today introduced a new Digital Asset Management offering within Adobe Experience Manager.  Adobe has re-imagined digital asset management with both marketers and creatives in mind, giving organizations unprecedented capabilities to deliver consistent, high-quality experiences anywhere.

New Digital Advertising Solution for Media Agencies and Marketers 

Adobe today unveiled a standard version of Adobe Media Optimizer, part of Adobe Marketing Cloud. Media Optimizer is Adobe’s digital advertising platform for campaigns across search, display and social media. The new edition, Media Optimizer Standard, delivers a rules-based bidding solution that improves the performance of search engine marketing campaigns through seamless integration with Adobe Analytics. Media Optimizer Standard is designed for media buying agencies, search engine marketing (SEM) agencies and direct advertisers seeking more control and transparency over their campaigns at an economical price point.

Taken together, these groundbreaking new solutions and capabilities are all designed to help our customers deliver the right online experience to the right person . They also offer the best way to tie social media activities to business results. And finally, they enable customers to achieve the greatest return on investment from online advertising.

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

Thanks to the success of Lance Armstrong and the US Postal Service team cycling has captured new audiences and fans in America. With that interest, there is a new groundswell around today’s elite international riders from Hincapie and Vande Valde to Utah’s own Leipheimer and Zabriskie. Utah’s strong cycling heritage has never been more apparent or more celebrated.  Today’s lineup of cycling celebrities offers new favorites to cheer on and admire as the battle for race and stage titles delivers compelling entertainment.

The Tour of Utah – becoming well known as America’s toughest stage race for professional cyclists – is no exception.  It is now recognized by Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) as one of the top three professional stage races in North America. Some of the biggest names in worldwide cycling are here in Utah to claim victory over the 30,000 feet of climbs as part of the 409-mile race. With the kind of talented riders and teams we have this year, the Tour of Utah is sure to deliver an adrenaline packed six days for participants and spectators alike.

As a proud sponsor of Stage 2 of the Tour of Utah, Adobe is powering the webcast enabling cycling enthusiasts from around the globe to participate in this prestigious race. Adobe SiteCatalyst digital analytics will be fully integrated into the Tour Tracker® webcast platform for real-time audience monitoring and insight sharing from commentary to social media from your mobile device or via the internet.  Tour Tracker® also provides live coverage from broadcast video, instant GPS location, speed, slope and elevation data, and more for cycling fans tuning in to the race from anywhere.

Each day, the event is free for spectators – another feature that makes professional cycling a sport to get involved in. Keep tabs on the race via Twitter with hashtags #Adobe and #TOU or follow me on Twitter @bradrencher to see the kind of cool stats and real-time action Adobe is providing.

Being able to see some of the great riders that just raced in the Tour de France is an absolute treat here on our home turf. We welcome everyone involved to Utah and wish all riders the best of luck!

-Brad

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

It’s hard to believe that we’re halfway through the week here at the 58th Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. In addition to beautiful sunshine and beaches, the Cannes Lions Festival hosts leading thinkers and innovators to discuss the future of marketing, advertising and digital – we’ve been busy participating in enlightening conversations and soaking it all in.

On Monday, our CTO Kevin Lynch hosted a panel titled “Advertising meets Digital Publishing: the Hot Issue.” Kevin was joined by esteemed panelists – Hamish Robertson from Vanity Fair (@touristique); John Battelle from Federated Media (@johnbattelle); Steve Simpson from Ogilvy & Mather (@ogilvyandmather), and Christian Haas, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners (@chaas). The panel touched on a variety of topics, including the #futureofdigital advertising, the evolving role of the Editor as the web continues to host increasing amounts of content, and the multiscreen revolution. Watch the highlights below.

On Tuesday, we were proud to announce the winner of the MOFILM video competition. The assignment for the Adobe competition was to create work that would give audiences a different view of Adobe – as a company that is transforming business and the world at large through the power of digital experiences. The list of global finalists was vetted by the MOFILM staff. We hear it was a tough decision, but in the end, the winner was Chris Bailey from the U.S. Check out his submission on the website under the Adobe category. Congrats Chris! And a special thanks to all the participants – we’re proud to sponsor you as the future creatives of the world!

Speaking of budding creatives, I’ve had the pleasure of meeting with several competitors in the Young Lions competition, who tell us how CS5.5 enables them to do their work every day. I’ll be posting highlights of these inspiring conversations here later this week, so stay tuned.

Woo, so much exciting stuff and we still have the second half of the week to go! Our SVP and GM of the Omniture business, Brad Rencher, just arrived and we’re looking forward to joining him in conversations about creative effectiveness.

Stay tuned to @Adobe and our Facebook Page for updates, including on the unconference we’re hosting today with Society of Digital Agencies (SoDA). We’re tweeting with hashtags #CannesLions and #FutureofDigital.

In my daily conversations with our Adobe team members, partners, and customers, the incredible pace of digital innovation is a big topic of discussion. From smart phones to tablet devices, high-speed mobile networks faster than your DSL connection, and social changing the way we connect – we see that running a business today has more challenges and more opportunities than ever before. Digital commerce is bringing the world via their tablets, smart phones and social networking sites to your storefront – and the question I have for you is: Are you ready?

I see many businesses struggle to understand how these new digital innovations translate into ways to better connect with a global audience of potential customers. For smaller businesses, eBay’s new X.Commerce platform – a cloud-based toolkit designed to power business innovation – will come as great news. The platform aims to level the playing field of the digital wave and put helpful technologies into the hands of people who want to innovate no matter the size of their business. We are excited to be part of it.

One of the powerful technologies from Adobe that eBay offers in the X.Commerce platform is analytics – the ability to measure data about how customers interact with your business and how your current online approaches and practices are working. Adobe SiteCatalyst has long been considered the gold standard in web analytics. As one of our earliest customers eBay has seen firsthand what measuring data can do for a business.

Analytics unlocks the power of your customer data. If you want to better know your customer, the details are within the data. Need a realistic snapshot of your business? That’s in the data, too. How is your site being used and what changes could you make to increase sales? Which of your products are your customers Tweeting and Facebooking about and how it is impacting your business? Getting answers to these questions means you can invent faster and better meet the needs of your customers, and that leads to more revenue. This is really cool stuff – and it means that you can drive your business success in new and meaningful ways.

We are excited to power the web analytics of X.Commerce and look forward to empowering eBay retailers with increased functionality in the future using additional offerings from the Adobe Online Marketing Suite. When you are taking action on your data – that is where the magic really happens.

It’s your data for the taking and if you aren’t using it, watch out because I can guarantee your competitors are gleaning valuable business insights from theirs.

I’d love to hear your experiences with going digital and how analytics has helped your business. Share your story by emailing me at customersuccess@adobe.com.

-Brad

Yesterday we kicked off our biggest Adobe Omniture Summit ever here at the Grand America Hotel in Salt Lake City. We had 2,600 online marketers in the room – the largest gathering of digital experts in the world. Our CEO Shantanu Narayen kicked it off with some great industry perspectives on where content creation, digital publishing and marketing are headed. His comment that “marketing is the new finance” got a lot of positive reaction.

Entrance to Day 1 General Session

Sharing the stage with Vivek Shah, CEO of Ziff-Davis, and Ellen Levy, vice president of strategic initiatives at LinkedIn, we talked about the importance of audience insights and social ROI. Vivek said that they’re seeing social media referrals rivaling search – a pretty amazing thought. Ellen made a great point that there is a broad span of different experiences that get linked under “social,” and marketers need to differentiate – what works on YouTube doesn’t necessarily work on LinkedIn. Both delivered insightful and thought-provoking ideas.

In my remarks, my big message was that we’re living in a world of “extreme data,” and it’s more critical than ever for us as an industry to measure what matters. That means integrating social media into all aspects of your marketing analysis, not just thinking of it as a separate silo, and finding new ways to do segmentation and connect the dots among devices, data and audience channels. Our news created quite a bit of buzz, as did our newest acquisitions – Day Software and Demdex. And, we announced our newest version of SiteCatalyst built on our revolutionary new architecture – full of new optimization enhancements asked for by our customers.

On stage at Day 1 General Session

In the afternoon, Michael Eisner offered his thoughts about what he calls the Gutenberg-to-Zuckerberg timeline – a look at the importance of getting content right over years of invention regardless of the delivery mechanism. He also touched on how Disney has applied digital technologies to its parks, films, online presence, and creative “Imagineering” – making the consumer experience even better. Then we wrapped a busy day at a signature party with headliner Lenny Kravitz at the Salt Palace. Backstage with Mr. Kravitz, we talked about his new album coming out soon, and then enjoyed his fantastic performance for our customers and employees.

Today we’re wrapping up with marketing guru John Gerzema and an open dialogue about what more we can do for online marketing in the “Ask Brett” session with our chief technologist Brett Error. Then we’ll all close out with skiing tomorrow at The Canyons – the snow should be perfect!

I’m more convinced than ever that the Adobe/Omniture combination is exactly what our industry needed, and it’s exciting to see our innovations as a combined company shaping the future. Thanks to all our rockstar customers who made it to Utah this year.

Hope to see you at the Adobe Digital Marketing Summit, formerly known as Omniture Summit, at the Salt Palace Convention Center
March 20-23 2012 in Salt Lake City!

-Brad