Today’s digital marketing innovations give marketers a newfound credibility. However, our recent search showed that marketers may still be missing the mark, as consumers still believe marketing is ineffective and view the marketing profession as one of the least valuable professions to society. We as marketers still have a lot of work to do to help dispel some of these common myths, and today’s panel at Cannes Lions, “You Can’t Trust Marketers,” aimed to do just that.

Moderated by Adobe CMO Ann Lewnes, with Tina Brown, Lisa Donohue, and Steven Althaus, the speakers discussed and debated the changing landscape of digital marketing and how it impacts what marketers can, and should, do better. They discussed a variety of topics including brand authenticity, user generated content, integrating marketing across functions, and proving the ROI of marketing investments.

After the panel, we got a chance to talk to festival attendees for their take: do they trust marketers? The results were interesting and entertaining, check out the highlights reel below.

We’ve arrived here in sunny Cannes for another year at the Cannes Lions Advertising Festival. This year marks a special milestone, as it’s the 60^th anniversary of the festival. We have a lot to look forward to this week, and hope that you’ll join us!

First, we’ll be hosting our seminar tomorrow, “You can’t trust marketers.” Now, more than ever before, advertisers can prove the ROI of their efforts thanks to today’s innovations technology, thereby giving marketers a whole new level of credibility. The conversation will feature renowned panelists, including our CMO Ann Lewnes, CEO of Starcom USA, Lisa Donohue, Director of Brand Management at BMW, Steven F. Althaus, and Editor in Chief at The Newsweek Daily Beast Company, Tina Brown.

Similar to years past, we’ll be sponsoring both the Creative Effectiveness Lions and Young Lions awards. The Creative Effectiveness awards honors creativity that has shown measurable impact on a business through consumer behavior, brand equity, sales, and profit.

Through our sponsorship of the Young Lions, we are proud to support the next generation creative talent, who come together to compete in one of six competitions throughout the week. Cyber, Film, Media, Print, Design, and Young Marketers. Each team has to respond to a client brief and deliver finished creative within 24 hours (48 hours for Film).

Speaking of awards, we’re also partnering with AdWeek this year to host an experience that aims to predict the award winners. The site will go live tomorrow morning, and we’ll send out the link once it’s live. There, you’ll get a chance to vote for your favorite nominees as well, so that we can hear from all of you following the festival from home.

To end our week at Cannes, our VP of EMEA Marketing, Mark Phibbs, will join Razorfish and Converge on a panel to discuss the blurring lines between creativity, technology, and media on Wednesday, June 19^th at 3 p.m.

Follow us @Adobe for the latest from the festival, and for those of you are here, we hope to get a chance to meet you!

Today we unveiled new global research that suggests marketing is still falling short in connecting with consumers online.  Click Here: The State of Online Advertising polled consumers and marketers in seven countries across the United States, Asia-Pacific and Europe.

Among the top findings:

• A significant portion of consumers and marketers feel online advertising is still not effective (consumers 32%; marketers 21%). Marketers in the U.S. and Europe were the most dismissive of online advertising.
• Consumer and marketing respondents globally believe that banner ads do not work (49% consumers; 36% marketers).
• Traditional media such as print and TV received higher scores for credibility and effectiveness among consumers and marketers in all regions.
• One-third of respondents agreed it is valuable when a website makes personalized product and service recommendations. More specifically, respondents said they were comfortable with targeted advertising based on their behaviors (U.S.74%; Asia-Pacific 63%; Europe 71%).
• The marketing profession was consistently ranked as one of the least valuable to society, although it’s viewed most positively by consumers (24%) and marketers (47%) in Asia-Pacific.

You can read the study online, and also check out our animated infographic below, highlighting a handful of top insights from the research.

To paraphrase global co-leader of McKinsey & Company’s Digital Marketing and Sales Practice David C. Edelman, the “era of creativity” in online marketing is only beginning. We just have to be smart about how we use it. We hope this research helps fuel some great discussions among marketers who want to make it better.

It’s hard to believe that another year has gone by and we’ll be back again on the sunny beaches of Cannes for the 60^th Cannes Lions Advertising Festival.

We’re kicking off the week on Monday, June 17^th at 10 a.m. with a panel, “You Can’t Trust Marketers.” Did you know that 80% of CEOs say they can’t trust marketers? It’s time to prove them wrong. Today’s digital marketing solutions are renewing the credibility of marketers, and putting the advertising world in a position to prove its business impact like never before.

Come hear the best minds in the industry, including our own CMO Ann Lewnes, Lisa Donohue, CEO of Starcom USA, Dr. Steven F. Althaus, Director Brand Management, BMW, and Tina Brown, Editor in Chief, The Newsweek Daily Beast Company, discuss marketing’s changing landscape. Will you be joining us?

For those of you who will be following the festival from home, follow us on Twitter: @Adobe. We’ll also be blogging highlights and capturing videos throughout the week here and on our Cannes site so check back for more.

We’ve just released the results of our 2013 Digital Marketing Optimization Survey, after compiling data from over 1,800 respondents around the world. Based on the premise that engaging customers online and optimizing their digital experience across channels can mean millions in revenue, the survey was designed to find out if digital marketers are implementing programs to maximize investment or, in some cases, still just talking about it.

Some of the findings are eye-opening, like data showing a majority of the companies surveyed spend 5% or less of their marketing budget on optimization activities. Five percent or less, even though it’s also clear from the data that companies investing more get more in return. For example, companies allocating more than 25% of marketing budgets to optimization are twice as likely to see high conversion rates.

With data like that, it’s logical to ask, “what’s holding companies back”, and almost half of respondents indicated two primary challenges are budget and resources. While companies are starting to invest and advance in digital marketing optimization, there still is much to be done, as indicated by data showing more than half of respondents are unaware of the impact of site search techniques beyond the baseline functionality of keyword matching. Nearly half do not optimize their recommendation strategies and rely significantly on manual updates, with only 18% using an automated approach.  And, even though Adobe Analytics saw a doubling of traffic from mobile devices last year, 45% of marketers still do not have a mobile-optimized site.

The results of the Survey provide insight into areas where digital marketers need to excel – key areas like testing, optimized targeting, leveraging consumer data, social, site search, and automated recommendations.  It doesn’t matter if a company is just getting started with basic optimization practices or mapping out complex strategies to maximize conversion, it’s never been easier – or more necessary – for business to up their game.

To learn more and understand how you compare with your marketing peers around the world, check out our Kevin Lindsay’s post with further details and download the full survey here.

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.

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!

On Day 2 at SXSW Interactive, we switched gears from the conversations we had about creativity on day 1 to talk all about digital marketing.

We started off the day with a demo and vision of Adobe’s Marketing Cloud, where the audience got to see the cloud in action.

Then, we hosted a lively debate to a packed house on the subject, “Is Marketing B.S.?” Moderated by Mashable‘s Todd Wasserman, our panelists, which included BJ Mendelson, Thor Muller, Jeff Feldman, and Christian Waitzinger, shared their opinions about social marketing and advertising, the intersection of marketing with customer support, social media ROI, and more. To wrap up the day, the audience got a good laugh with comedian Baratunde Thurston, who took the stage right after the panel to provide a comedic recap of the debate. You can catch our favorite moments from the day in the video below.

And of course, thanks to everyone who helped us drive a conversation around #AdobeSXSW throughout the festival. For each mention of our hashtag, we donated $1 to STEM to STEAM, a movement that integrates art and science into education curriculum. We’re still tallying the final numbers and will share with you once we have them!

It was great to meet everyone at SXSW. Thanks for coming out; we hope you had a safe journey back home. See you next year!

SXSW attendees: let’s talk about the intersection of creativity with data at this year’s festival. Starting March 4^th through March 12^th, we’ll hold the conversation on Twitter and Instagram with questions such as “Is data killing creativity?” or “Are you a data geek, creative pro, or both?”

Follow us @Adobe for the questions to answer and reply using #AdobeSXSW. Also, take pictures of images that inspire your creativity at SXSW and post to Instagram using #AdobeSXSW. For every mention of #AdobeSXSW on Twitter and Instagram, we will donate $1 up to $10,000 (!) to STEM to STEAM, an initiative focused on integrating art and science into education curricula to prepare the next generation for success.

Will you join our conversation for a cause? Let us know in the comments.

In addition, we will be hosting two days of SXSW sessions focused on the Adobe Creative Cloud, Edge tools and services, and myths about digital marketing. Get a full summary of what we’ll be up to here and mark your calendars with our Eventbrite invitations:

• Day 1: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/5636246164
• Day 2: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/5647650274

See you there!