Michelle Gautrin, Social Media Specialist, Adobe APAC – @mgautrin LinkedIn
What an exciting first day at the Adobe Summit 2013 in chilly yet beautiful Salt Lake City. I was thrilled to attend the introductory keynote, led by Brad Rencher, Adobe’s Senior VP of Digital Marketing together with his core Product Team. Through great story-telling techniques, they explored the theme of “the last millisecond”. There were lots of engaging discussion today, but the overarching theme of the day was ‘integration’ – the need to stop working in silos and start working together and integrating all the different digital marketing technologies.
The morning’s keynote session was followed by numerous individual breakout sessions covering the range of Adobe Marketing Cloud solutions as well as innovative digital marketing trends covered by industry experts. In between the many sessions, I managed to sneak a peek at the exhibition hall and was blown away by the set up. Spacious, interactive and eye-catching would be the best words to describe the area. Beside the usual sponsor booths, there was the famous Adobe ampersand which stood over 8ft tall! Everyone was lining up to take photos with it and they even provided fun props! There was also an amazing visualization wall, where you could see a live mashup of activities surrounding summit on social media (tweets, instagram pics, facebook post, videos etc). The wall included trending hot topics that were being discussed on social media via the #AdobeSummit hashtag and even a live polling option. The setup was all so impressive; already can’t wait to see what they have planned for next year!
The latter half of the conference day ended with another general keynote session, this time with luminary speakers such as Adam Bain from Twitter, John Battelle from the Federated Media Publishing and Bill Briggs from Deloitte. Bill started the session by claiming that we are now living in a post-digital era where such things as mobile devices are becoming the main platforms consumers interact with. John then shared intriguing facts with us, such as this year alone every human will create 600 bytes of data! The highlight for the afternoon was the highly anticipated Adam Bain from Twitter who shared the story of Twitter’s growth and success; there are currently over 400 million tweets a day – in fact, this conference generated more than 30,000 tweets through its duration, more than double the number last year, reinforcing how this social networking is still in growth mode.
Day 1 of Adobe Summit ended with legendary Summit Bash where none other than the Grammy award winning band The Black Keys performed live! The concert was amazing and there were so many other fun activities set up for attendees to enjoy. A green screen photo opportunity gave us the chance to pose with amazing backgrounds such as King Kong, Time Magazine cover, the famous Beatles Abbey Road album cover. A remote control car racing track was very popular, and there was a wall were we could all put our own creative spin on with neon glow in-the-dark-paint! The night ended with an upbeat DJ and digital marketers dancing the night away.
See you tomorrow for a second day of exciting informative sessions!
It’s the Chinese year of the snake…and here are my predictions for what will be happening in the world of the Digital Marketer in APAC – with a snake theme.
