Adobe Scene7 Blog – ShopTalk

Social shopping is where it’s at these days – more consumers are seeking second opinions from their social network before a purchase. But what about giving consumers a way to create and customize items together before they buy? Enter Customizo, an innovator in the custom, logoed apparel industry. Customizo offers a customer-centric online Design Studio so that anyone from individuals and affinity groups, to sports teams and large businesses, can use their logos and proprietary designs to design their own apparel and accessories. Through the Design Studio, users share creations among their group and collaboratively edit, review, vote on, and finalize a design.

Customizo uses Adobe Scene7 dynamic media solutions and Adobe Creative Suite Design Premium software to create this unique design platform and has recently seen online user engagement metrics soar. Within a month of its new website going live the company had dramatically decreased bounce rates by 95% and increased conversion rates by 400%.

“Using Scene7 to improve the way customers design, preview, and complete their orders, we saw more online conversions in just two weeks than in the 18 months on our old website with our previous, more manual, solution and processes,” explains Ryan Saunders, the President of Customizo. “Adobe has helped our business become more nimble.”

Continue reading about Customizo’s success here: www.omniture.com/go/41984

Posted by Scene7 at 10:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

You may have recently heard the news that Adobe plans to increase its efforts on HTML5, and to focus Flash on mobile applications (packaged with AIR) and PC browsing with an emphasis on use cases not yet addressed by HTML5, including premium video and console-quality gaming; and thus, will no longer develop Flash Player for mobile web browsers. Now, you may be wondering how this will affect Adobe Scene7.

Simply, the Adobe Scene7 dynamic media delivery solutions are aligned with this strategy. The current and future roadmap investments focus on standardizing on HTML5 to deliver engaging visual experiences on mobile screens.  With the recent launch of Adobe Scene7 5.5, we added a new HTML5 SDK for developing custom viewers for zoom and spin.  We plan to continue building on this foundation to extend to other viewer types and add more visually-rich capabilities to our HTML5-based viewers.  More details about the Scene7 HTML5 SDK are available in latest Scene7 product release notice.

For more information about the Adobe Flash Player news, check out the blog post by Danny Winokur, Vice President and General Manager of Interactive Development at Adobe.

Posted by krista at 5:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Henry Ford advocated his “one size fits all” strategy on Model T production when he said, “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black.”*

Eighty-nine years later, companies are embracing the idea that each customer is unique and deserves relevant, personalized experiences and product options. What’s driving this? We are living in what Forrester Research calls the Age of the Customer, where consumers are empowered with technology to obsess over their desires, and the successful companies obsess over those too. In this recent webinar, Forrester pairs up with Adobe customer - leading U.K. automobile manufacturer - Renault to discuss embracing customer obsession with customization and vivid digital experiences.  Renault even shares successful tactics of its own.

Product customization can be a powerful differentiator and represents an opportunity to deliver greater value, build loyalty and develop one-to-one customer relationships.

“Roll over, Henry Ford. Today, you can have any color you want, as long as it’s the one you want.” — James Gilmore and B. Joseph Pine II, 2000

*Source: Henry Ford and Samuel Crowther, My Life and Work, Garden City Publishing, 1922

Posted by krista at 1:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

With the explosion of the mobile and tablet market, mobility is top of mind. Customers want to stay connected with their favorite brands and companies wherever they are and have come to expect a consistent experience at their fingertips, regardless of the device they are using. For businesses, managing and delivering optimized content to meet their customers’ expectations across multiple devices was difficult, manual and time consuming…until now.

The latest release of Adobe Scene7 automates the delivery of rich media with the consumer’s device in mind. The new Universal Viewer dramatically simplifies the deployment of optimized viewing for each screen  with drag-and-drop configuration. Delivering interactive experiences across desktops, smartphones, and tablets is now as easy as including a single universal Scene7 URL tied to a particular media asset. The URL has built-in device intelligence to automatically serve image or video content in the right viewer and the right format. Since mobile touch gestures as well as mouse-driven interactivity are supported with one single URL, the implementation of each URL previously required to optimize for each device is eliminated.

After all, different screens deserve different experiences.

This release also offers increased support for video content creation and instantaneous playback as well as HTML5. Click here for complete details of the latest Adobe Scene7 release.

Universal Viewer

Posted by Scene7 at 10:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

With online technology rapidly evolving and consumers’ appetites increasing for more relevant and engaging experiences, online marketers and merchandisers are continually challenged to keep up with the latest tools and technologies – but how do you know what the most effective tactics are?

Are you curious about where your peers are investing their digital marketing dollars to grow their businesses?

The answers are here! In our 5th annual quantitative, global survey: the Adobe Scene7 2011 Survey: Digital Marketing in the Next Decade. The survey reveals what businesses worldwide have identified as the most deployed, most popular and most effective online tactics across seven categories:

• Rich media/merchandising features
• Social media-based features
• Mobile features
• Mobile commerce visualization features
• Personalization features
• Digital advertising executions
• Analytics

This year’s survey was expanded and for the first time measured deployment, planned deployment and effectiveness of analytics tools, mobile commerce visualization features and digital advertising. For 2011, social media executions along with mobile initiatives and rich media tactics are among the top planned with more than 25 percent of respondents planning to deploy features in these categories.

Digital marketers validated an ever-growing focus to further tap social media with an emphasis on social media analytics, which respondents cited as the top planned tactic (21 percent) and the third most deployed execution in the analytics category. Also, one out of three of the top planned initiatives and deployed executions are social-media based:

• Building branded social community pages – planned: 25 percent; deployed: 40 percent
• Advertising on social networking sites – planned: 25 percent; deployed: 22 percent

After years of hype and exploration, mobile is becoming a very viable commerce channel as mobile commerce enablement showed the highest year-over-year change in effectiveness (+124 percent) and was one of the top five tactics with the highest year-over-year increase in deployment (+13 percent).  And, for businesses with more than $100 million in annual revenue, four out of the six most effective features were in the mobile category:

• Mobile advertising, promotions and bar-coded coupons to drive in-store or Web purchases (42 percent)
• Mobile product comparisons (41 percent)
• Address book integration for mobile (40 percent)
• Check inventory status on mobile devices, in-store or Web (40 percent)

In addition to social media and mobile initiatives, interactive catalogs stand out as a key tactic in 2011. They were cited as the overall top planned tactic across all categories (27 percent) as well as the top planned for mobile commerce visualization (19 percent), and were ranked as the fourth most effective tactic overall.

How do these strategies line up with your 2011 initiatives?

Posted by Scene7 at 12:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

When Montgomery Ward sent out its first catalog in 1872, I am sure no one at the time imagined that one day people would be flipping pages of multiple catalogs from one single portable device. But here we are nearly a century-and-a-half later and that is exactly what the latest release of Adobe Scene7 is making possible.

Scene7 eCatalogs are now optimized for rich viewing experiences across multiple screens, allowing companies to quickly and easily transform print catalogs into dynamic and interactive experiences that reach shoppers on-the-go. Companies already publishing online catalogs with Scene7 can leverage existing eCatalog assets and seamlessly deliver them to iPads and iPhones. With support for multi-touch and gesture interactions, such as pinch to zoom in/out, double tap to zoom in/out, swipe to turn pages, mobile-optimized eCatalog viewers also respond to device rotation to swap between single page, portrait orientation and double page, landscape orientation spreads. These features enable businesses to scale existing rich, immersive experiences to more screens.

Some other highlights of this latest release include:

Tighter Adobe Test&Target integration to optimize relevance and conversion

Improved content synchronization capabilities between Adobe Scene7 and Adobe Test&Target™ enable customers of both solutions to quickly and easily transfer Scene7 images, templates, videos, recuts and Dynamic Banner assets to Test&Target to perform tests and reveal the most compelling and relevant content and executions for conversion lift.

Deeper Creative Suite 5 integration to further streamline desktop-to-Web workflows

A new Scene7 Creative Suite Extension for Flash Professional allows upload, preview and customization of Flash projects to Scene7 directly within Flash Professional, enabling a seamless, efficient workflow for creating Scene7 Dynamic Banners. The new "publish" capability in Scene7 Creative Suite Extension further enables users to publish assets, already uploaded to Scene7, to live image servers directly from within the Creative Suite 5 application.

With this tighter integration, companies can continually optimize their digital experiences in real-time without going back to the desktop to build new variations of creative, enabling customers to extend testing by eliminating high production time and costs.

Open Viewer Platform for Flash SDK to create innovative customer experiences with custom viewers

Companies can achieve flexibility and creativity to extensively customize Scene7 Flash viewers and uniquely brand viewer look-and-feel and interactivity with a new Flash component-based framework. Additionally, reusable performance-optimized components lower the overall cost of viewer development and accelerate custom development.

Video search engine optimization and libraries to maximize discoverability

To improve video discoverability, Scene7 now automatically generates and updates a sitemap/mRSS of the videos for submission to search engines, ensuring that companies are able to maximize the ROI on their video investments. Additionally, companies can create video libraries that consolidate videos in one central location within their site or as a separate microsite, establishing a destination where consumers can go to find valuable video searchable by title, description, keywords, category and related videos.

Posted by Scene7 at 11:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In today's fragmented environment where consumers are spending time in multiple channels and using multiple screens, the delivery of rich, relevant experiences is proving to be a challenge. Businesses have to be everywhere while continuously adapting to their customers’ ever-changing content consumption habits.

Fresh off the presses is our latest whitepaper, Top 10 Tips for Optimizing ROI with Dynamic Content, that identifies 10 key strategies and tactics to help you build rich experiences that yield results. From to scaling rich media through automation rather than manual production to socializing your rich media to engage fans, the tips in this guide can help you maximize results across multiples channels.

Get your copy today and let us know what tips you will try first.

Posted by Scene7 at 1:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There’s no question that mobile is transforming the way consumers shop and interact with brands.  Yet, optimizing the m-commerce experience is still untapped, whether in a mobile-optimized site or via an application. By incorporating PC learnings from the past 10 years with continuous measurement and testing in this new, but increasingly growing mobile channel, retailers have the opportunity to stay ahead of their shoppers’ demands.

This year, U.S. mobile commerce revenues are expected to hit $5.3 billion, up 83% from a year ago, according to Barclays Capital. To help you capitalize on this burgeoning channel, we are pleased to deliver the Adobe Scene7 Mobile Commerce Survey: Mobile Shopper Insights for 2011. This report is the second installment based on key findings from our survey of 1,200 consumers and takes a deep dive into mobile commerce from the shoppers’ perspective.

Get your copy to gain actionable insights on mobile shopping behavior and preferences, including:

• Who are mobile shoppers?
• What are they buying?
• How much time and money are consumers spending on mobile shopping?
• What features and tools are most important for them to make a mobile purchase?

P.S. – In case you missed the initial report, Adobe Mobile Experience Survey: What Users Want from Media, Finance, Travel & Shopping, that measured mobile user characteristics, behavior, preferences, satisfaction levels and other experiential factors across four key consumer categories: 1) Consumer Products/Shopping; 2) Financial Services; 3) Media & Entertainment; 4) Travel; click here for your copy.

Posted by Scene7 at 10:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As online videos continue to prove their ROI, we expect retailers to embrace this medium as never before. From showing the inner workings of a product to zeroing in on a dazzling product feature, there’s nothing like using video to bring merchandise to life for driving conversion.

Now, to help you get the most out of online video, we recently published a guide entitled Nine Easy Steps to Online Video Success. This paper contains best practices to help you realize rapid ROI, including how to streamline production and choosing the right products to spotlight.

The guide is written for merchants in any stage of video deployment. Whether you’re just getting started in video or have already deployed, we think you will find some useful tips here. Get your copy today and let us know what you think.

Posted by Scene7 at 3:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last month, we hosted a sold-out webinar featuring Forrester Research Principal Analyst Brian Walker, and our own Sheila Dahlgren.

The response was overwhelming, as we continued to get questions and feedback from the audience days after the event. Clearly, mobile is on people’s minds these days, as this channel is triggering profound behavioral changes that have deep implications for both traditional and pure-play online retailers.

To be sure, mobile represents lots of exciting opportunities, but it’s also a difficult channel to navigate, not least because it’s a fragmented ecosystem with numerous operating systems and multitudes of devices that continue to proliferate.

This webinar is a great primer for any business that wants to start integrating mobile into their digital roadmap. It’s also a great reality check for those who are already experimenting in this space. Brian and Sheila examine use cases that have implications for how businesses can build out an effective mobile strategy. For example, a key discussion point centers on making a choice between apps versus browser-based experiences.

For the first time, we also publicly presented some powerful research derived from our mobile survey around mobile consumers’ preferences and behavior, including their preferred entry point for shopping (i.e., browser versus apps), where they’re spending their time, how much they’re spending on mobile purchases—plus, who the top shoppers and purchasers are.

If you would like to listen to a playback of the webinar, click here. We promise it will be one hour well spent.

You will learn:

• What consumers want from their mobile experiences: Highlights from Adobe survey
• The state of mobile commerce & today’s mobile ecosystem
• How to get started & integrate mobile into your commerce environment

Posted by Scene7 at 1:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)