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