Adobe Summit 2024 in Review

Whether it was in-person or online, the 3|SHARE team enjoyed being part of Adobe Summit 2024. We were abuzz with the news of exciting features to come with GenAI especially and what it means for Adobe Experience Cloud and the potential for building the robust Content Supply Chain systems our clients need.

From our time on the ground to what we got out of some sessions, our thoughts on the Summit experience are below.

Thoughts from Summit:  on the ground in Las Vegas

A cohort of four 3|SHARE leadership team members were onsite in Las Vegas; they were Paul Brandwood (CEO), Paul Legan (CTO), Mike Hardiman (CGO) and David Holt (VP of Client Services).

Overall, the best parts included our “Summit Social” event that was held in collaboration with Epsilon, meeting clients  face to face, and also visiting the Adobe booths to learn more after sessions. In their own words, here is a little more about the time in Nevada. 

What was the highlight of Adobe Summit?

"The highlight for me was meeting our clients at Summit. It was great to get such positive feedback about the performance of our teams and how happy they all were. It's so rare we all meet face to face so for me that has to be the highlight." (Paul Brandwood)

"Attending Adobe Summit in person is a great opportunity to meet people and hear new perspectives on Adobe’s roadmap. I was able to speak with many software vendors in the Community Pavilion about technologies we are now evaluating on behalf of our clients." (Paul Legan)

"The best part of Adobe Summit is always the opportunity to meet with clients in person to build relationships, collaborate on possible new projects, discuss recently completed work, and have a bit of fun together." (David Holt)

What's the thing that excited you most?

"I’m impressed by and excited for Firefly Services. I believe access to those APIs will allow us to build more functionality into our existing content supply engagements." (Paul Legan)

"Lots of buzz at Summit from clients, Adobe reps, and other partners about both Content Supply Chain (particularly Workfront) and the impact of AI." (David Holt)

"This year's Summit from my perspective was one of the best of the last couple of years; there were a significant number of innovations coming from Adobe, together with some great announcements about what is coming in the future. For sure the obvious AI focus was of interest but I felt there were two areas in particular that stood out. The first was further detail on GenStudio. This promises to be a very interesting product that fits well with our Content Supply Chain focus. Still early days here but very excited to see what is to come. The second was in the AI Assistant for AEP which will certainly simplify our and our clients' ability to segment and manipulate data much more easily. Looking forward to digging into that in more detail too." (Paul Brandwood)

What (pleasantly) surprised you?

"Despite the pervasive use of online meetings, it still remains important to show your face to clients in person – most seem to value it highly." (David Holt)

"Very good to catch up with old colleagues and collaborators to hear their news and understand how things have been going for them. For me these things are all about the people so great to hear everyone's news and experiences." (Paul Brandwood)

"I was pleasantly surprised by the user experience in GenStudio. I’m encouraged by the amount of integration with AEM Assets and Workfront and look forward to seeing its general release later this year." (Paul Legan)

Adobe Summit Session Takeaways

By now, all of the sessions are available online so you can check them out at your leisure at the Adobe Summit website. Our team members share their takeaways and inspiration they got from selected sessions below.

Opening Keynote

Reviewed by Rabiah Coon, Sr. Marketing Manager
Firstly, as someone who has had to create or facilitate countless demos over the years, I have immense respect for the people who put the demos together for the Keynotes and for the grace that was displayed when things didn’t go to plan! I was most intrigued by the news about Workfront Planning which will enable timelines, project status and the performance record for assets and marketing activities, in one place.

I am also really excited to see how Firefly custom models develop so that teams can train their own models based on their own intellectual property. And also, Firefly services which provide automation apis for generating content.

One statement that grabbed my attention about GenAI was that "2023 was fun and exploration and 2024 is time to bring it into production". I feel like this is true and we’re all moving from asking ChatGPT random questions and playing around to really seeing how it can improve our own businesses and our clients’ businesses.

Reviewed by Ameya Kathapurkar, Adobe Campaign Developer
Marketers often rely on data experts for ad-hoc campaigns. The new AEP AI assistant (Beta Release) processes Natural language (NLP) and gives the power to the marketer to run ad-hoc campaigns using RT-CDP and AJO. By giving correct prompts, a business owner or marketing manager can load data to a journey, attach a template to the campaign and send communications. This significantly reduces the time to reach customer.

Adobe Experience Manager Sites: Top Innovations

Reviewed by Betina Haak, Senior Developer
The top two learnings I got out of this session are:

Native integration with Workfront: Adobe Workfront and AEM are coming seamlessly together to improve the Content Supply Chain. No more switching to the product of preference.  Once you get into AEM, you have a Universal Editor; it gets presented like an updated list of assigned tasks. We’ve all gotten used to using Instant Messengers and Slack to coordinate each other but bringing this much deeper into the actual product UI. Having an assigned task, you can create subtasks, delegating them to further people in order to complete the main task. So, the idea is to escalate the workflow in terms of getting more people involved in a structured, transparent manner in order to get the job done. It includes approvals and follow up work. 

GenAI (Generative AI) variations: GenAI is going to enable marketers and content creators to create a whole lot of content with a great amount of speed, not only making them much more efficient but also help them to unleash their creativity and improve the effectiveness of the content with insights from data. I believe the main idea was to use this for experiments. 

It can be used for Content Fragments, Experience Fragments, Pages, whenever you need to create variations for personalization or for experimentation purposes. You can select from templates and then state the intent using a highly configurable UI to create new content or rewrite it. So, the workflow will create not just personalized content but really a lot of experiments to improve existing experiences. 

The Future of DAM

Reviewed by Kristin Jones, VP, Group Director, Technology Administration 
Adobe is continuing to push for making creativity more accessible to marketers via generative AI and creative templates, as well as expanding on performance of translation, transformation for different devices and marketing platforms, and a branding logic check.

These advancements are important for us as delivery specialists, to get ahead of how to configure and demonstrate real life examples for our clients of how GenAI and the enhanced DAM tools can create a quality, branded creative output, that they can start using quickly.

Embrace GenAI to Transform Experiences

Reviewed by Mike Hardiman, Chief Growth Officer
Again, AI took centerstage here as we saw a demo that allowed a marketer to use AI to create a targeted audience for a new campaign. The promise is that this will greatly reduce the time it takes to identify a targeted persona for campaigns. The session ended with an end-to-end demo of leveraging AI from concept to publish, leveraging all the applications that make up the Content Supply Chain.

To me, this Summit was all about connectivity and AI...it was incredible to see how far the integrated or connected platform story has come, with the added excitement of AI being layered on top. I was excited because we are an Adobe-only shop, and we look forward to making this work for our clients as intended. I don’t know many (if any) vendors who can offer this integrated, end-to-end marketing platform. It will be exciting to continue our journey with Adobe and our clients.

Future of Adobe Workfront

Reviewed by Mike Hardiman, Chief Growth Officer
The announcement of Frame.io integration and the promise of an AI Assistant. I saw a demo that showed the ability to drag and drop an Excel (or Word) creative brief into Workfront that thru AI, can expedite the creation of an Adobe Workfront template. I thought this was pretty cool!

To me Adobe continues to move towards a truly integrated platform from Creative Cloud, to Experience Cloud and Experience Platform but even better is the focus on building in AI capabilities to reduce labor intensive work that enables more focus on strategy and innovation.

How to Select and Create Organizational Readiness to Implement a CDP

Reviewed by Ameya Kathapurkar, Adobe Campaign Developer
McKinsey said that, “Companies that grow faster drive 40% more of their revenue from personalization than their slower-growing counterparts.” To drive personalization at scale, it's necessary to check if the targeted data management solution/CDP has known data, pseudonymous data, unified profile, streaming ingestion/activation capability, run and operational for marketers, easy integrations to external solutions and maintains privacy guidelines and governance.

Maturity for Adobe RT-CDP moves from departmental to enterprise usage and potential ROl/value grows accordingly. It is not just a tech upgrade but a collaborative process involving cultural shift.

Data Doomsday: A Checklist to Survive the Next Generation of Analytics

Reviewed by Ameya Kathapurkar, Adobe Campaign Developer
Heading into cookieless world, digital analytics information will be badly affected. To mitigate this, methods like unified customer id strategy, consolidated domains, strict privacy approach, server side first party cookie, and augmented digital data with offline data will be instrumental to proactively implementing Analytics for our future clients.

Top Tips to Maximize Value with Adobe Target

Reviewed by Ameya Kathapurkar, Adobe Campaign Developer
You can send AEP data to Adobe Target to augment profile attributes which in turn helps for modelling and combining offline and online audiences. This feature has low latency compared to other products and you don't need to rely on external sources for integration. Just assign a schema and send to Target and use the fields as profile attributes.

Currently customers rely on third party non-Adobe systems to get data and then stream/upload that into Target to match a relevant experience, but with AEP the latency is reduced.

That's a wrap on Adobe Summit 2024!

Look out for more blogs from 3|SHARE exploring Adobe Experience Cloud features and if you’re ready to take the next step with GenAI or optimising your Content Supply Chain, get in touch!