Key Takeaways for Brands from the Adobe Summit 2020

It’s fitting that the premier digital experience conference went all-digital this year, as just one of many tech conferences that have rapidly adapted their strategies in light of the COVID-19 pandemic—building the on-demand streaming alternative in just a month. Pictured above, you’ll see MediaMonks Founder Wesley ter Haar speaking at Adobe’s last tentpole event, Adobe MAX.

This urgency for stronger digital experiences served as a key theme for the conference. “We are clearly living in unprecedented times,” said Adobe Chairman, President and CEO Shantanu Narayen. “COVID-19 is changing everything about life and work as we know it. Now more than ever, we must come together as a community to share best practices to digitally engage with customers.”

During the keynote address, Adobe unveiled new tools and updated features that can help brands provide a better customer experience and reach their business goals: most notable is the Digital Economy Index, a tool that analyzes more than a trillion online transactions across 100 million product sales to help brands understand, act on and anticipate digital commerce trends. In addition to that and new updates to Adobe Experience Cloud Manager, Narayen called for a stronger relationship between CMOs and CIOs as brands spend 2020 refocusing their digital strategies and seek new ways to connect all known user data across the customer journey.

Digital is Table Stakes, and Brands Need to Adapt

 “Whether you’re replacing an in-person conference with a digital event, or working to engage with your customers virtually, the theme is the same: digital is revolutionizing how we interact with each other,” said Narayen. This sentiment has become all the more obvious in the past month, in which social distancing policies have shed a spotlight on the gaps that brands must fill in their digital transformation efforts and the need for emotionally resonant creative digital experiences.

Today, customer experiences are much more than just delivering delightful and relevant experiences in real time, it is supporting the users’ needs in an almost completely digital world. From e-commerce services bringing products to our door, to paperless contracts and virtual offices, or digital tools enabling students to continue with their education, “digital isn’t only changing and reshaping our daily lives, it’s driving the economy,” says Narayen.

This change isn’t exactly new, but has become a moment of reckoning for brands. “Everything has been moving remote and online in one way, shape or form over the years,” says Henry Cowling, Managing Director at MediaMonks San Francisco, in our most recent report on reactivating customer obsession. “This is the chance for brands to really look at that, and reinvent how the digital experience looks and feels, because they’ll need to do it eventually.” 

The Moment for Real-Time CX is Here

Prioritizing customer experience management has become fundamental in a world dominated by digital interactions. Users expect more and demand more from brands, and they do not have the patience to wait for it, they want it all right now. Brands need to understand and use their data to craft a personalized and relevant experience that their users will enjoy in real time.

In one breakout session, Adobe Principal Product Manager Trevor Paulson reassured audiences, “Almost everyone is trying to better understand the entire customer journey across all their channels … So, if you think you’re behind your competition, chances are you’re probably not.” Among the top challenges in customer journey analytics he identified are disconnected data, not enough data expertise and inability to action insights—each of which inhibit a brand’s ability to meet its audience’s needs throughout the full, end-to-end brand experience.

Cross-functional collaboration helps brands gather together diverse knowledge and expertise to bridge these gaps. Successfully achieving data-driven creative workstreams is key to building the creatively differentiated experiences that build brand love, assisting consumers wherever and whenever it’s most needed along the CDJ.

Get Ready for a Cookie-less Future

Third-party cookies have been a key part of digital experiences for a long time, but that is coming to an end. With browsers having banned them gradually over the last years, Google announced a few months ago that it will eliminate all third-party cookies in 24 months. We are entering a new era of cross-domain personalization enabled only for known users.

“Cookies aren’t that good for marketing, they overstate how many people brands are actually reaching, they lead to wrong demographic targeting, they miss conversions that are happening, and they overrepresent the individual you are trying to target,” said Justin Merickel, VP of Adobe Advertising Cloud. “They haven’t been great at providing the value that they were set out to do.”

“Delivering personalized experiences at scale requires rethinking the approach to data,” says Pari Sawant, Director of Product Management at Adobe. First, they must remember that personalization should aim to truly help consumers; and to execute on that need, they must realize the power of context over relentless retargeting.

Knowing that brands will soon not be able to use third-party data, which today may make up a good portion of all their data points, they need to rethink how they use it to build truly valuable experiences by owning, operating and maximizing first-party data. Data clean rooms offer one interesting solution; as brands aim to reinvent their CX strategies or digitally transform in a fast-changing digital landscape, brands can lean on their creative partners to highlight new technologies as they emerge and determine which make the best fit.

Customers Expect Control All Across their Journey

For decades consumers were forced to stay static and receive an experience where they had no input whatsoever, but with the emergence of digital and mobile environments, they have become empowered, and they know it. Consumers expect to have a say on everything, from the decisions they make, to the content they consume, at every single touch point. 

For decades, consumers have had little control over how their data was used by brands. But with brands focused on a need for building first-party relationships a cookie-less world, an opportunity emerges for them to empower customers. to become active participants in the creative experiences they consume. There needs to be a clear value exchange for users to part with their data, further driving home the need for content to be assistive. This approach requires brands to take ownership of the customer relationship.

The bar has been raised for consumers and brands alike, particularly when it comes to digital native newcomers who have forged deep relationships with consumers by aligning purpose with data-driven creativity. “The experiences they receive in the applications and services they use online every day have led them to demand the same from every brand they deal with,” said Nick McLachlan, Product Marketing lead for Advertising Cloud in APAC at Adobe. Between 65% and 70% of consumers expect highly contextual, personalized experiences in real time.

Brands face a unique challenge in order to fulfill the customers’ expectations; they need to create strategies that cater to those needs across every channel, taking a user-centered approach to how they do business. These challenges have come to a head in a year where fractures in brands’ existing digital strategies are apparent. Thankfully, the Adobe Summit streaming platform goes live at the perfect time for brands to begin refocusing their strategies for the rest of the year and beyond.