The annual Adobe Summit has come and gone, and normally I would be diving through my notes, looking up speakers and wondering what I missed as we waited for session videos to be posted. This year is clearly different as the event moved to a virtual setting with 140+ on-demand presentations covering everything from data and insights, to content and commerce, to customer journey management, and more. In the past, it was hard to get schedules aligned to attend the sessions many of us thought would be great. Now, we have them all in front of us at one time. The question is, “Where should you start?”
While there are many reasons to experience Summit, ranging from understanding where Adobe is going, to deep product stories and knowledge sharing, and to networking and having a good time, I have always looked to find at least one innovative idea to take back to my team. These ideas tend to come from mashing up incremental innovation (session success stories) with disruptive innovation (new tech or processes to consider). Hearing what others are solving and learning new techniques to solve these problems have always been the best investment of my team’s time at Summit. This year, I started to find my innovative idea from the Adobe Sneaks video.
I’ve been attending Summit since 2006 when the clients and brands would propose next steps for the platform and then vote on those features upon which to work. It was a smaller and more intimate gathering back then, but the tie to my approach is clear – a group of clients sharing their challenges and the collective working to solve them in a disruptive way. I voted alongside Ford, Home Depot, and small agencies to pick out the next steps. Adobe Sneaks has continued this path over the years, and this year it was made clear to me that the concept of taking a dynamic approach to both content and audience selection is top of mind for many innovative marketers. We need the ability to connect the selection of audiences and the delivery of content in our own terms. We need to be able to create experiences naturally and Sneaks unveiled two approaches that were disruptive - #projectsegmentscout and #projectsnippets
First, #projectsegmentscout demonstrated a means by which to segment an audience through mining data with Adobe Sensi in a more “natural language” approach. It offers a segment building approach based on inputting a base understanding of what you may be looking for, analyzing the keywords and mining it for related terms, and then returning a segment that meets the criteria. You don’t have to be a data scientist to get it right, you just have to understand the behavior of the people you are trying to reach. You can create a dynamic segment and define the “who” that you are trying to target in your own terms.
Secondly, @projectsnippets shows how Adobe Sensi could be utilized to dynamically serve personalized content based on what may appeal to defined audience segments. It offers the ability to utilize the same content while appealing to different segments by use of Audience segment specific headlines and images. It provides suggestions around what creative and messaging works best to appeal to different audiences and provides the connection to serve that content. This project helps scale the “what” you deliver to appeal to your “who’s”.
I found my 2020 innovative idea by starting with Adobe Sneaks. Going forward, I will ask my teams to focus more on the mashing up of disruptive approaches in segmenting their audiences using “human terms” to define the “who” they want to appeal to with the “what” around the content that best appeals to these audiences at scale. I will ask them (and you too, please) to vote on Twitter for both #projectsegmentscout and #projectsnippets to enter the full experience cloud offerings which will make our marketing lives more innovative in 2021. I promise this will be a good use of your time investment.
