Presenting the winners of the 2023 Adobe Experience Maker Awards
Each year, brands and businesses push the boundaries of innovation in customer experience using Adobe Experience Cloud solutions. To celebrate these global leaders, we rolled out the red carpet and invited them to the 2023 Adobe Experience Maker Awards gala at the iconic Rainbow Room in New York City. It was an incredible event, and I even got dressed up to present the awards with my colleague Suzanne Bordeaux, VP for Adobe Consulting Services, as well as the incomparable Adobe Insider Katie Martell.
The gala honored our finalists and revealed the extraordinary winners — Experience Makers driving digital transformations that deliver seamless, personalized customer journeys, exceptional value to all stakeholders, and measurable business growth.
Global category winners
This year’s Adobe Experience Maker Awards featured 12 global categories. We are proud to recognize the following individuals, companies, and teams for their achievements and innovative use of Adobe Experience Cloud technologies.
The Advocate: TSB Bank
Embraces a customer-first approach to elevate the customer experience.
TSB is one of the UK’s most trusted retail banks, serving more than 5 million customers across the country. It needed to develop customer-centric marketing operations, with unified customer journeys across online and offline channels.
Before Adobe, TSB only had access to unstructured customer data that it would collect in its data warehouse. Latency was 3–5 days on average and now it’s less than 24 hours. Best of all, the bank can collect and process that data to deliver real-time personalization. By automating manual processes in paid channels with Adobe, it has not only made operations more efficient, but TSB has also made its social and pay-per-click content timelier and more impactful.
TSB’s transformation flipped an industry that has traditionally been product-centric and put customers at the center of every decision — and Adobe Experience Platform makes this possible. Real-time insight into customers’ needs and behaviors means the brand can be more sophisticated in content creation and targeting, creating a steady dialogue with customers rather than bombarding them with one message after another.
The Ambassador: Brooke Bartos, EngageSmart
Shares expertise and thought leadership to help peers succeed.
Brooke Bartos, director of marketing operations and analytics at EngageSmart, is devoted to sharing her Adobe Marketo Engage expertise with others. By training new users and developing resources, she works to teach and inspire as many people in marketing operations as possible.
She is a two-time Adobe Summit speaker, a five-time Adobe Marketo Engage Champion, an Adobe Marketo Engage Certified Solutions Architect, and the leader of two Adobe Marketo Engage Users groups.
Her expertise has helped EngageSmart establish a more efficient distribution of resources. She has coached and trained six colleagues and five mentees to Adobe Marketo Engage Certified Expert status and led the charge of bringing Adobe Marketo Engage into her company. Last year she mentored 18 EngageSmart team members in martech certifications.
She is also an active member of communities such as Women in Revenue, Women of Email, MOPs Professionals, and Women of Martech.
The Analyzer: TSB Bank
Masters the art and science of data-driven decision making.
TSB’s results since going live with Adobe Experience Platform are truly impressive. Their initial business case when implementing the solution in 2021 saw an 11x increase over expectations.
In their second year, mobile went from being their least popular customer channel to their customers’ channel of choice. This growth provided TSB with a further 3x increase in value from Adobe Experience Platform, arguably the biggest success of their transformation. By using Adobe to personalize the loan experience and application process for every mobile user, the bank saw sales jump 300%.
TSB learned the value of 360-degree customer profiles delivering truly customer-centric, one-to-one experiences. Understanding audiences, reacting in the moment, and connecting journeys in a seamless way have been a game-changer for its business. Instead of trying to push offers, it has created a marketing ecosystem that puts customers in control. This empowers customers to search, ask questions, and find what they need in seconds, with the incremental benefit of value-added offers and experiences.
The Architect: HDFC Life
Designs and delivers personalized customer journeys.
HDFC is one of the leading life insurance companies in India. To engage with policy holders, it runs direct marketing campaigns targeted across all age groups through email, SMS, and WhatsApp.
HDFC used Adobe Campaign to create personalized content aligned to specific customer personas — from Champion to Enthusiast — and gamification principles to engage younger individuals (e.g., Gen Z). These efforts generated significantly more revenue, as well as illustrated a commitment to delivering personalized content to the right customers at the right time.
To take things a step further, HDFC used AI-driven personalization journeys and communications to connect with the wide range of languages and cultural nuances present in India. HDFC exemplifies campaign excellence and how focusing on customers can minimize business costs and lead to substantial growth.
The Changemaker: National Center for Missing & Exploited Children
Innovates to drive quantifiable social or environmental impact.
The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) is the nation’s largest and most influential child protection nonprofit organization — and it was challenged with managing the volume of information that needed to get into the hands of the public.
NCMEC used Adobe Experience Manager to build a responsive, mobile-first platform that could keep information about children in ongoing cases secure, while still delivering resources to the right audience. Its new website’s bounce rate fell to less than 1%, even as traffic grew by 7 million visits. Online donation traffic jumped by 110% in three years, allowing NCMEC to devote even more resources to helping children.
NCMEC also used Adobe Experience Manager to equip 480 professionals from partner organizations to deliver safety presentations, reaching over 22,000 children in 2022.
The Collaborator: NTT
Optimizes work management to deliver exceptional value for all stakeholders.
NTT is one of the largest telecommunications companies in the world, delivering consulting services ranging from software implementations, digital transformation advisory services, and data infrastructure projects. Before Adobe Workfront, NTT used 21 disconnected applications to operate its business. It lacked a single source of truth, making visibility virtually impossible.
NTT needed to integrate its data silos. So, it centralized to a single project management solution within Adobe Workfront. Workfront Fusion drove significant ROI for NTT, reducing the amount of duplicative data entered into multiple tools. NTT has also used Fusion to automate processes within Workfront itself, reducing clicks and manual updates. Workfront provides resource visibility so NTT can maximize its most valuable resource — its people.
Today, NTT has acquired more than 1,500 users, managed more than 2,300 projects, completed more than 49,000 resource assignments, and made 776 approvals, all in Workfront. NTT has not only transformed visibility, predictability, and execution speed, but has also increased customer satisfaction, Net Promoter Scores (NPS), and survey responses.
The Disruptor: Sling TV
Reimagines the commerce experience by delivering growth across multiple channels, brands, or geographies.
Sling TV was challenged with customer expectations around what local channels were included in packages — as a result, customers would often cancel same-day. A regional pricing model was needed to create fairness among the Sling TV customer base, while also keeping those regions’ profits healthy.
To deliver the right customer experience, Sling TV created new packages for combinations of products and price points. This required an overhaul — creating new packaging in commerce engines, updating new and existing components in Adobe Experience Manager to behave differently, and deploying geo-targeting that would change messaging based on a customer’s location.
The data gave the company clear results. With higher conversion than originally modeled and fewer same-day cancels, Sling TV is consistently growing its profitability by getting more customers who will stay with it long-term.
The Engager: Sunbelt Rentals
Transforms pipeline creation to drive measurable business growth.
Sunbelt Rentals is a leader in the equipment rental industry. While equipment rentals are typically reserved online, the business has over 1,100 physical locations that carry over 14,000 product types. Marketing and sales cycles are very rapid, making it essential that Sunbelt Rentals offers customers exactly what they need, when they need it.
With the help of Adobe technology, Sunbelt Rentals took a holistic approach to the customer funnel. Adobe Experience Manager provided a pathway to a great CMS experience for both B2B and B2C customers. Now, Sunbelt Rentals can activate segments identified by Adobe Experience Manager and provide those customers with tailored content through an Adobe Marketo Engage integration. Then, Sunbelt Rentals pulls those customers into further targeted go-to-market campaigns.
Sunbelt Rentals was also able to increase campaign effectiveness by respecting customer wishes, increasing the ability to personalize content, and increasing lead quality, as seen by these metrics — marketable records up by 21%, sending marketing materials to competitors down by 3%, and normalized data within the system up by 28.4%.
Sunbelt Rentals transformed its tech stack and marketing strategy to accommodate its specific challenges and added a significant amount of forecasted pipeline — all thanks to a coordinated effort by marketers and developers, as well as a scalable approach to engaging its customers throughout the buying journey.
The Illuminator: Parques Reunidos
Shows great resilience to deliver inspirational customer experiences.
Parques Reunidos is one of the leading global operators of regional leisure parks and one of the three truly global leisure park operators. The company operates over 50 leisure centers in countries in Europe, North America, and Australia. Before implementing Adobe solutions, each leisure center had its own website design with complex checkout funnels and no cross-selling between sites.
To deliver a more unified customer experience, Parque Reunidos used Adobe Experience Manager as a Cloud Service and Adobe Target to create a uniform website design for more than 50 amusement parks all with a common architecture of information. The company tackled change resistance and low website optimization across the organization with a small but mighty team. These teams were able to provide a unified experience across over 50 websites worldwide and in multiple languages. The results exceeded their expectations: over 50% revenue post project, more than 60% conversion rate, and over 15% growth in organic traffic.
The Magnifier: Tabcorp
Drives business impact using the power of multiple Adobe Experience Cloud solutions.
Tabcorp is a market-leading gambling entertainment company operating in Australia. It ignites excitement in its customers through wagering and personalized experiences via digital channels and its over 4,000 venues.
The company transformed its customer experience by shifting to a customer-driven approach, focusing on getting digital journeys right by optimizing for conversions. Implementing Adobe Experience Platform along with seven additional Adobe applications helped Tabcorp offer customers a seamless, convenient betting experience.
Tabcorp can now identify when a digital customer walks into a venue and serve relevant offers to activate customers where they are more likely to engage. Its use of actionable, real-time data across multiple channels has resulted in an 80% incremental increase in digital in-venue bettors and a 64% increase in digital in-venue revenue.
The Maverick: The Warehouse Group
Drives the customer experience through innovative marketing, commerce, work management or advertising.
The Maverick is the only category winner selected through audience choice.
The Warehouse Group (TWG) is the largest retail group operating in New Zealand, selling its products both online and in-store. It needed to collect and unify multibrand customer profiles and multichannel engagement data to build a single, coherent, and complete view of each customer.
Using Adobe Experience Platform, TWG created a unified customer profile across 3 brands and 10 identifiers, building a single customer view across various channels. Next, it shared the unified profile with Snowflake for use in data models that it then fed back into Experience Platform for activation across destinations.
TWG successfully delivered unique customer experiences and empowered its internal teams to drive cross-channel personalization campaigns with a 147% increase in email open-to-purchase rate for iPhone sales, 9.8% online revenue growth in the new grocery category, and 2.5% in-store revenue growth across six stores in the initial trial phase.
The Transformer: The Warehouse Group
Drives innovation across people, processes, and technology.
The Warehouse Group (TWG) was not only peer voted as the winner in The Maverick category but is also being recognized for its outstanding digital transformation to create a game-changing customer experience.
TWG needed to make data available to marketers so it could create new use cases to target customers with omnichannel personalized marketing campaigns. A few of their key pain points were ID stitching, cross-brand profile building, cross-channel marketing, sophisticated segmentation, and real-time activation. TWG also needed to replace Salesforce DMP, which was sunsetting, so the company selected Adobe Real-Time CDP to scale personalization initiatives for the business across brands. It implemented custom solutions, such as filtering data before loading into profiles, creating brand-specific CRM IDs, and exporting profile snapshots outside of Adobe Experience Platform.
TWG transformed its business across people, processes, and technology. It unified multiple brands, channels, and teams to successfully drive efficiency and experience-led growth.
Regional category winners
We are excited to congratulate the following winners for The Experience Maker Executive of the Year, The Experience Maker of the Year, and The Experience Maker Team of the Year categories across each of our four regions.
Americas
The Experience Maker Executive of the Year: Raghu Vasu, U.S. Bank
Raghu Vasu is an SVP leading digital marketing and transformation at U.S. Bank. He championed a vision for Next Best Action and Personalization Programs, then worked backward to promote the ideal martech for those goals.
He evangelized Adobe Experience Platform and Adobe Experience Cloud technology among internal partners by brainstorming use cases for every team and identifying customer journeys that would best align with each team’s goals. Raghu worked across all lines of business to answer questions and smooth the path for adoption. His plan ensures intelligent, contextual, and relevant one-to-one experiences in real time at every meaningful touchpoint in the customer journey.
Raghu led a culture of innovative thinking — no small feat in a highly regulated, traditional industry — and was able to drive organizational change with everyone rallied behind the customer experience.
The Experience Maker of the Year: Ben Meck, CVS Health
Ben Meck, executive director of enterprise marketing technology at CVS Health, showed true leadership by establishing the company’s enterprise martech team and helping them reach the decision to adopt Adobe Experience Platform.
Under Ben’s leadership, CVS Health successfully centralized audiences so they can be built and pushed to multiple destination platforms with Adobe Real-Time CDP. Doing this all in a healthcare environment, where creativity and diligence is needed due to HIPAA regulations, is truly impressive.
Ben organized a team of leaders and team members who together have built roadmaps and adopted new ways of working, like Agile. He also helped empower the firm’s marketing teams to begin realizing the value from the tools. In Ben’s role, he is both a visionary and a change agent driving true transformation of people, processes, and technology to fuel customer centricity.
The Experience Maker Team of the Year: State of Illinois, Department of Innovation and Technology
The State of Illinois provides a wide range of state services to its more than 12 million Illinoisans. Historically, services have been sent by mail and distributed at physical offices throughout the state. The advent of the internet and the shock of the pandemic required a complete rethinking of online service delivery.
Internally, the state agencies were unable to rapidly deploy content — a big challenge when the CDC guidance for vaccines needed to be posted within an hour’s notice. Using Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Target, and Adobe Analytics, the Department of Innovation and Technology moved its website into a single digital ecosystem, creating a standard, scalable environment where each agency can easily deliver consistent experiences that work seamlessly across all devices and platforms.
Asia-Pacific
The Experience Maker Executive of the Year: Darren Gunton, Total Tools
Darren Gunton, general manager of marketing and ecommerce, has a clear vision for digital transformation. At Total Tools, he led a comprehensive strategy that uses Adobe Commerce technology to improve customer experiences and build new revenue streams for the extensive national store network.
Darren has been at the helm of a huge replatforming initiative to bring Total Tools into the future by providing a cloud-based infrastructure to service its B2B and B2C customer base. He spearheaded the urgency around the need to deliver true omnichannel experiences and insisted that a cloud-based architecture, complemented by numerous third-party integrations, was key.
He is open to experimentation and challenges his teams to think outside of the box. This has led to some highly successful initiatives, including buy now, pay later, which accounts for over 10% of the business. Darren is a magnet for top talent and is regarded among his leaders and the rest of his team as a visionary and innovator.
The Experience Maker of the Year: Chris Evans, HESTA
HESTA lacked a single customer view, an insights program, real-time personalization, and consistent one-to-one member experiences across channels. Chris Evans, digital manager of marketing technology at HESTA, was instrumental in helping to solve these challenges.
Chris consolidated multiple CMS platforms into Adobe Experience Manager, migrated to Experience Manager as a Cloud Service, and oversaw the Adobe Experience Manager Assets DAM deployment.
He also led the initiative to build a comprehensive onsite data layer foundation for analytics, set up processes to ensure no website release happened without proper analytics in place, and organized an insights team to provide reporting and insights for every new launch from day one. He also led the merger with new super fund Mercy Super and integrated it into Adobe Experience Cloud along with HESTA B2C and B2B data.
The Experience Maker Team of the Year: Tabcorp
Scaled across more than 4,000 venues, Tabcorp implemented a near real-time in-venue experience where customers could qualify for offers, converging retail venues and digital experiences for customers.
Tabcorp’s transition to Adobe Experience Cloud was driven by a project team and included the merger of two databases, along with implementation of Agile project management as its core way of working.
This cross-functional project team, consisting of subject matter experts from across the business (delivery, business analytics, data science and analytics), effectively collaborated to ensure success. They also paved the way for the future of campaigns and customer experiences.
Europe, the Middle East, and Africa
The Experience Maker Executive of the Year: Aidan Connor, Asprey
Chief Technology Officer Aidan Connor redefined the global technology strategy for Asprey and led the organization through an unprecedented technology transformation that is now 1.5 years into a 5-year digital vision — to become the world’s first digital-first luxury brand.
Under Aidan’s leadership, Asprey has achieved remarkable results. The conversion rate from online channels has increased by 900% in just 1.5 years and online revenue has increased by 300% YoY. These impressive results are due in part to the replacement of Google Analytics with Adobe Analytics, which has provided a more comprehensive view of customer behavior and engagement.
Aidan also oversaw the release of three sell-out NFT collections, generating over $4.5 million in revenue. Additionally, he implemented a content and commerce strategy to improve content velocity and content authoring time by 55%. This strategy has been made possible with Adobe Experience Manager Sites and Adobe Commerce GraphQL, using generative AI from ChatGPT to support the creation of product descriptions.
The Experience Maker of the Year: Arkadiusz Gawryluk, LOT Polish Airlines
Arkadiusz Gawryluk, digital director of distribution and loyalty at LOT Polish Airlines, has been the driving force behind LOT’s digital transformation since joining the airline in 2013. His tireless commitment to perfecting LOT’s digital properties has paid off in every way.
Previously a secondary sales channel, the LOT.com website now accounts for nearly one-fourth of the airline’s revenue with 30% more site visits, direct sales growth, and higher average passenger revenue for LOT.com across 50 markets, all while lowering online acquisition costs by 47%. These successes have made digital sales a top priority at LOT, which has grown its ecommerce team 16x under Arkadiusz’s stewardship.
Arkadiusz's leadership and clarity of vision also helped LOT’s board appreciate the impact of digital marketing and automation on the customer experience. To paraphrase his team, “Arkadiusz’s actions inspire other people in our business to dream more, learn more, do more, and become more. That’s what makes him a leader.”
The Experience Maker Team of the Year: CaixaBank
CaixaBank turned to Adobe Experience Cloud applications to fully activate customer data across touchpoints by creating a relevant experience based on customer behavior and preferences.
Its cross-functional team consisted of experts across digital sales, martech, business intelligence, and IT. They were tasked with identifying, selecting, implementing, testing, and activating the tools and capabilities necessary for the incremental generation of business.
As the team used an Agile methodology to complete their objective, they helped to reframe some of the more siloed thinking and approaches within their organization, modeling a collaborative, interdepartmental approach. Through teamwork, they successfully changed the cultural framework of CaixaBank, generated new capacities, and made launch processes faster and more efficient. This all resulted in an impressive 255% increase in gross sales and 277% growth in gross margin over the prior year for the company.
Japan
The Experience Maker Executive of the Year: Makoto Toyoda, Sony
Sony’s Chief Information Officer Makoto Toyoda is a visionary leader driving digital transformation across their organization. Before using Adobe technology, the company had three key challenges with the operation of its website and digital marketing — an existing platform that constrained the company’s ability to achieve its digital marketing vision, limited flexibility to manage content operations, and cost optimization.
Led by Makoto the Sony team took an Agile approach to ensure their path to success step by step during the project period. The company unified website designs with Adobe Experience Manager across 38 languages in over 100 countries, resulting in reduced page production lead times, improved flexibility of content operations, and optimized operating costs.
The Experience Maker of the Year: Shinnosuke Koizumi, Astellas Pharma Inc.
Shinnosuke Koizumi, senior manager of Astellas Pharma Inc., is a champion for Adobe Experience Cloud solutions within the organization and has garnered support from key stakeholders to create exceptional customer experiences.
With a fragmented marketing stack and an ever-expanding list of digital communication channels, the marketing team was challenged to deliver relevant and personalized communications to prospects and customers. Shinnosuke used Adobe solutions to deliver personalized email communications and foster interdepartmental collaboration to positively impact the company’s business.
Under Shinnosuke’s leadership, email traffic to the Astellas website grew by 274% and the efficiency of sales promotions improved by 25%.
The Experience Maker Team of the Year: ASICS Corporation
ASICS Corporation turned to Adobe Experience Cloud applications to help consolidate and streamline the process of managing key digital marketing assets — such as product images used for in-store graphics, ecommerce sites, or web catalogs — to ensure better consistency and protect the brand.
Adopting Adobe Experience Manager helped the team achieve a truly global reach, with teams in Japan easily working with product images photographed in studios in the United States. The teams also overcame language barriers to collaborate effectively. Together, they were able to reduce the cost of production by 50% and register approximately 40,000 new digital assets in Adobe Experience Manager Assets in one year, with a total of about 700,000 digital assets managed.
Congratulations to the 2023 Adobe Experience Maker Award winners
Congratulations to our extraordinary winners transforming customer experiences with Adobe Experience Cloud solutions! These innovations elevate customer experiences around the world, and Adobe is honored to celebrate the high-impact ways they are revolutionizing the digital economy.
Watch the recording of the 2023 Adobe Experience Maker Awards gala, which celebrates all the extraordinary Experience Makers.
Amit Ahuja is the senior vice president of product management, product marketing, and strategy for the digital experience business at Adobe. Prior to this role, Amit was responsible for business development and building Adobe’s ecosystem. Other roles Amit has held within Adobe include head of emerging businesses, general manager of data management platform business, and corporate development. Amit joined Adobe via the acquisition of Macromedia where he was in the corporate development group focusing on mobile and video. He began his career at Hambrecht & Quist as a technology investment banker and also spent several years at a technology startup. Amit has a bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MBA from UCLA’s Anderson School of Management.