Adobe Summit 2021: Driving business growth in the digital economy

Major new innovations across Adobe Experience Cloud and Adobe Experience Platform unveiled at world’s largest B2B industry event

Today we kicked off Adobe Summit 2021, the world’s largest digital experience conference, and our second year hosting it entirely digital, and free. COVID-19 has brought an unprecedented new reality into our business environment and has forced the world to quickly transition to a digital-first economy as digital has essentially become the only way for people to connect, work, learn, and be entertained. Global commerce continues to see record-breaking growth with $876 billion in the first three months of 2021 (up 38 percent YoY) and $4.2 trillion expected for the year.

This year, we’re introducing innovations and new features across Adobe Experience Cloud including new enterprise applications with Adobe Journey Optimizer, Adobe Customer Journey Analytics, and our next generation Real-time Customer Data Platform (CDP). We’re also introducing our industry-leading Marketing System of Record through the integration of Workfront, and new Adobe Experience Platform capabilities that delivers real-time personalization at scale.

Featured Adobe Summit 2021 speakers include executives leading in digital. You’ll hear from Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla and FedEx president and COO Rajesh Subramaniam as they share insights about the state of digital and what’s ahead. Peloton was the buzzword of 2020 and CMO Dara Treseder will discuss how brands connect to community and culture. General Motors CMO Deborah Wahl, Intuit CMO Lara Balazs, Mastercard CMO Raja Rajamannar, CVS Health’s Chief Customer Officer Michelle Peluso, Albertson’s EVP, Chief Customer and Digital Officer Chris Rupp, and Sephora’s CTO Sree Sreedhararaj. Also speaking will be design icon Jonathan Adler and tennis champion and entrepreneur Serena Williams about leading in the digital economy.

Hosting the perennial highlight of Summit and audience favorite, “Adobe Sneaks” is award-winning writer, actor, and director Dan Levy – watch as he goes behind the scenes for a peek inside what’s to come from Adobe’s R&D Labs.

Watch it all live – and free.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has proven that brands need to put a laser focus on customer experience management to come out in front,” said Anil Chakravarthy, executive vice president and general manager, digital experience business and worldwide field operations, Adobe. “Adobe Experience Cloud is bringing businesses closer to their customers – enabling them to deliver the best digital experiences at speed and scale.”

Adobe Experience Platform Momentum

Without strong data management, companies lack an effective approach to connect with customers in real-time. Adobe Experience Platform, at the heart of Adobe Experience Cloud, allows customers to collect disparate data from across the enterprise, enrich that data with actionable customer insights, and stitch data together for more complete, real-time customer profiles so that every experience is better than the last. Today, the Adobe Experience Platform and ecosystem powers thousands of brands globally, delivering real-time personalization at scale across more than 17 trillion segment evaluations every day.

New Innovations in Adobe Experience Cloud

Adobe Experience Cloud is powering Customer Experience Management (CXM) for B2B and B2C companies with applications focused on customer journey management, data insights and audiences, content and personalization, commerce and marketing workflows. Innovations to help businesses accelerate their digital transformation include:

• New Adobe Journey Optimizer: Consumers want to connect in a way that feels personalized and relevant throughout their unique journey, but brands struggle with providing context-aware experiences in real-time at scale. Built on Adobe Experience Platform, the new Adobe Journey Optimizer is the industry’s only enterprise application designed to help marketers optimize the customer journey across any outbound or inbound customer touchpoint. Brands can now actively listen to customer signals and use intelligent decisioning to anticipate and deliver the most relevant journey at scale by bringing together audience-based outbound marketing with one-on-one engagement.
• Next Generation Adobe Real-time CDP: With consumers becoming increasingly attentive to what type of data they are willing to share and third-party cookies in browsers going away, quality first-party data is the best way for marketers to build trusted relationships with customers. Our Real-time CDP is the only enterprise application architected from the ground up for first-party, data-driven customer acquisition and engagement. And, available today, the B2B edition of Adobe Real-time CDP allows customers to bring together both individual and account profiles for complete intelligence and activation to help B2B companies think and act like B2C brands.
• New Customer Journey Analytics: Successful enterprises need a data-driven approach to know their customers and to continuously optimize engagement in a way that ensures each experience is better than the last. New Customer Journey Analytics is the industry’s first enterprise application that enables brands to integrate and standardize their online and offline customer data, enabling anyone – not just data scientists – to connect that data, easily visualize it in a unified view, and better understand the entire journey to better inform marketing strategies.
• New Marketing System of Record: Work management solutions must help companies run more efficiently by centralizing work in a single application, so cross-functional teams can connect, collaborate, and execute the right work – from anywhere. We introduced our new Marketing System of Record, which will be the single source of truth for connecting and managing work across the entire marketing lifecycle, from strategy and planning to execution and measurement.
• New Adobe Experience Manager Innovations: New innovations within Adobe Experience Manager help brands create, manage and optimize the content businesses require, at the velocity needed to stay ahead. This includes Headless Content Management System (CMS) capabilities, which deliver immersive content as data over APIs and bring advanced AI to content automation. The new Adobe Experience Manager Assets Essentials will become the default asset management capability in all Adobe Experience Cloud applications and be fully configurable to ensure access to the best content.
• New Adobe Commerce Capabilities: Companies are increasingly relying on digital commerce as the dominant channel to drive business growth. Powered by Adobe Sensei, new Product Recommendations in Adobe Commerce unlock new ways for customers to discover products, and new Live Search delivers fast and hyper-relevant results and search experiences on the merchant’s site. A new strategic partnership with FedEx will enable Adobe Commerce merchants to integrate their storefronts with FedEx ShopRunner, allowing them to offer customer benefits such as free two-day shipping, one-click checkout, seamless returns, and the ability to take advantage of FedEx’s logistics intelligence to optimize their shipping spend.
• New Adobe Experience Platform Collection Enterprise: Companies need access to real-time consumer behavioral data in order to drive decisions that impact real-time experiences at scale. Collecting behavioral data is cumbersome, difficult to manage, and traditional approaches often lead to poor application performance, negatively impacting the consumer experience. New Collection Enterprise enables companies to leverage Adobe’s globally distributed, high-performance edge network for collecting data and sending it wherever it needs to go, whether that be to Adobe’s applications and platform or any other system. And the new lightweight data collection SDKs help ensure that applications are highly performant to provide the best consumer experience.