Adobe started the day with the expected opening on the importance of powerful customer experience and demoed the latest capabilities of recently acquired Livefyre, which is a mix of social listening and UGC plug-ins ala Olapic and Kritique.

During the ‘Becoming an Experience Business’ Q&A, Chaminda Ranasinghe, shared his journey of breaking silos within the organisation at ANZ as Global Head of Digital Sales and Marketing where initially the role of digital was to lead to the branch, and is now to convert online. He mentioned that BBVA bank in Spain went one step further and restructured their organisation by customer segmentation rather than channels.

Rebecca Eclipse, Chief Customer Experience Officer at Globe Telecom, then took the stage to candidly share Globe’s journey to becoming an experience business. Watch Rebecca’s talk here on Adone’s website: 

Adobe pledged to donate $5 to billionBricks who’s building schools for kids of foreign workers in Malaysia (it costs $120k so 24 tweets per attendees would fund 1 school).  

Adobe’s Janie Lim took the stage and emphasized the importance of immersive, beautiful customer experiences. 

She recapped the content velocity with key stats. 

And then demoed with Michael Stoddart a VR experience where they changed banners live in the Creative Suite. Banners in VR environment wouldn’t be the right approach to this new medium and it was surprising to see how little it took Adobe to jump on it technically. 

Refreshing typographer & illustrator Gemma O’Brien talked about authenticity in design and how her personal projects led to brand collaborations. One example is her sketches, doodled out of boredome on aircraft bags, that led to the #spewbagchallenge, a collaboration with Qantas and an exhibition in Sydney. 

Adobe demoed Argos Internet of Things smart bag that pairs with the Argos App: it recognises items that are in the bag and charges you automatically in  the App when leaving the store (allowing you to avoid queuing at the cash register). 

The data-driven marketing breakout showcased examples of data sharing partnerships: eg. Tourim Australia shared data with Virgin Australia which allowed Virgin to serve relevant content and offers to customers based on the destinations they looked up  on Australia.com (eg. flights to Brisbane rather than Sydney if they customer looked for itineraries in Queensland). 

 

To close the day, actress Michelle Chong supported the presentation of the latest Adobe Lab innovations that are not committed on the roadmap. One of the sneak is based on Personality AI: Adobe analysed Michelle’s twitter feed in comparison to the demonstrator’s feed and ranked attributes such as openness, competitiveness… It determined that Michelle is an Extrovert for sure. 

Adobe used this data to personalise Fossil’s homepage with bold, eye catching content and red items more likely to suit Michelle’s extrovert personality detected through Twitter login (when the default homepage showed beige items): 

Another sneak demonstrated how in-store experience can be personalised: A Kinect scan analysed the body type, age, gender. With opt-in on mobile, previous purchases and the scan can further personalise apparel recommendations based on style (in this example a purple jacket rather than a formal black one), size and available stock. This recommendation can be displayed on self-service digital screens in store. Additional product matching the item are also recommended (eg. shoes). Adobe demoed synchronised screens and shopping carts across the customer’s mobile phone, in-store digital screen and the store associate app. 

Catch the Symposium online with replay of keynotes videos on demand:  http://www.adobe.com/sea/events/symposium_online.html#x

Ending the day with a glass of vino with my lovely client Kara