Adobe Summit – A simple buyers guide

The Adobe Summit is this month in Las Vegas. Conferences can certainly be a straight-up boondoggle. Having a conference in Las Vegas significantly increases this possibility. In an effort to be a responsible business owner, professional, steward to my clients, and an adult, I’ve devised a simple plan to get the most out of this conference.

The first Adobe Summit I attended was over seven years ago in Salt Lake City. At that time Softcrylic was primarily positioned as a technology solutions provider and just dipping our toe into the Analytics space. I walked around somewhat aimlessly from session to session. As the years have passed, our company has evolved into a heavily Data and Analytics centric business. Along with that, my approach to Summit has changed to focus on gathering insights that are valuable for helping work with our clients as they weigh the various options available in building out or expanding their marketing technology stack.

This year we are bringing a small team of professionals from our Analytics group with expertise ranging from MarTech, DMP, Engineering and Analytics (@francis, @jerry, @JP, @Brett). This group hits the sessions that get deep into the weeds of tools and technologies. I line up sessions and my perspective as that of a marketing technology buyer. Our clients rely upon us to guide them to the right products and solutions for their specific business challenges. As my team focuses on in-depth sessions so they can drill down on complex client use cases, I aim to gather further insights on questions and considerations our clients have as they are evaluating new marketing technology/analytics solutions. These areas include:

Competing and incumbent solutions:

I know if I am speaking to a client about a new feature/solution/product available or that works alongside the Adobe Marketing Cloud, they typically may have some solution in place that is either fully or ‘sort of’ supplying the need. A frequent example we have seen involves visualization and specifically Power BI vs Tableau. We have run some side by side comparisons between these two, but I’m very curious to see if the Microsoft/Adobe partnership has further positioned Power BI to lead in this comparison.

Cost:

Not only the cost of bringing on the new Adobe solution but the cost of replacing a solution that is ‘sort of’ working. This may require us to help the client run a small ROI. One session of interest in helping formulate a solid ROI related to Analytics: S121 – Good vs. Great: Obtaining an Elite Analytics Practice Is Worth the Effort.

Talent Availability:

The needs around connecting data, data sources and customer experiences drives some of the innovative solutions delivered by companies like Adobe. However, the depth of the integration for these solutions is starting to demand both strategic and technical intelligence. Availability of this type of talent is never easy to find. If you do, go back to the previous bullet point on Cost. We are frequently hiring and training folks to meet the demand. It’ll be interesting to see the approach to training and team development in this session: S930 – Building and Developing Successful Analysts and Analytics Teams.

Hassle Factor:

This seems to come down to the political will to move forward with a new solution. A lot of momentum can be behind an existing solution from different departments. The need to convince others and retrain a group on a new tool can slow down the overall effort. If there is a new solution within the Adobe Marketing Cloud that isn’t fully integrated with the other products, that increases the hassle factor and makes the client lean towards the status quo.

New Needs:

We can almost put all the above bullet points to the side when there simply is a new need in an organization. This year for us it has been the demand to effectively measure media in the Over-the-Top space. A couple of sessions of interest in this area: S803 – Over-the-Top Media and the Evolution of Television and S804 – The Paradigm Shift in TV advertising.

Combining the broad-based observations gathered from the above with the rest of my team’s deeper dive insights, we should come out of the 2018 Summit well-armed to help our clients make informed decisions.

My team has shared a number of additional posts related to the 2018 Adobe Summit.