How the digital experience continues to evolve
Our TEKsystems Digital team weighs in on the highlights from the 2020 Adobe Summit on-demand digital experience—customer experience enhancements, technology innovations and industry best practices.
April 17, 2020 | By: Burk Buechler and Puneet Lamba
This year, Adobe Summit truly became a global digital experience. Completely online and free, Adobe and other industry leaders virtually shared new product developments, enhancements and upcoming trends. With six innovation tracks and several keynotes, we took a deep dive into the Adobe world to offer key takeaways from the digital summit that will impact the way businesses think going forward.
Content and the future of personalization
In the breakout session, "Adobe Target & Adobe Experience Platform: The Future of Personalization," Adobe experts discuss the future of personalization and how Adobe Target and Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) are evolving to power the next generation of personalized experiences.
Content is the fuel that ultimately shapes perceptions about a company and its value. It is the tangible evidence that brings the brand promise to life through words, visual graphics, and video and audio storytelling. When done right, content meets target audiences at the right time, in the right place and with the right message. Personalization is such a tremendous opportunity for customers. Once companies establish the right baseline set of measurements, the fun begins through testing, learning and improving to really advance customer experience (CX).
The technical impact
The hot-off-the-press "AEM as a Cloud Service" allows organizations to address the "agility" pillar of a successful CX management (CXM) strategy. Cloud Service makes upgrades faster as a result of the separation of code and content that Adobe Experience Manager has implemented in this offering. It also provides improved abilities for processing assets while keeping the authoring environment extremely responsive for content creators.
Gaining customer insights from data and analytics
Data powers your content strategy and personalization efforts. But many organizations struggle with maximizing the value of data within their digital marketing experience. In the session "Ignite Experiences Through Real-time Customer Intelligence," Adobe identifies four imperatives for true customer intelligence: omnichannel, profile, governance, and real time and discusses how their customer experience management platform and data and insights applications address these imperatives.
The technical impact
Adobe has completely revamped and streamlined its data collection and processing model. AEP Web SDK is a consolidated JS library that allows your web applications, mobile apps, etc. to stream data to a single endpoint known as the AEP Edge Network. This XDM-compliant data is collected and processed and then fed to the various downstream consumers in their desired formats. This is also known as server-side data collection, because all of your eVars, MBoxes, etc. are being generated by Edge and sent to their respective destinations. And because it is built on top of Adobe Launch and can be extended to non-Adobe data consumers (e.g., Google Analytics), Adobe is calling it “Data Collection as a Service.”
The trendy stuff
Each year, Adobe highlights business and marketing trends that shape the next 12–18 months. What are the challenges, opportunities and best practices for success as this industry continues to evolve at light speed? Adobe and McKinsey experts offer their opinions and provide key nuggets to bring back to the drawing board. Think: integrated data, AI for content and improved CX, scaling agile thinking and more.
The technical impact
Single view of the customer, as enabled by Adobe’s real-time Customer Data Platform (CDP), is a key marketing trend for 2020. Real-time data availability is another. The AEP Web SDK (discussed above) is a key component toward pursuing these trends because Alloy.js is 80% smaller than the collection of libraries it replaces. The result? Faster page load times and quicker execution. The shift toward using cohorts, AI and data consent is well underway.
Burk Buechler, Managing Director of Digital Experience, TEKsystems Digital
Burk believes in a business-first approach to digital transformation. Digital is at the core of the enterprise and integral in driving business impact. A dynamic leader with over 25 years of experience across industries and sectors, ranging from healthcare and commercial to financial services and retail, Burk brings a distinctive blend of innovation, leadership and problem-solving expertise.
Puneet Lamba, Adobe Digital Marketing Lead and AEM Practice Architect, TEKsystems Digital
With more than 25 years of experience, Puneet has managed and delivered web and digital marketing implementations for numerous clients. He specializes in Adobe's digital marketing suite of products and holds Adobe Certified Expert (ACE) AEM6 Architect, AEM6 Business Practitioner and Adobe Analytics Architect certifications.
Discover the Power of Real Partnership
With us by your side, you’ll fully realize ROI