Creative Cloud crash casts long shadow over Adobe's Marketing Cloud pitch
- Summary:
- When you’re betting the farm on shifting your installed base to an online subscription model, then there’s never a good time for your cloud to go offline. But there’s probably never a worse time than when your senior management are pitching the validity of your delivery model to a crowd of thousands of people!
That’s the situation that Adobe found itself in this week as its Creative Cloud went down all round the world for 24 hours on the second day of the firm’s EMEA Digital Marketing Summit in London. As CEO Shantanu Narayen and his team were extolling the virtues of the cloud and all things digital, their technical support team were trying to get Creative Cloud back online.
The problem manifested itself when users won't able to sign in to Creative Cloud (or create a new Adobe ID). The outage also kept some subscribers from purchasing or updating software, using the Creative Cloud website, synchronizing font files, and administering corporate accounts.
Once the service was restored, Adobe posted a brief explanation:
Several Adobe services were down or unreachable for many of you over the last 24 hours. The failure happened during database maintenance activity and affected services that require users to log in with an Adobe ID.
But the damage will have been done. This latest downtime follows the catastrophic breach in late 2013, when the usernames and passwords of over 38 million Adobe users were released online.
Marketing message
Meanwhile back at the Summit in London, attention was focused on the firm’s Marketing Cloud push with the release of a European-focused survey of marketing professionals across the continent. Among the main findings:
- Respondents in Europe are 25% less likely than those in the US to say that they want to reinvent or redefine their own role as a marketer.
- US marketers express more confidence than European marketers in their ability to ‘adapt to change’ and ‘reinvent their own skills’.
- Significantly more US marketers hope to take more risks in the coming year than their European counterparts - 45% v 26%.
- Over two-thirds (68%) of European marketers state that marketing has changed more in the last two years than in the previous 50.
- More than half (54%) of European marketers expect their role to change in the next 12 months and 75% in the next 3 years.
- 79% of UK marketers are confident in their ability to change with the times, more so than those in Germany (69%) and France (69%).
- Over half (58%) of all European marketers surveyed deemed that marketing success is dependent on organisational change.
- Some 73% believe that reinvention will be needed in order for marketing to succeed in new channels.
- 70% of French marketers believe that there is a need to embrace hyper-personalisation, compared to 66% in the UK and 60% in Germany.
- Nearly 2 in 5 marketers admit that “thinking mobile first” is not something they do very well, either.
In his keynote, Narayen told Summit delegates:
"The revolution of digital marketing is basically a reinvention of corporate structures.
"A customer finds a product today, photographed it with his phone and wants it tomorrow get delivered to your home. This is not a challenge for websites and apps, this is a challenge for the entire company.
"This silo mentality within the company must therefore stop the interplay of marketing, production and sales are accelerating. We need an integrated real-time enterprise "
“Digital marketing requires the analysis and interpretation of data in real time. The secret of business success in the digital age is to find the right algorithm from data, findings and resulting actions.”
"The frenetic pace of keeping up with trends is exhausting. To succeed in this digital era, you need to deliver on the expectations that every business has been challenged with - to transform their enterprises into the real-time enterprise."
Against the backdrop of the Summit, Adobe rolled out additions to its Marketing Cloud portfolio, including updates to the Adobe Media Optimizer and Adobe Analytics.
New features in Media Optimizer include:
- Next-generation predictive modelling algorithms that use Big Data to predict campaign performance and drive return on investment (ROI) across desktop and mobile.
- Unified campaign analysis via integration with Adobe Analytics, which enables website engagement data to pass to Media Optimizer while Media Optimizer sends search engine metrics to Analytics.
- Audience management capabilities, which allow marketers to manage and optimize remarketing lists for Google search ads.
- A redesigned user interface that makes it easier to set up, adjust, monitor, and optimize campaigns across channels in real time Integration of feed and campaign management.
New features in Adobe Analytics include:
- Live stream, which enables marketers to use real-time dashboards displaying events as they unfold, in-session remarketing to help when consumers appear stuck in a browsing session, and instant traffic visualizations from a channel or referral site.
- Predictive marketing decision trees, which enable marketers to predict the most likely decisions a customer will make and influence whether they will take a desired action.
- Unified segment builder, which enables marketers to easily create audience segments by dragging and dropping variables like gender, region, and average order value.
- Mobile app analytics, which enable marketers to tie successful mobile app downloads to campaigns and attribute actions taken in the app to measure the success of the campaign.
- Apple iBeacon support to enable marketers to deliver personalized content or offers to consumers on mobile devices while they are moving through an environment connected to iBeacons.
The online doors also opened on the Adobe Marketing Cloud Exchange, another marketplace for pre-built integrations and applications, this time between Adobe products and third-parties.
Verdict
Leaving the Creative Cloud outage to one side, the Marketing Cloud pitch came across strongly - as well it might as the messaging from Adobe management was well rehearsed, with little different from the US version of the Summit.
That said, Philip Carnelley of research firm IDC argues that Adobe is well placed:
“In a surprisingly short time, Adobe has built a position as a leader in digital marketing software.
“Supporting the marketing function is going to be a big part of IT’s role in the coming months and years. Very sophisticated functionality is being rolled out by vendors and marketing professionals are very aware of that, and are going to demand it – backed by boards, who are well aware that excellence in digital marketing is key to future competitiveness in B2B and B2C as commerce inexorably shifts online.
Carnelly also sees Adobe’s analytics push as an asset:
"Analytics is the life blood of effective marketing. Most of Adobe’s announcements at to the Summit were linked to enhanced analytics capability – intimately linked to social and mobile. Making it easier to use (and adopt) is a key theme.
"Much of this analysis can take place off-premise in the Adobe Cloud, in Adobe’s case, but the message to IT is clear: Marketing knows that more and better analysis is possible and they will want it. They will demand the latest tools and services (and are able to justify them in business terms) and so IT will have to respond – because if not, marketing is quite willing and able to go it alone using their favorite digital agency or SI to deliver mainly outsourced services."
All told, the Summit will do Adobe's Marketing Cloud ambitions no harm, with lots of energy and clearly a lot of interest from delegates.
Just a pity about the Creative Cloud...
Graphics: Adobe 'Digital Roadblock'
DIGITAL ROADBLOCK:
Marketers struggle to reinvent themselves, European Edition.