Adobe Summit 2023 Report - The digital experience conference

A small team chat

We chatted with Sander van Beek (Managing Partner IDA Netherlands) and Stefan Maris (Solution Architect) about their experience at this conference.

Sander van Beek is managing partner at IDA (Netherlands). Together with his team, he helps our customers to get the most out of Adobe Experience Cloud. His favourite sessions were: the Keynote, Cookieless future / CDP selection sessies and Top AEM sites / AEM assets innovations.

Stefan Maris is an Adobe multi-solution architect and Adobe Campaign Classic SME. Currently he is spending most of his time on an AEP/AJO project, together with two other projects running on Classic: e5 and AS Adventure.

Stefan’s favourite sessions? The new Campaign V8 UI (web-based UI) and All things Audiences - the new audience portal and interface to start building audiences.

Want to know what they found so interesting? Let’s look at the highlights from each of these sessions (so you don’t need to go through all of the conference materials yourself).

Diving into the sessions

What was Adobe Summit’s 2023 keynote about?

This one was mostly about generative AI. It is impressive to see how easy it is to create extremely creative images and even videos with generative AI.

The previously high barrier to doing such a thing is almost completely gone. This technology allows organizations to create content faster and most importantly, to create much more. These can then be used on a website or social media platform at the touch of a button.

What did Adobe say about a cookieless future?

In 2024, Chrome will stop supporting 3rd party cookies. These are now often used for advertising. This is going to cause a problem for many organisations, as it will become more difficult to show ads to the right target audience. A solution to this may be to implement a Customer Data Platform.

This allows you to bring together the data that an organisation already has (which is often very fragmented across different systems) to create a complete customer profile. Customer segments can then be discovered, with appropriate marketing messages shown to each segment, across different channels. And all this taking into account the privacy preferences of the user.

What are the top AEM sites and AEM assets innovations?

In terms of AEM, Sander (MP) found the news surrounding the composable architecture and its performance particularly interesting. Not only because of the very low page load times, but also because of the user-friendly way in which content can be edited. In this setup, it is possible to publish content from documents or spreadsheets in for example; Onedrive or Google Drive directly to a website.

As for Assets, the news surrounding the new integration capabilities is very interesting. This allows AEM to be deployed as a full-fledged DAM and even integrate with 3rd party applications. These no longer need to make a copy of the images, but can extract them directly from AEM sites, providing a true single point of truth and maximum reuse.

What’s new in Campaign v8?

Adobe Campaign v8 is crafted for cross-channel marketers seeking a top-tier cloud solution for managing their campaigns across multiple channels at an enterprise scale. It empowers marketers with its comprehensive features. (ETL and data management)

The orchestration engine facilitates the creation of sophisticated multi-touch marketing programs and prioritizing batch-based driven journeys. Additionally, it is paired with a scalable real-time messaging server that enables marketing teams to effortlessly send pre-defined messages based on comprehensive payloads from any IT system. This functionality extends to various scenarios, such as password reset, order confirmation, e-receipts, and much more.

The older versions of Adobe Campaign have been powered by PostgreSQL as database engine which presented limitations when handling large-scale campaigns. However, in version 8, Adobe Campaign introduces a powerful combination of two database engines: Snowflake and PostgreSQL. This enhanced platform offers scalability and efficiently supports organizations dealing with substantial data volumes.

Highlights of Adobe Campaign v8:

• Significantly faster runtime of workflows
  
  

• Up to 200 million customer profiles
  
  

• Up to 20 million/per hour batch emails
  
  

• Up to 1 million/per hour transactional emails
  
  

• Compatible with Adobe Experience Platform (AEP)
  
  

• Managed Cloud only
  
  

• Accessible via web browser
  
  

All Things Audience with Adobe Experience Platform

Great experiences start with great audiences. Experience a revolution in creating an audience with Adobe, as they elevate the process from targeting large groups to finely-tuned micro-segments. Adobe showed an improved way of composing audiences and leveraging them among the solutions, or even external systems.

The EMEA session was presented by Wouter Van Geluwe.