Opening Keynote

Transcript

Hi, everyone. Welcome to 2024 Skill Exchange. I’m Monica Sharma. I’m Senior Director of Product and Strategy at Adobe for Adobe Experience Manager. And I’m super excited to see the turnout of all the experts who’ve joined us today to exchange ideas and hopefully you’ll learn something by the end of the day. So stay engaged, ask questions, and hope you have a wonderful day today. So today, I’m going to walk you through the evolution of AEM, what we are hearing from our customers, and where some of the product innovations are happening over the last few months and where we are headed. So as we announced at Summit, we are in the era of AI. And we see that the way experiences are being consumed, and hence how experiences need to be created, is a shifting landscape. And we are committed to help our brands solve for each of these shifting trends. And what we see across our customer base is that brands are now realizing that campaigns, the big C and the small C, were one way to reach their end users. But in this new world, we see a lot of end user initiated micro moments of I want to know, I want to buy, I want to compare, etc. where they need to produce that bite sized content, which is relevant to meet the demands of these end users. And secondly, the distance between the intent and the decision of these end users is shrinking. So there’s an expectation that the end users have to get the relevant content at the speed of thought at the speed of intent to drive those decisions. And any slowdown or lack in the time or the relevancy of the content really helps impact these brands. And we see our customers struggling across these in multiple ways. We see 75% of the visitors who are coming to the page only stay on the first page and leave. We also see even a two second increase in the speed of the page load impacts the bounce rate significantly. And many of the users as they’re coming in do not find the relevant content and drop off. And at the end of the day, each experience is created to drive engagement or drive conversion. And we hear that our brands and our customers are often struggling to achieve this goal in today’s fast paced evolving world of AI. And some of the scenarios that we hear from customers are around having multiple CMSs and dams which are slowing down their pace of getting and creating that winning content when needed. Ability to discover the content lying around which is winning and has worked is often in siloed and multiple repositories. Being able to have control and governance on the data. Gen AI is generating, helping marketers not just the content authors and the agencies, but the marketers also create an increasing volume of content is creating almost like a choke point in the content supply chain process. Delivering those experiences in a fast, engaging, interactive manner to drive those engagements and conversions is yet another area. So while content creation through Gen AI maybe is getting simpler, there are all these downstream content supply chain scenarios and issues which are hurting brands to really step up their game and meet these evolving trends that we talked about. And we see our customers across multiple types of deployment patterns, single brand or single brand multi-region, multi-brand, multi resellers like the retailers who are creating content for distribution across multiple downstream resellers, multi agencies, and of course the e-commerce store funds. We’re all struggling with some of these challenges around understanding how the content is coming in, how the metadata is being put to drive automation and intelligence of finding effective winning content. How do you create relevant modular content to reuse across omni channels in a consistent manner? How do you provide a single source to activate to preview before you send it out across your channels for a campaign? And how do you ensure that these experiences are being performant and are generating that traffic and engagement that we all desire for? And this is where AEM has been playing a significant role and evolving in its innovation to drive and enable brands to unlock creation of that winning content, to accelerate the activation of that content across multiple channels, surfaces, campaigns, personas, tools, and being an offering capabilities in a data-driven manner to optimize the content that’s created so that it’s relevant across the channels, across various surfaces where the end users are having those touch points with the brands. And we see success stories across our customers on how AEM is helping these brands improve. We’ve seen improvement in organic traffic with Hanes, improvement in average time spent on page with Meritiv, and the lead creation with Danaher. In addition, we are not only helping brands improve the velocity at which they can launch effective relevant content, but also the speed of how they are testing and iterating on what does relevant content mean, which has always been a struggle given the multiple teams and personas and tools involved. And we have some amazing success stories of how shifting from five variants in 12 weeks that a company could test, they are now able to test 63 variants in two weeks and really improve some of these outcomes that these experiences are expected to deliver. All right, so let’s talk about how AEM can help customers through the process of content supply chain help overcome some of these hurdles. And Adobe defines content supply chain in each of these five areas, and we’ll walk you through how AEM has been innovating over the last six months and continues to innovate and what’s coming ahead across these areas. So we’ll use this as a framing, and let’s start with how a customer would actually start their journey of the content supply chain of finding the content through Content Hub, and we’ll walk through each of these areas of innovations to give you a preview. Finding the content, let’s say you’re starting out with a campaign, you’re a marketer or a content author. How do you find the content and assets that already exist that are relevant to the campaign that you’re starting to launch and starting to build out? And one of the innovations that we’ve launched in the last month is Content Hub, and I’m super excited about this. And within a month, we’ve seen multiple users use it very effectively and to be able to find that winning content, reduce the time to find ability, improve reusability of content that is sitting fragmented across the silos in their organization. And this is, we have a lot of more innovations in this area, so I encourage you to test it out and stay engaged on Content Hub. This also showcases integration with Adobe Express, which allows authors as well as any agencies who are using to be able to leverage Adobe Express in order to make real time and last minute changes to their assets or content in the flow natively within Content Hub. And again, throughout this presentation, you’ll see me highlight some of the North Star metrics for that we are working as I talked about earlier. How do we bring that agility? How do we improve that speed of shipping and launching content? And secondly, how do we make sure that that content is more relevant and closer to what will land with the brand’s customers? And so this will really help the audience not only improve the agility, but also fine tune and make those changes in context across a multitude of authors downstream, not just the content authors, but the marketers, but the agencies, the resellers who can have now access to a central, simplified way to access the content. The next area which is pretty exciting and leverages Gen AI is our generative discovery capability that is being worked on. And this is where it goes back to how do we enable brands to increase the relevance of the content and improve the speed of discovery when a user or a visitor comes to your site. And we’ve given this demo of Pet Place in interest of time. This is available on summit page if you’re interested. And what I’ll walk you through here is really the ability of how somebody can imagine a user coming to your site and looking for a very specific piece of information, and they enter it in your search. And instead of providing them all the blue links, which may or may not cover in this today’s world of generative AI, we can take the information on your site and curate and provide targeted relevant content that this user is looking for at the speed of thought and at the speed of intent. And this is also reflecting a shift in how content is going to be consumed, where people are not going to go discover things across your sites and brands, but want the content to be fed to them at the moment of thought. Again, leveraging Gen AI to improve the velocity and the relevance of the content that we can enable brands to deliver. As marketers and content authors and stakeholders are thinking about creating the content, ensuring it’s relevant and getting it out of the door and the pace of this is increasing day by day, how do you ensure that the inefficiencies that exist in the system can be eliminated and those friction points can be identified and eliminated. And one of the areas of innovation you’ll see here is AEM working very closely with our partner product work front to be integrated into the overall campaign workflows. Where once you decide that there is new content that needs to be created for a campaign, how do you communicate the tasks to the content author? How do you ensure that the back and forth that has been happening through emails, through slacks and shipping images in emails can all be just done with a click of a button. And so as part of the authoring experience, as part of managing the tasks for the content author, as part of the review and approval and the publication, we are doing tighter integrations with work front to unlock and remove, to unlock that agility and remove those fine points of friction that multiple authors and collaborators face to create the content and get it out of the door in a timely fashion. So super excited. This is, we expect 30% or more efficiency improvement in the creation of campaign and publishing the landing pages associated with it. In terms of the user experience, you know, this is a quick screenshot since I don’t have time for demo to be able to, that shows how you will see in the universal editor sidebar, which is the work management bar that will enable any and every content author to be able to track their tasks, track it in context of the campaigns, send them out for review and approval and get that workflow in context without leaving the tool and we’re meeting them where they are. So super excited about this. Stay tuned and hope you get to participate in our early access program around it. Moving on, as brands are thinking about how do you, okay, we’ve found the assets, we’ve, you know, worked with our collaborators to publish it. How do you build engaging and interactive content? And in today’s world, you know, I don’t like filling up forms and I’m sure many of you don’t. And this is another area that we see brands are increasingly shifting towards a more conversational style and interactive style of engaging with their visitors and end users. And so our mission here is to help the brands in simplifying and automating the creation of these interactive experiences through automated and Gen AI powered form creations in the form of conversations. And then secondly, also enable the end users to have a more interactive conversational style of filling these forms in a very adaptive manner, leveraging Gen AI resulting in at least 20% or more customer acquisition and not seeing that drop off of customers as soon as they see a form that they have to be filled. So again, a very exciting capability in tune to drive engagement of end users by the brands. Moving on, we are also making significant investments and innovations in our authoring and editing capabilities, especially tied with our edge delivery services that we had launched. And no content author are the same and no processes are the same across organizations. There’s always some nuances on who is editing and what their skill levels are. And one of the things we are realizing in today’s world is we need to empower every persona involved in that content supply chain to become that creative and unleash that creativity and ensure that they have the ability to author content. And so we offer a multitude of authoring services from content fragments to experience fragments to headless authoring for developers to push into their react apps, and also marketers through the use of the tools they use today like words and excels to be able to write down the content that comes in their mind, or take existing content and edit it in the tools of their choice. And so what you see here is really the ability for us to offer a different set, a multitude set of capabilities to meet the needs of different authoring skill levels and preferences across our customer base, and hope we encourage you to try out these different services and provide us feedback in the next campaign that you’re trying. As I talked about archetypes earlier, we also see patterns where there are multiple brands associated with a company or there is a single brand, but there are multiple regions that the brand has where content needs to be updated for a campaign. And how do you orchestrate this kind of a multi-brand or multi-region deployment of content for a given campaign or for an ongoing basis making updates to your content? This is again an area where AEM shines and is leveraged by many, many Fortune 500 companies to achieve these site factory kind of use cases. And the other thing that we are adding is the ability to do this with these multitude of authoring services to unlock and empower different personas and authors to be able to update that content. Moving on, another very exciting innovation that AEM team is working on is the experimentation and acquisition. Again, going back to the two North Star metrics of improving the content agility and building those relevant content experiences that will drive engagement and drive conversion. This is often an area we find several of our customers are struggling. And while AEM may be deployed by the IT side of the house or the martic side of the house, we also see the need for the business owner to influence and bring in changes to the content either to optimize for SEO or to optimize for content to drive that engagement forward. And today in many of the organizations, this connection is broken or is less efficient. And how do we enable brands to unlock that agility to drive more experimentation? And the more they experiment, the better results they can get. And this is an area that I’m super excited that AEM is investing in, in helping brands to generate those variants using Gen AI at a much faster rate. And I shared a number earlier. One of the brands went from doing five experiments in 12 weeks to 63 experiments in two weeks. That’s mind boggling. And the uplift in the revenue has been significant in millions of dollars. And so this is a very encouraging and exciting area that we see that we can help our customers unlock using the power of generative AI to generate those various variants and remove the friction to try them out in the real world. Another area we see a lot of innovation happening and demand from customers where we’ve made our customers successful is the ability to, right after they go live, the ability to ensure that their sites are up and meeting the bar to get the green lighthouse score from Google. And there are multiple, often sites have multiple SEO limiting issues, which we can now identify and have helped many, many brands to really get over that hump of several weeks of optimizing the tech SEO issues to get to that effective content and effective speed for search engines to rank them higher as users are looking for information. Another very exciting area of innovation for AEM that’s happening that I encourage you to stay in touch with. All right, moving on another very exciting area of AEM is the dynamic media templates. And we often hear from customers that as the content is shipped out, there is often a need to get real time signals from how the either the product or the PDP page or the content is being perceived and brands want to make last minute changes to the content. Brands want to make changes in the discount offers that they have for their customers. Brands want to do customizations, which are at the level of a region or level of a country or at a particular time during the seasonal cycle where they see that they can drive more traffic, but they cannot incur the overhead of going back to the content team and going back to the review process to make that happen. So how do we short circuit that? And that’s really this exciting feature that several of our customers are deriving immense value is the dynamic media templates where you can take an image and you can templatize it. You can add rules and change those rules to drive change in the content that is published and is already live. And these templates enable you to change, for example, your discount from 13% to 20%. If you need to up that, or if you’re seeing the already getting a lot of traffic, reduce the discount from 20% to 5% and continue to test out your hypotheses to drive again more engagement and more conversions. Very exciting feature and encourage you to try that out. And then lastly, I want to touch upon our integration with the journey optimizer. And as we are seeing, right, the customers do not have just one touch point with the brand. They are, it’s a whole journey and our sister product Adobe journey optimizer, one of the best products in the industry to help you define those journeys and orchestrate to keep that engagement across the journey of end user with the brand. And again, the question is, how do you, how do you, how do we enable brands to create the relevant content to support this journey that end users have with the brand? And so in, in Adobe journey optimizer, um, dumbed AJ on this slide, you’ll see the ability for the automation specialist to choose the right content and the template. Uh, and we, we are now providing deeper and more native integration so that the relevant content fragments can be selected and in the future recommended, um, for a given campaign or for a given channel, um, with the relevant automations at this point of activation. Um, again, very, you know, exciting integration between AM and journey optimizer to unlock that agility and the speed of delivering personalized content relevant content with channel specific needs in an automated manner. So I like to pause there and really take a moment to reflect that, uh, as you see, you know, our mission is to support our customers and as in the shifting world of, of AI, we definitely see a shift in how experiences are being consumed and how they need to be created. And we are really keeping up with that wave and unlocking the ability for the brands to create those winning experiences, to activate them across their channels, and then to optimize them to drive that engagement, drive the traffic and drive the conversions. So I hope you enjoy the 2024 Skill Exchange program today for AM. I hope you can connect, elevate and transform how you become the experts and building these winning experiences for your brands going forward. Thank you.