At The Star hotel on Darling Harbour in Sydney, Australia, Paul Robson, president of Adobe Asia Pacific, welcomed 1,500 attendees to the 2014 Digital Marketing Symposium Tuesday morning. He noted that attendance has tripled from only two years ago, making this symposium “the largest digital marketing event in Australia.”
Adobe president and CEO Shantanu Narayen then took the stage. He began by telling the audience what he immediately noticed about the region: that it is “not just mobile-first, but mobile-only,” referring to the high use of broadband mobile devices here.
“The common thread for all of us,” he continued, “is a focus on innovation. We are jointly working on reinvention and transformation with you.” This is all about bringing together creative invention and digital impact, according to Narayen, “and the magic happens when you bring those two clouds together.”
Today, he observed, digital marketing is an ever-changing landscape, in which “success will come to those who are singularly focused on bringing it all together for the customer—those who best reimagine the customer journey” in a time when tolerance for bad experiences is low and expectations are high. In order to deliver on this kind of transformation, however, companies must transform themselves into “real-time digital enterprises,” which fuels demand for next-generation technology.
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| Adobe's CEO Shantanu Narayen addresses the audience at the Digital Marketing Symposium in Sydney. |
But technology, alone, is not enough, he warned. It’s also necessary to “listen to the voice of the customer, break down internal silos, and use creativity to express ideas. Creativity is the center of the real-time enterprise, and reinvention of the business in this way requires us to reinvent ourselves. This, of course, requires risk, but the rewards are great.”
Narayen was followed on stage by Adobe’s John Mellor, VP of strategy and business development, who picked up on the theme of reinvention by noting that today’s digital world turns our profession as marketers into an “entirely different game.” Mellor observed that this has created a world in which consumers “demand that brands give us what we want, on any device we want, when we want it.” These technology advances, he said, have forever changed us as consumers.
Mellor explained that all of this digital disruption revolves around what he called “the three Ps”: people, process, and product. Yet while processes must change in this new digital world, and marketers have to determine what the right products are for them to succeed, “the No. 1 research finding for us is that people are the real issue—there are not enough of the right ones” who have the new analytics and other nontraditional marketing skills needed today.
Coming full circle, Mellor concluded that mobile is going to become an even bigger part of all digital marketing in the future because “mobile is how we, the consumers, live and work today.”
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