Adobe Summit: Wow, did they get it right

I’ve been a designer using Adobe products since Hypercard was a thing and the Internet wasn’t. I remember a much younger me being dazzled by the infinite possibilities shown in the release video of PDF technology. PDF was going to change the industry, and it surely did. Now, in 2023, I felt the same sizzle while attending the Adobe Summit keynotes as a marketing orchestration practice lead for Slalom.

You see, Adobe had two parallel platforms, Creative Cloud (CC) for creative professionals, and Digital Experience Cloud (DX) for developers and digital marketers. Creatives would struggle to cross the vast chasm that existed between the two products, and it was nearly impossible to make the move. Until now.

Adobe finally tells a great story around the Content Supply Chain that brings together copywriters, designers, front-end developers and demand generation. The underlying technology is Adobe Workfront, a scheduling and project management software that now allows creatives the ability to design, write and edit in their favorite tools, and the changes appear automatically in the digital platform. For example, a marketing manager requests a webinar using Workfront and uploads copy, images and tags. Using Marketo’s new integrated Webinar platform, Workfront will create the program in Marketo and populate the emails, landing pages and slides.

Adobe also announced their generative AI platform called Firefly, which neatly sidesteps much of the controversy around other generative art systems like DALL-E, Midjourney, and (my fave) Stable Diffusion. Those models were based on an academic model called the LAION-400M dataset, which scraped artist portfolios and stock photography images, allowed under academic licenses. When the dataset made it’s way into commercial products, the lawsuits fly.

Adobe avoided this by training on their own vast catalog of stock images and illustration. They’ve also directly addressed artist compensation ideas that will benefit illustrators who choose to submit their work, and establishing gates to avoid displaying artist styles that opt-out. This is still in the works at Adobe, but it’s a promising sign. Adobe earns their billions off of creative professionals, so it’s in their best interest to protect their base.

Finally, I spent hours having one-on-one deep dives with product managers and experts on the latest enhancements to Marketo, Journey Optimizer, and Journey Analytics. We talked roadmap, created healthcare journeys, developed trial experiences, and built targeted offers for Venn-diagrammed audiences. I came away impressed and energized at the thoughtful product decisions that will be released over the coming months, and grateful for the Adobe-Slalom partnership.

I feel that Adobe has released product updates that tie creative professionals closely to the digital experience, and their focus on ease of workflow can solve a lot of problems for enterprise clients. Additionally, between the thoughtful Marketo updates and the latest Journey Optimizer, there is a clean path to solving scale problems for organizations that have taken their Marketo instances to the outer limits. Finally, Firefly, the generative art model can reduce tedious design tasks, and Adobe appears to release this with sensitivity and respect towards artists.

I’m very impressed.