Adobe Summit 2024: Personalization, GenStudio, and Content Supply Chain Take Center Stage

This year’s Adobe Summit exceeded our expectations as an event sponsor and as fans of the Adobe product suite and partner ecosystem. Attendance was strong, energy high, and conversations optimistic about enterprise investments in marketing process, technology, and outcomes.

While we initially had some concerns about expected attendance with the conference still trying to find the right balance in providing value to attendees paying to be there in person versus attendees remotely joining for free, Summit 2024 did not disappoint.

Here are my three takeaways from Adobe Summit 2024:

1. AI is here to give marketers and content creators superpowers, not replace them.

2. GenStudio and Edge Delivery Services democratize content creation.

3. 2024 will be the year of incremental, measurable wins for marketing.

AI is here to give marketers and content creators superpowers, not replace them.

For six hundred years, since the advent of the Gutenberg press, there have been major disruptions to content creation: the typewriter, telephone, word processor, personal computer, mobile smartphone, and a myriad of software to enable writing, photos, video, and art.

During those periods of technical revolution, laypeople and professionals reacted with a mix of fear and excitement as innovation drove changes to working practices. While I’m too young to remember, apparently “computerphobia” was a thing in the 1980s as fears of personal computing converged.

While it’s natural and sometimes prudent to fear technological change, those who view the upside and adapt often find advancements elevate their human and creative potential.

For the 12,000 or so people at Adobe Summit, most of the attendees were excited to embrace AI-enabled products like GenStudio or leverage the extensibility of Firefly. They see their superhero potential with AI as a sidekick, letting them do more with less, focus dollars and time on higher order tasks and strategies, and meet the insatiable demand for content in the digital economy.

Democratizing content creation: GenStudio and Edge Delivery Services.

The AI-enabled GenStudio digital workspace will enable business users, not just creatives, to become content creators. With relatively little training and little knowledge of Creative Cloud products, a business user can access power features to create new content, mainly images, video, and, in the future, possibly infographics (if the feature makes its way out of Adobe Sneaks). This increased content velocity appears best positioned to fuel advertising, social media, merchandising, and web content.

While GenStudio stole the show in many ways, there’s a less-noticed offering related to Adobe Experience Manager Sites (AEM Sites) that also promises to enable the democratization of content creation: Adobe Edge Delivery Services.

Edge Delivery leads with a value proposition focused on site performance. However, its new paradigm on written content management (e.g., webpages, blogs, support docs, FAQs) aims to be a game-changer in helping organizations acquire written content from all corners of an enterprise.

Edge Delivery Services allows organizations to enable content authoring in whichever authoring tool they prefer (e.g., Microsoft Word, Google Docs, Github, and many more). This is a breakthrough because it offers further opportunity to decouple content authoring from web publishing.

In the past, content writing and web publishing have often been the function of the marketing team, those who can be reasonably and practically trained in working in a traditional CMS like AEM.

In such a world, marketers will often be tasked with the following:

1. Seeking out and cornering subject matter experts (SMEs) for information so the marketer can write informed content in the appropriate format for eventual publishing to digital channels.

2. Living in copying and pasting purgatory. SMEs from different parts of an organization ship written blurbs in all styles and formats into marketing for marketing to massage, reformat, and publish to digital channels.

This is highly inefficient and a waste of marketing and enterprise resources. In the most egregious instances, enterprises will have offshore copy and paste farms where dozens of people spend their time getting content formatted ahead of digital publishing.

With AEM Edge Delivery Services, there’s an opportunity to create new content processes to acquire and update content from SMEs throughout an organization. Content consistency will improve through MS Word or Google Doc templates and governance models tied back to digital publishing, and content creation velocity can improve as SMEs on the edge are taught to utilize the GenAI tools shipping with Microsoft Word and Google Docs. Thanks to decades of use through academic education, these are authoring tools they already know how to use, so training is incremental. Furthermore, Edge Delivery is compatible with a wide range of authoring tools, with MS Word or Google Docs onto two of the popular options.

We especially see great potential for Edge Delivery’s new content management and publishing paradigm for organizations with expertise embodied in thousands of front-line employees, such as real estate firms with many agents in various locations, professional services firms with thousands of consultants, and businesses in retail, hospitality, and financial services built around franchise models.

2024 will be the year of incremental, measurable wins for marketing

Many marketers could not attend Adobe Summit 2024 because budgets are still constrained. Organizations are reeling in overspending habits developed during the frothy years behind us, and many are cautious about being low on cash should an economic downturn occur.

It’s clear from discussions at Summit that funding is flowing towards projects with demonstrable return on investment, a return period of less than one year, and a manageable risk profile.

As a result, large scale marketing and marketing technology transformation initiatives will be fewer and farther between in 2024. This presents the challenge and opportunity for consulting partners like Oshyn to help clients uncover hidden but accessible value within the organization and to better articulate the business case for process and technology investment in 2024.

Looking a little farther out, our clients and prospects at Summit are optimistic about the future. Anxiety is building among executives who know consumer and market expectations continue to elevate, and the longer transformation initiatives are shelved, the higher the hurdle required to match expectations and to compete.