Event Roundup: Adobe Summit 2021

If there is one positive thing that came out of this long and strange year, it’s the option to virtually attend events from your living room couch. We had an absolute blast attending this year’s Adobe Summit and are excited to share our event Round Up!

Didn’t have time to attend this year’s event? Check out my takeaways from two of my favorite sessions – The Power of Video, and Delivery Empathy Across All Brand Touchpoints.

The Power of Video – Jamarie Milkovic, Head of Brand Studio: Synopsys & Jennifer Griffin Smith, Chief Marketing Officer, Brightcove

Let’s face it, connections are harder today than ever before: in both our personal lives and in business. This past year, video has proven to be the most powerful medium that we have as marketers to connect with another. It allows us to monetize content, communicate & engage with our audience, and sell our products & services.

Over the last year, we’ve seen:

• 104% increase in corporate communications video views (town halls, company all hands, etc.)
• 79% growth in the use of video in retail – to position products, etc.
• 59% increase in marketing videos (social, demand gen, virtual events, brand awareness)

Traditional marketing mediums such as billboards, static ads, and emails are designed to be scanned and consumed in a matter of moments. These tried-and-true tactics are undoubtedly effective, but video provides a much larger opportunity to house a story. It allows us to create an immersive experience in which we can draw in multiple senses. As cheesy as it may sound, video is an access point to our deepest human emotions. If done well, video can help us a bridge between our brand/solution and the audience consuming our content. Think about it: We all have that favorite TV commercial or viral brand video that really resonated with us. The music, light, editing, animation, and script – it all plays into crafting a story that has the ability to connect with us on a deeper level.

Now is the time to invest in and prioritize video in our marketing efforts. If there’s one thing that lockdown has shown us, it’s that all things virtual are here to stay. Hybrid events, offering both a virtual and in-person experience, are the future as they allow us to reach many more people. Companies are investing in video experiences so that they can continue to reach their audience, regardless of location. For example, SXSW held a fully digital experience this year. If you haven’t already, now is the time to invest in a freelancer or purchase some in-house video equipment so your team can stay up with ongoing demand for video experiences.

This session wrapped up with an incredible analogy for how video can fit into our existing campaign structures: In its best execution, a campaign should act like an orchestra, each channel adding to the larger harmony. Video should be at the center of the symphony.

To watch the full session, click here.

Delivering Empathy Across All Brand Touchpoints – Peter Graf, Chief Strategy Officer, Genesys

2020 has changed customer expectations forever. As we all know, a bad customer experience has the power to completely change our opinion of a brand. One negative interaction can reshape the way we look at an entire company. And to top it all off, this past year, our experience with quarantine and lock down has changed the way we expect businesses to interact with us.

The opposite is true as well: a single great customer experience can offer huge brand value. At a time when businesses and consumers are still physically distancing, it’s more important than ever for us all to stay emotionally connected. The missing link for many brands is empathy.

Empathy means that we as brands must first listen and understand somebody before we react. Empathy delivers business value by driving trust and loyalty – and research has shown that leaders who prioritize loyalty grow revenue 2.5X faster than their peers.

To produce empathy at scale, we need to know what matters to our customers. We need to create new levels of personalization, so strong that it makes our audience feel that they are the only customer we have. This can be done by leveraging data across our companies. For example, we should never ask a customer for information we should already know. We’ve all had those experiences where we’re stuck on a phone call, getting tossed from one team to another, each time having to repeat information that we’ve already shared. This is a big no no.

The good news? Today, we can leverage advanced AI to anticipate our customer’s needs: to improve and optimize and learn so that every customer experience is improved upon. The goal is to connect the entire customer journey across marketing, sales, and service. Our teams and systems should share key customer information in order to provide a seamless experience. For example, imagine dealing with a sales rep that already has your entire history of interaction with a brand, including contact information, previous support conversations, digital purchases, campaign history, etc. Sounds pretty hassle free, right? Taking time to understand these details about our audience makes us as brands appear vastly more empathic, and in turn more trustworthy.

We should strive to take the result of every single customer interaction, understand its larger business impact and use it to make better recommendations and personalization in the future.

To watch the full session, click here.