Our team was on the ground at Summit, learning about the latest innovations from Adobe and how marketers need to lead the transformation of creating an experience-led business.

Michael Porter, managing principal of Perficient’s strategic advisors, was among the team members at Summit, and he shares his perspective on the top three takeaways from the event.

What experiences or technologies at Adobe Summit impressed you the most?

He started out with a couple polls, most of the attendees basically love the intellectual stimulation so obviously there were a bunch of data geeks involved.

What’s the end goal?

In ascending order

1. Data exploration
2. Data visualization
3. Insights
4. Action (there is a key chasm between insights and action)
5. Automated action
6. Results

Some of the questions to ask: what, who, why and then so what.

Quote: What got you here won’t get you where you want to go

Quote: Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication (Leanardo DaVinci)  You have to keep your data explanations  as simple as possible.

Key best practice: Communicate visually. A picture is worth a thousand words.  Use them to better relay key concepts. He showed several examples including some bar charts of pencils.  But the key is to tell a story with the data and visuals.

The same goes for infographics.  You can use various stock photography libraries to make your own infographics.

Best practice: Tell me what to think.  Don’t just throw data at it.  Add a little color to highlight things people should see.

• Good things are green and bad are red btw.
• Label the outliers.  you see a peak or a dip, highlight that it was “Memorial Day”
• Show benchmarks for context.
• Avoid the mistake of now showing bad results
• Include goals in charts.  Show what you want to achieve vs what you achieved
• Show a trended view, not just a point in time.
  • Can also show a trend vs target

Best Practice: Align to your corporate objectives.  Then measure yourself in those terms.

Best Practice: Use composite metrics.  Composite metrics is a combination or index of things with an average.  Nasdaq composite, Dow Jones Index, Quarterback ratings, etc.

Chris George, VP Product Marketing at Pop Sugar

Pop Sugar is a media and technology company that caters to 18-35 year old women.  Popsugar.com and shopstyle.com.  Mobile is hitting them in a big way.  Over 70% of visits come from a mobile device.  It’s really hard to create ads for mobile.   That means they are putting a lot of investment in content marketing (easier on mobile) vs display advertising (banner).

Problem: Marketers are not content creators.

Pop Sugar is focused on using data to identify places to focus on content.   To that end, they’ve tried very hard to define key content metrics like social sharing.  They created a composite metric: the POPSUGAR engagement score: composits of vists, time spent, social score.  They then plot the composite score over time.   You can then use that data to define what content will have the most relevance to a brand or company.

End result: Data helps you focus on what content will have the most impact.

Questions for evaluating your game:

1. Are you good at recognizing patterns and breaks in patterns?
2. Are you better known for the insights you discover or for your ideas or for acting on them?
3. Are you good at advocating for your ideas?
4. When someone asks the wrong question, do you answer the question they should have asked?
5. Do you tend to look for the story in the data of for the data to support your story?

Note: this is less about your technical skills and more about just getting the right answers and acting on them.

“I can’t live without my… [fill in the blank].”

Many of us might answer smartphone, tablet, eReader, or wearable device (like our smartwatches or FitBits). This rampant proliferation of technology has opened our eyes to the possibilities of customer engagement.

It’s no wonder that capitalizing on analytics is a top priority for marketers. According to a recent Forbes article:

• 89% of marketers have predictive analytics on their roadmap for 2016
• 49% use predictive analytics today
• 40% plan to implement analytics in the next 12 months

In our interview series with Robert Sumner, principal of Perficient’s Adobe practice, we talked about the path to personalization and the challenges of implementing a personalization strategy.

However, the insights gained from analytics make it possible to create engaging, personalized experiences. Sumner shares his perspective on analytics:

No matter where you are on your digital marketing journey, we’re ready to help you navigate your transformation. Come chat with our team in booth #530 at Adobe Summit, March 20-24, 2016. You can also follow members of the Perficient team on Twitter during the event, @PRFTDigitalTech.

Question: When did you say you could have a profession in number and stats?

I don’t know when really but I took a boring consulting job right out of college.  In my spare time I started working on a program to forecast how baseball players would do.  I think KPMG technically owns everything I do still. (audience laugh after pregnant pause…..)

Question: (roll Charles Barclay video on his anti-analytics riff)  What do say to that riff?

Charles is a really smart guy actually but it’s pretty much total BS what he said.  Houston Rockets are run by an MIT grad. The spurs are analytics driven. The best teams in the NBA use analytics.  We can now measure how good or lazy people are on defense.  (How far someone runs during a game is the stat)

Question: Let’s talk baseball. Is there a difference between how teams use data or is it the new norm?

There is an aspect of adverse selection for the teams that don’t use analytics.  It’s gone from an open source kind of thing to being behind closed doors. (kind of a shame really)  All but two or three teams list an analyst in the front office.

Question: Is the NBA harder or is the data set different than baseball?

Baseball is a weird sport because people take their turn.  When modeling interactions between players like in the NBA things become more challenging. There is pretty good data though. The NBA is at the peak of growth for this now.  In the sports analytics world basketball is the most exciting?

Question: What about soccer?

There is huge money in soccer.  Munich is doing analytics. Others are throwing millions at players.  Soccer is seeing a lot of growth. They used to only keep track of goals and red cards. But now they are looking at a lot more in crosses, touches, tackles, etc.

Question: Another area where you came to the fore is politics.  What is the difference with politics?

I think politics is different for a lot of reasons. You don’t have the competition you have in sports.  Politics is about how the media talks about it.  If you actually look at polls, the public is a lot more chill than the media.  They focus on pretty basic stuff. The media will accentuate the outliers.  An Obama poll showing him winning in Utah would get all the media attention.

Question: What were the polls missing?

The polls were fine. The people couldn’t read the polls correctly. When you have so much data like you have now, it’s hard to read.  The majority of polls showed Obama in the lead in the last month.  It was a pretty basic thing. Look at polls in swing states, take an average and you saw the result.

Question: How do you see this shaping up?

One of the things about prediction is that you can make a decent prediction in the short term but it becomes a lot more fuzzy the further out you predict.  All the indicators show a really close election in 2016.  To a first approximation it’s close. Hillary seems reasonably safe in a Democratic primary.

Question: You are also an entrepreneur. One thing you have to do is how to communicate the data.  How do you and your colleagues do that?

The first part of it is to understand the question. We are trying to avoid putting three unrelated items together.  We are doing basic techniques and then communicate it.  If you can’t communicate the method then you missed.  He used an example of an academic paper with bad writing that can obscure brilliant insights.

Question: So, if you don’t know your data then you should be a poor writer?

We want our writers to know their subject and data really well. We try to reverse the shouting and screaming when people don’t know their topic.

Question: What can people take away from your approach?

It’s about asking the right questions. We use some Adobe products to understand how our site is performing. We may not be using the right measure.  We want to measure according to business objectives to get out of the short term.  It used to be we had really great way to measure offense but really poor ways of measuring defense. Billy Bean’s teams started with poor defense.  As he measured better, his teams defense got a lot better.

This stuff takes time vs a quick fix.

Creating a dynamic platform to support global digital marketing programs? PwC and USG developed a strategic plan and roadmap to deliver an integrated solution that enables local markets to take advantage of the global investment, from digital asset management, assets and product data, to developing country-specific workflows, while also ensuring brand compliance and consistent analytics and measurement. This scalable, Adobe Marketing Cloud based solution provides USG with the framework to target its marketing and optimize experience based on real-time data. Learn how USG and PwC collaborated to develop a cloud-based platform based on Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Analytics and Adobe Tag Manager, and DAM. In this session: – Learn how starting with a Mobile First mentality drove the experience design – Discuss global analytics dashboards – Explore marketing automation platform integration, and hear how USG is leveraging the platform for their employee intranet This session is for digital marketers.

Data

• 50 billion connected devices by 202
• 2X the E7 GDP will double
• Gartner by 2017 the CMO will spend more on IT than the CIO
• eMarketer – just under 40% of marketing big data spending will go to software investment

USG is a building manufacturer. They had a large impact in the recent downturn and needed to deal with that plus making changes in how the company dealt with the market.  They had a lot of challenges including an outdated site, outdated technology, no clear user experience, no analytics or decent benchmarks. On top of that they were in the midst of going global

The old site was a bunch of links focused on their products and not much. It had little valuable information.

What did they do?

It started with user research

• Interviews
• Personas
• customer journey
• Industry research
• full technical and architecture analsysis
• Better metrics and a plan for metrics

The deliverables was a scorecard and a roadmap on moving forward.  They used the term “insights” that would drive a more valuable experience

1. Organization of content was needed
   1. Search vs browse. Needed to support both
2. Must focus on the user experience
   1. Mobile first philosophy
   2. Data rules with key analytics
   3. Structure that scales

The customer journey

One key focus was on supporting the customer journey with the focus on the four sub-principles.  USG chose Adobe Experience Platform and other tools.

Search vs browse:

had to support both.  Purposeful navigators and inspired explorers both needed to be supported.  Insights came as they looked at the web analytics with a lot of site failures.

The home page is now much simplified. Search is now predictive and allows for search by item and form numbers.  The search results are very clean with an easy to use “add to submittal” feature

Mobile First

It’s a Philosophy of designing for mobile interfaces first and then for more rich interface, add to it.

Data

They built a set of customized dashboards to get actionable insights using Site Catalyst.  It allowed for more detailed dashboards to see what was working and what was not.   They could view by market (Mexico vs USA) and by a lot of other filters.

Structure that Scales

They started with the simple stuff like templates and web analytics and move on to features like countries, languages, intranet.

• Consistent branding across the world. May change colors but other features in the theme remain the same
• Developer a product wizard to create a uniform product page that fits that structure that scales mantra
• Pulled in 10,000 digital assets localized through the tag manager
• Wanted to use Adobe Cloud for intranet and campaign
• Intranet
  • Unified security
  • Reuse of the tool
  • Social connections and commenting on articles
  • Team publishing and collaboration
• Support for microsites like Team USA that went live during the Sochi Olympics

Getting It Done

• Multi-phase plans
• Agile appraoch
• Parallel development teams
• 7 total iterations over 12 months
• Rebranding with the Olympics
• Included changes to design based on market changes

Results

• 153% increase in useage
• exit rate down by 5%
• 15% increase in return to site
• 16% increase in product page views
• 76% more page views
• 13% decrease in home page bounce rate

USG now has a a rocket ship prepped for future changes with a great view on the digital experience of their users.