1. Ad Wearout – prevent consumers from hitting “unsubscribe”
2. X Attribution – track conversions throughout the journey
3. Adaptive Store – personal shopping that integrates mobile & retail

What technologies did you see at Summit this week that impressed you?

The Marketing Cloud will support mobile app assets.  It’s part of the unified digital assets services within the cloud.

• This new functionality lets you connect Phone Gap apps to the apps that are in the Marketing Cloud
• Showed the list of Audi apps
• Showed the Audi car configurator app which allowed the presenter to download and install the app directly to his phone.  Note: this was an app in production.
  • This process used to take days to get a dev app to someone’s phones
• Showed the app on multiple devices
• Really cool: He made one change to an existing app in the app store on the marketing cloud.  That change was pushed out to all the other devices in a real time manner.
  • I’m partially sold on their mobile approach
• The store integrates web analytics and campaign reporting info
  • Who downloads it
  • who launches
  • how it’s used
  • how campaigns worked
  • etc.

Audi GM of Digital Strategy and Technology Jeff Titus

Note: The demo used many different Audi apps.

Audi recognizes that the entire digital experience of our brand is important.  You need to relate to customers on their own terms.  You bring a good experience where they are.  Audi City is a virtual showroom that allows you to be very interactive.  In the show room, you work with a hi-res digital interface in very large screens.   Imagine building the car of your dreams and available in a larger than life experience at the dealership.   You get to pickup where the customer left off when they reach the show room floor.

Technology in the car

• Recognize that people have their devices and their own unique expectations
• Picture navigation in the new A3
• Facebook availalble but not while driving
• Google maps navigation now part of the experience
• Want to bring the technologies that make sense in the lifestyle of the customer

The Audi A3 is geared towards Millennials. It will have a plugin hybrid version in 2013.

Continuous Delivery as a process.  To Audi it’s a revolution.  A developer commits an idea through a deployment pipeline through a series of automated tests.  Shaping the requirements you have in a way that can be actionable and can be turned into a series of tests.  If you can do this, it will save you a lot of money and a lot of time.   It’s a change. It’s a revolution.  Audi is practicing it on a daily basis.

Julie Bornstein,  CMO of Sephora

What have you seen change over time: from threat to brick and mortar stores to digital being a weapon.  Originally the internet was a one way street.  The stores would get feedback but not the sites.  Now, they have much more information and feedback online.  It’s much more complex than it used to be.  It’s no longer just an e-commerce site.
Sephora uses a mobile app to serve as a bridge between online and the store.  It tracks past purchases, lets you read reviews when in a store, gives you the customer card, and sets up opportunities for more mobile interactions.  The Color IQ section in the iPad gives some education. The iPad is also avaiallble in the store.  QR codes work as well.

How does the organization help or hinder the digital process? In the last two years, they’ve realized what a critical asset it is.  They brought in an amazing technology team to do this.  They start with a consumer experience and then user their technical partner. The investment in the team has made them an asset.

Quote: The CIO is my best friend.

Julie also noted the cross channel campaigns in stores, print, and online.  She is excited to use the Adobe tools as the continue down this path.

What advice do you give: There are three really interesting trends

1. Globalization- Korean pop star creates a YouTube video and a week later boys in CA are singing it.  It makes a lot of the differences irrelevant to the consumer.  Skin care trends in China can come to the US very quickly
2. Personalization –
3. Content – the idea that content and commerce are coming together. The power of the consumer experience in any channel has become more important.

This study highlights some important data about mobile usage, including the following:

• Tablets have overtaken phones in the amount of traffic they drive. Think about that. Modern tablets were introduced in 2010. In just 2+ years, they have taken over smartphone traffic.
• In the Retail industry, tablets are preferred, while in Telecom phones are preferred by a wide margin.
• Since February 2012, iOS has overtaken Android (again) for browsing
• Video has grown by 300% on mobile devices, however, the desktop still accounts for almost 90% of video browsing.
• For online shoppers, tablet users are 3 times more likely to buy versus smartphone users.

This is all good data for those people who are targeting mobile devices.  I’m looking forward to more of these types of studies from Adobe.

Gartner sees many vendors, such as IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle expanding more and more into the Suite side of the market.  There are also emerging vendors in Suite side, including Adobe and Cisco.  On the lean side, we see vendors such as Liferay, Backbase, Drupal and DotNetNuke.

One of the key points I got out of Gene’s talk is to understand the ethos, or character, of the various vendor products.  Gene offers the following ethos for each vendor.

• Vendor -> Ethos
• Adobe -> Customer
• Cisco -> Collaboration
• IBM -> Customer; Employee
• Oracle -> Business Apps/Process
• MS -> Collaboration
• SAP -> Business Apps/Process

The ethos doesn’t mean that a vendor can’t play in another space, but it may be more challenging.

Gene offers the follow strategies to address UXP in the future:

• Take inventory of portal and portal-like technologies and efforts in your enterprise
• Establish governance early, including processes, teams and executive sponsorship
• Improve design processes as precursor to UXP adoption
• Gather Feedback from stakeholders
• Capitalize on widget and gadget integration via RESTful approaches
• Plan for an onslaught of mobile requirements
• Verify Alignment with Portal Vendor strategies
• Devise a framework and establish standards to address ongoing portal and UXP initiatives.
• Look at new sourcing strategies: buy  vs build vs hosting vs cloud

I asked about how Web Content Management vendors play in the UXP arena.  Gene responded that Personalization is really at the heart of a UXP.  Personalization is something portals do very well.  If you have a content management system that also does a good job of personalization, then that could be the basis of an excellent UXP platform.  See Adobe for an excellent example.  He thinks, and I agree, that we will see Web Content Management vendors becoming players in the UXP market.

First, Adobe purchased PhoneGap late in 2011 and has incorporated that tool into CQ5.5.  While in the past you could target CQ5 for multiple devices, with the inclusion of PhoneGap, CQ5.5 will take mobile to new heights.  In the demo, Adobe showed how easy it is to drop a camera widget on the mobile page and then preview the exact functionality via the device’s emulator.  So as you are building the mobile site, you can instantly see how each device will exactly render the page.

A second really nice feature is the Client Context view of your site.  Here you can open the site with a context viewer to see how the pages will look to various audiences.  In the context viewer, you can adjust user attributes to see how the page reacts.  You can click on a location in a map and the page will display based on that locale.  You can click on different devices and see how your page looks in that context.  This provides a great way to experiment visually with personalization rules.

Adobe is now including translations of your page into multiple languages.  For example, you can create a page in English, then click on the icon for French and have the page translated directly.  Translations can be configured to use Google Translation as the engine or you can integrate others.

One final new feature I like is the inclusion of Adobe Bridge.  This allows editors to seamlessly manage digital assets in CQ5.5 and keep them in-sync with other media efforts.  So from CQ5.5 you can open an image from the library, make changes to it through Photoshop and save the changes.  Or somebody on your creative team can make changes to an image in the digital asset library. Those changes immediately appear in CQ5.5 and then can be workflowed prior to publishing to the site.  Likewise, content and images used to generate brochures from inDesign can be reused in CQ5.5 directly.   The goal is to reduce the pain often associated with trying to sync the creative department with the web management team.

It will be exciting to see what else is coming in Adobe CQ5.5.

What is interesting is that the report includes only those companies that have native applications on multiple mobile operating systems and have some sort of cloud-based solution.  Naturally this criteria is going to leave some companies out, like Apple, Microsoft, and RIM who target apps for one mobile OS.

The applications included in this Wave are somewhat of a melting pot.  Adobe’s Connect application is a leader and delivers web-based conferencing.  Comparing that application to Yammer, also a leader but more of a corporate-friendly Facebook, is kind of hard.  Box.com is a file sharing and synchronizing application which is completely different than Connect or Yammer.

Still, the collaboration space is a very broad market consisting of a variety of application types.  It is good to see an evaluation of these different companies not based just on the product they deliver, but on many other factors, such as strategy and market presence.

Forrester rates the leaders in these categories as follows:

• Current Offerings: Box, IBM, and Yammer
• Strategy: Skype, Box, Cisco, and Yammer
• Market Presence: Skype, Cisco, and Google

If you don’t have access to Forrester.com, you can read a quick review of this Wave on CMS Wire here.

Well, two products are trying to help with build once, deploy anywhere: Adobe Flash Builder and IBM Web Experience Factory.  These tools are targeted toward different kinds of developers, but they both have features that ‘easily’ target multiple devices.

Pick iOS in Flash Builder 4

Adobe Flash Builder:  I understand that it is not widely known that Flash Builder will let you build native iOS applications, in addition to Flash and Flex applications.  Holly Shinsky, @devgirlFL, explains how easy it is to use Flash Builder to create iOS applications using Flex/Air, both from Adobe.  Here is a link to the article on her blog:  Flex/AIR for iOS Development Process.

As you can see the image to the right, Apple iOS and Google Android applications can be generated right out of Flash Builder.  Of course, you can’t deploy Flash applications to the iPhone, but Flex applications work fine.

IBM Web Experience Factory:  IBM has just released Web Experience Factory Version 7.0.1.  (Web Experience Factory used to be called Portlet Factory, but since it does so much more than build portlets, IBM wisely changed its name.)    Web Experience Factory now includes Mobile and Multi-Channel support.  This allows you to build one application and deploy it to Portal, WebSphere Application Server and now mobile devices.  Here is a link to the announcement where you can get more details.

Applications built by Web Experience Factory are not native applications, but are web browser based.  Support for mobile devices includes two new, cool features though.  First, Factory uses its Profiling feature to allow you to target various devices in one code base.  By enabling the mobile UI features, your application will tailor itself to various mobile devices, including iOS and Android.  This video shows you how you can build a muli channel application using Facotry: Build multi-channel application in 13 minutes.

The second new feature in Web Experience Factory is the support for many device specific features such as Geolocation, selectable lists, phone numbers, etc.

You can access videos about Web Experience Factory here.

In the following video, Going Moble on Adobe CQ5 ,you get to see how CQ5 lets you view your page on many different mobile devices, which a lot of other vendors offer.  Something I think is more unique to Adobe is that CQ5 let’s you edit the page right in the emulated mobile device, so you can see exactly what happens as you make the changes. 

The image to the right shows the user editing a title on a page destined for a mobile device.  Editing the page right on the emulated device lets you experiment with what works best without the crazy edit/preview cycle in so many other systems.  What you see in the video is that you can edit the image right there as well.

Another nice feature of CQ5 is that you can tailor a page for a mobile device, but also share contents on that page with other devices.  Through a mechanism they call inheritance, you can have a mobile page inherit contents from a regular web page, and then just alter parts of the mobile page.  This helps when the image on the page has to change for the mobile device, but everything else stays the same.  With inheritance, as the page content changes on the web, it will get reflected in the mobile version, but the image will be overridden.

CQ5 also lets you build native applications for various devices, including Android and iOS.  As a developer, CQ5 will let you take advantage of the capabilities of each mobile device to sync content from the web site to the mobile device.

Finally, if you are an iPad user, CQ5 has an optimized authoring tool to allow you to preview and approve content right from your iPad.

The only concern to have with all the MEAP tools is that it’s still the wild west in the mobile development world.   Competing standards, tools, and vendors make it hard to see who the winner will be.  Regardless, Adobe already has a strong start using tools creative designers around the world already know and love.

Anyway, check out eWeek to see examples and descriptions of mobile sites that use Adobe Flash to deliver.

Conqu by AsFusion uses Adobe to repurpose a legacy site to mobile

Netflix Queue Manager by UnitedMindset brings Netflix to you

Anyway, eWeek has a slideshow on the the hottest projects Adobe has in the works.   I’m not sure I completely agree since they completely leave out Day and Omniture but it’s still an interesting read.