A better way to innovate: Inside the Adobe Marketing Summit

Walter Levitt is not funny – seated before a standing-room crowd at the Adobe Marketing Summit, he wants that fact to be abundantly clear.

He does, however, work with the funniest people on the planet. And in doing so, the CMO has transformed Comedy Central from television channel to comedy brand.

How?

Levitt says its no secret that millennials are the biggest audience for comedy, so much so that data indicates “taste in comedy” is one of the most important factors in shaping millennial identity.

But reaching the millennial audience has required stepping outside the framework of traditional television.

“We need to be the favorite comedy brand anywhere millennials want to laugh,” Levitt says. And that’s why Comedy Central adapted its content for social media and over-the-top streaming platforms.

“When something is funny, you share it on social media and your friends think you’re cool and funny for finding that content. It’s social currency,” he says.

Levitt’s work isn’t just about using new channels to find his brand’s audience – it’s also about being data smart to create promotional content.

The introduction of Trevor Noah, the new host of The Daily Show, is the first example to come to Levitt’s mind. After announcing Noah as the replacement for TV legend, Jon Stewart (a task Levitt calls “one of the scariest of coolest opportunities of my career”), the marketing team at Comedy Central started noticing something peculiar.

In addition to run-of-the-mill Google search queries like, “who is Trevor Noah?,” search data revealed more nuanced – and hilarious – queries like “Trevor Noah girlfriend” and “Trevor Noah single”.

It became clear to Levitt and team that this data could help them create an in-depth, digital-first way for Noah to introduce himself to the Internet, and set the record straight on their most burning questions.

What followed was a series of 30 unlisted YouTube videos, starring Noah, which could only be found when users entered precise search terms. Each video featured Noah hilariously providing answers to even the most trivial of questions – and the campaign went gangbusters.

Levitt says that comedy is driven by a core idea that’s trying to be ahead of the data – trying to be the next big searchable term. But from a marketing perspective, it’s the exact opposite.

“From a marketing perspective, we don’t start a campaign until we’ve looked at the data,” he says. “What do we have? What do we know? We always start there, and that drives a ton of our decision-making.”

So, no: Walter Levitt is not funny. But knowing now how he uses data to create hilarious content, maybe that’s a good thing. 

Shantanu Narayen walks onto the stage like a rock star, accompanied by a heart-palpitating audio-visual experience projected on the stage behind him and two massive screens visible from every angle of the exhibition room. 

The audience of 14,000 goes wild.

Despite the fanfare of the occasion, however, Narayen doesn’t waste any time before cutting straight to his core message: We are living in the experience age, and the brands that can deliver compelling and contextual digital experiences will be the brands that dominate the era.

The Adobe CEO points to case studies from Deadpool and MasterCard campaigns, which have leveraged customized consumer touch-points to launch and transform the brands, respectively, and challenges the audience to evaluate how they can elevate the experiences created for their customers.

Of course, in kicking off the 2016 Adobe Marketing Summit, Narayen realizes that the complete path to an experience-focused business will be revealed in the days to come – but he does offer that the solution to his challenge can be found within Adobe’s core competencies.

“Great experiences always start with great content,” he says, describing how the Adobe Creative Cloud equips agencies and marketers with best-in-class tools for content creation. But Narayen also acknowledges that content in a vacuum can only be so powerful. “Experiences are powered by data,” he says, detailing how the Adobe Marketing Cloud can help marketers put the right message in front of the right people at the right time.

“Our innovation agenda is focused on bringing these clouds together to create powerful experiences,” he says.

Brad Rencher is almost too excited to take the reigns from Narayen. 

And it’s understandable, Rencher will serve as emcee for the remainder of the session and be responsible for announcing brand-new features of the Adobe Marketing Cloud and interviewing keynote speakers.

But first, he builds on Narayen’s message in a more concrete way, detailing the “table stakes,” as he calls them, for operating in the digital arena. And to merely secure a place at the table, he says, brands will have to adopt technology in ways they haven’t had to in decades.

So far, technology has disrupted business in “two waves.” It started with the digitization of the back-office – being able to seamlessly connect orders with their fulfillments, and speed-up commerce – and the digitization of the front office – using customer relationship management technology to optimize sales and make the most of leads.

Now, he says, those two aren’t enough: In the same way that engineers talk about computing powering doubling every 18 months, Rencher says consumer expectations double every 18 months as well, requiring new points of contact.

And that bring us to Rencher’s third wave of disruption: Using technology to surprise and delight customers with experiences.

“They expect you to know them, and deliver an experience that is consistent, continuous and compelling,” he says. “This wave is about goosebumps, it’s about smiles, it’s about bringing people closer together. It’s about doing our jobs so well that consumers don’t even know that you and I exist.”

McDonalds is the definition of scale. But how does a company so huge operate in the experience economy?

The fast-food giant serves 26 million customers per day, and has grown to such size by perfecting a small and consistent menu of food items. So the concept of personalization would seem counter-intuitive.

However, when Deborah Wahl sat down with Brad Rencher on the Adobe Marketing Summit Stage, she said that McDonalds acknowledges the modern, expectation-filled audience, and recently decided to pursue a future built on a smaller scale.

That’s meant switching up food offerings to serve more diverse customers, and using technology to improve communications.

So far, the new direction has seen the creation in a brand new mobile app that already has 10 million downloads, kiosks for new ordering options and faster-than-ever response times to customer service queries.

Wahl confessed that, when bringing technology into a business, it can be easy to get distracted by the shiny new “toys,” but making the commitment to become an experience business is about prioritizing the right solutions that can be delivered at scale.

“There is so much incremental power in the little things,” she says. “We can build to the other things, but bigger gains will be from every day, practical aspects of the business.”

In 2014, Giles Richardson wasn’t impressed by his bank’s digital presence.

“We were terrible,” he says, just before explaining that RBS had a “fireworks culture,” in which they’d launch a new experience and then disappear without measuring its effectiveness.

For a bank that serves 24 million customers across the globe – including the Queen – Richardson felt that was was unacceptable.

“You know the Rule of Digitization? 80% of everything you do online doesn’t work out the way you thought it would,” he says. “We were probably making things worse.”

To combat this culture of guesswork, Richardson created the “Superstar DJs” program, a fun way to encourage testing and measuring among data analysts at RBS that equated digital marketing with building a career as a pop DJ. And with the help of the Adobe Marketing Cloud, teams could work seamlessly to optimize the bank’s digital campaigns.

Thanks to the new program, RBS went from conducting two measly optimization tests in 2014, to conducting 400 in 2015.

And now, with the company firmly entrenched in the future of digital experiences, Richardson couldn’t be happier. “We’re a 300 year old bank, but we only care about the last 10 seconds a customer spent with us online,” he says.