Project Recap: Adobe Summit 2013

Marketers have milliseconds between the time a consumer takes an action and an experience is served. In order to assemble and deliver meaningful experiences and drive conversions, marketers must use data to create more personalized experience for customers, but now there’s more data than ever, making it difficult to know which information to use most effectively. As a marketer, efforts to reach your customers must be intentional, focused, and motivated. As a digital marketer, you have to do more with more.

The Adobe Digital Marketing Suite is designed to help solve the problem of marketers having to do more with more by breaking down organizational silos and encouraging teams across organizations to work together in the Marketing Cloud. In order to showcase these new products and tell their story to the largest Summit audience to date, Adobe contacted EAS to help formulate their story and create a compelling Summit experience for all attendees.

Working with Adobe, we created the Road to Summit video, strategy, keynotes, agenda, visual concepting, and demos for the Adobe Summit 2013. You can view the keynotes and product demos we built on day one and day two here. Adobe Summit took place in March 2013.

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Lync Conference 2013

Connecting people everywhere – that’s Lync. Lync is driving business communications, with 90 Fortune 100 companies using the enterprise-ready communications platform. Providing services such as instant messaging, voice, video, and online meeting capabilities, Lync 2013 users are able to communicate anywhere on any device. Lync is designed to enhance productivity in the workplace by allowing virtual and easy-to-join meetings that allow you to extend your meetings outside your organization with browser-based access.

February 18-21, 2013 Microsoft held the first ever Lync Conference highlighting these new features to a sold-out audience in Southern California. In order to help drive this future of communication, Microsoft came to Extreme Arts + Sciences to plan, idealize, and execute the Lync Conference 2013 general sessions content. Working with Microsoft stakeholders, EAS was able to bring together our creative vision and Microsoft’s strategy through the art of storytelling to build an engaging, unique experience for Lync participants. You can view the opening and closing keynotes we put together here.

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Pitch Perfect

Pitch Perfect web-based training brings together sellers and managers to guide removal of sales barriers, identify sales opportunities, and find and leverage relevant resources required to have a deeper customer conversation. In order to build a program to help sellers succeed with Windows 8 Ads and Aps, Microsoft Advertising came to Extreme Arts + Sciences to create an online training guide including overall strategy and an in-depth role play. This role play will be used to shape prepared, confident sellers while enabling manager reinforcement and coaching. After gathering necessary assets, stakeholder interviews, and working closely with Microsoft Advertising, EAS came back to Microsoft with a verbatim script to use for their Pitch Perfect program for Windows 8 Ads in Apps. Pitch perfect was launched in January 2013.

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Digital Digest

2012 is the year Microsoft reinvented itself with the launch of Windows 8. Bringing a cohesive look and feel across all platforms, Windows 8 offers a natural interface, unifying consumer and enterprise experience through design.
Whenever change comes about, education is key. Looking to help marketers learn how to drive their businesses forward using the new products and advertising opportunities, Microsoft Advertising called the Extreme Arts + Sciences team to build an education program from the ground up. EAS came back to Microsoft with Digital Digest, a new agency education program comprised of modules and demos to showcase the latest and greatest of the Microsoft Advertising world, bringing their story to life. These interactive Digital Digest workshops put end user experience first, highlighting Microsoft’s consumer vision and product capabilities including Windows 8, Surface, Xbox, and Skype. Digital Digest was launched in September 2012.

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The Awkward Adolescence of Social

Social has grown up quickly and it feels like it’s at an awkward adolescent stage. We know it’s destined for greatness, but it feels gangly. While everyone is doing social, it might just be because everyone’s doing it, it’s the “cool” thing to do. Ask your mom if that’s a good strategy.

Social is exciting. Youthful social is largely driven by exhilaration — that rush you feel from every Like or re-tweet. Now, marketers are demanding more than a just good feeling from their investment.

EAS believes grown-up social is more exciting than an adrenaline rush because it delivers a bigger impact on business. Grown up social is vast and nuanced, it’s ubiquitous and layered, and will ultimately reveal the whole person. The sociologist Erving Goffman once noted that who we are changes every time we change situations. This doesn’t mean we’re faking it – it means that we highlight certain parts of our personalities and our interests with one group or in one venue that we wouldn’t in another. There are things you can say and do at home that you can’t at work, things you can say and do at work you can’t at home, and things you can say and do at the bar that you couldn’t get away with at work or at home. This is how social works. Who we are on Pinterest is just a bit different from who we are on Twitter, or Facebook, or App.net, or in this room, or at the bar afterwards. What we do is different. Who we share with is different. All these layers of social are like layers in an onion, and we as human beings are more than just the sum of those layers – we are the relationships between them. So far, this gets lost digitally. The way we’ve been talking to consumers recently is counterintuitive to the way we treat people in real life, and our lack of attentiveness to this basic reality has resulted in censures like Do Not Track… which is essentially a restraining order. We’ve been going through a very awkward social puberty.

Adobe gets grown up social. They recently launched Adobe Social, which allows marketers to capture increasingly complex social relationships through data, and turn it into simple, effective solutions centered around understanding the new consumer journey. Adobe contacted EAS to create a 20 minute presentation, focused around what a longer view of social looks like to marketers. EAS created “The Awkward Adolescence of Social”, wherein the world of grown-up social is defined, along with how social is moving from a big business to a platform that can make your business big. The presentation was first delivered at Signal in Chicago in September 2012.

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Project Recap: Adobe Summit 2012

When you hear Adobe, you think Photoshop. You may not know that Adobe has amassed the best set of digital marketing tools in history – the Digital Marketing Suite.

Providing tools to help businesses from content creation to monetization, Adobe is an agent that publishers, advertisers, and marketers are all trying to figure out. Adobe is driving the conversation at their Digital Marketing Summits. 4,000 marketers air-dropped into Salt Lake City (and 2,000 in London) for Adobe Digital Marketing Summit 2012 to be a part of this conversation.

Adobe has a very clear idea around what it takes to be successful in digital marketing, and that is bringing together the holy trinity of data, content, and optimization. Wanting to drive home that vision for all Summit participants, Adobe approached Extreme Arts + Sciences to concept, plan, and execute the 2012 Digital Marketing Summit content. In close collaboration with the Adobe leadership team, EAS brought their strategy to life through the Digital Self. You can view the keynote we put together, as well as participant reviews of the Summit here:


All signals we send show who we are, and the online behavior of each ecstatically unique individual creates incomprehensibly mind-blowing amounts of data, as vast and as interwoven as the universe itself. We’re inundated with data, so much and so fast it can cause a brain freeze. By working with companies such as Adobe, marketers can capture that data and turn those signals into personalized and meaningful experiences.

Our advice: In talking with our clients, we have found that content, data, and optimization live in different departments, agencies, and sometimes even organizations. Your goal is to bring them together. It’s a big journey. But it is where the world is going.

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Changing the world of work

The world of work is changing, and LinkedIn is leading the change. Incubated in co-founder Reid Hoffman’s living room in 2002, LinkedIn is now the world’s largest internet professional network. Executives from every 2011 Fortune 500 company are LinkedIn members and their affluent user base grows at an average of two new members per second. LinkedIn’s largest growing demographics are students and recent college graduates – future talent that has not been nabbed up yet.

LinkedIn called Extreme Arts + Sciences to build assets which allowed LinkedIn to bring their capabilities to life.  Working with a two week timeline, the Extreme Arts + Sciences team researched, storyboarded, and created all requested assets for LinkedIn. These assets were presented to top-rated agencies and the world’s largest companies at this year’s Cannes Lion Advertising Festival in Cannes, France. The assets were to showcase the business value of the LinkedIn Company Page, the breadth of elite talent and recruiting capabilities, the value of the influential LinkedIn userbase for a business’s ROI, as well as to showcase the sexiness of LinkedIn’s new UI.

Our advice: Build out your company page. Engage the influential community following you. Connect with the future of your industry. This is just a glimpse of the new world of work.

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Enterprise Social: The Future of Work

The social networking movement of the last half-decade has widely been seen as a consumer focused movement. However, with the consumerization of IT, we are starting to see consumer oriented tools, including social networking being used in a corporate setting. This brings up a fascinating question, what does the future of social look like inside the enterprise? Will employees be able to find five Turkish-speaking engineers in their company in the same way they can easily locate 100 fans of their favorite band in their hometown today? Will these internal networks break down the organizational barriers inherent in many large organizations? Will they allow easier and more natural collaboration between historically distinct departments like marketing and IT? We already know that many employees are unhappy with the current state of corporate collaboration tools. Today, 26% of all workers think email is overused in their organizations, 21% felt overwhelmed by it and 15% felt that it actually diminished their productivity. Additionally, only 44% of respondents agreed that it was easy to find what they were looking for on their organization’s intranet. This compares to 87% for users conducting personal searches on popular consumer oriented search engines like Google and Bing. (Forrester Research)

While there is much work to be done, many corporations already have the foundation for a robust social platform. With simple algorithms and the data derived email, calendars, IM usage, corporations can construct a detailed social graph. The challenging part is deciding what information and tools to make available to employees. How can the data derived from the social graph be useful, without being intrusive or cumbersome?

While there are still many challenges to overcome before social networking within the enterprise becomes widespread, we believe the concept will transform the way employees work, communicate and collaborate. Adoption rates will vary by industry and organization; some organizations are already using proprietary in-house tools or public services such as Salesforce.com’s Chatter or Jive, while others won’t adopt anything for years to come. Whatever way you look at it, this movement is still in its infancy, the platforms need refining and the usage cases are still evolving, but the groundwork and experimentation that is happening today will support the groundbreaking enterprise centric, social networks of the future.

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You Don’t Have a Social Network Just Because You Have 500 Million Users

It started with Google Buzz, and continued with Apple’s Ping service; just because you have 500 million users, each with a unique ID, doesn’t mean you have a social network. Mark Zuckerberg understands this all too well. He grew Facebook by expanding slowly, starting with Harvard and expanding only when he was sure there was enough user demand. This grass-roots growth strategy is almost the exact opposite of Google’s and Apple’s approach. Both companies hoped to take their large user base and simply add social tools on top of existing services. While this sounds great in theory, successful social networks have always been an opt-in experience.

So what does this mean for large corporations that want to make their products or services more social? They need to think carefully about how they promote their social services and what control they give to users. Google never gave Gmail users a choice, they just turned Buzz on and made users go into account settings to disable it. Social networking is a deeply personal computing experience, and users are quick to abandon a platform, when they feel like their privacy is being invaded.

We won’t go as far to say that it is impossible for large corporations to create a social platform. Many web services have successfully integrated Facebook Connect to bring social features to their product. We hope in the future that there are other social platforms out there that businesses can plug into but at this point, Facebook’s social graph is far more sophisticated than anything else out there and we strongly suggest that other web services take advantage of it, rather than trying to build something from scratch. Your users will thank you.

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2011: The Year of HTML5 for Mobile

There has been a lot of talk about HTML5 this year; some say that 2011 will be the year of HTML5 while others say that it will take years for the web standard to gain widespread traction. At e(a+s), we certainly think that we will see a huge uptake in HTML5 web development, but it will be aimed squarely at mobile and tablet experiences, not full featured websites.

From a consumer perspective, the user experience on a PC will remain virtually unchanged and most users won’t be able to tell the difference between a site built with Flash and HTML5. It’s a totally different story when it comes to mobile computing. Up until very recently, to create an interactive mobile experience, you had to use a dedicated application. This app ecosystem makes for a disjointed experience. Want to do online banking, install an app, watch a movie, install an app, read the news, install an app, and so on.  With HTML5, users can finally view their favorite websites in their full glory right in a browser – no downloads required.

For more information about our web and HTML5 development services please email info@easci.com

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