I've arrived in Salt Lake City, Utah, for the 2013 Adobe Digital Marketing Summit. The air is a crisp zero degrees, and the imposing mountains surrounding the city are snow-capped, as we sit down for a breakfast briefing on the summit.
As you'd expect from this kind of thing, there's a great line-up of sessions - across disciplines like digital advertising, digital analytics, marketing innovation, social marketing, targeting and optimisation, and web experience management. As well as a bunch of tech labs and of course the obligatory keynotes.
We're going to be hearing from the great and the good - Adobe SVP Brand Rancher on 'the last millisecond'; John Batelle, Founder and Executive Chairman of Federated Media, and Adam Bain, CRO of Twitter, talking about digital marketing insight; and John Mellor, Adobe's VP of Strategy for Digital Marketing will sit down with Red Bull's Felix Baumgartner (yes, the guy who jumped from space!) to talk about 'Taking the Leap'.
A sizeable contingent of Aussie and Kiwi businesses have made the journey out here - including representatives from Fairfax Media NZ, Wotif, NAB, Medibank, ANZ Bank, Sportsbet, BudgetDirect, Virgin Australia, Telstra and Compare the Market. And the general theme of the conference is going to be addressing the necessity of integrating digital content, tracking, testing and optimisation - something that lots of brands are bad at.
As head of strategy at a content agency (Edge), this is something that's close to my own heart. A recent study by ADMA showed that although 96% of Aussie marketers plan on using content marketing, only 29% currently rate their content as effective or very effective. In all likelihood this is probably because content is being developed across the business without a unified content strategy and without integrated measurement and optimisation. So I'm all ears to see what the Summit can offer on the subject. And I would imagine that's what the Australian and New Zealand businesses are here for too.
Tomorrow I'll round up on all of the key findings from day one of the summit - the big themes and topics, as well as the buzz from the attendees. Hope you can join me.
Richard Parker
Head of Strategy
Edge