Adobe Summit 2017, Day 2: 'We Are the Experience Ambassadors'

LAS VEGAS — "When we deal with experiences, we're dealing with people's emotions. In fact, emotion is the currency of experience," said John Mellor, vice president of strategy, alliances, and marketing at Adobe, underlining the message from yesterday's speakers at Adobe Summit 2017, who stressed the power of customer experience to provoke emotional reactions.

"We believe that experiences are meaningful because they create an emotional reaction, even a physiological reaction," Mellor said. "Experience is about the emotions that we have when we interact with brands."

It is imperative, then, that businesses become experience-based, he says.

"We begin with context, we design elegant content and we organize it so that we can deliver it to millions and millions of people, but we manage all of those interactions in milliseconds, and we do it not just for marketing, but we do it for all the departments in our enterprise," Mellor says. "We're not just marketers anymore; we are ambassadors of experience, and we own the milliseconds that make up the journeys that our customers travel with us in our marketing, in our sales, in our support and, increasingly, in the products that we develop."

When crafting experiences for customers, companies must focus on how customers expect to receive them, particularly with the growing use of mobile devices. Speaking about the transformation of advertising in the digital age, David Fischer, vice president of business and marketing partnerships at Facebook, told the audience that storytelling in advertising needs to evolve to meet those audience expectations. "It's not that this iconic storytelling is going to go away; it’s that you have got to adapt," he said. "The best practice…is saying, 'OK, a huge part of my audience is engaging on mobile devices…what is going to be great content on a mobile device?'

"It has to be shorter, it has to capture attention right away," he added, "[and] it has to be core to your campaigns."

Mellor said the emphasis on experience needs to be felt companywide. "Our job is to think about the emotional impact every time we deliver an experience to a customer; it has to extend to our entire organizations," he said. "We are the experience ambassadors, and we need to make experience our business."

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