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The latest version of Adobe Experience Manager, released Feb. 13, leverages Sensei, the company’s artificial intelligence and machine learning technology, to better manage and automate the delivery of personalized web content. Adobe unwrapped its cloud-based marketing platform, the Adobe Experience Cloud, two years ago.
Adobe also announced the general availability of Adobe Asset Link (pictured), the long-promised connection to Creative Cloud and Adobe tools like Photoshop, Illustrator and inDesign, making it easier to pull content in from different sources. “We’ve been working on this a long time, along with the content licensing issues too, so that users can check in and out what they need without jumping through hoops,” Kevin Lindsay, director of product marketing at Adobe, told eWEEK. He said the system gives organizations the ability to easily search and access massive amounts of fully approved assets.
Adobe Sensei is behind many of the new features and updates in Experience Manager 6.5. Adobe’s Smart Crop for Video makes it quicker and easier to identify and crop the most important parts of a video regardless of how users hold their phones or mobile devices. This streamlined editing process may be of particular interest to brands using popular social services on mobile like Instagram and Snapchat to reach consumers.
Smart Tags has been updated to now include video (building on its established support for photos), with Adobe Sensei automating the process of video discovery so users don’t have to manually sort through hundreds of clips. Smart Tags lets you assign “intelligent tags” that correspond to actions, attributes and objects in videos. With the updated Visual Search, marketers can find images similar to a specific asset, like a family in the park, in seconds.
Other new features include the Single-Page Application (SPA) Editor designed to help developers and marketers preview, edit, manage and personalize content in context and in one place for faster collaboration.
While search engines can be slow to a crawl and index client-side SPAs, Adobe said its server-side rendering of SPAs lets developers improve first experience load times. “With this new capability, IT teams can enable server-side rending for better web crawling and improve the overall SEO [search engine optimization],” Aditya Ghule, senior product marketing manager at Adobe, told eWEEK. He noted that later this year Adobe will add the ability to tag and personalize content using Adobe Target, a cloud-based testing platform.
Better Product Discovery
Early customers of Experience 6.5, like chip maker Silicon Labs, are making good use of the new features. “As we’ve needed to broaden our marketing, we needed new ways to enable product discovery, and Adobe has helped with that,” Deirdre Walsh, director of marketing and communications at Silicon Labs, told eWEEK.
Walsh said Silicon Labs sells more than 50,000 distinct products, and Experience Manager helps the company highlight competitive benefits by making resources like whitepapers and easily accessible.
“Performance enhancements in speed and load times in 6.5 have also helped in our online community space, and there’s better personalization and integration across the entire user experience,” said Walsh.
Lindsay said the key advance in Experience Manager is the machine learning features in Adobe Sensei that have been applied across webinars many different areas, from how companies access and manage content to the personalization that determines the end customer experience.
In a recent Adobe survey of 1,000 U.S. consumers, 51 percent said they are more likely to make a purchase and 49 percent are more likely to become loyal to the brand if content is personalized.