Speaking during the keynote address of the Adobe Summit, Shantanu Narayen, president and CEO of the firm told the audience that “people buy experiences, not products”. That philosophy appears to be at the centre of Adobe’s announcements on day one of its annual Summit, with the company focusing on unifying its Experience Cloud offering and providing marketers with an ecosystem where data can effortlessly inform creative choices.

An upgrade to the firm’s Advertising Cloud platform, Advertising Cloud Creative will function as a self-serve platform for marketers, providing them with dynamic creative optimisation and offering control over basic design elements including advertising copy and assets. Creative can be dragged and dropped into different ad formats, automatically rendering to the correct sizes, with Adobe’s AI framework Sensei helping to intelligently select the most impactful parts of an image. Marketers can also customise and personalise creative within Advertising Cloud, eliminating the need to involve designers with more basic tasks.

“Designers are spending more and more time rebuilding and resizing ads across different platforms,” said Zarpana Kabir, director of advertising services at Adobe. “This tool allows marketers to modify ads on the fly, and collaborate with designers in a meaningful way, so that designers are spending more time making impactful experiences, and less time just resizing ads.”

Advertising Cloud wasn’t the only part of Adobe’s ecosystem to benefit from Creative Cloud integration. Marketing Cloud and Adobe Sensei itself will all gain additional resources from the firm’s suite of creative tools, including access to a huge database of stock images, increased personalisation tools and the ability to edit creative without having to leave the program.

Adobe is also increasing Advertising Cloud’s integration with Analytics Cloud, enabling marketers to properly attribute conversion data to the ads that influenced the behaviour. The firm is also providing access to data including time-spent, bounces, page views, conversions and custom metrics within Advertising Cloud’s DSP, to enable more informed media optimisation.

Analytics Cloud is also being more closely integrated with Audience Insight, in an effort to create a virtuous cycle for marketers where data informs segmentation. The Attribution IQ function will analyse different attribution models for campaigns, enabling marketers to compare and contrast various versions and find the best combination of attribution model, marketing channel and segmentation to power their brands.

“We are tearing down the wall between creative, data and media in a way only Adobe can make possible,” said Keith Eadie, vice president and GM of Adobe Advertising Cloud. “Many marketers today still struggle to deliver relevant advertising messages to their customers. We’re making it easy for brands to deliver well-designed, personalised advertising to consumers who may currently ignore or even block their ads.”

The keynote ended with Adobe’s chief technology officer Abhay Parasnis taking to the stage to discuss some of the benefits and capabilities offered by Adobe Sensei. Building off a discussion of Tourism Australia’s latest campaign, which was built using Adobe technology, the audience was walked through the process of putting together a new piece of creative with the help of Sensei, taking the idea from a quick sketch to an image with multiple iterations in a matter of minutes. Adobe Sensei’s AI technology enabled functions like automatic image tagging, content suggestions and smart editing, all integrated into Adobe’s existing platforms.

“Intelligence is foundation to everything we’re doing at Adobe,” said Parasnis. “More than anything else, we believe that AI and machine learning will transform everything we’re doing. Its impact will be even more transformative than the birth of the internet or the emergence of the smartphone era.”

For more news and insights coming out of the Adobe Summit, keep an eye on our tag for the event