Shantanu Narayen
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How Adobe shifted a Las Vegas conference to executives’ living rooms in less than 30 days
Adobe was scheduled to hold its annual conference in Las Vegas two weeks ago, but the coronavirus pandemic forced the company to make alternate plans. In less than a month, its events team shifted venues for the massive conference, not once, but twice as the severity of the situation became clear.
This year didn’t just involve Adobe Summit itself. To make things more interesting, it was also hosting Magento Imagine as a separate conference within a conference at the same time. (Adobe bought Magento in 2018 for $1.6 billion.)
Originally, Adobe had more than 500 sessions planned across four venues on the Las Vegas Strip, with more than 23,000 attendees expected. Combining all of the sponsors, partners and Adobe personnel, it involved more than 40,000 hotel rooms.
Once it became clear that such a large event couldn’t happen, the company reimagined the conference as a fully digital experience.
Plan A
VP of Experience Marketing Alex Amado is in charge of planning Adobe Summit, a tall task under normal circumstances.
“Planning Summit is a year-round endeavor,” he said. “Literally within weeks of finishing one of those Las Vegas events we are starting on the next one, and some of the work actually is on an 18 or 24-month cycle because we have those long-term hotel contracts and all of that stuff.
“For the last 12 months, basically, we had people who were working on what we now call Plan A — and we didn’t know that we needed a Plan B and Plan C — and the original event was going to be our biggest yet.”
2019 Adobe Summit stage in Las Vegas. Photo: Ron Miller/TechCrunch
After the team began to wonder in January if the virus would force them to change how they deliver the conference, they started building contingency plans in earnest, Amado said. “As we got into February, things started looking a little scarier, and it very quickly escalated to the point where we were talking really seriously about Plan B.”
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Tim Cook, Satya Nadella, Elon Musk, Sundar Pichai and more sign renewed commitment to Paris Agreement
The U.S. government may be in the process of formally withdrawing from the term of the Paris Agreement, an international accord on targets to fight climate change, but major U.S. employers say they’ll stay the course in a new statement jointly signed by a group of around 80 chief executives and U.S. labor organization leaders. The statement, posted at UnitedForTheParisAgreement.com, represents a group that either directly employs more than 2 million people in the U.S., or represents a larger group of 12.5 million through labor organizations.
The group collectively says they are “still in” on the Agreement, which many of the undersigned also supported vocally back in 2017 when the Trump administration announced its intent to formally remove itself. They also “urge the United States” to reconsider its current course and also agree to remain committed to the agreement. The Agreement will not only help to potentially counter the ongoing impacts of global climate change, the group says in the letter, but also prepare the way for a “just transition” of the U.S. workforce to “new decent, family supporting jobs and economic opportunity,” implying that bowing out of the Agreement will actually impede the U.S. workforce’s ability to compete on a global scale.
Apple CEO Tim Cook shared the renewed commitment on Twitter, noting in part that “humanity has never faced a greater or more urgent threat than climate change,” and other prominent tech executives have also co-signed, including Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, Tesla’s Elon Musk, Google’s Sundar Pichai and Adobe’s Shantanu Narayen. Chief executives from other powerful U.S. companies across industries are also represented, including Coca-Cola’s James Quincey, Patagonia’s Rose Marcario, Unilever’s Alan Jope and Walt Disney’s Robert Iger.
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Adobe had a record quarter, but still has substantial untapped potential
Adobe announced a record quarter yesterday with $2.01 billion in revenue for Q42017. That represents a healthy 25 percent year over year increase for the company, but about half of that continues to come from Creative Cloud. Experience Cloud, which includes Adobe Marketing Cloud, Adobe Analytics Cloud and Adobe Advertising Cloud in many ways represents promise for even greater revenue in… Read More
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