‘2022 is still a question’: Why in-person events aren’t on the agenda any time soon for Adobe CMO Ann Lewnes

By Kimeko McCoy

There’s a light at the end of the pandemic tunnel as vaccine rollout continues to ramp up in the US. Some brands and agencies have already started planning a return to in-person events this fall by way of hybrid models — i.e. in-person events with digital elements. But other marketers are still hesitant to make any formal commitment to in-person events.

Like most brands responding to the pandemic, Adobe quickly pivoted major annual conferences (like Adobe Max and Adobe Summit) from in-person to completely virtual. With an eye toward the future, CMO Ann Lewnes said Adobe will continue to experiment in the virtual space as normal life in 2022 is yet to be determined. Digiday caught up with Lewnes to discuss what the brand has learned from hosting virtual events and what’s next.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Given we’re still in a global pandemic, Adobe is fresh off the heels of its second virtual Adobe Summit. How was that experience? Any takeaways?

Honestly, it was the best summit we’ve had — which, I know is kind of antithetical to what one would believe in a pandemic. One of the benefits is that the preparation that you can do in advance of these events is pretty staggering, because [of] the ability to pre-record a lot of the video content and edit it. And the scale, you can get a lot more people to view the content. When you’re in a Las Vegas ballroom, you can jam 20,000 people in there. But when you have an event online, you can get hundreds of thousands or even millions of people to attend if the content is absolutely paramount. Hundreds and hundreds of people pre-registered, which is great. And then millions of people watching all the videos — we had 20 million video views, which is really crazy. Those are the advantages: the scale, the preparation, the ability to help people with additional agenda and just the ability to have much more content viewed by many more people.

Anything you miss about having in-person events?

The thing you miss, of course, is that intimacy you can get with your peers, colleagues, network, especially with business to business. Those customer meetings are really important because those relationships are critical when you’re doing a large transaction. We all miss that. Having a live show, there’s an energy and dynamic feeling of having something live.

What was the strategy behind having to pivot to a fully-digital event as the pandemic was just settling in last March? How did your team approach messaging?

It was crazy. On March 11 last year, we decided to close all of our offices internationally. It was an extraordinary communications effort as you can imagine to get everyone to stay at home. We sent out an email a few days before we closed the offices, saying we would not be able to have the event. And then we had to create all this content. It was a mad rush. For keynote speakers, …read more

Source:: Digiday