It is spring conference season! Whether you went to the Adobe Summit, Oracle Modern CX or another marketing conference this season, it is busy times! We wanted to share some key takeaways unique to each conference, and the commonalities we found, highlighting the trends of the marketing automation world.

Oracle MBX (Modern Business Experience)

Oracle brought us to Mandalay Bay in Vegas for a gathering of Modern Customer Experience professionals. This year’s conference included Human Resources and Finance professionals as well! It made for a more diversified audience and a larger event than previous years.

• One of the big announcements this year was the roll out of Unity CX — the new customer intelligence platform that will be embedded within Oracle CX Cloud — a great step ahead of the industry.
• A great roadmap presentation by Wren and Thamina highlighted what we can look forward to. For those who missed it, here is a webinar of interest to catch up!
• Flo-rida knows how to rock the house — he put on an impressive concert where he engaged his audience, with personalization and all — marketers can appreciate that performance!

Adobe Summit: The New Marketing Nation

Adobe Summit also brought us to Vegas, but this time at the Venetian, where marketers showed Adobe how it’s done! With over 17,000 attendees, an estimated 30% or more came from Marketo’s Marketing Nation.

• We quickly came to realize that for those of us not bleeding purple, Marketo was now dubbed, “Marketo Engage”.
• A tighter partnership with Microsoft was featured. We can expect the Marketo-MS Dynamics integration to be nurtured.
• Adobe Sensei, mentioned frequently, appears to be on the roadmap to bring machine learning across the Adobe product suite, including to Marketo.
• Marketo Sky demos highlighted many great features including a long-awaited journey view of smart campaigns, event registration cap, event program goals, and predictive smart list filters using Adobe Sensei. One thing is for sure, if you haven’t spent time getting comfortable with the Sky UI, now is the time!
• Our burning questions on how Marketo will fold into the Adobe product suite were not entirely answered, but for now, great integrations on the horizon for AEM for those using Marketo Sky.

Conference Commonalities

While there were plenty of differences between the Oracle and Adobe conferences, there were some common themes, too:

• Salesforce — not sure what Marc Benioff did… but there is a target on SF, as both Adobe and Oracle are looking to overcome the giant.
• Vegas, for back to back weeks — for those of us that go to both — wow, that was a lot of Vegas!
• Both are part of a bigger ecosystem — this has its pros and cons
  • Having a suite of products all owned by the same company provides a higher-level strategy to tie the systems together and give customers a suite to adopt and meet more comprehensive needs.
  • The conferences can be a bit of a “bigger pond, smaller fish,” kind of feeling. You can sit down for a meal and not have any other marketers at your table because they are users of other systems.

Which conferences did you attend, and what did you learn? Comment below!