After an amazing time at Silverpop, I'm honoured to be joining Adobe, heading up the marketing team for Adobe Marketing Cloud in Europe.
Firstly, thanks to my colleagues at Silverpop for all their support over the last year or so. I can truly say I had a blast. Silverpop is a great company - well positioned to capitalise on the phenomenal interest in digital marketing technology, with great technology, great customers and a great team.
But, as in a lot of times in life, I got an offer I just could not refuse. From a company I've admired for many, many years.
My association with Adobe goes way back when, as a budding sales executive, I helped a non-existent marketing department pull together some print ads using Aldus Pagemaker (later to become Adobe Pagemaker, then superseded by InDesign) on an Apple Macintosh SE.
More importantly though, I've been a big advocate of the transformative effects digital marketing technology can have on the impact of the marketing function. Being a B2B marketer, this translates most immediately to regaining the revenue conversation and putting numbers around marketing campaigns. Numbers which sadly for the profession went missing for many years, allowing the sales function to take the high ground in most B2B companies.
I've pioneered marketing automation platforms, championed social media as a customer outreach tool, introduced social community portals and helped marketing regain its rightful place at the strategy table. I've also written before about the need for more science graduates in marketing to facilitate this transformation.
And, of course, Adobe is leading the transformation with its technology. Nothing gets more gold standard in web analytics than Adobe (formerly Omniture) Analytics. And add to this world-class social, media optimization, targeting, web experience management and cross-channel campaign management and you can see why the geek in me is excited by the possibilities that Adobe presents for today's digital marketer.
So, exciting times indeed. And for a creatively-minded, Pagemaker-trained, marketing scientist with a passion for digital marketing technology, I just couldn't turn away the opportunity to join the Adobe team. After all, it's not like I'm joining a brave new world. It's more like coming home.