About two hours after enjoying a Kouing Aman, you ask yourself “whoa…what did I just eat?  It was crunchy and sweet on the outside, thick and moist and the inside, and I think it will stick with me for another eight hours.”  I just returned from Adobe (Omniture) Summit, the Kouing Aman of all Conferences.

It’s a big event that descends on Salt Lake City every year…and it got a lot bigger this year.  The venue was larger (Salt Palace), there were twice the number of attendees (~4000), the band was big (Foster the People), and  even the breakout sessions had a pastry-puffed quality.

I also attended the Adobe Un-Summit at the University of Utah the day before.  Although the balance of participants was tilted a little too far towards consultants and academics (and MBA students), the spirit was there.  And I’m not sure that the 10 min rocket pitch approach supports discussions.  But it is an effort to get back to the roots of analytics without the Adobe uber sales engine.  And they served a box of Kouing Aman at break.

It’s a few days later and I’m not sure what I ate.

At the Adobe Summit I attended presentations in the Personalization track.  Most were brief, heavy on images, and tried to split time between a client case study and spiel on the supporting Adobe technology.  I left wanting to learn more about integrating Test & Target with Insight, and about CQ5.  And in general I left early.  But that may have also been because the weather was fantastic and Salt Lake is a very walkable city.

Adobe (Omniture) Summit was great because of the amazing people who attended.

In the hotel lobby and over dinners I spoke with brilliant analysts from REI, The Home Depot, L.L. Bean and American Express.  We talked shop and agreed to keep talking after Summit.  I hung out with the Keystone gang, ate too much sushi, and enjoyed a back-seat view of getting lost in Salt Lake despite 4 smartphones, a lot of digital analytics smarts, and a grid city with super-sized lanes.

Despite all of our Social Media tools and incarnations of “The Digital Self” there is nothing like face-to-face time to accelerate an industry.  So while the Adobe Summit was thick in sales sugar & crust, it was pretty rich on the inside.  And I’m not sure how the right ingredients might have otherwise mixed together.