Tech Talk: Adobe, Sizmek, Oracle and more

Google offers free mobile speed test

Google has launched a free online tool to help businesses measure their site’s mobile performance and give businesses a detailed report so they know what they’ll need to fix. The average load time for mobile sites is 19 seconds over 3G connections but one out of two people expect a page to load in less than 2 seconds.

Sizmek launches authoring tool for HTML5 VPAID

Sizmek has released its HTML5 VPAID authoring tool within Ad Builder, for interactive video campaigns. This self-service solution for the codeless authoring of HTML5 VPAID ads enables creatives to build more attractive and engaging interactive video experiences for campaigns across screens, as the advertising world moves away from Flash-based ads.

Jaime Singson, director of product marketing for Sizmek:

Interactive video has been left in this weird life-support, nether-state where it is still being built in Flash but the entire display world has already begun to move to HTML5 formats. We are excited that our new offering gives our customers exactly the tools they need not only to keep up with the shifts in our industry, but also to gain an advantage in creating impactful, engaging interactive video campaigns.

Adobe Sensei to aid intelligent digital design

Adobe unveiled Adobe Sensei, a new framework and set of intelligent services for dramatically improving the design and delivery of digital experiences.

The new offering’s intelligent services are touted to tackle complex experience challenges, including image matching across millions of images, understanding the meaning and sentiment of documents and finely targeting important audience segments.

Adobe Sensei is built into the company’s cloud offerings, including Adobe Creative Cloud, Adobe Marketing Cloud and Adobe Document Cloud, to automate mundane tasks, drive predictive and personalization capabilities, and boost productivity.

Examples include:

• Content intelligence: Uses deep learning to search and tag images automatically and makes intelligent recommendations when a user searches for images 

• Face aware editing: Finds faces in an image and uses “landmarks” such as eyebrows, lips and eyes to understand their position and change the facial expression without ruining the image 

• Semantic segmentation: Shows each image region labelled with its type; for example, whether it is a building or the sky. Such labelled regions allow easy selection and manipulation of objects, using simple commands (e.g., “change the sky”) 

• Intelligent audience segmentation: Gives marketers and analysts new visibility into which segments are most important to their businesses and allows them to target overlapping or adjacent segments, making it possible to acquire customers much more efficiently 

• Attribution: Algorithmically determines the impact of different marketing touch points on consumers’ decisions to engage with a brand, determines the effectiveness of different campaigns and makes optimized marketing investment recommendations 

• Natural language processing: Provides text understanding, topic modelling and sentiment analysis of digital documents 


In addition to its availability in Adobe’s cloud offerings, Adobe Sensei will be available to partners and developers as APIs via Adobe.io—Adobe’s developer platform. This will enable developers and systems integrators to build new types of applications and solutions for their customers.

Shantanu Narayen, president and CEO, Adobe:

Adobe Sensei is uniquely focused on solving today’s complex experience challenges in the design, document and marketing fields, where only Adobe has decades of expertise and market leadership. Leveraging our machine learning and AI capabilities, as well as trillions of content and data assets, Adobe Sensei will be one of our biggest strategic investments. We’re excited to open it up to our broader ecosystem of partners, ISVs and developers to enable even more innovation.

Oracle Marketing Cloud beefs up identity management

Oracle has introduced a series of new data management platform innovations within the Oracle Marketing Cloud that enable customers to seamlessly define, select, count, and deliver audience IDs based on the user’s environment.

This allows customers to create audience segments tied to the customer journey across devices, channels, media environments, and ID spaces.

There are enhancements for the Audience Builder user interface within the Oracle Data Management Platform to help marketers visualize and manage ID source, with planned functionality to link these audiences via a self-service UI through the Oracle ID Graph.

The new user interface released is intended to make it easier for customers to manage and select ID types in order to identify, build, plan, and analyze audiences based on the device or platform within which the ID was originally created.

The company said this lays the foundation for the next iteration of the platform, which will further enable cross-device marketing by bridging IDs and scoring linkages between those IDs. This set of enhancements accelerates the convergence of adtech and martech within and outside of the Oracle technology stack.

Steve Krause, group vice president, product management, Oracle Marketing Cloud:

The explosive growth in connected devices has created immense opportunities for marketers to engage with consumers at the moments that truly matter. To capitalize on this opportunity, marketers need to be able to manage audiences based on the engaged environment. This is critical to intelligent linking for use cases like cross-device targeting and that is why we have revamped the Audience Builder user interface within the Oracle Data Management Platform to help address device agnostic identity management.