With the upcoming announcement of the Creative Suite 3 family of products, Adobe Systems Inc. was about to reveal its biggest product launch in the company’s 25-year history. The new Suites would provide highly integrated tools to help creative professionals expand their skills across print, Web, interactive, film, video and mobile devices.

To introduce this new creative environment, Adobe planned a series of training events. CS3: The Creative License Conference would consist of one-day events held in six cities across the country and more in-depth, two-day events held in New York and Los Angeles.

Challenge
Adobe wanted to reach six audience segments – designers, Web designers, Web developers, print service providers, photographers and videographers – with an invitation to attend the conferences. The goal was to attract 1,000 attendees to each conference site, however, the company’s ultimate objective was to encourage software upgrades.

While the company had already developed creative for marketing materials promoting the new software, it wanted the field marketing component to have its own identity that would support, rather than replicate, the overall product marketing.

Solution
Trekk designed a cross-media marketing campaign to drive registration at the training events. It began with a series of personalized emails with messaging targeting each of the six audience segments. Those emails directed recipients to one of six segmented Web splash pages. Each incorporated graphics representing a specific creative professional and a slider bar that visually demonstrated the creative license theme. The interactive element gave site visitors an opportunity to “push their creativity to the maximum” while learning what the conference offered specifically for them. A generic version of the splash page, located at www.CS3conference.com, featured all six creative professionals. Regardless of how they came to the site, navigation allowed visitors to see and interact with each of the splash pages.

The second email in the series included audience-specific messaging and offered additional enticement to spur registration at one of the events. A third email, sent as a follow-up to each of the conferences, linked recipients to Web sites where they could purchase software or obtain additional information and resources.

Three Flash animated Web banner ads were developed for placement on selected industry sites targeting print, photography and creative professionals. Trekk designed all of the conference collateral, including event signage, presentation templates, attendee badges and conference guides.

Attendees of the two-day events also received a personalized agenda within their conference guide that leveraged variable data printing to provide a list of the seminars and events each attendee had chosen during the registration process.

Results
Trekk implemented a highly segmented, multi-channel campaign that aligned with the overall corporate creative direction. It was successful in raising awareness and encouraging conference registration while demonstrating the integrated tools offered in Adobe Creative Suite software.

“Because we’re targeting our own peers, the projects we do for Adobe challenge us to push our own creativity,” said M.J. Anderson, Trekk’s Vice President, Creative Services. “One of the exciting aspects of developing this campaign was having access to all of the new features in the Creative Suite 3 software. It helped us create a rich, interactive, cross-media experience.”