How Adobe Scaled a New Type of Event on LinkedIn

The venue is booked, the speakers are confirmed, the plans are all in place and your 23,000-person conference is just a month away. Until suddenly, it isn’t.

That was the situation in which software giant Adobe found itself in early 2020, after the Covid-19 pandemic forced the cancellation of its annual showpiece event, The Adobe Summit. It’s been far from a unique challenge. Many are the B2B marketers who’ve found themselves executing a rapid pivot to virtual events over the last year. They’ve been seeking answers to the question of how you generate emotional engagement and earn attention at scale, without the advantage of bringing thousands of people together in a shared space. Adobe’s was one of the earliest answers to this question – and one of the most compelling.

We’ve put together this infographic that tells the story of how Adobe planned, designed and scaled a new type of summit. It started with a swift realisation that online events involve fundamentally different challenges and opportunities to in-person ones. It moved forward at speed, as Adobe embraced the ways that LinkedIn and other social channels could scale its promotion of the event and drive new types of interaction with its audiences. And it delivered truly spectacular results. So much so that the Adobe Summit online has so far generated over 700,000 views and more than 3x the target number of event registrations.

The Adobe Summit online didn’t just demonstrate the power of virtual events to create experiences that resonate at scale – or the power of LinkedIn Live to help introduce video content to a wider audience. It also played a key role in moving the conversation around digital experiences forward. It proved, for example, that turning speakers’ homes into remote production studios could result in high-quality and authentic content that audiences found relatable. It surfaced feedback about the experiences that resonate most on digital platforms, including short-form, on-demand video content, personalised content recommendations and creating opportunities for delegates to interact with one another. As a result, Adobe has found itself acting as a consultant for the many customers of the business scaling online summits of their own.

To read more about the Adobe Summit story, explore our full case study.