SAN DIEGO, Calif. – You don’t have to be Creative to benefit from Adobe’s Cloud.
The audiences for products such as Adobe Spark and Project Nimbus extend well beyond what popular opinion assumes is the company’s artistic user base, president and CEO Shantanu Narayen told reporters during a press conference on Wednesday.
“The truth is, we have tens of millions of users,” he said. “We have this fundamental belief that everybody has a story to tell.”
Narayen was responding to a reporter asking how non-creative types could take advantage of the tools Adobe showcased at its annual Adobe Max conference on Nov. 2, such as the Spark program’s ability to automatically adapt eye-catching messages to multiple platforms, which the reporter said would be useful in presentations.
“Spark has always been about how we enable anybody with a story to tell – whether it’s a page, a post, or a video – their story,” Narayen said, noting that Adobe’s leaders “get motivated by the impact of knowing tens of millions are able to tell stories” thanks to the company’s tools.
Bryan Lamkin, Adobe’s executive vice president and general manager of digital media, noted that one third of Adobe’s customers are now brand-new, with millions trying the company’s products before they buy them, and that efforts to make Adobe’s products accessible to business users was part of that.
“We definitely feel like we’re having an impact with the new business model by engaging customers across all segments of the market and bringing them into the fold,” Lamkin said.
The company has also produced training materials aimed at making its products easier for novices to use, Adobe staff noted during the conference, such as a series of training videos for Lightroom on YouTube.
Narayen said that while Adobe’s products are designed for creative professionals, the company always tries to keep novice users in mind too, with the developers behind programs such as Adobe’s new cloud-based photo editing software Project Nimbus frequently asking themselves how they could make their chosen medium easier.
“We’ve always been about… enabling [people] to use the power of our tools in an easier way,” he said, noting that Adobe’s cloud photography plan has attracted more new customers to its platform than any other.
Then, answering the reporter’s original question he jokingly added: “I’d be remiss if I didn’t end by saying that if you’d like to try our tools, go to www.adobe.com/creativecloud.”