The Influencers: Loni Kao Stark, Product and Industry Marketing for Adobe Experience Manager

Kicking off our Influencer Series is a great person. She’s incredibly smart, with a keen understanding of the customer experience industry. Loni Kao Stark is the director of Product and Industry Marketing for Adobe Experience Manager.

As part of a billion dollar digital marketing business, Loni understands market dynamics and customer needs and is able to translate that knowledge  into market strategies that feed into the AEM (Adobe Experience Manager) product strategy.

Her team is also responsible for the go-to-market direction for the AEM business globally, as well as planning and execution with the rest of the marketing team at Adobe as it relates to pricing, packaging, partners, etc. – the value add beyond the product itself.

Loni manages a team of twelve, with weekly updates with the rest of the Adobe organization. They set direction through recordings and written material so everyone understands the direction they want to go with the AEM business.

Loni said that successful businesses need this level of communication, because it empowers others to support the business ecosystem going forward. Loni also writes on the industry extensively. For her, and Adobe as a whole, communication is at the core of everything they do, empowering others to do their best.

Getting Started at Adobe

Thirteen years ago, Loni started with Adobe as a Computer Scientist. Her core interests were (and still are) how technology impacts creativity and business. That’s what attracted her to Adobe – it was a technology company entrenched in the creative process.

She started out on the digital media side, working as an engineer on the first .com version of a service that enabled creative professionals to collaborate on images. This was the precursor to Adobe Creative Cloud (Loni said it was ahead of its time). She also worked with designers to figure out the user experience on the client side. Keep in mind this was before we called it the “cloud”.

The next major shift happened when she became one of the first product managers in the enterprise business. Up until this point, Adobe was a consumer company. Loni was one of the first product managers/engineers looking at the use of electronic documents and forms to streamline business processes.

Her next stop was Adobe Experience Manager, which Loni said was on the same trajectory as her prior position,  looking at technology and how it impacts interactions.

A Typical a Work Day for Loni

She starts her day looking at market needs, using that information to provide input into the next generation of solutions under the Adobe Experience Manager brand. Depending on the time year, this work is greater or smaller.

She also provides thought leadership, writes a lot, speaks at industry events on topics related to customer experience such as how mobile and social are changing, and how businesses need to change the way they compete.

In addition to all this, she works on the go-to-market pieces. This year was the big launch of the next-generation AEM and Loni spent a lot of her time working on that.

For Loni, it’s a mix of things her team does externally to make people aware of what Adobe is doing and how people need to think of experiences.

The Top 40 Under 40 in Digital Marketing by DMNews

Loni was listed as one of the top 40 under 40 in Digital Marketing by DMNews for 2013. She said that she was really surprised, noting that a lot of things are happening in the industry and a lot of great marketers and other people thinking about this digital transition.

Loni believes that the fundamental impacts of this transition are still happening and that in 7-10 years we’ll look back and be amazed at how much has changed.

She also said she joked with her colleagues that this was the last year she’s likely to make any list, because almost all of these lists are for the 40 or under age group (note that Loni is a few years away from 40, so she actually has lots of time to make a few more lists!).

“Awards are interesting animals,” Loni said. “ It’s great to be recognized, but they are a symbol of something more valuable – that you have a great team, have done meaningful things and have had an impact. It’s important to keep your eye on the ball and realize it’s a result of all the things you’ve done.”

Significant Achievements with Adobe

Her involvement with Adobe over the last thirteen years has resulted in Loni working in some fast-paced exciting areas of technology and customer experience. I asked her what she saw as her most significant achievement to date is with the organization. Her answer was telling of her character.

Loni said that she is most proud of the culture and team built around web experience management, something that has long-standing value. She rightly points out that while the technology and the products are great, the market changes so fast that what is marketing leading today will be obsolete tomorrow.

The fact that she has been a part of creating a culture that is able to think about innovation and develop great products, and that can go to market and have a real customer focus, and be agile around it, is her proudest achievement.

One way she sees this culture working:  “Adobe is the market/industry leader for web content management, but we are also focused on innovations around DAM and social communities. I am confident in the team built at Adobe that we can sustain that leadership, but also have the DNA, culture, aspiration and perseverance to win in the DAM and social communities market. Creating that engine – it has long-term significance”.

Views on the Marketing Technologist Role

We are all hearing and talking about a new role in digital marketing – the Marketing Technologist. Considering Loni has both a marketing and technical background, I was curious about her thoughts on the role and whether it’s important for organizations?

Loni told me that the recent Adobe Summit was focused on understanding how executives and leaders were thinking about transforming their business. This understanding helps Adobe meet those needs with the Adobe Marketing Cloud. She said the skillsets were mentioned, but there were variations on the title of marketing technologist.

“It’s interesting, normally job roles don’t get new names. Things move slow and generations of workers evolve in and out of the workforce. As they do new jobs are created. There’s been a real focus on marketing technologists, because this whole digital disruption is happening faster than a generation of workers. People that are mid way into careers and have achieved quite a bit are realizing they need new skills or need to hire new skills to succeed.”

For those thinking about their marketing career, or career in general, the takeaway from the marketing technologist discussion according to Loni is that you always need to be evolving, learning about new things.

Loni said to treat your skillsets the way a company thinks about their portfolio of products. You have the ones that are your mainstay/cash cows (how you earn your living). Then there’s 10-15% where you are looking at things in the corners that are innovative/disruptive.

A few years ago marketers were thinking about mobile, social media. Developing an understanding of new things and simply being aware of what’s going on around you keeps you current, Loni said. Today, the focus is on storytelling and human behaviour (loyalty, customer journeys), and on how we move into the post digital era (which is digital experience fused into the offline world). The key is to always stay curious.

“It’s important for me to stay current. Moving from some very different fields, the curiosity has been an asset, and it’s table stakes”.

Educated to the Nth Degree, What Loni Has Learned

If you read Loni’s LinkedIn profile, you’ll see she has an incredible education (McMaster University, Berkeley, Harvard, Stanford). What has all this education provided her?

Loni admits she is a course-junkie. LinkedIn shows recognized courses, but she’s taken courses in some weird and interesting things. She said it’s interesting to learn about new things because you see patterns. With all this education, Loni said the best thing was learning the thought patterns of how you approach a problem.

“There is so much information out there at the tip of your fingers, the most valuable thing your brain can do is approach those datasets in different ways.”

At McMaster University (in Canada), Loni attended the Arts and Science program which then only took 60 students a year. With the low professor to student ratio (and some of the best professors at the university), Loni said there was a strong focus on the idea of a liberal arts education (western thought, eastern thought, logic). She combined that with a second major in computer science, partly because she was interested in technology, but also because she needed to explain to her Asian parents what she was doing in university (she laughed about this).

This combination gave her very different thought processes. Computer science processes are destructive, you break things down into their individually executed pieces. Liberal arts/creative writing is more constructive , taking different issues and making patterns, building overall themes. Together, these different perspectives taught Loni to approach a problem from both aspects.

With her website the Stark Insider (see next section below for more), Loni gets to meet people in theatre, fine arts, even comedians. In each of these conversations she gets to understand the different ways people think about the world, helping her build her brain to tackle problems into today’s world.

The Stark Insider,

The Stark Insider is a project Loni and her husband embarked on together. Loni said they are both Type A personalities and they were looking for constructive things they could do together.

The Stark Insider started as a small blog covering the arts on the West Coast, where they wrote about things that were interesting to them. For Loni, she wanted another outlet other than technology to write about.

What started small grew as they reached out to theatres and other create venues. With a cutback in the coverage of the arts in traditional media, the Stark Insider was able to help fill the gap and it took on a life of its own.

Loni was quick to say that they aren’t looking to be a news crew. Instead, it’s a creative outlet for her and her husband, allowing them to explore different things, like cinematic journalism.

All Business? Not Quite

I suspect Loni works a lot. But she’s not all technology and marketing. There are some very interesting angles to Loni Kao Stark, Stark Insider being one them.

Loni said she is always thinking about the concept of stateless vs stateful (I think she mentioned writing a book on the topic?), thinking about the various aspects of your life and how you want to develop as a person.

“Painting is something I’ve always been interested in, but didn’t have time to get into it . I was inspired by this documentary called Armagosa, about a New York ballerina that opened an opera house in the middle of a desert.”

Painting is something Loni wants to explore for the next 30-40 years, so she has things to do if she ever decides to retire. She joked that she hoped she’d be good at by that time. “Like anything, it requires a certain amount of creative confidence. You have to put yourself out there and try.”

Advice for the Next Generation of Product Marketers

Does Loni have advice for the next generation of product marketers, outside of all the insights we’ve heard so far?

“The biggest thing is to always focus on the customer. The technology, the solution, they will rapidly change. But if you are thinking about a career to span decades, think about the customer and how you add value to them and their  business. Be curious about everything around that. Keep exploring technology, new innovations or things that enhance value to the customer.”

One Last Thing…

Is there anything we haven’t learned about Loni? Maybe something really cool? Loni said it’s her painting, but she also said there’s something else she’s thinking about, but won’t likely get to for another two to three years. She wouldn’t offer any more detail, saying only that you should “execute just as much as you have vision.”

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