The very first time I ever heard the word “PostScript” was in high school. I was the editor of my high school’s yearbook, and the publishing company told me that they used the newest technology available like PostScript files that could be sent directly to a printer. Soon we wouldn’t even need carbon paper! A couple years later Adobe would come up again when I was asked if I had ever seen these new Adobe fonts and did I like Utopia or Minion.
It would be a couple more years until I officially joined the ranks of full-time marketer and I had to make that choice many of us had to make back in the day: Adobe or Quark? After dabbling in Quark, my creative "training" (super loose quotations around the word training there) landed and remained in the Adobe Creative Suite. There are still a couple Creative Directors out there that wish I had never taught myself Photoshop or InDesign…and just today I’ve spent a good part of my day creating data charts and report graphics in Illustrator.
Making Milestones Personal (aka It’s All About Me)
I will mark 30 years in Marketing in 2023 and I have to admit that Adobe has been a near-constant partner in my professional journey. And now, all these years later, I cover the broad portfolio that is today’s modern Adobe as part of my role as an Analyst tracking the ins and outs of CX. The team at Adobe may admit that this connection is probably really unfair to them. It is why I can be a bit more tough or critical of them, coming at them as an overly excitable raging (recovering) practitioner instead of a more measured or mild-mannered analyst. But maybe this is also why I find myself thinking about Adobe’s milestone as a marker of “our” work and not just a marker of their work.
When I think about Adobe, I think about an interview where co-Founder John Warnock retold how he and Charles “Chuck” Geshcke decided to leave their jobs and start this adventure. Quoting the transcript from the Wharton interview Warnock said, “I went into Chuck’s office one day and said, “Chuck, we [can stay at] a very cushy, wonderful job here. Or we could try to get something done.” As a marketer, this drive to just go…leave the comfortable…explore that space between cushy and something…is a familiar motivator. It is core to the work of marketing. And the work of marketing is core to Adobe.
But it is, perhaps, a line from a white paper that only the truly nerdy among us have likely ever read. Called “The Camelot Project”, John Warnock outlines a brief for a new technology and foundational idea behind a project that set out to “solve a fundamental problem that confronts today’s companies.” That problem would be the ability to standardize and communicate visual materials across different applications and systems. In this paper Warnock wrote out a vision for documents that could be viewable and printable on any modern device. He wrote, “If this problem can be solved, then the fundamental way people work will change.”
That standard was the Portable Document Format (PDF), and the project was renamed Adobe Acrobat.
Celebrating the Hard Work of Marketing
Once again, we are confronted with this desire that sits at the very epicenter of Adobe’s history…the desire to solve problems and improve how people work. It is still alive and well in today’s Adobe, unapologetically championed by a new cadre of leaders starting with Shantanu Narayan.
From how we imagine and express to how we reach and engage, Adobe has been there stirring the pot and solving problems. There are only a few organizations out there as in tune with the work of marketing…dare I say the messy, hard, sometimes-heartbreaking, always-changing, insanely wonderful work of marketing.
As Adobe turns 40, we can all step back and appreciate how far the company has come, and by extension how far the work of marketing, communications and creativity has come. Adobe isn’t perfect…far from it. Like every other company out there, Adobe has a SWOT deck with plenty of things to include in that W box. But for today, let’s set aside that criticism and cynicism to appreciate the journey started by Warnock and Geshcke who named their little adventure after a creek that ran behind Warnock’s home.
Adobe, Happy 40th. 40 years from now as younger analysts mark your 80th trip around the corporate sun, may they continue to celebrate your dedication to us…to the marketers that decided to leave something cushy behind so we could just get something done.