At the Sitecore Symposium CHILI publish was a hit!

Last week, the CHILI publish team attended the Sitecore Symposium event to meet with customers and partners to deepen our relationships and spread the Creative Automation word. If you didn’t know, Sitecore is one of our Strategic Partners. Their customers easily access the CHILI publish platform via a connector to get branded promotional content to market at scale and at hyper speed!

It continues to amaze me, however, that our technology remains an emerging market – but not for long. The buzz and interest is catching on. Exciting times ahead for CHILI publish.

There is momentum, as Forrester is focused on our sector now and Sitecore is introducing new product features that will benefit us all in the future. For those of you who missed the Sitecore Symposium event, I’ll share a recap!

Tuesday – Day 1

After attending Sitecore’s Partner event the night before, it was time to turn to the serious stuff. Fortunately, we had a fantastic booth location, right between the main stage area and the beginning of the solutions partners area. We could not have had a better location, really.

Sitecore’s CEO, Steve Tzikakis, kicked off the Sitecore Symposium and announced the launch of 3 new products: Content Hub One (the new purely headless CMS), Content Search and Connect.

It was interesting to hear that brands typically only reinvest 1% of their revenue in content, and 5% of the content receives 90% of the attention, while L’Oréal’s global head of digital, Anne Girard, stated that there is an explosion of need for content due to the customer journey (in their case, 600 websites, 2.2 million assets), complexity, and boom of new platforms.

71% of consumers relate better to authentic brands, so understanding their customers and communicating with them on-brand in a personalized and consistent way is of the utmost importance – this is where CHILI publish comes in to accelerate the Sitecore platforms. As some of you know, our platform is connected to Sitecore Content Hub to act as a multiplier of content variants.

Content and Creative Automation are evolutionary steps in the same landscape.

Fabian Prudhomme

Wednesday - Day 2

Day 2 was marked by the many breakout sessions.

Dave O’Flanagan (Sitecore CPO) led the first showcase with the new composable future of Sitecore and a powerful message relying on the ability to connect or combine any Sitecore product you want.

A lot of breakout sessions focused on the XM Cloud, Sitecore’s new CMS featuring a new UX and tons of new features. I’ll leave you to visit the website to learn more.

The day ended with the anticipated Sitecore Party at the Museum of Science and Industry, which was fully accessible to party attendees who could switch from DJ music to a live blues band to food and drinks and, of course, all museum exhibits and attractions. I enjoyed the F4 flight simulator the most. Hanging upside down while doing barrel rolls, loopings and shooting down enemy aircraft was quite satisfying for the Maverick side of my personality.

Thursday - Day 3

The final day of the Symposium was quieter. Quite a few people seemed to be having to deal with hangovers and/or excessive overnight ageing.

The CHILI publish booth remained quite busy with big brands dropping by a second time to learn more. The 'Aha' moment when people realize how much time and aggrevation our platform could save them as opposed to all the unnecessary manual and repetive work they have to do in InDesign, never gets old! The demand for content is only going up and to keep scaling, Creative Automation is now starting to take a central place in the Martech stack for creative teams.

To end, the main conclusions of these three full days for me:

Sitecore’s future is composable

It offers functionalities that you can plug in based on your own needs is the way to go and will provide the personalized and digital experience customers and prospects seek. None of this will be on premise anymore. Like everybody else, either you go SaaS or you DaaS (Die as a Snake).

Sitecore’s ecosystem is much bigger than I originally thought

Looking back, I wish I’d had more time to engage and spend time with the other Solution Partners who sponsored and participated. It is clear that we (all) have a lot to gain by collaborating and combining our solutions for the benefit of joint customers. It was awesome to see that our partners started bringing some of their prospects to our booth when they captured interest in our platform.

In my opinion, the Sitecore Symposium is a must-do show for us to exhibit at as we were able to learn more about the ecosystem surrounding the Sitecore solutions, establish stronger relationships with relevant fellow Sitecore partners while introducing Creative Automation to the world.

On our journey to evangelize Creative Automation, it continues to amaze me in this era and level of data and transformation, how many people still are not aware of this powerful CHILI publish engine that can accelerate a consumer brand or agency’s strategic goals to automate controlled brand content at scale!

Join us at SPICY talks '22 Europe!

Next month, we’re hosting our annual user event in Brussels to inspire and educate the industry on the importance of Creative Automation and how to take ‘phygital’ variant production to a whole new level.

It is a packed 2-day event that includes speakers such as agency-world analyst Jay Pattisall from Forrester, creative thought leader Dave Birss, Creative Automation experts, CHILI publish platform experts, certification tracks on our new platform, and much more. And we always throw a great party!

Come to hear more about what Forrester shas to say about the future of our industry. I hope to see you there!

If you want to have a sneak peek of what's coming, you can enjoy our recap video from SPICY talks 2019!