Week 12, 2025 - Vegas, baby

Song of the week:

Thoughts

The last few days of torture are finally over. I flew to Vegas for the Adobe Summit, related to $job. And while most folks might imagine Adobe being the company behind Photoshop and general creative tools, you'd be lost at sea if you showed up to their annual Summit.

Summit is more about their SaaS b2b and b2c tools. Most of the audience are marketers (an audience I know well thanks to $prev_job). And they love talking ad nauseum about AI, user journeys, data, etc.

Last year, a few of us went under the radar and took about two billion meetings, pressed as much flesh as we could and proved the model. This year, about two billion colleagues showed up with a booth, on-stage presence and a divide-and-conquer approach to meetings. I also had a new hire with me, which will hopefully avoid the need for me to attend in future.

And I say that last sentence genuinely. Vegas is awful. The smell of smoke, the funnelling through casinos despite going from breakfast to a conference. I only spent 3 nights there but felt like it was 3 weeks. And for others impacted by the Heathrow shutdown, it probably felt a lot worse.

It's funny how the audience there shifts so aggressively. All week folks were wandering around with Adobe lanyards, sipping on free cocktails in bars with open tabs sponsored by vendors or partners. And as soon as Thursday landed, as we filtered through the strip to stop off at different hotels to collect bags for traveling Europeans, the mood shifted to old dudes in beards. Vegas was no longer marketer central. It was hippy central, and it shifted to accommodate hordes of Deadheads.

It's a place to go see. You kind-of have to. But it is truly terrible.

Photo of the week

(via my flickr)

Tabs

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Published on: 22nd March, 2025

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