I just had a one on one with Adobe CMO, Ann Lewnes, a power house of interactive marketing energy for the combined Adobe/Omniture companies.

In her words, "Adobe's goal is to be the site role model of what the combined Adobe/Omniture suite of products can bring to any marketer's site."

Her plan is to market how products from the combined firms can help designers and marketers track customer engagement with content at the content level, not campaign or page level.  And she is going to do this by improving upon Adobe's existing Website design best practices.  New site development of Adobe.com will actually center around a modular creation approach — perfect for the Splinternet — which will allow Adobe to test performance of different parts of the site and constantly iterate in order to improve performance and customize the site to customer profiles.

And what online efforts does Adobe has planned beyond its site? Ann cites a staggerring 74% of Adobe's marketing dollars go toward digital media.  Let me say that again: 74% of Adobe's marketing dollars go toward digital media. Most goes toward email and search — the best drivers of immediate sales.  But a reasonable amount also goes toward display and social media engagement.

As a fellow champion of interactive, I loved hearing Ann say that B2B marketers can't afford not to be aggressively investing in online.  But I loved another point she made even more: Don't sacrifice long term brand engagement in the name of short term revenue results.  (This actually sounds like the perspective I also got recently from another silicon valley power CMO, Elisa Steele). I've found many marketers sacrificed brand investments during the recession to invest more in driving direct sales.  

But I agree with Ann.  This trend is an eventual detriment to your business. And I look forward to hearing that more CMOs are following Adobe (and Yahoo!'s) example to invest in engaging users with their brand on and offline.