“It was so hard—I can’t even describe to you,” Lewnes adds as she looks back on the event, almost as if she’s catching her breath. Adobe MAX 2020 required unprecedented coordination across various internal departments as well as extra heavy lifting from Adobe’s longtime MAX production partner, Pix. “We had our video production team internally shooting all of these people everywhere—and we did it safely,” she says. “We had to stream the whole thing, too”—all for an international audience over the course of three days. “I think that’s the whole story about 2020. It’s been a year where everyone has to come together, even if it’s virtually, to make things happen,” she says.
All told, the event saw 21 million total video views across all channels, 2.2 million visits to the Adobe MAX event site and more than 50 million social interactions. It helped, of course, that the event was all digital and it was the first year Adobe opened it up to the masses. But Lewnes says the success of MAX and its ultra-quick turnaround for its b-to-b event, the Adobe Summit in March, provide a blueprint for what may come in the near future. “Digital will be a huge component even if we go back to having live events because of the tremendous reach you can achieve,” she says. “We had millions of people attend MAX; normally we have tens of thousands of people. That ability to engage a much broader community is something we totally want to do.”