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Written in 2026 and dated to when it happened. The links at the end show where the story went next.
In 2014 a single phone call to Adobe’s Dutch office started a partnership that changed the product plans of Adobe and Samsung. It is still running today. It worked because of luck, and because one seller happened to care about the product.
The phone call
Samsung’s lead for digital signage and digital out-of-home in EMEA worked from the Netherlands. One day he phoned Adobe Netherlands with a simple request: could he speak to someone who knew about digital out-of-home or digital signage?
Nobody had an obvious answer. After some asking around, someone at Adobe Benelux found me. I was Adobe’s mobile evangelist, and in my own time I was president of the EMEA chapters of the Location Based Marketing Association. As far as I know, I was the only person in Adobe EMEA with a real interest in screens in physical places.
The odds were small on both sides. The one person at Samsung responsible for this market in EMEA happened to sit a short drive away, and the one person at Adobe who cared about it happened to be reachable through a switchboard.
The gap nobody owned
Digital signage in 2014 was a strange market. Samsung’s own analysis put it bluntly: the top five hardware makers held more than 60% of the market, while the top five software suppliers held less than 10%. There were somewhere between 500 and 1,000 signage content systems, about 80% of them offering the same thing, mostly sold by small local resellers. Content was managed separately from everything else a brand did online, and store teams needed training just to change a poster.
Every big hardware maker had tried to fix this by building its own software: Samsung had MagicInfo, and Intel, Cisco, NEC, Philips and LG all had their own. None of them made a real impact.
Meanwhile Samsung had changed the hardware. Its Smart Signage Platform put a processor, storage and an HTML5 browser inside the screen. The screen no longer needed a PC beside it; it could pull content straight from a vendor’s web server. In effect, the store screen had become a web endpoint.
Adobe sat on the other side of that gap. Creative Cloud was where brands made their content, and Adobe Experience Manager was where they managed it for web and mobile. What Adobe lacked was the last step: a display in the physical store. Samsung had the display and no strong way to manage what it showed.
Three business cases, not one pitch
A joint pitch tells both companies why the partnership is good. That rarely moves anyone. What worked was writing a separate case for each party, in its own language.
For Samsung: a unique selling point its hardware rivals could not match, because Adobe would integrate with Samsung’s platform first. It also opened a door to Adobe’s top brand customers and the agencies that serve them.
For Adobe: a new channel for its content platform, and a missing piece of its “omnichannel” story. Samsung’s direct sales and its network of installers could deliver projects Adobe could not reach on its own.
For the brand: one library of content for web, mobile and store, data from the store flowing back into the same analytics, and fewer people needed to keep screens up to date.
The cost argument made it concrete. In a reference case of 600 screens across 120 locations, Samsung’s built-in player removed the PC beside each screen and cut total cost by about a quarter. Managing content in Adobe took off roughly another 14%. Together, about 35% off the total cost for the customer.
There was a pricing idea inside it too. Signage software was usually licensed per display. Adobe licensed per user. For a brand rolling out thousands of screens, that difference in pricing unit was worth more than any feature.
A few minutes in a breakout session
We arranged for my Samsung counterpart to join a breakout session on Adobe Experience Manager at an Adobe event. That was meant to be a first step towards a pilot.
Then an Adobe VP found out. A few engineers had looked at digital signage as a channel for Experience Manager before, but it had never had much attention. The VP walked into the breakout session, spoke with my Samsung counterpart for a few minutes, and decided it would be good to announce a global partnership with Samsung on stage, in front of Adobe’s entire global sales team at the December 2014 sales kickoff.
That was the moment it stopped being a project between two people. Once a VP has said “partnership” to 1,500 sellers, engineering time, legal attention and executive sponsorship follow, on both sides. A partner, Cognifide, was already building a working demo that combined Samsung’s player with Adobe’s, so there was something real to show behind the announcement.
From announcement to plan
An announcement is not a partnership. Over the following months we turned it into a memorandum of understanding with three workstreams:
- Proof of concept: connect Adobe’s content platform directly to Samsung’s screens, and run a pilot with a leading brand.
- Experience centre: a retail lab where customers could walk through a full journey, from phone to shop window to till.
- Joint go-to-market: aligned sales, marketing and R&D, both internationally and country by country.
The R&D part was the most concrete. Samsung would provide the SDKs, APIs and headquarters-level support for its professional displays. Adobe would build a direct connection between Experience Manager and Samsung’s platform and share its progress with Samsung’s engineers.
The plan had numbers too. The first wave, in 2015, targeted Europe and the Americas, with 20 named international accounts and five retail sub-sectors: fashion, banking, telecoms, automotive and electronics. The ambition for 2020 was for Adobe and Samsung to become the leading platform for in-store digital marketing, with more than 150,000 Samsung screens managed through Adobe and €20 million in cumulative Adobe licence revenue from digital signage. Those were plans, written in 2014, not results.
Where it landed
Both companies changed course. Adobe turned signage from a side experiment into a product: AEM Screens. By late 2016, Adobe’s own product deck listed Samsung’s Smart Signage Platform among its supported players (Adobe, 2016), and today Adobe documents a dedicated player for Samsung’s Tizen displays (Adobe Experience League).
Samsung opened its platform to Adobe, named Adobe as a content management partner for enterprise brands, and took on joint go-to-market work. The two companies still sell the combination together, with Samsung providing the displays, installation and support, and Adobe the content platform (Adobe and Samsung info sheet).
The partnership is still alive in 2026. I don’t have figures to report against the 2020 ambition, and I won’t guess them. What I can say is that a phone call to a switchboard ended up in the product roadmaps of two of the largest technology companies in the world.
What I took from it
Never underestimate serendipity. This partnership did not come from a strategy deck. It came from a phone call that could easily have gone nowhere. Go after the long shots now and then; some of them pay off.
Product expertise sells. Many sellers thrive on networking, negotiation and process, and that is fine. Some sell because they genuinely like the product and understand where it could go. That second group spots opportunities like this one. Let your product marketing managers spend more time with them.
Look for the fixed endpoint. When one side changes its platform, as Samsung did by putting a browser in the screen, it often creates a slot for the other side. Ask who just became connectable.
Write a business case for each party. Samsung, Adobe and the brand each needed their own reason to say yes. One joint pitch would have convinced nobody in particular.
Let a third party build the proof. A partner building the demo removed the “who goes first” problem between two large companies.
Use the stages you already have. An internal sales kickoff turned a two-person idea into a company commitment overnight. Sometimes the fastest route to executive sponsorship is a demo in the right room.
Change the pricing unit. “Per user, not per display” made the business case for brands. The unit you charge for can matter more than the price, as I argue in Price AI on outcomes, not tokens.
Sources
- Adobe: AEM Screens overview, November 2016
- Adobe Experience League: Implementing the Tizen player
- Adobe and Samsung info sheet
- Market figures, cost example and 2015–2020 plans: Samsung and Adobe partnership materials from 2014, from my own archive.