Over the past few weeks on Tuesdays with Tukaiz, we’ve been covering the technology and application of Web Analytics and discussing how marketers are relying more on analytics to measure the effectiveness of campaigns and optimize things like advertising and user experience. One of the Web Analytics companies we mentioned, Omniture, was acquired by Adobe last year. Many of us were wondering how Adobe would integrate its Creative Suite products with Omniture’s own products. Last week, we finally got an answer when Adobe unveiled the fifth iteration of its Creative Suite family of products (commonly referred to as CS5) and all of its various packages: Design Standard, Design Premium, Web Premium, Production Premium, and the all-encompassing Master Collection.

Test&Target, Omniture’s testing and optimization product, has been integrated into a panel within Adobe’s Flash tool, while SiteCatalyst, Omniture’s flagship analytics platform, has been integrated with Dreamweaver. These integrations are meant to bring the designer and the marketer closer together by enabling the designer to sync multiple Flash designs, such as online display ads, to Test&Target, as well as build and optimize Web designs to work well with SiteCatalyst. For Test&Target, the marketer can test the different ad versions that a Web visitor receives based on a variety of metrics, such as location and browser type, to see which ad is most effective. A Test&Target user can also change the text of a Flash-based ad, such as a call-to-action, without ever having to open the actual Flash application. This allows for greater flexibility. With CS5 also comes the launch of Omniture SiteCatalyst NetAverages, which aggregates and visualizes analytics information from a pool of Omniture users to give designers insight into the latest trends across the Web. These trends include screen resolution and browser type, which provide designers with useful information to meet the top requirements of Web users.

The Adobe CS5/Omniture integration represents a huge first step in bringing the art and science of marketing together by enabling marketers to test and optimize the performance of their campaigns before launching them to a wider audience. With marketing budgets still tight and a greater push to utilize multiple marketing channels, this type of streamlining will be welcome. It has the potential to enable the tracking and analysis of other mediums within an overall campaign, including print.

Adobe CS5 also has a number of other improvements that make it an attractive upgrade option for organizations that may have passed over CS4. Many of the features in CS5 include tools that help end-users increase productivity. For example:

• Photoshop adds a wide variety of new features, including content-aware fill, which garnered a lot of buzz on the Web before Monday’s release. Content-aware fill enables users to intelligently fill in areas and even fully take out items from image files by sampling from surrounding areas of that image (check out the video example to see what we’re describing). This feature and others like it are designed to boost productivity during the image editing process.
• InDesign CS5 provides the necessary tools to design and export interactive Flash (or interactive PDF) designs without knowing the ins and outs of ActionScript. As organizations continually seek ways to provide value-added, multi-channel solutions for their clients, this feature will be a welcomed addition to the toolkit. Other notable features include the ability to have pages of multiple sizes within the same document, CS Review for collaborative review sessions of files, and the ability to export directly to the EPUB format, which will be a welcomed addition to publishers trying to produce and distribute eBooks.
• Illustrator was also expanded to include new features for accurate drawing and more detailed vector art. Features include perspective drawing (enabling scenes and shapes to be drawn in accurate 1-, 2-. and 3-point liner perspective) and the ability to apply raster effects that can maintain its appearance across multiple media types as they are resolution-independent.
• Like the Photoshop features, the new features for Flash have been generating a lot of buzz for numerous reasons. Flash CS5 includes the ability to package and export ActionScript 3 projects to iPhone applications, which can be distributed through Apple’s App Store. A change to Apple’s development terms (with the release of the iPad on April 3) may bring about some issues, and this is saying nothing about the potential impact of the impending release of HTML5. With Flash Catalyst CS5, Adobe’s image software’s (Illustrator and Photoshop extended) become more integrated, allowing to easily become interactive Flash and AIR apps.
• Despite controversy, Dreamweaver CS5 embraces the HTML5 canvas. CMS (Content Management System) support has been added, making it easier to work with frameworks like WordPress, Joomla!, and Drupal. More CSS templates have been added, but more interesting is the CSS inspection tool, which enables the user to toggle CSS properties without reading code.

Adobe’s latest Creative Suite release shows that the company is focusing on increased productivity for end-users, enabling designers to more easily develop interactive designs and interfaces, and ultimately bringing creative and marketing departments closer together to ensure greater organizational alignment and a streamlined workflow. It will be interesting to see how end-users embrace and push these features to their full potential to obtain maximum value and provide the best experience possible.