How Adobe and Lumen harness the power of marketing work management

There’s no bigger name in marketing than Adobe—a name that greets Workfront marketers every single day when we log into Adobe Creative Cloud or Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) to execute on our work.

That’s why we recently pulled together a trio of marketing experts in a webinar to talk about harnessing the power of work management from within the Adobe environment that so many marketers call home. Our conversation with Adobe Group Studio Manager Creighton McEwan, Workfront’s Director of Strategic Technology Partnerships Kris Jenkins, and Creative Operations Leader Shane LaBounty from Lumen offered valuable insights on how powerful technology integrations (like Adobe and Workfront) enable marketers to create impactful content and campaigns that add value to the business.

Thanks to just such an integration, Shane’s team was able to accomplish a global brand launch in record time, despite everyone working remotely during a pandemic. The team was able to control permissions to keep the project confidential, even while involving offshore teams to update hundreds of pieces of collateral in a matter of weeks. But most importantly, says Shane, “we were able to use document reports and all kinds of Workfront reports that we could give to marketing operations teams and stakeholders, so as things got rebranded, the right people had the right links to have the right assets to put in the right places,” a feat that also leveraged Adobe Asset URLs at scale.

The realities of the moment.

As the Lumen case study illustrates, marketers have a greater need than ever to rapidly pivot and adapt as new priorities emerge and as circumstances on the ground change. And companies with disconnected and ad hoc martech stacks will struggle to deliver measurable results that align with the organization’s top strategic goals—especially if those goals are in flux.

Both Shane’s and Creighton’s teams are successfully navigating these challenges for three reasons:

• Their Adobe-Workfront integrations enable more agile, aligned creative work while eliminating work friction and distractions.
• Their remote and global creative teams have seamless access to centralized information that connects work to strategy.
• With all work details, deadlines, collaboration, and resources available in one place, they’re able to deliver content and campaigns with greater speed and efficiency.

In moderating the webinar, Kris asks questions that get to the heart of how Adobe and Lumen are creating business-impacting campaigns within their own marketing teams, generating engagement at scale, and optimizing their planning and forecasting.

Here are highlights from their responses to a few of those questions:

1. What key initiatives are part of your tech stack strategy?

For Shane, it starts with evaluating “what tech do we own, and how do we start looking at workflows from creation through distribution? A high percentage of the time, it’s not the tech where we get hung up; it’s being clear on what we want to do and how.”

Shane also discusses the importance of getting the greatest benefit from tech without making it complicated for his team members. In one example, they made sure creatives didn’t have to change their processes at all, focusing instead on iterating their project management approach in a way that augmented existing workflows, resulting in a smaller pool of people to train on the new tech.

2. What are some of the critical metrics that help you effectively do your jobs?

Creighton appreciates having insight into what assets they’re creating for whom, how successful they are in satisfying the needs of their marketing partners, and how well the assets are being used in partner campaigns. He says that with Workfront and AEM at the center, “We’re able to roundtrip assets and projects consistently within a singular mechanism, [allowing] us to more cohesively build a seamless stack for how to manage work and assets.”

“One of the big ones for us has been capacity and forecasting,” adds Shane. “How much effort does it take us to create asset types? How much effort do we spend on concepting?” This isn’t about micromanaging, hourly billing, or granular time-tracking; it’s about being able to “actually plan and make sure we have the appropriate amount of time and resources planned so we can bring our best creative to the market.”

3. How has connecting Adobe technology to Workfront impacted your business?

Marketing teams are working within the creative cloud, the document cloud, the experience cloud, and the work management cloud. And they don’t always talk to each other that well. Integrations between Adobe and Workfront make all of this seamless and intuitive.

“Being able to complete a project in Workfront and for the assets output from that project to automatically publish and be made available to be consumed worldwide by marketers was highly promising for us,” Creighton says. And the reality lived up to the promise. It “dramatically impacted our business and dramatically lessened the burden of our studio managers internally on our team,” he says.

Watch the webinar on demand to learn how technology integrations (like Workfront and Adobe) can empower marketers to more easily pivot as circumstances and priorities change, arming them with the insights they need to create impactful content that aligns with the company’s strategic goals.