[Music] [Shelly Chiang] Welcome to Best Buy: Scaling with DAM, Now and into the Future. My name is Shelly Chiang, and I am an Adobe Experience Manager Assets in the Product Marketing team. And now let Stacy introduce herself. [Stacy Aase] Hi, I'm Stacy Aase. I am the Associate Director of Product Management at Best Buy and work with Adobe on various different tools in our marketing and advertising technology team. All right. So you may have seen on main stage that asset management is really the center of content supply chain. And in this session here, we're going to tell you why a digital asset management is important to DAM. So I've been really excited to work with Stacy here today because Best Buy was an early adopter of content supply chain. And they started out with asset management to help with content creation and workflows. So it's organizations like Best Buy, where we're able to evolve the DAM into composable services and having DAM as really the fuel for content supply chain. So what are composable services? Composable services are building blocks to help you with the speed, the volume, and the scale of content. And being able to address one used case or many complex used cases. So with that, we're going to help you provide a map today on how you can reach the summit. And I'm going to hand it over to Stacy to start.

Thank you, Shelly. First, I'm going to tell a little bit about our journey at Best Buy. We started back in 2016, and we, at that time had an explosion of need of content. Our consumers were looking for more digital content and they no longer wanted our paper flyer. That posed the need for us to act quickly and to find assets. But we have also had a tool problem. The tool we had was over 20 years old. There was maybe a group of 10 people who could access that particular DAM, which meant our creators were getting content from all over the place, in their email, on Zip drives, everywhere, posed a huge problem when you had to create more and more content. And so what we did was implement AEM. So we started with the DAM, and that really started our content supply chain. Going into it, we had a couple of different goals. The first goal was to improve consistency of our marketing communications. Obviously, when you're looking for assets and they're all over the place and had timelines to get content out the door, that content always didn't look the same if it was in Facebook or on bestbuy.com.

Our second goal was to increase the efficiency in our content creation process. We needed to make sure that our creators could get what they needed. And how we were going to get there was by bringing in AEM assets and supported a Create Once Use Everywhere model.

So as we talk today, we're going to walk through how we define Create Once Use Everywhere before and now today.

How we use Metadata and not to underestimate the power of Metadata can bring.

How we identify the structure and organization to our DAM.

And then I'm going to turn it back over to Shelly and she's going to talk about democratizing access across the organization.

So let's talk about, first, about how we define Create Once Use Everywhere. As I was thinking about this presentation and how to talk about it from where it was to where it is now. I went to Google and did a simple search. And what I found was everybody has a different definition of Create Once Use Everywhere. Or some people call it create once publish everywhere. Organizations talk about it as software that allows you to create or edit piece of content, allows content creators to add content in one place, and it also is a part of a single unified process. Well, looking at this and looking back at our journey, Best Buy wasn't any different. Create Once Use Everywhere meant different things to different parts of our organization, and not only different parts of our organization, but even within the line of that organization. When you talk to our designers, they thought it meant create a file, create a piece of artwork and use it everywhere. Although for them, that didn't make sense, because they knew that, what they needed on Facebook or on a page of our global homepage, those specs were different. And so they really couldn't use the same one because they needed to make adjustments. If you talk to our category management team, to them, they thought it meant, use the same message in all the different channels. And they really didn't think about it from a creative perspective. And then technology. We thought it meant, go ahead, take the file, hit a button and publish it everywhere. And so all these things meant very different things to everybody. And looking back, how did we... How did that happen? Well, when we talked about our vision for Create Once Use Everywhere, we illustrated it. Sometimes, a picture is worth a thousand words, but you have to be careful if you want it to mean a thousand different words. So what we were talking about is how and the now phase was that our assets that we were putting out there in our different channels, even though they may have been the same message or did the same promotion, they looked very different and that caused consumer confusion. Our consumers weren't sure if the offer they saw on our website was the same that they saw on their email. And as we talked about going into the future state, we needed to create that consistency. Our fragments that we use in the future state were ones that we put together that they could be assembled and pushed downstream to some of our vehicles. It was a curation of images and copy, and then formulated for each of the different parts. And as I look at this now, many years later, you can see why our designers thought we were thinking it could just be the same piece everywhere. You can see why our technology team thought it was push a button and have it go everywhere. Or how our category marketers thought it was more about the message itself.

So now we talk about what is Create Once Use Everywhere and what are the learnings, we have from that? First is, you really want to define what is that definition for your organization and explain what it is and what it is not.

So let's talk about what it is. What the definition is for us. Create Once Use Everywhere is a content creation strategy for content creators that allow them to be more efficient in the creative process. Now, this is the definition that we use. And there's a couple key three pieces of this that I talk to my teams about. The first is, what is it? It's a content creation strategy. It's not a message strategy. It's not a technology strategy. It's a strategy on how we're going to create the content and how we're going to bring tools to help support that. It is for content creators. So our number one persona is our content creators. And why we're doing it or why is it important is because it helped them be more efficient in the content creation process. So now we have a definition. And with a lot of definitions, a lot of times we want to talk about how do you really get down to, really, what does it mean? So now we're going to talk about what it is. So our definition of Create Once Use Everywhere is a way to drive efficiency by reusing creative or parts of previously created content.

Talking about the different parts of previously created content, users can start with something that may be 40%, 60%, 70%, by finding those images in our DAM and make adjustments to them, so then they can send them on their way. Starting from 40%, 60%, 70% is going to be a lot faster than starting from zero. That also then allows our creatives more time to create new content. There are times when you don't have contents that you can recreate. And so this allows them more time to create that new content.

And talking about what it's not, it's not a rule to only create one piece of content for a whole campaign. We still produce hundreds of pieces of content for a singular campaign. It is not the same file being pushed everywhere. And it doesn't mean we don't change our creative based on the medium type. We know that our designers know what works on social, what works on dotcom, what works in email. And our creative still needs to be relevant to our customer in those channels. So you will see changes within our content. So how do we make all of this happen? And that, my friends, is the power of Metadata.

So for us, Metadata is the key to helping find our assets. At Best Buy, we have over 849,000 marketing assets in our DAM today. Our Metadata helps us manage, where it is stored. It allows it to be searched. It conveys how content can be used, and it helps us keep the DAM up to date. I'm going to dig a little bit into each of these a little bit more. So our Metadata helps us direct our assets as where they go. We have a series of workflows and different attributes for every different type of file. And this is something that we worked on when we started to implement this DAM and it's still working today. In fact, there's some people in this room that helped me with this a long time ago. So we know from this asset here that it's an approved asset. For us, an approved asset means anybody can use it. It's gone through all our legal reviews. It's ready to be used. From there, we know that we have a different asset type. Our asset type tells our system where and what folder structure it needs to go into. And I'll talk about our folder structure in a minute. So in this particular example, it's a compound image and it's for a product. Because it's a product image, we also have other attributes, such as, what category or department does it come from. In this case, it is mobile. So with all these different attributes and values on our assets, we have devised rules and workflows to help move our assets throughout the DAM.

And while we have all this different Metadata on our assets, it also helps us to improve our search results. Unfortunately or fortunately, Google has set a new standard for search. And part of the problem with that, is that a lot of our users expect to have the same capabilities that Google has. And I'm sure all of you have that and feel that as well. So we had to try to teach all of our designers, our production artists, our copywriters how to search into our DAM. And we continued to improve on this area. We asked them by showing them different images. How would you search for this? How would you filter? What do you want to see? How would it help you? Asking the specific users helped us understand what type of filters we needed to have, and what type of folder structure, and how we wanted to label our different images. We also have on here is, you'll see on the rights management piece, which I'll talk about in a second. But all of our assets, we continue to work to try to make sure that our users can find them faster and easier. We also are using smart tagging and learning to train that model with Adobe Sensei to help us find it easier as well.

So let's talk about how assets can be used. So you heard on the main stage today about how Project Firefly and the need to protect those assets and make sure that they're right. We have that same problem with our assets. Our assets, we get from some of our partners. We shoot them ourselves, or sometimes we may get them from some of our influencers. And ensuring that those rights are followed in all our different places are very important. So we customize and created a special schema just for rights management. On our schema, we ask things of like, what is the talent? Who is the photographer? When was it taken? And then nightly, we have jobs that run through that content to understand whether or not that image can still be available for someone to use. We also tell them where they can use it. When a user goes into our DAM and they see an image with a watermark over it that says rights managed, that is a visual indicator to them, to make sure that the purpose they're using that image aligns with the rights of that image.

Not only do we manage rights, but we also use Metadata to help, make sure that we are deploying our retention rules and keeping our DAM clean. We've created a DAM lifecycle. We have images that are active. We have images that become obsolete. And then eventually, they're either archived or purged. We also have times where we reach out to users through reports and communication about their assets. This is all run through workflows off of Metadata every week. So that when an asset has reached a certain point in its lifecycle, it can actually just be moved, and it will not show up in the user's view when they're searching any longer.

So let's also talk about how we define our structure and our organization. Because part of the need for Metadata also relies on where that assets live.

So in our DAM, we have various different structures within it. We have our assets. We have approved assets. Our users know that in our approved assets, they're going to find things in there that can be ready for print. They're higher res images, and they are then on a different hierarchy. So product images, lifestyle, those kinds of things. We also have a group that has their work in progress in there. We have digital content, which is a signal to them that it is in a file type in weight that can be used digitally. And all these different folders also have different permissions.

So our folder structure helps us allow access. We have many, many users in our DAM, in our author instance. And we use the folder structure along with roles and permissions to control what people can see and what they can do.

In fact, there are very few people now that have the ability to delete assets. The reason for that is because we use to have it, opened up a little bit wider, and someone accidentally did delete part of our DAM and caused a lot of panic. This is not a good day. But good thing is we had a backup, and we got a back up when we were good. So we need to make sure that we're careful with that. There's maybe three or four people now that have the ability to delete out of our DAM. Instead, we use workflows. Also, our folder structure helps us with who can read, who can create, who can modify, who can publish within our assets. So one team may only see a particular folder in our folder structure, while other teams may see across them, so that everybody can get what they want when they need it as quickly as possible. We don't need to give access to everybody if they don't need images that we have all in the DAM. More images they have, more they have to filter through and sift through to find what they want. So how do we keep it organized? It's not fancy. It's a spreadsheet. So this spreadsheet is an example of all our different roles across the top and down the sides. And we mark who has rights, who can review, who can read, who can modify, who can publish. And we put everything at the top level that we can, so that those permissions can scroll down.

So now we're going to talk a little bit about going into the future. And I'm going to turn it over to Shelly here in a second. We've done a lot since 2016, and I only shared a very small portion of what we've done. We've learned a ton, but we're not done. I would say we have a long way to go yet. So I'm very excited about the different technologies and capabilities that Adobe's bringing with AI, as well as some of the things that Shelly is now going to show us around Content Hub and Composable Services.

All right. So building from what Stacy was saying around permissions to different groups and different users, for different use cases, like your project managers or your copywriters or your designers, how are you able to get content out beyond the DAM? So it's able to bring approved assets to more people and allowing them to also create and remix that asset into different variations with control. So this is where I'm going to talk about democratized assets for more users.

So this is the way we're seeing in terms of how the market is shifting. You got to create content and you got to create it fast. An approach would be to distribute that content out to more people across the organization, so that they're able to take that approved asset and be able to use it for downstream activities and even have the ability to create and reedit and remix that asset into different variations in a controlled manner. Now, organizations are probably using tools to create. They're using probably Generative AI. And now it's more important than ever to have a DAM in place, so that you don't get something called content sprawl. And let me explain that. So if you haven't seen "I Love Lucy," it is a 1950s black and white sitcom, and it's hilarious. And there's a particular episode where Lucy and Ethel goes into a chocolate factory and they work there. So there's a famous scene there where Lucy and Ethel are at a conveyor belt, and there is a big machine that's churning out all these chocolates one by one. So their job is to wrap up these chocolates, and they do a good job. And they're actually very proud of themselves. And then all of a sudden something happens. It becomes faster and faster, and more chocolates were coming out. So what did they do? They put in their hats. They put in their shirts. They put in their mouths. And this is what I call content sprawl. So let me illustrate this. CMOs want to hit that performance stage on higher conversion, right? Now in order to do that, you got to go and create content and you got to create it fast. What happens in the steps in between? Approval processes, controls and permissions, governance, legal compliance, and omnichannel delivery. Well, it slows down so that you don't even hit that, really, that performance stage. So it's more important than ever to have a DAM to be able to accelerate that upward. And Best Buy has a great foundation of these steps. Now, how do you get that out for consumption to more people, so that they're able to use it in a way, use content in a way where it's controlled with compliance and then you're able to remix that into variations. So there's a couple approaches here. If you're a DAM expert, you know that that's your sacred place. And you don't want people to come litter your DAM after you knew Maria Quando all your assets, right? It's sort of like, I just cleaned my house and my kids come home and my house was clean for two whole minutes. So you want to be able to get that content out in a way that is controlled and being able to get it out and distribute it to others, so that it's not even an upload and download type of situation here.

So this is what we're talking about in terms of the evolution of DAM with a set of composable services. So where you're able to find content in the DAM, from the DAM, and then being able to take action of it. So what this allows you to do is that it's able to get more content out to more users that you were never able to do before, like your sales and partners, for example. They need to create content and they need to create it with consistency here, or your agencies, or your vendors. These are the types of people that also need to create content. And these are the composable services that are modular and flexible, which allows you to handle multiple used cases and expand that to more users across, for more people to help with volume, speed, and scale. So let me speak about composability. Composability, I'll give you an example of a dishwashing company, and they were, during the pandemic they were able to shift their machinery into something that was helping facilitate medical supplies, right, during the pandemic. So this is what I'm talking about in terms of composability, where you're able to be flexible, you're able to be modular and build it out for different used cases. And it could be like Lego Blocks, right? You're able to mold that Lego Block into an animal or a sculpture or even a house. So let me break this down.

Let's talk about these services. We'll start with Find. How do you find content through an intuitive portal or even within the tools that your users are using? And then after finding that content, how do you remix them in different variations and then managed with controls and permissions and governance? And then being able to deliver them down into different channels, like your CMS, or your email campaigns, or your commerce system. And underneath it all, you got insights of all these different services that's helping you to be more personalized and more targeted even more the next time. So I'll give you an example here. Taylor Swift is probably one of the most influential people in America. And let's say that she wears a brand-new red lipstick at the Grammys and that goes viral. It goes on social. It gets on the webs. And you as a brand want to be able to build on that momentum, be able to create more content, and create it with consistency and then being able to actually deliver that content out to different channels there. So I want to first talk about our brand-new innovation within assets content hub, where this allows you to address asset distribution. It helps your... The people that want to be able to access these assets and being able to a way where they can pull in the asset from this intuitive portal and then being able to remix them. And we're able to do this with the integration with Adobe Express and the Generative AI capabilities of Adobe Firefly. So I'm going to... Also, then you can save it back to the DAM for version control. So right now, I am going to be vulnerable here and I'm going to do a live demo. Let's see if it works because I've been working on this all weekend, and hopefully, the demo gods are with me here. All right. So let's go ahead and go into my environment here, and this is AEM assets content hub. Now there's a search capability here, and I'm going to head and search for, like, outdoors, for example.

So you can see here all of my assets are able to be populated here, right? And, actually, these are in collections. I'm going to go back into assets and I'm going to do outdoors here.

And you can see all of my assets. Now one thing that's pretty cool is that you can see on the side that these are your filters, right? And you could define these filters as, as you like it to be. So it doesn't have to be campaigns. It doesn't have to be channels. And you can even search within those filters as well.

Now, I'm going to go into my asset here and you could see that it collects all of the Metadata details here on, like, the size, the upload date, uploaded by, resolution, keywords, and even colors. It captures the colors. You're able to download the asset or you're able to share that asset out or you're able to add it into a collection. Now I'm going to go ahead and hit this button here and this is going to open up Adobe Express. So this is the embedded editor within Content Hub, and you can see that there's tons of things that you can do here. You can even pull in more assets from your DAM. You can do templating. You can actually do some text in here. I use Adobe Express a lot for birthday parties and then I also use it for creating cards for my mom on Lunar New Year and I was able to translate it to the language that she's familiar with, and so she felt it was more personalized for her. Now, I'm going to go ahead and show you this capability here where it is text to image, and this is leveraging the Generative AI capabilities of Firefly to help you speed up that content creation. So I'm going to go ahead and click on that. I'm going to spice up this asset a little bit and we're gonna put a garden gnome in spring. I'm in the East Coast right now and its springtime. The cherry blossoms are out and it's gorgeous. So let's see what gnomes I get. And there you go. You got some gnomes. You got some, other ones here, and you can load more. And then I can do, actually, a simple operation of removing that background.

And there is your garden gnome. I'm going to resize him a little bit, put him over here. Another thing that you can actually do here is resize that into different sizes. So you could do an insta-square-post. You can do a LinkedIn post, web banner. There's lots and lots of options here that you can choose from. You can duplicate into these various different variations here, right? And they're in different sizes. What you can do is that you can actually click out of it. I don't want this one. And you could actually save this asset, so that you can also pull in, what campaign name, some keywords here, what region. So you're able to do that as well. So this is with the power of the integration of Adobe Express with Content Hub. And I'm going to go click out of here. I'm going to show you a couple of other things. So I showed you how you're able to download and share that asset out. You're able to do that in a collection as well. So a collection is cobbling up a lot of assets together and being able to download that collection which contains 25 assets here and you're able to share it out with others.

All right. So another thing I want to show you is the insights. We're able to understand the usage of all these insights. Uploads by day, uploads by month. It's very granular. Active users by day, active users by month. You could see even the filters and how many assets are in there as well. All right. So I'm going to go back in here and going to continue on. So I talked a lot about how you're able to get content in the tools where users are using. So AEM Asset provides integration with our Adobe and non-Adobe applications. So these are your CMSs, your PIMs even, your commerce system and we're bringing DAM to our users, the DAM content to our users. And on top of that integration, you're able to deliver that with optimization and performance. So I'm going to wear four different hats here and show you every persona here on how they're able to access assets. So the first one, let's say that this is your asset in your DAM, and you want to put this into your CMS. So I as a web author, I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to use my asset selector. It's called Asset Selector here. And you can open this up, search for the asset as a web author. Hiking in Utah is what I'm searching for. I'm going to place that asset into my web page here. And then if you're in the DAM and you change that into a black and white, and then if you go back to your CMS and you hit Reload as a web author, you're able to see that it is black and white. So it does speak to the DAM. So that's reference, it's not a binary copy. Now, I'm going to move on into another way to author web pages. So AEM site stock authoring allows you to be able to take a webpage and edit it into a Word doc or a Google doc. So this is another way of democratizing authoring. Now I'm going to be really focused on the assets. If you want to learn more about this, there are, there is sites track and there are great experts around sites. But I'm going to show you the assets and how to get that in. So I am an assets librarian and I'm going to go ahead and... Oops, let's go back here.

Give me one second here.

Well, this one's not playing, but I can talk to you about it. You're able to make that assets approved as a DAM person and then you can actually go into as a web author and being able to pull that asset into the web doc and then it could be published. The whole webpage can be published. Now, I'm going to wear a different hat here. I am a creative person and I want to be able to also pull in my assets here. So give me one second. I'm not sure why it's not playing.

Well, I can describe this too. So you are a creative person and you're in Photoshop, for example, and you want to be able to access assets as well. So what you can do here is you can actually check out the asset and then you're able to be pulling in the assets from your DAM without that creative person even leaving their tools. And they're able to pull that asset in and then being able to comment and then it is actually shown in the DAM. So again, that person, that creative person doesn't have to download and then upload to DAM. They don't need to learn a new tool. They're actually able to do this within the applications they're in.

So another thing I want to talk about here is the AEM Assets Integration with Adobe Commerce. This is in our early adopter phase, and what this allows you to do, it allows you to ingest, search, and collaborate with assets. It does auto-share and syncing of assets. It helps with personalizing those product images and accelerating content creation and delivery. So this is really showing how you're able to democratize assets to more users and the tools that they are in. For example, you're a merchandiser. You're able to pull assets from the DAM into your commerce tool. You're a creative person. You're able to pull in assets into your Photoshop tools. Or you're a web author. You're able to pull in assets from your remote DAM into your authoring web tool. And then the intuitive portal is there to help you with those that need access as well, like your partners or your salespeople, or your vendors.

And then on top of that, we're able to see where those assets are being delivered to, whether it's being used a lot into your commerce system or your web pages. You see that it's being used a lot. You want to be able to double down on that. And if they're not being used a lot, maybe you want to pivot to a different sort of asset.

So this is what we're talking about in terms of the art of the possible. When you marry consumption and governance together, and this is the workflow that you get. You're an AEM Assets Content Hub. You search for your asset, that's approved. You can remix it to different variations, have the control and compliance and management in place, and then it's able to be integrated to all your different applications to pull in those assets and then have it dynamically delivered to multiple channels. And then you get insights on every level here, so that you're able to be more personalized and more targeted, even more the next time.

So these are key takeaways.

Define Create Once and Use Everywhere. So Stacy provided really good tidbits here on that, and it's really like not everybody's going to have the same definition, right? Don't underestimate the power of Metadata. Metadata is gold. It is the DNA of your asset. It helps you with search. It helps you with workflows and it even helps you with delivery of that content.

Identify structure and organization. So know who our users are and what their used cases are.

And then democratize access across the organization. So I showed you a couple of examples there in different personas where you can do it from an intuitive portal, or you could do it in applications your users are comfortable with. So with that, Stacy, do you have any last words? I don't other than it's a journey and use the tools. Talk to your users is probably the best thing that we did was understanding how they use it and what they want to use. All right. So before we go into Q and A, I showed a lot of innovations here like Content Hub and also the way that you can select assets in for commerce, right? So you're able to use this QR code. If you're interested in getting early access to this, fill out the form and we'll be sure to reach out to you. So I think we're out of time and they're at the door waiting for us to be. Thank you so much. Thank you, Stacy, for being here with us today.

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