[music] [Heather Freeland] Hi, everybody. Welcome to Summit, and welcome to this session. So, I'm Heather Freeland. I'm the Chief Brand Officer at Adobe, and I am really excited to connect with you guys today and talk to you about the journey we've been on at Adobe. You know, it's so funny. I've been in this industry for my entire career, and I've never seen more change than I've seen happen in the last year. So, believe it or not, this is what it looked like when I started work, and only my colorist will confirm that. But it's really interesting because the world of content creation and deployment just looked completely different at that time. So I started out on the agency side, and one of the funny things I remember is when we sent out an email campaign that was one email. There were not versions for different segments, there were not different cells and personalization at all. And when we produced an email, we would literally design it, we would print it out, we would mount it on a board, and then someone's job was to walk around the agency to everyone in the agency, from the creative director to the marketing lead to whatever, to approve it and physically sign off on it. And then we'd make those edits, and then we'd do that again for round two. So let's just say things are a little better than they used to be now. Now we can personalize content. Now we can really move at a much more significant pace than we have. But the volume has gotten insane, right? Like I talked about previously, we could do one email. Now, thanks to our technology, we can do literally hundreds of different cells, different tests, different variants, etcetera. And think about it, all of us walking in our customers shoes know what it's like to get a bad experience, right? Like, if a company that you like sends you a wrong recommendation, a misplaced message, what have you, you really kind of take a step back and question that relationship and the value they're bringing to you. What's happened, though, is now this explosion for the need for content. So we need to fill all these cells for tests. We need to produce lots more content for different media channels. You know, one of the things I look at in the last year at Adobe is not only are we producing assets for all of our different products, all of our different customer segments, all of our different regions, but then we have to do that time and time again as the pace of innovation and the rate, with which we're releasing products, products increases. It is absolutely mind-boggling the increase in content that we've had to produce. And so the tricky thing now comes in that we have to look at what this does to our processes. And this probably looks familiar to a lot of you. It's not linear like me walking up and down the halls, cycling that email around. Instead, it looks like a spaghetti mess, right? And there's a lot of complexity in the process. There's a lot of different people and touch points throughout the enterprise that it takes to actually get an email campaign or any campaign out the door. Now, at the same time, while we have this explosion of the need for content, this demands from our customers for personalized content, then I have my CFO tapping me on the shoulder saying, "Can you hold costs down? Can you produce more? Can you really speed all this up a little bit more?" And that's when my head is about to explode. And I'm sure a lot of you can identify with those tensions between the personal needs for personalization at scale and the need to reduce costs and increase speed and time to market. So the question now comes, how do you produce a really efficient, effective, smooth content supply chain and one that is still creative? So you heard this morning in the keynote that we talk about the content supply chain and the promise of Adobe GenStudio around these five different pillars, starting with workflow and planning, content ideation and creation and production, asset management, reporting and insights. It goes throughout the entire cycle. But we have been leading on this journey internally to really dial this in. When I joined Adobe about a year and a half, we had dozens of different processes, dozens of different teams producing content, and it was that spaghetti mess. And the journey that we've been on has been to really stitch together and smooth that content supply chain for us internally and with our agency partners. So what's interesting about my job, and one of my favorite parts is I also get to be what we call customer zero. So what that means is that I get to be kind of first in line to try out our new products, to help sit side by side with our product teams, to inform them of what's working, what's not, our hopes, our dreams, all of the things that we wish were in these products. And so I have been on this journey in close partnership, not just with my product teams, but because I am also treated as a customer, I've had the benefit of working with Adobe Consulting Services to also help us on this journey. So they have treated me like a client. And I'm about to introduce my friend Mike Inman, who is from Adobe Consulting Services, who has been my partner in crime on this journey. He is not allowed to tell you I was the worst client ever, but he can tell you that afterwards. So come on up, Mike, and what we're going to do is walk you through the journey that we have taken over the last year and a half as we have implemented this internally. So take a seat. - [Mike Inman] Nice to see you. - Yes, you too. Okay. Mike. Why don't we start by telling me a little bit more about you and the role you play at Adobe. Yeah, happy to. So I've spent most of my career in consulting services and technology roles and joined in that capacity nine years ago at Adobe. I've had the humbling opportunity to work in many different functions at Adobe across marketing, sales ops, customer success, strategy and operations, and of course, consulting. Yeah, I joined consulting and marketing roughly a year and a half ago when you joined the company. And that's right about when we started to work together - on this exciting initiative. - Yes. Yes. Now, the fun fact that we haven't told you yet is that our executive sponsor is my dear friend Shantanu Narayan, who was on the stage this morning. So you better believe we have to be on our A game through this implementation. So let's start and kind of talk a little bit more about kind of how we went about this journey. Like how did we start and kick off the whole process of this implementation? And you can kind of share your perspective and I'll share sitting on the other side. Yeah. So a couple things. First and foremost, Heather is not the worst customer. I'll pay you later. Adobe is certainly some of our most challenging customers, and we really, truly try to push the envelope. So that's expected. So quick context setting, we did a deep diagnostic on the marketing landscape at Adobe coming into this, before we implemented anything. We made no assumptions. We came in eyes wide open, really trying to understand. We met with 19 different marketing teams across Adobe. We found virtually 19 different ways of doing marketing at Adobe. We certainly found some pockets of excellence, but what we did find is a lot of inconsistency and opportunity for improvement. So building from that, we had three primary big objectives coming into this initiative. One was building from Adobe's heritage of creating world-class content. We're really trying to raise the bar and be better than that and be responsible stewards of the resource spend to produce that content as well. Second was to create optimized processes across marketing teams and really improve the connected workflows. And last but not least, the third was to create real taxonomy and shared vocabulary in the organization as a critical currency to the content supply chain. It's interesting because that last piece was particularly interesting. We found that everyone was defining even the word content in different ways. We were discovering that not only did people have different processes, but different ways of referring to different parts of that journey. And what we had to do while we were going through this implementation is the discovery work that Mike did also helped inform how we could streamline and improve our operating model. So it became much more than just about the technology and the tools we were implementing. It was about how do we raise the bar for us as an organization in terms of how we operate on a day-to-day, and how do we draw a much more consistent, cohesive way of working. So let's start to dive in a little bit more on each of those steps and how we approached each of the stages of the content supply chain. Obviously it starts with workflow and planning. And so talk to us about kind of how you dug in there and started to help us think about streamlining. So back to the diagnostic, we found every way of doing everything, teams would use Microsoft Teams, Slack, hallway conversations, live meetings, you name it, for collaboration and project execution. So one big decision that we made was to standardize on Workfront and leverage all of its very powerful project management capabilities, data objects, and native views like Gantt charts and reporting. Second was kind of back to the vocabulary piece. We looked at this from the aspect of the marketing brief itself. First, we had to define what that is because there was not a lot of shared understanding of what that meant. But secondly, how should it be done, right? So we deconstructed the marketing brief, created a better way of doing that consistently, and then built that into the workflows themselves. So the marketers were putting the brief together in context with the workflows. And then third, review and approval is a big part of any marketing review cycle. And so what we've done is leveraging Workfront and Frame.io, facilitating the review and approval actually in context with the workflow itself, as opposed to letting teams do the hallway conversation approval or the Slack, "Did you review this yet?" "Oh, yes. That's approved." We actually are building that into the workflow so you can capture both ease of use for marketers, but also the retrospective view of what happened and what the system of record shows. Exactly. And it's really interesting. And I just mentioned how we use this as a forcing function to standardize our own operating model. But that was really true. I mean, we sat down and Mike talked about the brief. We really took a step back and said what does this brief need to be consistently across the org. And through that process, as we define that brief, we also started to see this real opportunity for deeper connectedness with AEM Assets, which we'll talk about in a little bit. That brief also became the metadata that then flows on in as we complete assets and they get stored in our DAM. So I think what's really powerful is how some of these conversations and the technology implementation really helped drive our operating change internally. It also started to really eliminate some of those more manual activities, the reviews, what have you, but also give us that historical context. I think what's often powerful for me, so I'll review creative in the tool and I can see the history of what other people said, and I can either plus one things or say, no, I don't want to make that change, or I can make sure that everyone's kind of playing their position in terms of what they're feeding back on. So I think it's been a really powerful tool for me. One of the things that's also been really on the planning front, that's been a game changer is I now have a centralized view of all the campaigns and work that's happening. I can view a calendar of everything that's coming up. If dates change, I can make sure they line up properly. And it's suddenly giving me a dashboard to view everything in one fell swoop, which is something we just didn't have before because all of this was dispersed across the organization. So that's been a game changer for us. So let's go to the next section, creation and production. So, I talked a little bit about ancient times of pre a lot of the tools we have now. But my creative team, I oversee our internal studio as well as all of our agencies. And being customer zero for Creative Cloud is not something new to my team. This has been our bread and butter. And one of the things that I really think about as they're using our tools is how can we be the best example of what's possible with our tools at Adobe? And I think that is a high bar for my teams, but also one that I think they embrace. And it's one of the reasons they came to work at Adobe. They love our tools. But what's really interesting and what's happening now, and you saw a lot of it on mainstage this morning is, with Generative AI, that's completely transforming the creative process. And what we've started to see is this ability for our creative teams to really focus more on the big idea versus spending all of their time in a lot of the mundane tasks or a lot of the more production-oriented activities that inevitably come with some of these bigger campaigns. So I talked before about how the explosion of content that we're creating has just grown exponentially. And one of the things, excuse me, one of the best examples of this happened last fall. So we do an annual Black Friday promotion, as I'm sure a lot of other kind of retail type companies do. When you think about how we approach Black Friday, we do different offers for different products and different product lines, all of the offers within our Creative Cloud. We then develop variants for that, for kind of pre Black Friday to give people a heads up. Black Friday itself, Cyber Monday, all different phases. But then multiply that by all the markets we operate in, multiply that by all the media platforms we advertise on, and all the different specifications for each of those. And quick, back-of-the-envelope math, that's 52,000 assets for this promotion that we had to create. So imagine what that takes. What that takes is starting in May, or it did. So last year, we started in May. We worked to develop the concepts, and then we ultimately said, okay, now we got to go through all the versions. We even had to create versions because we hadn't, because it was so early, we hadn't even aligned on what the promotional, the discounts were at that phase. So we had to create every possible variation of a discount, many of which were never used. It took us seven weeks to produce those 52,000 assets. So thanks to Firefly Services, we recently tried to recreate that campaign and see what it would take to do this year. We were able to replicate that and do those 52,000 assets in one week, producing 21 assets a minute. And if we needed to change any of them because we changed what the promotion was or what have you, guess what, we could do it like that. So it was pretty incredible, the efficiency we saw. And now we're going to be able to roll that out even more consistently across all of our global campaigns in a really powerful way. But the most exciting part about it to me is my team can get to focus on the idea, right? They're not stuck saying, "25%, 30%, 15%" for the discounts. They're in there coming up with the big idea. And so this is what we're starting to see with the big unlock in all of these new generative AI tools that we're working through. And we're doing lots of pilots and change management in our teams so that we can bake these into our workflows, which has been super powerful. The other piece of this is we're starting to build custom models as well. A lot of the Summit work that you see here, the design system developed by our team built a custom model to then scale it across lots of different services, plugged it into Express, gave it to our team so they could promote their sessions on LinkedIn or what have you, and customize it to their needs with their photo and their headline. So lots of different powerful ways to extend, extend and scale what we're able to do thanks to these tools and technologies. And again, let our teams focus on the big idea. - Just to build on that. - Yeah. I think a real opportunity for teams like studio teams, who often create extra content because you think you might need it, and it takes so long to build. I imagine your team wouldn't have to produce less content because you can do it faster. Exactly. And we can also, because we're, and we'll get to this in a minute, because we store all these assets, they can easily grab something that already exists, that they know that it worked and then easily customize it and build off of. So they're not starting from a blank sheet of paper or a blank screen. They're starting with something and able to do that. One of the other pieces of this that's really interesting, and I think you saw the promise of this with the GenStudio presentation this morning, is it starts to democratize the creation of content as well. You start to, you can take an existing asset and suddenly, whether it's using Express or some of our other tools, we can put some of these lower-level creative tasks in the hands of marketers themselves, and they can move faster. I used to, in a past job for our growth marketing team, who was constantly doing new tests and variations and experiments, I actually would sit a designer next to the growth marketer, and the growth marketer would say, okay, I want to change this headline, I want to change this discount, I want to change this image, change this color for the sake of testing. Now they're able to do those things themselves, which is pretty amazing. And so I think there's a lot that this is going to unlock in really powerful ways that are ultimately really accretive to business impact as well as speed. So let's go a little bit further into asset management. So I talked a little bit about lifting those assets up and also being able to kind of pull assets through all the way from Workfront and the briefing process all the way down. Now, it's funny, I mentioned my executive sponsor, Shantanu, and when we were walking him through this Black Friday case study before we ran the new pilot we did with it, he was like, why would you ever need 52,000 assets? That's just crazy to me. That's way too much content. And my partner Pat Brown, who oversees growth marketing, said, actually I'd like twice that amount. Because he knew if he had twice that amount, he could run that many more iterations and get the highest performing asset, run that many more tests and get that much more revenue impact for us down the line. So, but if we can't store and manage all this content, if we're not ultimately leveraging what's been built and being able to reuse assets that worked or start a few steps down the process, then we're not realizing the full benefit. And that's where the AEM Assets Deployment was a real big win. So why don't you talk about what I think is one of the more exciting things that we built, which was the ability to really connect Workfront all the way down through AEM Assets. Yeah, that's right. So I mean, content is fueling the digital economy. We need more content, not less content. Yes. So first and foremost, let's talk about metadata. Heather mentioned it a little earlier. So with the connected workflows across Workfront and a native integration with AEM, we're starting to capture critical metadata on the front end of projects, starting with the brief. And as that project executes, as it goes through review and approval processes, as it goes through different channel teams, we're adding to that metadata. It's just enriched over time. When the asset is finally approved and ingested into the DAM and AEM Assets, all that rich metadata comes with it. For the first 60,000 assets we got into our new marketing hub, there were over a million pieces of metadata that we took in with that, including smart tags added by Sensei. So that's the first point. Second point is it's not enough to just capture the assets. You need to be able to find it. And so we created a nice user experience for marketers sitting on top of AEM Assets that we call Marketing Hub. Anil mentioned it on mainstage this morning. It's becoming content hub that we're going to make available to customers. But it's this nice window into AEM Assets for the marketer. You don't need to go into AEM Author or publish environments. You can go right into the hub. You can leverage search facets and find what you're looking for based on a couple clicks or a search. You can view all the metadata. You can even view the project in Workfront that it came from. And so that's a really powerful aspect of it. Absolutely. Yeah, it's really been a game changer for us. And, it's funny, I remember when I started, and when we were really just first kicking off this project, Shantanu asked me, how much content do we have? How many assets do we produce on an average month? I literally could not answer that question because it was sitting everywhere throughout the organization, on desktops, in other cloud services, you name it. And I literally couldn't answer that question. And now, I literally can tell him down to the exact digits every single week in terms of what's being uploaded there. And it's really powerful. And it also gives me a lot more diagnostics, like, are these things being reused? What percentage are we reusing? Things like that. And the addition of new permissioning also helps make sure that we're governing this content in the best way possible, too. So the next phase, delivery and activation. So none of this works or is meaningful unless we actually get it in front of the customer. Otherwise, it's just a tree falling in the forest with no one around to hear it. So one of the things that's really critical, and I think some of the most exciting things we saw in mainstage this morning are around kind of both how this all can be connected to delivery and activation, but also to analytics, which we'll talk about in a second. But often what teams can now do, thanks to AEM Assets, is then lift that content up and really bring it straight into AEM Sites, build new landing pages in ways that are literally just as easy as editing a Word document. And through some of our new generative AI composing features, test out new headlines or new elements and versions of things really directly to flow into the channels that we need. So why don't you talk a little bit more about what we've done for Adobe.com and some of our APIs? Yeah, so two big use cases we focus on here, Heather mentioned Adobe.com, so Nathan, Heather, and team are using the latest and greatest AEM content-based authoring as well as edge delivery for more performant website. If you haven't been and if you haven't seen Nathan's video yet on the AEM Sites webpage on business.adobe.com. Go check it out. It says watch the Adobe story. Check it out. It's very powerful. I'm not going to recite all the stats from his team, but incredible performance uplift. The second was we integrated with our performance media's content engagement platform between AEM and their platform. And so we're actually pushing assets directly to their platform, reducing the download upload issue. And try not to add to the manual nature of these workflows. And then they can measure and look at performance of those assets across the channels as well, which has been super important. I mean, as you saw in mainstage as well from Inman and team, we're building that into the GenStudio product so you can actually see insights of those assets right in that nice container. Yeah, I mean, it's amazing. Back to my point about being able to democratize that content, it's amazing now that these tools can make it that much easier for anyone to help deploy the content.

So none of this matters unless we can track the results that we're looking at. And honestly, some of the most exciting things we've saw on main stage this morning where we're around the ability to understand what assets are working for you and how, one of the things we often as marketers do is run campaigns and we're like, yes, this one performed better than that one. We don't always know the why. And that's where I get really excited about the vision that we're seeing around some of these analytics tools that are going to help us understand whether it's something about the image or the color or things like that that were really part of the drivers of performance, so we can continue to optimize. But why don't you talk a little bit more about this from your perspective? Yeah. In addition to analytics on asset performance in channel, another really interesting thing we did was take Adobe Journey Analytics and apply it to the marketing hub. And so we're actually able to track marketers interaction with content. We can see how easy it is or how difficult it is to find the content and use that to optimize the experience for the marketers and make their job easier. Yeah. So I think there's, and there's a lot more on this that's coming, and I'm really excited about how we're going to really see that closed loop, ultimately, starting with planning, going all the way through to reporting and analytics. And then that can kind of feed this virtuous cycle of content creation and continued optimized performance and ultimately incremental impact. Yeah, and then if you add it to the data you're collecting in Workfront through the project execution, then you can also get to some really interesting operational metrics. Time to briefing completion, time to review, round one, round two, round three, time to approval, time to market. And so you start to add these operational excellence, throughput and quality metrics in addition to the content performance, and you get that end-to-end perspective, which we all want. Exactly. And that enables me to help tweak the process, tweak the operating model, tweak the staffing model, to really help make sure that I'm running every element of the process in the most efficient way possible and continuing to hold my team to a higher bar in terms of how we're functioning.

That's literally data we didn't have access to or we weren't even capturing before. And now I can set measurable, actionable goals for my team and really continue to improve our performance. It's pretty powerful. So one of the things that I think has been most interesting about this journey is the change management piece of it. And I often joke that technology is a lot easier to change than people are. And we took that spaghetti mess that you saw before and had to turn it into this streamlined, virtuous cycle. And I think we learned a lot through the process, too. I mean, I think we've had to bring people on the journey internally. We've had to help teams understand that even if in the near term, while they were adopting a new process or a new tool, if things took a little longer, that ultimately they were going to realize greater benefits down the line in terms of being able to understand the impact of their content or be able to reuse it or speed things up, ultimately. So we've had to really frame things a lot through the value to the internal customer and what it will do to help them. We've also had to really rethink every part of the kind of equation. So we've had to rethink how we bring our agency partners along, and we're onboarding them to the same tech stack here so that we can look at all of that content. We're revisiting our brand guidelines and brand design so they're easier and more consistent, so that we can train models on them more easily and make them more scalable. We're looking at our teams and saying, do we have the right talent on our team? Maybe I need to invest more in creative technologists or an archivist to help us manage AEM Assets. And so it's really been a huge journey for us. And I know change management is something I hear from a lot of our customers is one of the biggest challenges in this. So that's been really as much the effort we've gone on as it has been a technology implementation. But I'm curious to hear your take on that as well. You know, I like your, "People are harder to change the technology." I used that this morning.

No, it's true. And look, as individuals, we all want to be heard. We all have unique perspectives and something to offer. And so, as we went through the discovery and diagnostic on this, we talked and talked and talked to a lot of people, and we didn't rush to then go build. We revisited and we shared and we revalidated. And so I think that's really important. And teams need to see their perspective show up in requirements for technology. Absolutely. They want to feel heard and then they're going to be more apt to use it. Secondly, I think there comes a time for leadership decisions around how should the business operate? And then that needs to show up in the technology requirements as well. And so those two combined, I think, create a lot of synergy and ability for the organization to move forward and execute. Absolutely. One of the things that Mike's team did was we started out by taking one project that we thought was representative of some of our bigger, more complex projects, and we did a pilot. So it was isolated and we tried to build the optimal way to operate within that. And then we scaled from there to other product lines, other businesses, what have you. And then similarly, you know, we had started with kind of our studio teams and our integrated marketing teams, but then Mike's team has then gone to our growth marketing teams and our adobe.com team and our social team and all of the other teams around that saying, what are the unique ways that you are going to plug into this system? What are your requirements so we can bring you along? And I think, again, to Mike's point, helping people feel heard, but also making sure that we're not designing this one-size-fits-all all solution when ultimately there's a lot of different sizes out there in the organization. So I think that was a really powerful part of the journey, too. So in closing, it was obviously a huge journey. We are still on it, and ultimately we've made huge progress. We're already realizing this, and there's a lot more to benefit from. I think one of the things that's exciting that we've saw on stage this morning is how much it's even going to change going forward. And one of the things I say about change in this time we're in right now with generative AI, and the kind of speed of technology is we need to not build for where we are now. We need to build these flexible, extensible systems that are going to help us build for where things are going, and so, and enable us to pivot as new technology and new capabilities come out. So we're super excited about how far we've come and where we're going. Thank you, guys, for joining, for listening, and for the engagement, and enjoy the rest of Summit. Yeah. Thank you.