[Music] [Philip Wilkinson] So, yeah, I'm Phil Wilkinson. I'm Senior Director of Consumer and Shopping Experience at Kellanova, which was formerly Kellogg's. [Billy Hanna] My name is Billy Hanna. I lead the practice around Experience and Content Platforms at Merkle. And, yeah, really excited to tell you the story of everything we've done together with Kellanova and Phil. I'll hand back to him now. Thank you, Billy. So today, we're going to invite you to embark upon a journey with us that challenges the status quo and propels us into the future. But first, I'm guessing some of you may not have heard of Kellanova in the past, which recently spun out of Kellogg's. So here's a short video with really amazing sound to tell you a little bit more about it.

[Music] So I love that video. It's a fantastic introduction into Kellanova, which is going to be a global snacking-led powerhouse.

So Kellanova is all about differentiating, driving, and delivering, and that's very much what today is all about. So picture this. It's 2030, and Kellanova reigns as a Snackin' Meds global powerhouse. We're a master of anticipation, and we create personalized experiences at the speed of desire for our consumers.

Because today, we live in a world inundated with choices where attention spans are fleeting, and desires evolve like the seasons. So we must ask ourselves, how are we going to stay ahead in this world? And the answer lies in our ability to understand the heartbeat of our consumers and to synchronize with the rhythm of their desires.

Gone are the days of generic one size fits all marketing messages. We need to predict our consumer desires by leveraging comprehensive data and insights where first party data and strategic second and third party data really drive our brand strategies and our brand briefs, and where our brand experiences are driven by the pulse of data.

And in this era of instant gratification, our strategies must be attuned to the ebb and flow of our consumer desires and our consumer wants, and we must deliver messages at the precise instant when desire peaks. Capturing attention and driving behavior in the moments that matter the most to our consumers.

So, today, Billy and I are going to share a real-life example of how Kellanova, in partnership with Merkle and with Adobe Technology, are really going to change the face of connected consumer experiences and where data isn't just a tool, but it's actually the heartbeat of our brand. We're on the brink of launching a game changing platform to collect data that allows us to feed Kellanova and move at the speed of desire. But to realize these benefits, we actually needed data in the first place. And therein lay the big problem for us in Europe. We didn't have a great deal of data. And the quality of data that we were holding wasn't good enough to drive proper personalized experiences. So that was a big challenge. But not only that, we also have day to day business challenges as well. So why don't we take a look at a day in my life back in the office in Dublin to see some of the disparate challenges that we face in the business that this can help us address.

So we have Leo, our head of insights, telling me that consumers are demanding more and more relevant and personalized experiences, and that we've got to deliver them.

But then I've also got Arnaud in finance telling us that our unpacked promotions are creating waste, that it's complex in our supply chain, and that every time we put new promotions on cans, millions of cans, it's creating issues in our supply chain, and therefore, we need to fix it. And then conversely, I've got Tanya in the German team who's saying we must have promotions on every single can of Pringles because that keeps consumers buying them and keeps them excited and engaged and interested. So what are we going to do with that? And then finally, we've got Nicole who works in our global team. And she's propagating that we need to start using 1P data more heavily to enhance our targeting, our audience creation, and our insights. So we needed a solution to address all of those various challenges. Key was that we have an engaging platform for our consumers that allows us to reduce the complexity in the business and the write off of packaging. And at the same time, we have a desire and a need to collect more 1P data so that we can be more relevant for our consumers.

So we needed a solution and let me show you a little bit more about what that is. We call it Pringles Pop topia.

Rinse out. Drop that low.

Wow. Wonder how many of us are going to get a Pringles tattoo in Las Vegas this evening.

I planted a seed there. So for Kellanova, Poptopia provides a platform for the effective and efficient collection of 1P data and a solution to our operational challenges, ticking all of the boxes or cans actually. So for our consumers, it also means a personalized, relevant, and engaging way they can interact with what is an extremely strong brand.

So, launching this April, this immersive always on platform is going to replace our traditional redemption sites. It's going to become a living and breathing platform where we update content, where we update features and functionality regularly, and that's going to launch across 40 markets in Europe across 29 languages. And when we launched, 100 million cans of Pringles will go into the European market with a pop, scan, and play call to action with a QR code on the front of pack and on the lid, which we know is a proven way of driving traffic to our redemption site. So it should work extremely well as we drive to this new platform. But let's take a closer look. So when we launch, and this is just a launch phase, we're going to have four distinct areas of the platform. The first one, we call Pringles, and that's really related to our first big promotion on the platform, which is a key consumer moment, football, or soccer actually, probably for the majority of this audience. We know that consumers really enjoy entering our competitions, and we're going to give them a chance to win a holiday in Europe. So that will be a key and proven traffic driver as we launch in April. And then we've got pop of fame, which really celebrates the creativity of Pringle fans by allowing them to vote every month for all their favorite social media content. And that will give us really good, rich signals on what's popping with our consumers and allow us to repurpose that content across various other touch points. Then we've got Pringles Dribble, which is a highly addictive, in fact, more addictive than Pringles game, which uses really proven assets of Pringles to bring some gamification and a bit of fun onto the platform. And then finally, we've got FlavorStack, which is an idea around creating insights so that we can develop products for the future. So what FlavorStack does is allow our consumers to interact with our global flavors, and we'll be able to understand through the 1P data at a customer level, their interaction with those flavors, which helps us then drive media, drive CRM. But it also helps our innovation pipeline as well because we've got really rich signals of what consumers are interested in at any given time, in a given market, in a given retailer or geography.

So I hope you agree that that's the perfect high five. Poptopia launches in Europe. It's going to deliver unparalleled value, and it really is marketing innovation in action and a key driver of growth. It's going to provide the data foundation that we can build out on and start to really become more personalized with our consumers. And I guess from a consumer perspective, it's personalized, it's relevant, it's always on, it's going to be frictionless and contextual. And for us, it really does tick the box because it helps us acquire 1P data. It provides a platform in which we can really engage with our consumers, gain rich sources of insight. It's efficient and effective. But most importantly, it helps us drive lifetime value.

So I'm going to hand over to Billy now who's going to bring to life a little bit more how we made this happen and some of the broader context of content creation. Thank you, Phil. Thanks. That was really good. That was great. I especially like hearing clients of ours talking about their passion for their own brand, and everything that's sort of driving the decision making and the factors that actually bring about success for them. And what I think I find especially interesting about this is this, it's a customer engagement brief, but actually there's more to it. There's underlying business challenges and business change that we're trying to bring about.

And before we go ahead and talk about, Poptopia and some of the factors that went into it, I think it's worth thinking taking a step back in terms of where we were. And our relationship with Kellanova had really been around sort of campaign driven redemption sites. So lots of investment in media, lots of investment in partnerships to drive people into store. Phil referenced the sort of on pack promotion and that material. Driving people in store to purchase and then we would encourage them to go online, to engage, and we would reward them.

And that was great. That was good. That was good, but a couple of things weren't great about it. So one factor was that there wasn't a great deal in there that was reusable.

And the other piece is that the customer journey that I've described was linear. And one of the problems with linear customer journeys is that by their nature, they have an end.

So we wanted to address this, address the core business needs and the core business changes underpinning this. So I'm going to go through that in a little bit more detail. And the following section that I'm going to go through, I'm talking about three main topics. I'm really standing on the shoulders of giants today across the team that's come together across Kellanova and across Merkel. There's quite a lot of topics I could talk about, but I'm going to talk specifically around data, I'm going to talk about the shift to always on, and I'm going to talk about the underlying content supply chain transformation, which has helped bring this about.

So the first thing, it's not a campaign, it's a relationship.

We want to have that relationship and the main value that we need to drive, need to drive as brand, is sort of underpinned by this principle.

So this cascades into much of what was done, much of the design decisions and much of the overarching solution. But, yeah, let's get to data.

It's one thing having data, it's another thing bringing value through it.

So data has a massive impact on the customer experience. The stickiness and engagement that we can achieve through Poptopia, through the gamification, through personalization, is ultimately driven at its core through data. Real time CDP based data driving those gaming experiences, which is different from just kind of capturing data to segment. It's actually supporting the functionality and fundamentals of gaming. And also bringing about community type features to create an ecosystem that people want to engage with, adding competition type elements in there including things like, having leaderboards, and creating peer to peer competition.

And actually the data that we capture on customers, a lot of the designs are either there to engage them or they are there to encourage, and or to elicit greater information around them, so that we can actually support the strategy and what we want to learn about them in the context of the value they place in the brand and their behaviors, what their kind of preference is around the product and the sector of CPG and the Pringles brand itself.

The other use of data is around connecting with media and partnerships.

So if I talk about media first, we're moving to a place where first party data is increasingly crucial to bring success about for brands. The reliance on media data to support targeting and to support how media campaigns are activated works. But actually moving to the cookie-less world is having fundamental changes and impacts in terms of how that model operates across channel, and to the customer's current and potential in that ecosystem.

So by having greater autonomy on the first party data that Kellanova can now reap and grow from the perspective of Poptopia gives us a data model that we're building out to inform what we want to do from a Kellanova perspective.

We can also share that data and use that data to optimize the targeting of media and actually get better value for money into media through the data and the data exchange to them. And then also the partnerships.

One big challenge around the CPG sector is that the point of purchase is rarely controlled by the brand.

The majority of purchases happen in supermarkets, they happen in physical stores and there's a detachment between what the brand can actually know and understand about the customer and actually what they can take back. So there's a reliance on understanding how shoppers are functioning in that ecosystem through supermarkets and so forth, and they have a huge amount of data. So we can take that data in and combine it with our first party, zero party, second or third party data to really get a greater understanding of buying trends, buying habits in sector and also other trends in the market which might lead to product development and going into new geographies. So that informs an evolving strategy and that's a fundamental product and brand level, but then also evolving a strategy around how we evolve our communications with the customer.

So what does that look like? Well, it looks a little bit like this. So we create that cycle. People come in through the traditional model of engage and we capture them, but then after that point, the whole strategy and the whole ecosystem is around rewards, be they engagement, or be they actual prize or loyalties. Understanding more about them and then driving further communication, which ultimately leads them to come back to this ecosystem as we evolve out the features and functionality and the campaign mechanics within it.

And obviously, this drives a change into CRM and how we communicate to customers as well. At the heart of this is that 360 data which I talked about, and there's an example of some of the third parties on the right. Now, there's an innovation we've been using in, to support that value exchange of data between media, retail, and other partners and that's using data clean rooms. I'll hold my hand up. I hadn't actually heard about data clean rooms, this time last year, but luckily, there's some cleverer people than myself in our business who do know about them. And what they allow brands to do or owners of first party data is to share aggregate data around customers that they know from their datasets with the aggregate customer data and attributes that are owned by media, retail, and other partners. So that data can be shared so that on each side of the fence, you get a growing understanding of those customers and their interests. So we can better personalize on both sides of the fence, and that's all done in a secure and data compliant ecosystem and environment.

So, adapting to always on. This was the next topic.

The campaign flow is not necessarily always easy to achieve. There's a lot of work that goes into it, but actually it's easy to understand from planning perspective. It has a start, a middle and an end, but actually this now has a continuous feedback loop, and we don't want to be in a place where the teams, the brand and the marketing teams feel like they're drinking from a fire hose.

So what we're working with at the moment, with Kellanova is looking at how we kind of organize the data which is going to come in from the platform, from a customer perspective, from third party perspective, from behavior, what the customers are actually telling us through and what we're capturing from them and feeding that into a way in which we organize a backlog of change initiatives and evolution. So yes, there are still the big campaign moments and obviously there's sort of commercial drivers in terms of legal or regulatory change that need to go through and need to be cascade out into this ecosystem. But there's so much learning and actually one of the challenges is going to be is to kind of make sure we know what the best are, what are the right things to learn from.

And obviously that informs a new communication strategy. You know, that's will great, some really, really great games and experiences that are really going to capture the sort of desire of the consumers and really resonate with the Pringles brand. But actually it's that wider communication. How do we really kind of bring people back around and into this ecosystem and evolve that communication strategy over time? And the final topic I said we'd talk through is content for always-on.

Content supply chain, you will hear a huge amount about it at this summit. It's possibly the biggest topic here. I'm not going to talk in huge amounts of detail around features and functions.

I want to try and talk to you and give you some examples of things that you might not hear elsewhere.

There'll be more time given to deeper dives to some of the topics around Content Supply Chain elsewhere.

So I've pulled out a few things which I think resonate to what we're doing now with Kellanova and with Poptopia and then also talk about, in the context of some of the sort of wider thinking that we have developed in this area over a number of years.

So the first one is the principle of multi-X content. I think everyone is quite familiar with multi-X, multi-brand, multi-region, multi-site, multi-language, multi-device.

And I've really enjoyed seeing a lot of the innovations which are being announced by Adobe. Gen AI Studio, the advances in Fly Firefly. It's actually come along a significant way in the last 12 months since the last summit I attended.

And actually, that's really transforming the way that content will flow from master down to the, sort of, different variations of what those Xs could be. But I think the core principle still stands. When we set up, the campaign sites and the work that we do for Kellanova. We're quite fortunate to have Adobe Experience Manager driving at the heart of that. That's got really good models for organizing around kind of master content and then cascading that down into regions. And that's a key principle that I would recommend is still followed, and I think, might be proven wrong with this, but I think we'll still be applying in the generative AI in the generative AI world. And by that, what I mean is when you get to the bottom, once you multiply all those Xs together you potentially have hundreds of different variations of things which all link back to a main content asset, or content message, or thing that you want to say.

And the later you move from a single concept of content to those multiple Xs, the better.

You organize your teams and try and organize your content supply chain around managing that one master flow, and then at the last possible moment, split it out into the different translations, and the different variants, and the different versions, and automate as much of that as possible.

That applies in the legacy, the non-generative AI ecosystem and I think it will be applying in the future also.

The other one is around connectivity and availability. Right time, right method, right format, right time.

The legacy approach to content was often have it in the DAM, people can access it, people can then use it in their channels. We have to move to a world where content is completely connected. Connected for those creating it and connected into all of the channels that you want to execute it and distribute it out into.

As we've seen over the past, over today, there's more and more integrations in between that sort of core asset model in the Adobe Ecosystem with the other tools out there.

We've been working for a long time with principles about headless content, where content can be reused and consumed and adapted across multiple channels, but that would be another fundamental principle of success.

And then the other one is scaled personalization.

And I'd say I've sort of used personalization sort of reservedly because actually I think contextual relevance around content is quite often as effective and considerably more efficient to deliver and achieve. And what I mean by sort of contextual relevance is, I don't need every piece of content personalized specific to me. If I go into the supermarket the gin might be next to the tonic, and that's relevant for everyone. Well, for people who like gin.

It doesn't have to be personalized to me, but that content relationship between what works in that moment in time is really, really valuable to think about.

And when you move ahead to an ecosystem in a world where we have large amounts of data and we're also talking about the production and the reduction in cost around creation of content, something's kind of missing and it's not talked about enough, I don't believe, and it's the relationship between the rules that are driving personalization and the content itself. Because once you start scaling, matching those two things together becomes your bottleneck. If you have infinite data and infinite content and infinite personalization rules, how are you going to plumb the content together with the data? And that's where the principles of intelligently selecting content come into play. And that's underpinned by having data models around content to describe the content and organize it in a way that machines can pull and read and recommend. And to give an example at the moment we're working with a client who has a constant stream of service information coming in from one side. They've got a constant stream of articles and editorial content coming in. They know a huge amount about the customers who are part of that ecosystem.

And so we have to design something which links the customer data model with the data model around the content so that can all be automated, and rules based because having someone making those decisions to match stuff up doesn't work. There's not an army of people sitting behind LinkedIn and X and Facebook doing that, and this is where we will be going to.

And then so final slide around content. We've been using this model to initiate conversation around content for probably about five years. Content really came to the fore. I've worked in CMS and content management for most of my career, but when I joined Merkle and I worked with people who were real experts in one to one, orchestrated, next best action driven, personalized experiences, I really saw the gap in content to support the way in which those are executed. And that's one of the ways that I fundamentally became so interested in content supply chain transformation.

But when we look at this model, it's hugely simple. I think most people will probably look at this and think, yeah, that makes total sense, that's really simple. And actually one of the best things about Content Supply Chain Transformation as a sort of initiative or strategy is that no one is going to say, "Yeah, we don't want more content, we don't want better content, we don't want content more effectively and efficiently as before." But actually on the flip side, it has the challenge that because it's so sort of ubiquitous and it's so easy to buy into as a principle, it actually fundamentally affects almost every part of organizations. I was talking to one of our other Merkel colleagues here from the US this morning and he was saying that one of the piece of work they're doing has five different budget stakeholders who are all sort of invested in this content transformation.

So actually bringing everyone together and having a roadmap which addresses concerns and delivers value in an incremental and a way that actually works for the business, is fundamentally important in terms of how to roll out and conceive and consider these programs have changed from a content perspective. And also be aware that you might say, well look we're going to focus on distribution first. But if you do that, you need to be aware of the impact that has around the rest of the flow, and to feature and to consider those impacts in your design decisions. Because those design decisions you might make around distribution might really help solving things in creation, six months, 12 years down the line. And I can reference a number of examples where that exact same thing has happened for some clients of ours, where we've made sure that design decisions were put in place for things which weren't necessarily being solved. The design decisions didn't cost money, but they established principles to ensure that changes and impacts elsewhere in this flow would be addressed and would be supported when those parts of their business or the organization came on board.

So it's about governance, it's about workflow management, you'll hear all this everywhere, but that principle of having a single content view which is fully connected, as I mentioned, connected for distribution, connected for all individuals within the ecosystem and the organization including third parties, is hugely important. Democratization of this content treated as data to deliver against what I was previously mentioning around the fact that we need content to be understood by machines more and more.

And the data model around content, yes, it supports search and supports a lot of those kind of manual things, but it also supports automating things around the supply chain. It automates governance if you have the right content data model underpinning it. And all of this, yeah, automate and Gen AI.

So final slide for me before I reintroduce Phil to the stage. Just a few other things to reference around the Poptopia initiative. Over two billion tons of waste are created annually.

And actually by having the Poptopia ecosystem, it really solves and simplifies the physical supply chain of packaging. It's a promotional material in store and that packaging becomes a lower cost item and reduces waste write offs.

There's huge partnership potential. Most of the campaigns that are launched by Kellanova and actually, this is quite standard for many CPG brands, are supported by partnerships.

And that's really, really successful.

But actually, it's reliant on quite a lot of upfront cost and quite a lot of upfront media.

But actually the Poptopia ecosystem can start doing some of that heavy lifting for those partnerships. We can launch partnerships and have them run for two weeks or a month or something smaller like that. Not necessary, it doesn't not everything has to be the big-ticket partnership, which are those big campaign moments throughout the year. So greater business opportunity there. And then, yeah, ready for anything. We've got a platform which is built around a customer data model. Really, really flexible, real time. We've got a web and a content platform which has essentially been built with some plug and play principles so we can adapt and evolve efficiently and effectively.

So yeah, we can go into loads of new directions. We often did AR and VR experiences historically. We can do way more of that. We can use the data and the content to push into partner gaming experiences.

Gaming brands, gaming companies, you know there's loads that we can do with that. And then there's also some sort of sporting tie ins. We could do educational training via the Poptopia ecosystem just to sort of really kind of engage people in whole new ways and build a great sort of value exchange and different value exchanges between brands and between consumers and that's what consumers want these days. That's a differentiator.

So I'll pause there. I'll thank you for listening to that section. I'll just hand back to Phil summarize and-- Thank you. And wrap up.

Thank you so much, Billy. Cheers, Phil. Thanks for the partnership. So hopefully, you can see that with Poptopia, we're not just solving business challenges, we're not just driving data and we're not just driving efficiencies through the business. This is going to unlock profound insights from our consumers. It's really going to power Kellanova moving forwards. By harnessing the power of this data, we start to be able create a crystal ball that helps us anticipate the needs and the wants of our shoppers and to be able to react to them in real time. So what we're unlocking here isn't just for today. It really is to power the future of our business and the relationship with our consumers. And hopefully, you see it as a paradigm shift. This is a big change in the way in which we interact and engage with our consumers and how we utilize data to become more relevant to them. And hopefully, you can see that this will be a game changer for Pringles and Poptopia.

So thank you so much for listening today. Thanks for attending our session. I'm sorry the sound didn't work perfectly. There was some fantastic music on there. But, yeah, we really appreciate you listening.

Thank you.

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