[Music] [Matt Skinner] All right. Hello, everybody.

Hello, everyone. Welcome to Summit. Welcome to Session 501, How Marriott Maximizes its Impact with Adobe Real-Time CDP. My name's Matt Skinner. I'm on the Product Marketing Team with Adobe. And I'm thrilled to speak today with Chris Zheng, VP of Data Activation and Audiences for Marriott. And so I just want to get a quick pulse of the room. How many of us traveled to get to Summit today? Yeah. I'm not a betting man, but I kind of assumed we didn't have a lot of Vegas natives here. How many of us rented a car? Okay. A couple people. So I want to open by telling an experience story about a recent car rental journey I personally had. Did a family trip. Had to rent a car. And when I was going through my online checkout process, there was a great deal on a Tesla. And I was excited about that because I don't own a Tesla, and I was excited to try it out. And so, as you could see, I started getting a really great email campaign not long after my checkout. And so, you can tell from the subject lines, they were doing a great job, right? My favorite was, are you ready only 24 hours until you go electric? I was like, yes, I am ready.

And the content of that email was really helpful, right? Having not driven a Tesla before, it was explaining how the dash was going to work, how I was going to charge the vehicle, even little things like how to work the doorknobs, because we all know that they're super high-tech in Teslas. And so I was getting excited. My family was getting excited. And then, we went to the branch where we were going to pick up the vehicle and the employee working there, he pretty much laughed. He was like, we never have Teslas, right? And so they set me up. It wasn't like a bad trip. We had a good trip, but I was driving around in, like, a midsize SUV, which was great, but it wasn't what I was expecting. And I was reflecting on it and the thing about it, I had a great on-site experience with the checkout. They did a great job with the personalized emails. The email team was doing fantastic. I downloaded the app along the way. There was a great mobile reminder, but the on-time delivery of the experience I was expecting was what was lacking. And it really drove home this principle that I think is important for us all to keep in mind, which is when we do a good job personalizing in one channel, we're setting an expectation with our customers that they're going to have a consistent experience across all the channels where they engage with you. And I'm sure many of us think about, okay, what is the area that I'm responsible for and I feel like I'm doing a good job in that area. But if we're really honest with ourselves and we think about all the touchpoints that our customers might engage with our brands, we might be a little bit less confident about some of those outlying touchpoints. And this principle is really important because this is one of the key things that a customer data platform or a CDP seeks to solve for. And so in this session, I'm going to quickly do some level setting, explain what is a CDP, what's Adobe's perspective on what a CDP should be able to do for you. But I'm going to go through that quickly so that we can get to Chris to share Marriott's journey because he has a lot of really compelling content to share with you all. And then we'll wrap things up having kind of a back-and-forth discussion based off of Chris's experience, based off of what we see at Adobe, and some key learnings and best practices with CDP implementation.

Okay. So what is a CDP? Here's the traditional definition from the CDP Institute. Package software that creates a persistent unified customer view that is accessible to other systems. And just to kind of quickly break that down, package software, this is referring to the fact that there's going to be different features and capabilities that get bundled together into the CDP. So identity resolution, being able to connect to sources and destinations, and so on. Persistent unified customer view. Now this is kind of where CDPs have emerged to help you build a unified view of your customer. Over time, our perspective is the space has evolved. It's no longer enough to just have a persistent unified view. That view needs to be actionable. The profile needs to be actionable to other systems. And it should also be extensible. And that's something that we heard about this morning that I'll touch on in just a moment. It should be able to be used more broadly across the enterprise beyond your standard CDP use cases.

So why do you need a CDP? Why are brands purchasing CDPs? Well, when I think back to my rental car journey and the different touchpoints I had from starting with an online search like we all do when we buy anything, to going through that checkout process, being able to make the reservation, opening up those emails, downloading the mobile app, picking it up in store. There's a challenge that that rental car company faced, which is pulling together these fragmented data sources. Right? I was touching a bunch of different systems across their organization, which made it difficult to get an understanding of who I was and what I was expecting on my journey. And with those fragmented sources, there's also fragmented teams. And we all know that different teams are going to have different objectives and it can be challenging for the teams to be able to work together to get that cohesive view. So just from the examples here, my engagement might have touched a bunch of marketing teams. But those teams are structured in different ways, right? From paid media to CRM, to loyalty email, to mobile, the web experience, finally even the branch point of sale. And so these are the challenges that we all face in a large organization that's going to do personalization across multiple different channels and different touchpoints. But let's not forget, we're working in an environment where they're shifting market forces. And there's been a lot of discussion today. We're always having conversations about a couple of these at least. The shift to durable identifiers, really, really highlighted by third party cookie deprecation in Chrome this year. The fact that as consumers, we have high expectations for personalization. I think coming out of the pandemic even more so than it was before, we expect to have personalized experiences. Our customers expect that from us. And then, of course, privacy and governance has never been as important as it is today in the way that we do our marketing, having to market responsibly, honor customer consent, and in different verticals, having to comply with different regulations as well. And so the way that we view this at Adobe is the real-time CDP is designed to be a single system that's supposed to help people across the entire funnel. So when you think about the purchase funnel from being able to do prospecting acquisition at the top through awareness, consideration, eventually engagement with loyal customers. We support use cases throughout that experience. And so that can be everything from working with a data partner to ingest a list of prospects, so you can segment those prospects and activate it out through our prebuilt destinations, to being able to spot opportunities, reduce churn with AI/Ml. To being able to do suppression or re-engage a lapsed customer. The product philosophy behind real-time CDP is to be able to support full funnel experiences. And ultimately, the CDP should be able to complement your existing digital infrastructure and make that data that you've already collected from a first party standpoint even more actionable.

So just to put a pin on specifically what's powering that, it all starts with the actionable customer profile. And so what that contains is person attribute data. Who are they? There's examples here. Your name, your email address, the identifiers that are collected about a given user. But also in a B2B context, their account association.

This needs to be matched up against behavioral data. What are they doing? This is if the previous was the who data, this is the do data. So how are they engaging with you across different channels and being able to understand that at a very granular level.

But we also need to be able to incorporate preferences in the profile. So consent by use case, preferences for channels that are communicated, etcetera. And then finally, an individual profile gets rationalized against the entire set of profiles by building audiences that are going to lead to the campaigns and the experiences that you provide. So based off of what we know about somebody's attributes, somebody's events, somebody's preferences, should they be presented with a new offer? Should they be cross sold with a new offer? Should they be suppressed from the campaign because they recently purchased? And one of the dynamics that you see across these different types of data is you have slower moving data, attribute data. We're not changing our name too frequently. But then you have fast moving data, behavioral data that is streaming in from your website in milliseconds. And so if you need to be able to do a use case, like personalize an experience to somebody before they leave the site, you need to be able to do these processes, collect the data, tie it to the profile, honor consent, and then activate the data to a downstream system within milliseconds. And that's where the name real-time comes from, is because we're built to be able to support those sorts of low latency use cases.

Sometimes it's helpful to conceptualize this with a data flow where we're collecting data from different systems. We often get asked, how does this work with an existing enterprise data warehouse, data lake system? That is a source into real-time CDP. You're not replicating everything that sits there in the CDP, only the actionable data that needs to be available for the experiences that are powered by the CDP. Tying that into unified profiles, leveraging AI machine learning, segmentation, applying that patented data governance framework, and then activating consistently across channels. And in a couple moments, Chris will give an example of what this looks like from Marriott.

So earlier today, how many of us were in the keynote? Hopefully, everybody. Or we streamed it if you were like me, and you were a little bit late and you weren't able to get into the actual keynote.

So we heard some really exciting announcements. And in the demo that Marissa delivered, if you remember the one with Major League Baseball and NBC Universal in particular, we saw a couple features, that are coming to real-time CDP. I think that these are really emblematic of what we're doing to try to expand and also redefine the CDP category, what we believe people should be able to do with a customer data platform. So the first one was real-time CDP collaboration. This was the tool that she showed that showed how advertisers and publishers would be able to collaborate to build audiences. It's a clean room application. We have a session on Thursday that I'll point you to at the end, where we're going to go deep into that. So I would encourage you to check that out if this is something that you're interested in, or you could swing by the booth. The other one is Federated Audience Composition. And so this one is about being able to work with your enterprise data warehouses more flexibly and being able to query those warehouses using a marketer friendly UI and being able to build audiences, so you don't have to copy underlying data into other systems. And this is an increasingly important topic for many of our customers, who are concerned about the copying of data when that isn't absolutely necessary for your use cases. When I think back to my rental car experience, I would presume that inventory at different branches is data that might sit in their data warehouse. And if there was a query that was run to match that up against recent reservations and people who are picking up tomorrow at that branch, they might have avoided sending me that only 24 hours to go email that got me so excited. They might have given me a different email to set expectations. So Federated Audience Composition is an example of something that customers will be able to do in the near future. So with that, I'm going to hand it over to Chris to tell us more about Marriott's journey. [Chris Zheng] Great. Thank you, Matt. Good afternoon. How's everyone doing? Awesome. I'm super excited to be sharing the Marriott CDP journey with all of you.

But kind of before I start, I'm assuming everyone here has at least heard about Marriott. So we're going to try to have a little trivia game to really test how well everyone here knows about Marriott. And hopefully, in that process, reintroduce you guys to this storied 100-year-old brand. Okay? Does that sound good? So I have a colleague here, Kristen, who's going to be walking around with actual gift cards. So there's an incentive to get the right answer. So most people probably know Marriott as a hotel company. But what you might not know is we have 31 brands across six continents, 140 different countries. So we'll start off with the easy question, and I'll maybe ask my Marriott colleagues, Epsilon partners, and the folks Hilton in the back to refrain from answering these questions. We might have an inside edge on this. But rounded to the closest 1,000, how many hotels does Marriott have around the world? Raise your hand if you think you know the answer. [Man] 120,000. 120,000? I wish, but thank you. Maybe in a few years. Any other guesses? Go ahead. In the back. [Woman] 72,000. 72,000? Nope. A little high. Yep.

55,000. 55,000. Closer. 8,000. 8,000. Closer. 7,000. 7,000? All right. I think I heard 9,000. So 9,000 is correct. So we are about 8,900.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Please, no GenAI or chat inward.

Yeah. We, around 8,900 hotels around the world, 1.5 million rooms. And beyond just in those 9,000 hotels, we have about 15,000 restaurants and bars, 50 Michelin Star restaurants, if you're a foodie.

A couple of years ago, we decided to expand beyond just the hotel business. So we got into the homes and villas business. So you heard of Airbnb and VRBO. So the second question, a little bit harder, how many homes and villas does Marriott have around the world? And this answer, I'll take nearest, round to the nearest 10,000. So that at least gives you a sense of perspective. Gentlemen in the back? 1,600. What is it? - 1,600. - 1,600. A little bit more? We have more homes and villas than hotels. 2,500. More. Let the starting bid be 9,000.

Okay. Go. Yep. 50,000. 50,000? Maybe next year. Actually, no, no, a little bit more. - Go ahead. - 30,000. - What is it? - 30,000. 30,000. 70,000. Okay. All right. I'll give it to the closest, 70,000. So we have a 140,000 homes and villas around the world, believe it or not. So it could be a beach rental home on the East Coast Rehoboth Beach, or it could be a Grand Castle in Scotland, where you can literally take your direct and extend a family.

So that's and we're expanding more than just land. So we've launched, in the last couple of years, three Ritz Carlton yachts that's sailing around the world, and we're trying to expand that footprint. So as you can see, our traditional product portfolio is expanding exponentially. We're trying to expand beyond just being a hotel company to all of these other great products.

The other thing that we did a few years back is reposition Marriott from a hotel company to more now being a travel and experience company. So our new kind of pitch is anywhere in the world, Marriot Bonvoy enriches you by connecting you to places, people, and passions that you love. So we talked about places. Now, we're going to pivot a little bit to passions. So whether if it's once in a lifetime moments that's available on the Moments platform, so that could be a Taylor Swift concert, a Bad Bunny concert. We have partnership with F1 Formula Racing, NCAA tournaments. We have this amazing luau cookout with Jose Andreas, for those of you who are foodies.

Or it could just be a day-to-day kind of experience that you can tag on to your next business or leisure trips. So this could be tours or activities that you can go with your colleagues or with your family. And Marriott's not just about these travel related experiences or once in a lifetime experiences. We're trying to be relevant to our customer in their daily lives. So whether if it's a co-brand card that you can acquire, that you can charge your groceries, or gas stations that you can earn points on. We've had partnerships with Uber and Uber Eats, as well as Eat Around Town, so you can earn and redeem points for takeouts and your local restaurant dining experience. You can sleep on your Westin Heavenly bed and make your room smell like the addition lobby with the scented candles. And we also have partnership around the world, Alibaba in Greater China, Rakuten in Japan, and Rappi in Latin America. So here are all the ways that we are trying to be more relevant and engage our customer where they are, versus relying on them to come to a hotel.

So the third question is, how many experiences do you think we have on the Moments platform where people can bid for these special experiences, once in a lifetime experiences. I'll take it to the nearest 10,000. So let that as a starting point. And any guesses? Raise your hand if you know? 30,000. Right on. We have 30. That's amazing. That's amazing.

So we have 30,000 experiences that, if you're a Marriott Bonvoy member and some of these experiences, they don't even take a lot of points. So we have these, what we're calling, one-point drops, where you can literally bid on experience for one Marriott Bonvoy points.

So...

What we do is all that products and services has really built the largest member base in the world.

We recently crossed a milestone threshold, so we reached our 200 millionth Marriott Bonvoy members worldwide. That is not just a map of the world. That is a map of every single country that we have a Marriott Bonvoy member in, minus a couple of shaded areas where there's OFAC sanctions against. But you can see Marriott Bonvoy members is everywhere in the world. And it's not just the breadth of that Bonvoy portfolio, it's also the depth of the loyalty. So the last question that I'll ask is, what is the most nights that a Marriott Bonvoy member has spent at a Marriott Hotel? You say right beyond? No. Just last year, most number of nights.

320. 320. 365. 365. Did you already win? No. All right. 365 is the answer. Somebody literally spent-- Great job. Somebody literally spent every single night last year at a Marriott property. It could be an extended stay. It could be a corporate reload. Nevertheless, it just kind of shows you the loyalty that our member base has demonstrated. So what happens is, when you bring, really, the world's most loyal customer base, and then the portfolio of just amazing, not only hotel products, but experiences, that's really where the magic happens. And my job, our team's job, is really sitting at the intersection of those two circles, right? That's where personalization happens. That's where data activation happens. At Marriot, we talked about this idea of making the big feel small, because you don't want to be one in two million to 200 million, right? You want your experience to be personalized. You want your experience to be curated. And you want that unique experience that, frankly, nobody else is getting. So that's a little bit about who we are, and how we think about our overall strategy. So I'm going to make a pivot to our CDP journey. Before I dive specifically into CDP, I thought I'd share a little bit about our larger Martech and personalization ecosystem, and how CDP fits kind of fits into that larger ecosystem. So starting on the left, we have our data, right? So a few years back, we embarked on this cloud-based data strategy and platform journey. So we stood up AWS S3. We have Snowflake, where it's serving as our data warehouse. On top of the data infrastructure, we built analytics capabilities, as well as data science capabilities. That's Tableau...

And SageMaker. And so in addition to the offline data, we're also getting data from real-time sources. So from the digital channel, web and mobile, via analytics and SDK. And also, we have real-time data coming from our enterprise legacy systems via our event hub, Kafka. So that's kind of where the data sits. And then on the right-hand side, we have our activation channels. And as you can see here, we're primarily an Adobe and Salesforce shop. Adobe powering our digital and marketing channels, and Salesforce powering our service channels. So we have Target powering our web and mobile experience, campaign, outbound com, email, push notification, SMS. And we have Audience Manager powering our paid activations.

So despite all of this investment, we've had a couple of challenges. One challenge is this idea of data democratization. We have the wealth of data on the left, but they're not available to the marketers and the channel owners on the right. And as a result, we can't activate, really, personalization at scale. The other challenge that we had is this idea of centralization of audience. So individual channels on the right, they would build their own audiences in those activation platforms. And the same customer would get disconnected, inconsistent experiences, because the audience definition would be very different. So we wanted the ability and not to mention, it's inefficient to build the same audience multiple times in different activation platforms. So we wanted democratization of data, and we wanted centralization and omnichannel activation of the audience. And that's really the job that we wanted the CDP to be able to play.

And I'd love to say that it was a smooth, easy journey. But in fact, we had this vision probably three years ago. But it took a lot of discussion to get to organizational alignment. And we didn't have that organizational alignment to be perfectly honest. So coming out of the pandemic, we reached out to our partners over Adobe and Accenture, and we said, invest in us. Partner with us. Let's do a pilot together so we can show the broader organization, really, the potential of this technology and how it fits into our broader architecture, and how it can scale our personalization ambitions. So we had the partnership back in 2021. We ran the pilot. That gave us ammunition, frankly, for us to really sell the idea to the broader organization. And last year, we spent most of the year implementing version 1, we would like to say, of the platform. We activated a number of use cases that I'll talk about a little bit later. And this year, and for the foreseeable future, it's really about scale. Scaling the number of users on the platform, scaling the amount of data that we'll continue to bring in offline and real-time, and most importantly, scaling the use cases and the value that we're going to generate for the broader organization. So that's, at least at a high level, the CDP journey.

I understand that's all like theoretical, so I'm going to try to spend the next few minutes and make it real for all of you. So I've decided to bring in a couple of use cases, and it's a combination of use cases that we've already activated and are in the process of activating, just to show you how we are leveraging the CDP, as well as other technology to really scale our personalization ambition. So the first use case that I'll talk about is, in our kind of language, loyalty lifecycles. But it's basically, how do you take a member, who's enrolled in our Bonvoy program through their love and money journey with Marriott. And the program that I'll talk about very specifically is the onboarding experience. So think you are newly enrolled Marriott Bonvoy member. You came to Marriott. So what does that onboarding experience for you look like? So before we went through the transformation effort...

It was, for the most part, three emails through our outbound com communications. For the most part, those emails are not very personalized. It was three emails delivered over the course of 15 days of the member's enrollment. And from the time that the member enrolled, right, signed up either on property or through the digital channel, it took us anywhere from 24 to 48 hours to get that initial communication out.

So that was the before. And then so last year, we partnered very closely with the marketing operations team and the loyalty operations team to stand up a new way to reimagine not only the strategy, but the execution of the loyalty lifecycle program. So the new program is...

15 emails spanning the first 100 days of the member enrollment. Instead of getting that welcome email two days later, now the member gets it within hours and even minutes of that enrollment. So that's that real-time expectation. Instead of having a standardized template that goes out to all of our members, these communications are hyper personalized based on real-time signals that we're getting from our customers.

And it talks about really the breadth of our product offerings, not just hotels. So if a member, for example, has...

Binded their account with Uber, then we're not going to talk about Uber. If the member has already downloaded the mobile app, we will try to talk about something else, such as have you binded your account with United so that you can earn points back and forth. And as a result...

With this new strategy and architecture, we are enabling real-time signals and using that to inform our outbound communication and personalization effort. Everything is hyper personalized versus before where we had, effectively, just a set templates. Now I think the stats is we're able to drive something like 22,000 variations of the emails across these first 500 days series of communications. We launched a new capability called Dynamic Content Assembly, where we're taking everything that we know about a customer and everything that we know about the content, and try to dynamically pair that, the right content with the right customer without human intervention. So that really helps us be able to scale the personalization effort. And at the end of the day, it's all about the business value that we drive. So based on at least the limited time that the spin in market, we've seen a 3% lift in pointable activities. These numbers might seem a little bit small, but multiplied by the millions of customers that enroll in our program every day, this is a great achievement. And for those not in the hotel industry, pointable activities is basically just any activities that, whether it's earn or redeem, that a Bonvoy member will be qualified for. So many of those point actable, activities, especially during the first 100 days, translate directly into revenue to Marriott, either directly through our product and services, or product and services that our partner ecosystem offers. So that's the first use case I thought I'd share. The second use case is around this program we're calling retargeting, or many companies would call that abandoned cart or abandoned search. So again, just set the stage, the before experience is a very channel specific experience. So Digital built their own retargeting program based on digital signals. Same thing with outbound communication. Same thing with the paid channel. And those audiences are not necessarily aligned. And we don't have necessarily an orchestrated strategy across those different platforms. So the new vision for retargeting is we want to centralize all of the signals. We want to get the signals from digital, web, and mobile. We want to bring that into the CDP. We want to merge that with all of the offline signals that we have on the customer. And we want to build an omnichannel orchestrated journey. Because for some customers, maybe they-- If we can communicate with them, or if we can reach them and convert them via our own channel, we shouldn't have to pay for acquiring them through the paid channel. But if the customer is not responsive to us, either because they're not engaged through email or SMS, or they prefer other channels, then we want to activate those other channels accordingly.

So again, this is another example where we're trying to leverage the capability of CDP, as well as our existing investments, to really try to bring that omnichannel customer experience together.

In terms of the capability and value unlock, again, the real-time signals is super important.

We have this concept of a unified profile, where if maybe a customer is on marriott.com and is looking at a particular hotel, but we also know, based on his or her past booking behavior, they have other brand propensities or a propensity for complementary products. We will use a combination of both sources to actually drive that marketing message. It's obviously a more omnichannel approach versus a channel specific approach. And then based on kind of our projections, we're expecting a 20% lift to just the retargeting program alone. And that's kind of an omnichannel number.

So as you can see, these are just a couple of examples of how we are trying to not make the technology investment for technology's sake, but to really leverage it to drive value for the broader organization and hopefully deliver a better experience for our customers. Yeah. What I love about both of those examples is these are things that I think are translatable to a lot of organizations across a lot of verticals. And it really demonstrates how some incremental benefits from a use case that is one of the early ones that you implement can drive material business results across the organization. So with that, we'll transition into kind of the discussion portion of our presentation. And I think the first question is for folks who are maybe evaluating CDPs, maybe you're at that part of your journey. Based off of what you've learned, Chris, like, what are some of the top criteria and capabilities that you think people should keep top of mind as they look at different CDP options out there? Yeah. I'll share a couple. Both are centered around this idea of, like, do your homework before you go out there and start talking to vendors and enlisting RFPs.

Before we even decided to go on this journey, we...

Took a hard look at our existing investments and our overall architecture. And we asked ourselves the question of, what is the job that we want the CDP to be able to do? When you talk to these different vendors with different solutions, they will pitch you all sorts of capabilities. And certain CDP products will be more advanced in certain capabilities than others. So one example is a lot of the CDP has master data management capabilities, concept of being able to create a golden record. Well, that was not really a job that we wanted the CDP to be able to do. So really hone in on what your capability gaps are and finding those solutions that really complement your existing investment. I think that's one super important. The other one is just look at who you're partnering with. So as you can see, we're primarily in Adobe and Salesforce shop. And there is some advantage in having a unified single tech stack.

One thing we kind of talked about a lot internally is sometimes, if you get the best of breed kind of solutions, there would be a lot of finger pointing if things don't go well. In this case, because we've made the investment in Adobe, it's both invested on their part, as well as our part, to make sure that that whole stack works seamlessly. And you worry less about, as these products matures and evolves over time, that there is additional manual or custom integration that needs to happen. Yeah. I think building on that, I mean, we view things similarly. And being able to connect to your existing sources and destinations is definitely one of the most critical capabilities for any CDP. We have a session being presented by one of my colleagues in the room, actually, tomorrow afternoon, which goes deeper into this, how to choose the right CDP. So I would encourage you to check that out. One of the things, when I think about, like, the overarching principles, first of all, we understand the CDP space is super confusing because everybody talks about it the same way, right? So it's important, as Chris said, to get into the details, to look under the hood, and most importantly, to do this with your use cases front and center. So what are the use cases you want to execute, not just now, but what are the use cases you need to execute to drive the growth that your business expects in the next three to five years? We recently had a conversation with a CIO who said something really insightful. He said, I'm not buying a CDP for my current needs. I'm buying a CDP for my needs three to five years from now. So as you think about what systems you need to connect to, what sort of use cases you need to execute, it's important to always have that future goal in mind because it's a significant investment of both money as well as time for your teams. And you want to make sure that it's going to be a successful long-term investment. Okay. So the next question, I think, is a really interesting one, and it's top on mind for everybody. So there's the technology licensing piece. And then there's the adoption piece and getting to driving value in the organization. So from what you've seen, what's the best way to drive adoption among teams? Yeah. There are two things that I'll share from a Marriott kind of experience perspective. The first one is don't make value delivery an afterthought.

As much as you time you spend thinking about the architecture of the data, also think about what use cases can you begin to activate for two reasons. One is make sure that you've actually stood up the technology the right way, because many times we will stand up a technology and only to realize that it doesn't really solve the problem that we want it to solve. So if nothing else, just to help you validate that you've stood up the technology and the configuration the right way, I think that's important. And also, I think it's important from an internal kind of change management perspective, right? So if you're able to actually demonstrate value early, then it almost creates a pull from a demand perspective versus constantly you having to sell the technology out. Because there's, across all organizations, there's healthy dose of internal competition. So if I know that my sister organization is leveraging the new capability to unlock value for the organization, then I'm going to proactively seek out those opportunities. So definitely...

Bake value delivery into your implementation plan. Think a little bit hard about what are those initial set of use cases that's going to help you kind of demonstrate the value and help you unlock that for the organization. I think that's suggestion number one. Suggestion number two is, the other thing we didn't want is for this to be solely a technology implementation.

We wanted to make sure that we have a thoughtful approach for the people and the process side of it as well. We internally would kind of call that the operating model discussion. So probably like many of your organization, you have your marketers and channel owners up top, and then you have your data and engineering teams on the bottom. So for our implementation, we've added these two layers in the middle. So we introduced this concept of a global audience, COE.

So these are individuals with both a marketing and data background. Their job is to work in the tool itself, partner with the marketers to translate their business marketing briefs into actionable audiences that then can be created and activated against. And separately, we have stood up a dedicated product team, cross functional product team whose sole job is to make the audience team's job as easy as possible. So because of this, we are able to create centralization from a product management perspective, so that it's monitoring alerts, security, privacy. All of that is centrally managed to drive that efficiency. But one of the things we're trying to unlock as part of this implementation is, how do we democratize data? How do we make it easy for the marketers to not necessarily rely on a centralized team to get their job done? How do we move at the speed of thought versus...

Weeks and months worth of SLA? So we decided to have the audience COE really be sourced from around the world. So we have members from all of our major continent regions. And their job is to really support the local marketing team so that they don't have to wait for the headquarter team wake up in the Eastern time zone before they can start exploring the audience and start thinking about the activation. So I think the combination of both of these things is super important, both in terms of focusing on value delivery, as well as really think about what that operating model and by the way, this is an operating model that works for Marriott. I've spoken to some of my peers who also had successful implementation of CDP. They have a very different operating model. So it's really talking to your stakeholders to understand what they're looking for and what is the things that you would want to really prioritize, I think that will help with the adoption. Yeah. And you just said it. What works for Marriott might not work for a different company. There's no single right answer for how to implement and organize a CDP. And when you think about it, what we're talking about doing is breaking down data silos in the organization. That means teams are going to have to work differently in the organization than they may have been working previously. And so having executive buy in and executive support, being able to get teams to work together in new ways to drive against unified goals for a round customer experience is really critical to success. One of our track's most popular sessions every year at Summit is about organizational readiness and creating a center of excellence. I know you said you attended this in a previous Summit and found it valuable. So that session is Thursday morning. And I would encourage folks who are interested in trying to solve this problem, to check out that session. And, like I said, there's no right answer. But they're going to look at different frameworks that have worked for hundreds of customers, what we've seen as best practices, as they implement this and drive adoption. This is just one example of the content they're going to share. But I think it hits something that is often overlooked, which is the internal communications around driving that adoption. And so know, one of the things that we've seen a lot of customers be successful with is internal newsletters. We have some customers who went so far as to create internal podcasts, because it's an engaging forum. And it's a way to get people to maybe tune in during their commute and understand what's going on with the CDP implementation, e-learning, e-badging, and then, of course, office hours and slack channels. All of these things can be really valuable. And I can't really emphasize it enough, like, it's new ways of working, like, just a quick poll. How many people here are in IT related roles? Just by a show of hands. And how many folks are in marketing related roles? All right. And how many of you are like, it's not that simple? Right. So we're already seeing this, right? And so you're all on this journey already, maybe even independent of a CDP. And so you're already struggling with these new ways of working. So, I'll just leave it at that. It's going to be a compelling session to just get ideas for different frameworks of working together. Okay. So I'm sure lots of people are wondering because you shared a lot about Marriott's journey. What were some of the key surprises, successes, overarching learnings related to that implementation that you guys did? And again, I'll share two, specifically.

When we were going through the planning effort, we knew about a lot of the work that needed to get done in terms of bringing data in, connecting to our activation channels, all the channels that we talked about. But perhaps I underestimated how much work it would take to actually stand up an enterprise grade platform for a large multinational company. And these are things that I, such as making sure that we have the right security controls, encryption, tokenization, etcetera. These are things like making sure that we have a robust dialogue with our enterprise architecture team about how does this new platform fit into our larger Martech and personalization ecosystem, and getting the approval for that? It's all about the privacy controls, operating in 140 different countries. How do we make sure that GDPR, all the US state consent are respected and observed? And then last but certainly not least is how do we make sure this platform stays up and running, and if something goes wrong, that there's somebody that's monitoring it, setting alert, and that we have a good operating model with our friends over at Adobe to make sure that that gets addressed in a timely manner. Because once you really start to onboard use cases onto this platform, once you start to rely on it for omnichannel activation...

It's mission critical, right? This is not only a customer experience enabling platform, but also a revenue generating, enabling platform. So making sure that all of that foundation work, what's below the iceberg or below the waterline, is super important.

The other thing, I would probably be remiss if I don't mention this, is we find some good partners to go on that journey with you. We were implementing CDP for the very first time. I didn't know all the pitfalls, or all the gotchas. So I think we were fortunate enough to have some of our partners from Accenture and Adobe Consulting Services partner with us, co-invest with us, to really be on that journey with us. And what I value beyond just their technical expertise is the mindset kind of connectivity, is they were as focused about value delivery as we were. So it's not just about check a checkbox, do we stand up the platform? But ultimately, are you delivering the value for your organization? So hopefully, you can find those partners to go on that journey with you, both internal as well as external. Yeah. Great insights. Thank you. All right. So we're nearing the end here. And I don't want to keep you all from happy hour at the end of Summit Day one. But just to kind of wrap up with some top takeaways. So the key functions of a customer data platform, right? Being able to bring data together to build actionable profiles with a focus on powering experience use cases. This is different from the golden record that might exist in an enterprise data warehouse. This is focused on those marketing driven experiences downstream, and making sure that those are consistent across different channels and touchpoints across the lifecycle. We talked about the fact that your CDP investment should complement and enhance your existing infrastructure. I think you gave a great example of that, Chris, of how it fit in well with the existing investments that Marriott has. Partnering with the right partners. You just said it. Absolutely critical, both from a run and operate and also an implementation standpoint, and of course, internal partners who you need to bring along with you on the journey. And then I think one that is easy to overlook is building momentum with quick wins that deliver value and grow from there, right? We come to Summit, and we see the beautiful demos, which we're all very at Adobe, we're very proud of. And hopefully, it's inspiring to everybody. But just know that you don't need to be able to bite that off right away. You could start with more straightforward use cases, like decreasing the amount of time before you send the loyalty email to drive business results within your organization. And then that builds internal support and momentum, which helps you then go tackle those use cases as you mature your practice. So that's one thing that we always like to drive home. And then I'll just leave you with a couple quick other sessions. If you are interested in real-time CDP and our CDP sessions, this is the lineup for tomorrow and I'll show Thursday in just a moment. We're kicking things off in the morning with a session led by my teammate Laurie, who I believe is in the room here. Five strategies to execute cookieless marketing now with U.S. Bank. And then we have other sessions. I think one of the really exciting one is the strategy keynote at 2:30, where there's going to be more demos on those recently announced capabilities, Federated Audience Composition, and real time CDP collaboration. And then, of course, that CDP selection session I mentioned. And then Thursday, there's more. There's the organizational readiness session in the morning, that data collaboration focused session at 10:30, and then power of AI and all things audiences, in the afternoon. So lots of great content by the CDP team. And we hope that you check that out. So with that, we'll wrap. And again, thank you for the time... - Thank you. - And your attention today.

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