[Music] [Narrator] Please welcome Eric Hall. [Music] [Eric] Good morning.

You're here, congratulations. Welcome to Adobe Summit day two. I hope you were blown away by yesterday's keynote, strategy sessions and breakouts. This morning is our Inspiration Keynote. And we have an amazing lineup for you today. But how can we top the insights of day one? Shantanu shared his reflection on the impact of AI on customer experience management and outlined Adobe's innovation agenda. Anil dove deep into our product strategy, showcasing the future of data, content and journeys in an AI powered world. And David showed us the next generation of Firefly and the future of ideation and creative production. It was standing room only for the Strategy Keynotes on generative AI and marketing performance, and I hope you are inspired by where that technology is taking us. Summit 2024 is demonstrating how we as a community we're shaping digital marketing and customer experience in the age of AI. The lines have been blurred between your marketing, your sales, your product and support. In today's world, your digital experience is your brand. And increasingly, it's also becoming your product. And with the higher pressure on growth and downward pressure on budgets, we're all called upon to be on top of the financial outcomes. As digital and streaming continue to displace traditional media and social channels continue to evolve, acquiring, engaging and retaining customers is more difficult than ever, and this means that lifetime customer value and loyalty, they matter more than ever. To stay ahead, brands in every industry must constantly raise the bar on their end-to-end customer experience. Consumers expect to be remembered, valued and rewarded when they interact with your brand. And perhaps no industry represents the intersection of digital and in-person like the airline business. Now, this is an industry with tremendous competition, complicated logistics and critical safety standards. As airline customers, we have high expectations, and that includes a seamless digital journey connected to our physical journey, selecting flights, booking tickets, frequent flier programs, seat and meal selection, lounge access, and our baggage location. That's a lot of experiences to get right or wrong before you even take a step onto the plane. So is your travel experience going to be an adventure or an ordeal? As customers, we expect it to go perfectly. So the bar for success is really high. And this morning, we have an opportunity to hear from one of the leaders who takes on that challenge every day. Ed Bastian, CEO of Delta Airlines, will sit down with Shantanu right after this short video. [Alicia] When I get on an airplane, it is me-time. [Maya] Maybe learn another language, binge watch. [Eric] By nature, travel has just so much optimism in it. And I love that. [Alicia] Our ambition as a brand is not just to be the leading airline in the world, but to be the leading customer experience brand. [Eric] We want the interactions that customers have with us to be one click, one platform, one source of truth.

[Ranjan] The digital experience is as important as the physical and human experience. [Alicia] How do we recognize it's someone's birthday and we wish them a happy birthday when they walk on to our aircraft? [Eric] It's not just an email platform about an offer, it is about making that interaction and that travel experience at the gate and then on board the aircraft better. [Ranjan] We have the app, we have the website, we have the kiosk, we have the onboard in-flight entertainment screen. All of those channels need to be synchronous at every touchpoint they feel like Delta knows who they are. Delta Sync is creating a digital environment that is compelling for the customer and then capturing the data on the back end. [Alicia] The more we have the intelligence that we rely on Adobe to bring us, the more we can build a connected journey. [Maya] We know our customers are evolving, so we're looking at their behaviors and what they're doing with other brands and how they're engaging and interacting with our brand. So we're creating and developing content and iterating in real-time.

[Alicia] We know through the analytics they're booking some sort of a leisure vacation, but they're falling out of the process, and we can see that. [Ranjan] When we send them a notification, How effective were we in getting the action done? What's really exciting is we have this ability to test and learn that much faster and do so at a scale that's unprecedented.

[Alicia] Delta as a brand is showing up in a similar, consistent way time and time again. It builds trust, it builds loyalty. And Adobe is the foundation that allows us to enable that. [Maya] Experience is the difference. How can we bring in better tools and technology and scale up our talent? What can we do next? GenAI just takes it to the next level and allows us to think beyond what we could have even imagined. [Ranjan] We want to connect to the world, and we want our customers to trust that there is no better option than Delta to do that.

[Narrator] Please welcome Shantanu Narayen and CEO, Delta Airlines, Ed Bastian. [Music] [Shantanu] Good morning.

Well, I'm thrilled to have Ed Bastian, CEO of Delta Airlines, joining us today at Adobe Summit. Under Ed's leadership, Delta is transforming air travel with generational investments in technology, aircraft, airport facilities, as well as employees worldwide.

Ed's a 25-year Delta veteran, and he's championed Delta's shared values of honesty, integrity, respect, and we'll talk a lot more about that, as well as servant leadership at the core of every decision. And since becoming CEO in 2016, Ed has expanded Delta's position as the world's most reliable airline and grown its global footprint. So welcome, Ed, and thank you for joining us at Summit. [Ed] Thank you, Shantanu, and it's great to be here with you. Very impressive community that you've built and created. We're glad we're a part of that community. And I know we have many people that we carried to Vegas today, too. So welcome to Delta too, and we'll get you back home safely too.

[Shantanu] Well, let me start off with as a 25 year veteran, when I think about the kinds of things you've had to navigate as a leader, you talk about 9/11, you talk about COVID, you talk about bankruptcy, I mean, you've really done an amazing job building Delta for the long run and stirring through crises. So maybe you can touch a little bit about that. It's certainly not an industry that's for the faint of heart. It has its challenges, but it's a really important industry. And I think that's one of the keys, is that if, you know, having been through so many challenges, including COVID, which was the biggest of them, or if you know why you exist, if you know what your purpose is, you know the importance that your customers, not just your customers, your community, your world places on what you do, that gives you the confidence you're going to get through those challenges. And that's what kept us going right through COVID because we knew how isolated and how dark and how much angst sat in the world when people couldn't travel, people couldn't be with each other, people couldn't get to where they needed to go and travel was one of the things that unites and brings understanding and brings fellowship and brings joy. And so I knew we were going to get back. And when you have that confidence that enables you to be bold and courageous in the steps you're taking, that allows you to be humble when you realize the depths of the challenges that you have to work through, the transparency that's required. And we knew we were on stage all through COVID people were watching how Delta was one step at a time, starting to bring the world back together, and especially in the United States. And it was an incredible feat that our team displayed, but it was one of the things that I look back on and understand that resilience that you build, that muscle that you create over time, how powerful that is. And it's really what our brand stands for. It's a resilient brand. [Shantanu] And I think, again, this is something I know, Ed, you've championed, which is the people first culture. And there's an amazing statistic. I mean as you had to go through this entire pandemic, you did it without any layoffs across your 90,000 employees, and you've grown that to 100,000. And now that was amazing. So first... [Ed] Yes. Thank you.

Well, it's easy to say that you're people first. What company doesn't say that? But it's actions like that and in fact we were the only airline in the world that didn't furlough a single person. And so you talk about knowing you're going to get through the hard time and working together to get there. That's what enabled it. [Shantanu] But it truly is. I mean, when we take a step back and think about how you had to navigate it and did it with the people first, it's amazing. Well, we're in Vegas, and I know last year when we were in Vegas at CES, you announced two, I think, industry-first initiatives and maybe we can get an update on that. Ed announced free Wi-Fi on all planes and everything you were doing, and you announced, I think at that point what was really pioneering, which is how you are going to create a set of relationships with other companies to create this loyalty culture that you wanted to do, maybe touch on that. [Ed] So last year at CES, we announced that we were rolling out, we're still in the process, continuing to roll out fast free Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi that works. A lot of people say they have a Wi-Fi. It's not a lot of people have Wi-Fi that works and is free at the same time. We've got it through most of our domestic system at this point. We're in the process of putting it on all of our international equipment as well by the end of this year, it will be on all of our international planes where it's really going to be a game changer. And to me, it's remarkable. Again, it's another point of connection Wi-Fi sounds like a fairly simple, it doesn't sound like a very revolutionary technique to bring in but when you consider the fact that we've got 1,000 planes that are flying at 500 miles an hour around the world, bouncing around, trying to create that sterile high-speed connection is really difficult. But we've been able to master that. And what it's enabled us to do is to bring people into our community at an even deeper level, because the only thing we ask is that you be a member of our program if you're a SkyMiles member. And over the last year we've had over 2 million new members of our program, customers we already had, we just didn't know who they were, come and sign on in order to get the free Wi-Fi and to become part of the membership. When you think about what that 2 million customers that you have that you can't even market to, you can't personalize, you can't serve well that's huge. And then on top of that, we have brought a community of partners. We've got T-Mobile, we've got Paramount+, we've got Walmart+ now, we've got Amex, recently we've got the new York Times and all the puzzles and the games that they display all free for our members when they're on board of the planes. And now what we're also in the midst of rolling out is all those seatback screens that we have on board, because we have three times as many seatback screens as any airline in the world has, we're turning them into smart screens. And we've got about 100 of those flying today. And by the end of this year, at least domestically, we should have most of the domestic fleet enabled. And so that will take your extension of what you're developing, from your handheld to your screen and then you'll be able to actually use your handheld for what you want to have and be able to watch whatever you want on your own terms. It's really fascinating. [Shantanu] And I know you've really been trying to push the whole experience and we'll come to experience and maybe the role that technology plays. But I've always thought we all get influenced by our early experiences in travel, and I've read about some of your really, really early experiences in travel with the family. I don't know if you want to maybe touch on your early travel experiences. [Ed] My early travel experience was not in an airline, I was 25 years old before I stepped foot on an airplane. So how I got this job, I have no idea. This is the last thing, I've done a number of college commencements, and I always tell the kids, just keep your eyes open to opportunities, because when I graduated college, I never even stepped foot on an airplane. But I also grew up in a very large family. I was one of nine children. And so our travel experience was once a year, we'd all be in a car, a station wagon, my father driving through the night to Florida for the spring break travel and back again. And it was my parents, nine kids and my grandmother, and we were able to carry only what we fit in our pillowcase. And that's a pretty good lesson for parents out there. Tell your kids they can only care at school what you have in your pillowcase. It kind of gets your prioritization in place. So in my mind, I knew there must be a better way to do this and how I learned. [Shantanu] Well, you've talked a lot about creating the single Delta experience. Maybe you can touch a little bit on irrespective of what platform or what brand, how you're creating the single experience for all the folks out here. [Ed] Digital technologies are providing us the opportunity to have what we'd like to think of as a seamless experience for our customers and a unified experience. Our company next year is turning 100 years old, we'll be the first airline in the country turning 100. We're going to celebrate loudly absolutely. It's great to see.

And when you think about a 100-year-old company, you envision the technology infrastructure is kind of what you think it is. There're others, like thousands of applications and programs that have been developed over time and the ability to knit them together and to be able to develop a modern experience from a technical standpoint is quite a challenge. So we were working actively on that. We've moved most of our infrastructure to the cloud through AWS, we'll be complete with that by the end of this year. So that's enabling us. But then we want customers as they travel through the Delta system, whether you're booking a trip online or are needing to talk to one of our reservation agents or going through security or picking up your bag at the end of the journey or being on board with us and interacting through our Wi-Fi channels, you can engage, we want that relationship to be robust, to be connected, the information to be consistent as people travel through the system. And we know that our Delta app now is one of the leading apps, period, out there in terms of the experiential world. And we also know it's one of the reasons why people continue to prefer Delta because of the app, and we've got a new release coming out. It's going to be our best release yet in May, the team's working on are excited about that. Because we also want people to be able to have control of their experience. One of the challenges with travel, it can be stressful. I'm sure none of you can relate to that through an airport. It's really easy. And one of our ideas is it shouldn't be as stressful as it is. It should be something you look forward to and that you're looking forward to where you're going, and your journey is part of that. And so we've made the travel app or the Delta app an opportunity for people to control their experience while they're on board. If they want to make change, if they want to find out information about where they're going. Because, by the way, a lot of our customers connect onto another plane as to where that is and how that's all working. And the more information and the easier it is to use, customers feel a sense of comfort and peace and control around the experience and that's where the technology really makes a huge difference. [Shantanu] So let's just keep on the technology theme. I mean I think it's fair to say 2023, everybody talked about AI, so maybe a little bit on how AI changes travel and maybe Delta specifically. [Ed] Well, we've been working with AI for many years. It's now a new form I understand, generative AI, but I prefer to mention, call it augmented intelligence, because we never want our people to think that we're taking the power away from the human touch. So there's always going to be a human at the controls. By the way, the airplanes that you fly on are largely flown by technology. We've our pilots there, they're human touch, they're monitoring it, they're managing it, their interacting as necessary. But technology goes as far as it flies the aircraft even. But there are customers around, which is, by the way, a heck of a lot safer than any other way to travel. And it's great and it's a good way to think about technology in our world. We see AI as unlocking the opportunities for our employees to continue to spend even more time personalized experience and service with customers, rather than having to just sit there and punch out the screens and be able to bring information forward. We use predictive technologies to make sure that we're the most reliable airline in the sky through our engineering programs and maintenance. Delta's got a standard, it's the industry gold standard on reliability. But we don't do that just through hard work. We do that through smart work and technology and augmenting the decision making that we have. But we know we can do better because we have 5,000 flights a day. We serve on average over 500,000 customers a day that are flying all over the world. And when you think about the complexity of all that, And you think about the behaviors of all that and you think about what you can learn to be able to make better decisions and forecast and analyze and make better choices in terms of how you're going to route a plane, how you're going to avoid turbulence, how you're going to ensure that customers are getting to their journey in an even quicker, more seamless fashion, how you can use that to give your agents the ability to kind of run up punching around looking for information, but to call up a question in 2 seconds, have the answer presented consistently across the airline, it's significant. But the watch out for it all, and I tell all my fellow CEOs this, is to make sure your data that you're putting in there is cleansed, it's clean, it's giving the information out, the answers out that you want to see happen. And that's where we're spending a lot of our time is making certain that our databases and our infrastructure is actually generating the type of answers that we'd expect it to produce. [Shantanu] So as somebody who thinks about the future of travel all the time and is sort of saying, how do we plug the fact as to where travel goes and then paint us a picture over the next 3 to 5 years. What happens with travel, what's in, and how are you positioning Delta to be there as a leader? [Ed] Well, travel, we've all seen as everyone's come back from the pandemic, how important travel was, and people are traveling at a level we've never seen, our demand set is really, really strong, and everyone thinks that it's some form of revenge travel occurring, it's not. This is the new normal. This is the new normal. I mean, everyone that's here made the decision to come here because we wanted to experience something together. You could stay home, and you could maybe watch this online, and you could stream it, but the power of connection brings thousands of people together to listen to us talk about this. You have so many things with travel that I think technology is going to enhance. You think about the experiential aspect of it, you think about the ability to share, the ability to find new places to go, the ability to make it feel closer to home, to give the encouragement to go and explore. I, the dinosaur, I grew up, and we in our house we had encyclopedias. I'd look up encyclopedias and see all these places around the world. And I never thought I'd go anywhere. But it was kind of interesting. Our kids now, are at the places we were reading about and sending us pictures that we still haven't gotten to. And that's cool. So I think travel and experience, is going to be even more powerful, as service than it was pre-pandemic, because when something was taken away from you as travel was, people now are relishing it and they're going for it. And I don't see it slowing down. [Shantanu] Maybe a little bit about brand. It's a set of marketers in this group. I mean, how do you think about the Delta brand and what do you want it to stand for and how it evolves? Well, the Delta brand has three underlying attributes. We want it to be welcoming, we want it to be caring and we want the experience to be elevated. And that's what we trust our people to deliver every single day. Now, you can't deliver a brand unless you have an airline that has a high-quality standard of reliability. And I think that's where sometimes the marketing, and particularly in our industry, can get out of the way. I mean, you can't market that unless you actually are delivering that because your customers know who you are every single day and how you perform. And so we've invested for the last 15 years in making certain that we have the most reliable airline in the sky. And while COVID certainly hurt us and our recovery was challenged over the last nine months, by far we've been number one across the board of every average standard, in fact. And in Dubai in May, I'm going to be receiving on behalf of 100,000 people at Delta, the global Airline of the Year Award that the industry gives out. It's a top airline, not just in the US, but in the world.

So that's a statement. That's a statement of the brand. Another statement of the brand I think about, and this blows my mind, we are the fifth largest e-tailer in the country. Delta is. If I ask you the top five, I'd be willing to bet you and I know we're a good client of yours, I don't think you would have said Delta, but we are maybe after Apple... [Shantanu] I would've set you on number one. [Ed] ...and Amazon. Well, we're number one in spirit. You got Amazon, you got Apple, you got Walmart, and you got eBay, and number five is Delta. And you think about how far that's changed. So it used to be travel, you go through the online agencies and the Booking.com and all, to try to find the lowest price. 60% of our customers now book directly on Delta because they trust us, and they want to have that experience. So that number continues to grow as the experience because it's the experience of the brand that creates that. Delta was named this year by Fortune magazine, the 11ᵗʰ most admired company within their whole survey, within the Fortune 500, 11, as we're still recovering from a pandemic. And so that tells you the brand has power and there's a premium that we get with our customers and our people generate and deserve that, our customers pay us a premium. Last year, Delta generated 40% of the industry profits, yet only having 20% of the market share. And so our seats are twice as valuable as any other seat in the industry. So that's what a brand stands for. And now where we take that brand is that we start to extend the brand. We extend the brand to our partners in American Express with the world's biggest loyalty arrangement, the Delta American Express loyalty card. We have a great partnership with Starbucks. We expand it through ridesharing with Lyft. We expand it through our partnerships throughout the broader ecosystem, we're even looking outside the travel ecosystem to be seen as a brand that transcends transportation because people don't choose Delta just to get someplace because there are cheaper ways to get somewhere. People choose Delta for the experience that we offer and the confidence they know that when they're traveling on Delta, we're going to have their back. [Shantanu] Well Ed, from my perspective, both in terms of inspiring folks of how you have navigated the crisis, how you put people first and how you help connect the world. I think what Delta does is really inspiring. I'd like to end with some word associations. So I'll just say a few words and you can answer with whatever word comes to mind first.

Accountant. [Ed] That was boring.

[Shantanu] Bulldogs. [Ed] Georgia, Bulldogs. [Shantanu] Miles. [Ed] That's my grandson. My first grandchild, a little 15-month-old boy.

Most people in this room are way too young, you're still having your own kids or starting to have your own kids, but for folks like us, Shantanu, it's... I have found... People talk about wellness and how do you relieve pressure, take care of yourself, for me, spending time with my grandson takes all that worry off my shoulders.

[Shantanu] Marathon. [Ed] I've run two, I ran New York recently and I've got to get a knee replacement a few months because of that. But raised a lot of money for childhood cancer and that was worth it.

[Shantanu] You're doing a great job of answering it. You're not using one word, but that's okay.

[Shantanu] We're left with three more. Golf. [Ed] Love it. [Shantanu] Delta. [Ed] It's my home. [Shantanu] Ed Bastian. [Ed] He enjoys people. [Shantanu] Please. Thank you. Thank you so much. [Ed] - Thanks Shantanu. [Shantanu] - I really appreciate it. [Ed] Thank you all. [Shantanu] Thank you. [Music] [Eric] Thank you to Shantanu and Ed. What amazing insights. 500,000 people a day traveling on Delta while maintaining a human touch. Consumers expect to be remembered, valued and rewarded when they interact with your brand. And I think Delta is doing exactly that. This morning, we are celebrating the art and science of making that happen and the innovation leaders who take on that challenge every day. And we wanted to celebrate those leaders. A few years back, Adobe introduced the Experience Maker Awards to recognize breakthrough performance from our customers, The digital leaders and their teams who deliver amazing customer experiences, create business growth and set bold new standards for their organization and industries. On Monday evening, we held the 2024 Experience Maker Awards on the eve of Summit right here in Las Vegas. And you can sort of think of this like the Oscars for marketers and experience makers. And by the way, just a slight detour, in the last few years, Adobe is very proud to have won scientific and technical Oscars for three of our flagship applications, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe After Effects and Adobe Substance 3D.

That's no small achievement. These are products that have defined creative categories. And in the same way this years' Experience Maker winners are defining new levels of success for their business. At our awards ceremony, we saw our Experience Makers looking their best, and more importantly, we heard what's top of mind from the nominees and the winners. So let's take a look. [Music] [Kevin] Being honored as an Experience Maker is a great independent recognition of a lot of the hard work that we've been doing. [Gene] What it means for me to be honored as an Experience Maker, and it isn't me it's T-Mobile, it's my team, they all do an amazing job in partnership with Adobe. [Shekhar] Being honored as an Adobe Experience Maker is a testament to our work. [Music] [Carmen] Qualcomm is transforming how we engage with our customers, and that's a whole new set of customers for us. And through this work that we're doing around transforming marketing, it's actually bringing that customer viewpoint right into the front. [Kevin] One of our key success factors is the culture that we've been able to build. We've built something transparently open within our organization that really allows our business stakeholders to understand how we can help them achieve their goals with the help of the users through user experience research and experimentation. [Gene] AI is really exciting for us. We want to embed AI into our devices, into our network. The best customer experience is when you don't notice [Shekhar] GenAI is actually a compliment to all of our marketers. So it makes our marketers' life like much, much easier. [Carmen] I think AI is fantastic and what it's going to help us do now is actually bring it into the forefront of how we develop our customer experiences and take advantage of all this amazing technology we've been putting in place for quite some time and bring personalized experiences forward to our customers. That's what they're expecting of all of us brands and now we're going to be able to do that for them.

[Eric] A big shout out to all of our winners. Stand up if you're here. There're 10,000 people in here. So I don't know that we'll be able to pick all of you out. But congratulations again.

Now, if you want to make the big screen next year, look out for our 2025 call for entries this August. It's Adobe's honor to celebrate the amazing work you and your teams do every day, because we know that none of this is easy. A world class digital experience is not created in one step, and technology does not turn itself on. But more importantly, it's not just about any digital experience impersonal automation, it's not compelling. The real innovation is what we do, it's not just the technology, but using the technology to deepen our customer relationships and build the bond between brand and customer. building relevance, building engagement, building true 1:1 relationships that takes creativity, empathy, expertise, nuance, our human experience informed by data.

The organizations who get it right are standing out from their competition and evolving new business models in the process. This level of business evolution is only possible because of you, the teams and leaders who are driving this work every day. It's people like all of you in this audience who do the heavy lifting to make change happen, to take the necessary risks, to galvanize those around you, to change the game and invent the future.

Now, our next two guests are leaders who are doing exactly that. They are changing the game and inventing the future. They come from different industries and separate continents, but there are some connections. They're both leaders in storied institutions that have been around for a long time, and as leaders, they're empowering their teams to do amazing work, where risk taking is an imperative, where customer relevance is at the center of everything they do, where digital is driving business model evolution and something counterintuitive, their digital first efforts are forging a more human connection with their customers.

So our next speaker is Emma Springham. She's CMO of TSB, a UK bank. And TSB was one of the big winners on Monday night at our awards gala. They won this year's Maverick Award, and Maverick is a great description of Emma herself. She is reinventing the TSB brand across every medium right in front of 65million citizens of the United Kingdom. In a 25-year marketing career, Emma has also held leadership positions at Barclays, NatWest and even His Majesty the King's Bank, Coutts and Emma is doing it all in her own style. Today, TSB is shaking up the industry against some pretty big and entrenched competition with a human centric brand promise. So before we meet Emma, let's play a short video and learn all about TSB Bank.

[Video] Hello from TSB. If you've not heard of us, we're a bank from the UK with around 5 million customers and a team of around 5,000 people. We were the world's first mutual savings bank, founded in 1810 in Scotland by the Reverend Henry Duncan. Today, our purpose is still helping our customers feel confident about their money every day. It's brought to life through our brand idea, which recognizes that money is still the elephant in the room, and TSB is here to help it seem less scary. As a business, we're on a journey of transformation from a traditional high street bank to a digital bank with a human touch, and our partnership with Adobe is at its heart. So say hello to our CMO, Emma Springham. Viva Las Vegas.

[Music] [Emma] Hello, Adobe Summit. Thank you for such a warm welcome. I have the pleasure of being here today in Las Vegas to talk to you about some of my career stories and give you the opportunity to spend some time thinking about your personal brand. What I love about my career is you never know what's around the corner I didn't know three months ago that my career journey would lead me to this stage, talking to you in the entertainment capital of the world. And just as the American Howard Hughes sets out to rebrand Las Vegas in the 1960s, transforming it from its Wild West roots to what we're all experiencing today, my journey is also a journey about branding and transformation. Most importantly, enjoy the ride. Life is too short to be miserable in your career if you don't take action, it can chip away at your mental health. So most importantly, make sure that you get to enjoy the ride. Surround yourself with people that you trust, that challenge you and make you question yourself. We spend more time at work than we do with our loved ones, so it's so important that we have fun along the way.

One of the biggest enablers in my career has been my focus on my personal branding. And just like Howard Hughes, it all started with a clear purpose, vision, and some very core values. It's always been lost on me why people don't spend more time thinking about their personal brand and rather leave it to luck. Especially coming from an industry where the power of branding is so well understood, I schedule time to think about my personal brand, I spend time thinking about my target audience. The list is endless. My boss, the board, my team, sales, finance, they all need different things from me. So when we're building external marketing plans, we also spend time making sure that we have highly effective internal marketing plans to engage our stakeholders.

When I work on my personal brand, I focus on my three personal brand words, the words that best describe my personal brand and help me stand out. My three words are brave, trust, and growth.

Brave because as the American stunt performer Evel Knievel once said, Where there is little risk, there is little reward. Brave because it pushes you in your career. I always ask myself, is the marketing strategy brave enough? We would be proud of the deliverables. I encourage my team to look outside for innovation. I also encourage them to speak out if they see discrimination or bullying in the workplace. Being brave is in my family DNA and the bar is set very high.

This is my super brave soul mate, Bex. Bex saves lives for a living. So no pressure then. But Bex does really make me think about what am I giving back through my work? When we meet people and are asked what we do for a living, the reaction to Bex is always total admiration. When the question then comes to me and I say marketing, it's actually a bit of a cool response actually, no, marketing, it's pretty cool, it's pretty funky. Even our teenagers think that marketing is pretty cool. But then when we were asked about the industry that I come from in banking, it doesn't usually go down as well as it usually does, because banking, one of my core values has been to never incite hate, in any of my marketing campaigns and I just stick to creating pink elephants.

I'm grateful to the banking industry. Over my career, I've worked with some of the most incredible people of minds. Everyone I meet wants to exceed customers' banking expectations, or as I like to say, create magical moments across the customer journey. Banks have a history of being at the forefront of transformation. There is a lot of representation from banks today at the Summit because they recognize the importance of attending events like the Adobe Summit.

The most important thing is that I can look Bex in the eyes and be proud of the work we're delivering. One example is in the customer vulnerability space. TSB was the first organization to train their branch staff in domestic abuse support, Providing a flee fund to support victims' escape. Domestic abuse will affect one in four women and one in six men in their lifetime. Raising awareness of safe spaces campaigns makes me feel really proud.

I also feel really proud of our CGI pink elephant and what they represent. Talking about the elephant in the room, asking our customers to be brave and talk about their money, only one in five people talk about their money worries, which can have a detrimental impact on their mental health. The earlier a bank knows a customer is facing financial difficulty, the quicker they can step in and provide support. Talking helps and hence tiny the elephant was born. I don't have the same level of marketing budgets as the big banks, so CGI was a very cost effective and flexible production method.

But trust me, I felt very brave going into board to re-pitch a brand around a pink elephant.

I made sure that I led with the voice of the customer and their positive feedback on the campaign ideas. The launch of the Elephant in the Room campaign was a big success, not only externally, where the brand perceptions around innovation, trust and money confidence increased, but also internally. Our staff fell in love with the elephant. We've had staff making elephant cakes for competitions, knitting little elephants. The response has been amazing. And then at the end of 2023, a magical moment happened, Marketing Week put Tiny forward as a nominee for the Campaign of the Year Award, and Tiny only went on one.

The external recognition, though, really helped build trust with the board that we'd made the right decision on the rebrand. So a big thank you to Marketing Week and all the people that voted for us.

We're brave enough to be the first financial services company in Europe to deploy Adobe Experience Platform. We're moving to real-time solutions which help our customers to build their money confidence, enabling us to launch personalized customer content, delivering the right content to the right customer by the customers' channel of choice. When we turned on 1:1 personalization for loans, sales in the mobile channel immediately rose by 300%, which achieved a lot of attention from across the business.

Our journey to moving to real-time solutions. We are using marketing tech to identify vulnerable customers and provide proactive prompts.

One example which will not go down well in Vegas, In fact, we might need to lock the doors and I apologize in advance to Howard Hughes, but we are starting to use data to identify gamblers in debt and offering support for gambling blocks and video banking.

My second word is trust. Trust is about being trusted by my colleagues, my boss, and my customers. Trusting and empowering my teams to deliver work they're proud of, is about building long-term valuable relationships. I have had the pleasure of working with Adobe for 25 years. That's silver wedding territory that is incredible, better than marriage, is about creating trust at the highest level for the organization. When you're pitching innovation to the business with no proof business cases, it's not easy, you need that trust at the highest level. My marketing teams proactively use customer and data insights to inform the business strategy, which has led to personalization and data sitting at the heart of the business.

When marketing tech sits at the heart of the business strategy, you have buy-in at all levels. It's the same for customer trust. Personalized digital experiences are helping us to build deeper, more meaningful connections with those who trust us to manage their money. This is more, this is about more than sales. This is about making our customers feel valued and appreciated and enabling them to realize the milestone moments of their lives. And my last word is growth. My growth, my team's growth and the growth of TSB. Having a growth mindset coaching others so they become their best selves is just as important to make team members feel individual and special as it is our customers. When our people feel psychologically safe, the teams can unlock innovation and excellence.

Growing the commerciality of TSB, this quote from John Wanamaker, who was an American pioneer in marketing back in the 1900s, was very true back then. But fast forward to 2024 and John would have had his answers, there is no excuse for marketeers not to measure their work. The 2000s saw the start of the evolution, the age of digital, and with it marketing became a combination of precise, measurable science and leading technology.

Successful marketing today is the delicate blend between art and science. Art being the brave creative execution and science being the data and transformation. To get buy-in to new ideas, you have to speak the Chief Finance Officer's language and focus on sustainable growth.

These are my gorgeous twins, Emily and Jessica. As you can see from the picture, very different mindsets on their first day back at school.

Just as I expect their teachers to grow their minds, teach them new skills and build their confidence, it's no difference for leaders, we have a duty of care for our teams and their wellbeing. And as leaders, we must talk about wellbeing and encourage team members to bring their whole selves to work. In my team meetings I have a regular slot for Bring Your Whole Self To Work.

Recent topics spoken about by my team have been John, who talked about his stammer and Becky who educated us about ADHD and what we could do to support her. It's our role to build highly effective and collaborative teams, which can only be achieved for ensuring there is a growth mindset culture at the heart of the team. They say feedback is a gift. It is if it's given by someone trained in coaching and someone who understands the importance of emotional intelligence. All of the leaders in TSB are trained in coaching.

In summary, my personal branding focuses on three words brave, trust, and growth. I will leave you with the following question. What are your three brand words? It has been an absolute pleasure today to spend some time with you. I hope you enjoy the rest of the Adobe Summit. Thank you everyone.

[Music] [Eric] Emma Springham.

Emma, that was amazing. Thank you so much for being here. We loved your talk today. Thank you for being with us. [Emma] My pleasure. [Eric] Now, Emma did not fly Delta Airlines from the UK to here, and so she had some flight trouble, and that was a huge bummer because she won the Maverick Award this year, and we need to give it to her right now. [Emma] Thank you so much.

[Eric] Emma, you're a true joy. Thank you for being here. [Emma] My pleasure. Thank you so much. Going home with this will mean a lot to my team, because they did so much hard work. It's about the team and also all the senior execs will keep investing in me. So it's brilliant. Thank you very much. Thank you.

[Music] [Eric] Now moving from banking to sports. Next up, Major League Baseball.

Come on. Let's hear it for baseball.

Now, look, in terms of fan attendance, baseball is way ahead of other major sports in the USA, as you're about to see. And baseball, of course, is a storied institution, part of America's cultural fabric. No summer is complete without a trip to the Ballpark. Chris Marinak is Chief Operations and Strategy Officer for MLB, reporting directly to the commissioner of baseball. He leads growth and innovation efforts and he's responsible for driving the reach of the game, working with the league's Competition Committee on strategic baseball initiatives and creating the Major League playing schedule. In over 15 years with MLB, Chris has grown his career working in labor relations and strategy before taking on his current role.

Chris is driving really exciting changes in baseball and Major League Baseball. So let's take a look. [Music] [Video] This game is for you, the fan. This is the game we all want to see. Get the ball, pitch the ball. Keep the defense on their toes. Field like Ozzie, run like Rickey. It's the best game in the world. Now it's even better. [Rob] We noticed the game was changing on the field. We decided it was time to intervene, to make sure we put the best form of baseball on the field. Look, if we get to the point that somebody is getting towards Rickey Henderson's number, that would be a good thing for the game, the way I look at it. [Video] The throw at the sand was not in time. Stolen base. [Theo] And the entire effort was an attempt to just give fans more of what they like. [Rob] In a lot of ways we think we're restoring baseball to when it was the most popular. [Theo] They want to see more action. They want to see an improved pace. They want to see the ball in play a little bit more. [Video] Artistic smash. I'm here to tell you, I've seen them showcase their skills even more often and more frequently. It's great for the game. [Rob] These changes, I think they're fantastic. I think they make the game quick and athletic, the way I remember it, being in the eighties and nineties, watching it on TV, jumping around on my couch at home. [Conan] Baseball has changed significantly this season and everybody's talking about it. [Video] Viewership is up, attendance is up. And social media engagement. And the buzz in the building. We throw out the first pitch, you look up you're in the third, you look up, you're in the sixth, everything's moving. It's snappy, it's clean. It's a great night to be at the Ballpark. Just a beautifully played baseball game today. These fans are in it to the end. Seeing the energy and the emotion that's in those stadiums was just fantastic. Best fans in the world we have right here.

[Narrator] Please welcome Chief Operations and Strategy Officer MLB, Chris Marinak. [Music] [Chris] Hi everyone, thanks Eric for the intro and thanks for Adobe for having me here today. I'm here to talk to you a little bit about what we do at Major League Baseball to innovate and to grow our business both on the field and off the field and how we use tools from Adobe to bring that to life. Major League Baseball has been around for 150 years. As Eric mentioned in his introduction, we're probably one of the most traditional businesses around. Change is not easy. For those of you that are baseball fans, you know how much our fans value tradition and heritage, but that doesn't mean that we can't innovate, and we can't grow our product over time. And I want to talk to you a little bit today about how we do that. For us, innovation starts on the field.

We over time have historically not changed the game on the field very frequently. As you saw in the introductory video, last season, we made probably the biggest round of changes to the game in over 50 years. Baseball is the sport without a clock. It was the sport without a clock, and we added a clock to Major League Baseball. And that change not only went well, it went amazingly well as you can see on the screen above. The game times for a Major League Baseball game went down 30 minutes when we added the pitch clock to the game, along with rules around pick off limitations, limitations on the shift and expanding the size of the bases. The rules that we implemented last season were an amazing success. These were not just incremental changes, but as you can see, these were monumental changes. Not only did we change the time of game, but we also addressed another big area of feedback from our fans, which is the action on the field. Our fans talk a lot about how they want to see more action in the game, in particular, something like you see here, stolen base attempts, which are our fans' most interesting play. We designed rules that fostered more base stealing and you can see stolen base attempts last season went up by about 40% as well as other things like balls in play, hits and run scoring. It was a big, big success for us on the field by adding more action in less amount of time and giving fans more of what they want on the field.

As a result, this had major impact to our business. You can see our attendance on the screen. We were up almost 10% in attendance last season. This is the largest attendance growth that we've had in Major League Baseball in almost three decades.

Thank you.

We got more people into the Ballpark because we were giving them a better product. And not only did we get more people into the Ballpark, we had better TV ratings, we had better engagement on digital and social platforms. Fans were more interested in being a baseball fan last year because we made the product better.

I think there're a few things that I want to communicate to you about how we deliver change in baseball. As I mentioned, we're a historic institution. Change is not easy. So how can you deliver not just incremental change, but meaningful change, change that changes the game? And I think there're a couple of key themes that I want to communicate to you today about, things that we did that we found were successful. First, is listening to your fan or your customer, asking them what they want and designing change to meet their needs. Don't just implement change because you think it will be successful, ask your consumer what they want and give them something that will deliver the results that they're asking for. Secondly, is test big changes to make sure you get them right. If you're going to go big, make sure you don't make a mistake We have the luxury of having Minor League Baseball, which has over four levels of baseball that leads up to Major League Baseball. And it created an atmosphere for us to test the changes that we had around the pitch clock and pick off limitations to make sure that they worked, to make sure that they actually gave fans what they want and that they were successful. And so when we implemented them, at the Major League level, we knew what they were going to do, and we knew they were going to be a big success. And then the last thing is to spend time educating your stakeholders, to make sure they understand the purpose of the change and to make sure they understand the reasoning behind making change, and why they should put effort in to adopting those changes. We spent countless hours with our players, with our coaches, with our fans, educating them about what those rule changes were. You saw a spot from Bryan Cranston that we had out extensively to educate our fans about the rule changes. When the changes came on the field, people knew they were coming, and they were ready for them. And as a result they were willing embrace them and adopt them. And that's how we got over some of the historical limitations and hesitancy towards change, and really made lasting and impactful change.

But change for us is not just on the field. Innovation is part of the fabric of Major League Baseball and why we've been able to sustain ourselves over 150 years as a business. Our innovation off the field started decades ago when we looked out and felt like we had a unique asset, which is that we play a game every single day, and we could deliver those games to our fans on streaming platforms. And so in 2002, we became the first major sports league to stream a live game online. We grew that platform over time, and when the iPhone came out, we were the first major property to update our iPhone app to contain live streaming. That product grew and developed over time and ultimately became the foundation for Disney+. The streaming technology that baseball built is now bringing you all of the amazing content and property that you have on Disney's platforms. And most recently this last season, we became the first major sports league to produce and distribute our games locally to our fans. This is an example of us understanding our strengths and innovating and growing our business based on what we do well.

But the innovation that we did digitally doesn't just extend to video, it extends to our entire suite of digital products. So we made a concerted effort to migrate to become a direct-to-consumer franchise. And similar to the way that you heard from Ed earlier on Delta Airlines, we want to be a direct-to-consumer business, and we want to know who our consumer is. And as such, we've built an extensive portfolio of digital products the MLB app, the Ballpark app, we own a ticketing company tickets.com, MLB.tv. We have an opportunity to create a first-party relationship with our fans, and we think that's the foundation of innovation for baseball.

The fundamental strength of baseball as a sport is the in-person experience. I'm sure many of you have been to a baseball game. You understand the connection that it brings to a family, to friends. That experience of going to the Ballpark is an experience you remember from your childhood, and you never forget. We have more people attend professional baseball games than all the other major US sports leagues combined. This is a strength for us. When we looked at this strength three, four or five years ago, the majority of that asset was an analog experience. It was a printed ticket. You'd print a ticket out and you'd walk into the Ballpark. We didn't know who our fan was, and thus we couldn't personalize the relationship. We couldn't create a great experience for our fans because we didn't know who you were. You were literally coming in with a printed ticket and we didn't know if you were the same person that came yesterday or if this was your first time to the Ballpark. We made a strategic decision to migrate our in-park experience to a digital experience. And you can see what we did over a couple of year period. We went from 14% digital in 2017 to nearly 100% last season. We know every single person that comes into the Ballpark and we're able to create a 1:1 personal relationship with that fan.

What that has done for us is it allows us to give more context about who our fans are. There's a funny anecdote that you'd read a lot in the media about how the average age of a World Series viewer is over 55 years old. Baseball's fans are an older demographic, but the reality is that's not a full picture of our fans. That's a very, very limited picture of who our fans are. And there're a lot of other ways that our fans engage with the sport. And so by creating a first-party database, we understand who our fans are. We know that the average viewer on MLB.tv, our digital streaming platform, is 45 years old. We know the median age of a ticket buyer is 44, and we know the average age of a fan in our entire database is 41 years old. This tells a much more complete picture about who our fans are.

And as a further example of this, when we migrated to digital ticketing, it opened the door to our relationship with a whole new consumer. Before we went to digital ticketing, we were only collecting data primarily on the buyer of the ticket. The buyer of the ticket tends to be a person who's older and has more access to disposable income. But when you go fully digital, you open the door to your entire fan community. And what we've seen is that the average new fan to our database now is 36 years old, whereas before we went to digital ticketing it was 45 years old. We're talking to the younger fan now and we're creating a relationship that we think will be a lifelong relationship with that fan So what are we doing with that data? We're using our relationship with Adobe to transform the consumer experience. We're taking that data that we have about over 100 million fans in our database, and we're using tools that Adobe brings to us, including the Adobe Experience Platform, the Journey Optimizer, the Customer Data Platform to segment our customer base and deliver to them target offers and real-time information, personalized experiences that transform your experience as a baseball fan. I'll show you a couple of things that we're doing to bring that to life. Hopefully, you're doing similar things in your relationship with Adobe. First example, we have automated abandoned cart campaigns, so you try to go buy a ticket you don't convert, our system in conjunction with Adobe will automatically send you an email that asks you to buy a ticket and convert and come to the Ballpark. We build AI driven segmentation in the Customer Data Platform. We use a whole host of variables to figure out which of our fans have the highest propensity to buy. We take those segments and then we serve them ads on social media platforms. Those targeted campaigns show over a 50% lift as compared to a generic campaign. We're reaching our fans in a more targeted, personalized way, and that's showing real results for our business.

And then one other example is on our digital products, we allow you to pick your favorite player. We know who's a Shohei Ohtani fan, for example, and we also know where you live. And so historically, if I was a Phillies fan living in Philly, the Phillies are serving ads for Phillies fans. But what we can do now is serve ads for a Shohei Ohtani fan who lives in Philadelphia when his team comes to town. And we're seeing tremendous return on those campaigns as well because we're reaching an entirely new segment that was left out, that wasn't a segment that was targeted previously. And we're creating new opportunities for fans to engage with our sport.

We're also creating ways for our partners to activate and to bring our relationship with the fan to other opportunities in commerce. And so this is one example where a fan scans in at the Ballpark with our Ballpark app and one of our partners in this case, Mattress Firm, you get an offer to buy an item with Mattress Firm, and we've done that with a number of other partners as well. It creates an opportunity for our consumer to get an offer and it creates a way for our partners to unlock opportunity with our fan base.

But the experience is just beginning when you scan your ticket. As I mentioned, we've converted our fans to a digital ticketing experience within our Ballpark app. That app has real-time notification opportunities, much in the way that Ed talked about with Delta, we're doing a very similar thing in our Ballpark app. That's the flagship platform for us to communicate with our 100 million fans every year that go to a game. Last year we started to create customized information notifications to our fans when they get to the Ballpark, you scan in and you immediately get a push notification that gives you options for food near your seating location, it gives you information about online food ordering and it gives you more information about how to have a great experience at the Ballpark. In addition, we started to create offers for our fans. So the one on the right, you see is an offer for an upgrade. You scan your ticket in, there's an open inventory available and better seating. We create upgrade offers for our fans to improve their experience once they get to the Ballpark.

As the journey continues this season, we're going to be integrating our notifications with our Statcast system. We have an extensive system. Many of you've probably seen it on our broadcasts that track where the ball is. When the ball goes off the bat, the exit velocity, where it's going to land and how far it traveled. We will be integrating our Ballpark app with our Statcast system so that when a player hits a home run, we can send you a push notification that says, Go buy a jersey for that player go buy a piece of memorabilia and get a discount while you're at it.

It's a way to integrate the digital experience with the physical experience of being in-person and creating a really great way to engage with our fans. And then lastly, to tie the entire journey together, we're going to be sending push notifications to fans after the game. You go to the game, you have an amazing experience, you're with your friends, you're with your family, your team wins. We can send you a push notification that says, Hey, why don't you come back and here's a discount to do it as soon as possible. We're creating this journey from start to finish where our fans are getting personalized notifications and information. They're getting personalized marketing, they're converting, and they're coming to the Ballpark, they're having a great experience while they're there and then we're bringing them back as soon as possible. That's what the tools from Adobe allow us to do. They allow us to have a personalized experience for all of our fans to create a virtuous cycle with engagement and bring to life this really, really amazing experience of being a fan of baseball. Hopefully, that gives you some inspiration, some things to think about.

Traditional business like ours, change isn't easy, it takes time, it takes effort, but when you have a real clear vision of what you want to do to be successful, you can bring that to life. And in a digital world, Adobe is a great partner to help you do that. Thank you for having me today. [Music] [Eric] There we go. [Music] Chris, Thank you for being here. Really awesome. So great to see all the cool things you guys are doing with digital and fan engagement and turning it into a real relationship. I want to just share a little bit. I grew up in Topeka, Kansas, Topeka, Kansas, 60 miles from Kansas City and the Kansas City Royals. And Chris, in 1985, the Royals beat the St. Louis Cardinals in what was known as the I-70 series in seven games. Now, that year, Bret Saberhagen was the Royals' biggest ace, he won two games, he was the MVP of the World Series. And I went to the parade, and I was like this high, and he gave me a high five.

So could you get his autograph for me? [Chris] Hey, I'm happy to do it, and you know what? Those are the kind of experiences that stay with you your entire life. And that's why we think these tools are so important. [Eric] So what would also be awesome is this is the Bo Jackson jersey, so could we get Bo to sign this jersey for me? [Chris] I think you're getting a little carried away here. [Eric] But wait, just one more. So George Brett almost hit 400, one season. For a moment, he was at 400 and then it came back to like 395. Can we get George Brett's autograph? [Chris] How about we do some tickets for opening day? We're opening tomorrow, Kansas City. [Eric] We're all invited to opening day on behalf of Chris.

No, so Chris, you're doing a lot of cool things, and you shared a lot of them, one you didn't talk about was the fact that you were globalizing the game. And opening day is tomorrow, but actually the first game of the season, the first two games of the season were played last week. Tell us about that. [Chris] Correct, we had two games in Korea last week. I was actually in Korea and just came back a couple of days ago. We had the Dodgers and Padres open up in Korea and it was a great way to showcase the global nature of the game. We have a lot of interest right now in Asia, particularly with Shohei Ohtani and some of the Japanese players that are having a tremendous amount of success in the United States. And so we were able to bring two teams over to Korea, connect with that fan base and bring the Major League Baseball product around the globe. It just creates a great connection point for us to start the season. [Eric] That's very cool. So talk to us about opening day, like this is obviously a big deal. How do you prepare for a big marketing moment, like opening day across the country? [Chris] It's really omnichannel for us. We have a new ad campaign coming out. We're going to have another iteration on some work we did with Bryan Cranston. So you'll see a new version of that talking about how anything can happen in baseball, it's unpredictable. And that's a brand narrative we want to reiterate with our fan base. But it's not just on traditional media channels, it's about using digital platforms as well to connect with fans. So we have active marketing campaigns on social media platforms around selling tickets, and a whole host of other things on our owned and operated platforms in terms of advertising the start of the season and getting our baseball content in front of the fans, reminding them that this is the greatest day of the year. [Eric] The greatest day of the year, I love that. So, Chris, last question. You've had a really great career that just continues at Major League Baseball, you're doing a lot of cool things. Maybe just share with us an insight or two about what's allowed you to continue to be successful and grow, the types of things that you're conquering at Major League Baseball. [Chris] The one thing that's really interesting for me is, I've been involved in baseball as a player, as a coach, as an executive, every year since I was five years old, and so for me, it's a lifestyle. I love the game and it's a passion for me. And I think the takeaway that I have after being at baseball in an executive capacity for about 15 years now is that that passion and energy that you have for the product is a key driver for innovation. It sparks creativity, it sparks energy, it sparks fresh thinking, you have a huge knowledge base with which to build on. And so for me, the love of the game and the love of the sport is something that really helps drive a lot of the things that we talked about here today. And so for those of you out there that are in a similar position, with your businesses, your organizations, what are you passionate about? What makes you really get out of bed every morning, and drive creativity and thought? And that's what's really going to lead to the most amount of innovation and creativity for your businesses as well. [Eric] Follow your passion, I love that. Chris Marinak, everyone. [Chris] Thanks a lot, Eric. [Eric] That's really good. [Chris] Thank you. [Music] [Eric] So we've heard from two Experience Makers, who are ensuring that established brands thrive and grow in a digital first world. Now, today's last guest is going to share a different side of that equation, what it takes to be entrepreneurial. He's a pioneering podcaster and much more, with groundbreaking hits, including How I Built This, the kids science podcast, Wow in the World, and a third podcast, The Great Creators. He has interviewed thousands and thousands of people, Nobel Prize winners, iconic actors, athletes, musicians, and a lot of business leaders. In fact, Forbes magazine has called him the greatest interviewer of his generation. So without further ado, please welcome Guy Raz. [Guy] I think the best piece of advice I've learned from leaders is that kind leaders have kind companies. I mean, kindness is an incredibly powerful tool. It sounds a little hokey, but we've had leaders on the show and entrepreneurs on the show who are kind. People like Gary and Kit Erickson of Clif Bar, they give their employees a chunk of ownership. Kim Jordan of New Belgium, that makes Fat Tire, she gives ownership to her employees, and the thing about kindness, that I've learned from entrepreneurs is that kindness is free, it costs nothing, it's zero dollars and zero cents. But the return on that investment is bigger than any financial investment. It's actually a hugely important quality of successful entrepreneurs. [Jimmy] I love that, be kind. Guy, I love you buddy.

[Narrator] Please welcome Guy Raz. [Music] [Guy] I want to tell you a story about the dumbest business idea I ever came across.

Not a particularly inspiring way to start a talk. Well, the founder of this product decided to enter one of the most saturated categories in all of CPG. He had no connections to it, he had no experience in it, he had no money to start it. The founder's name is Mike Cessareo. And Mike spent his entire career working in advertising agencies. He was a guy who would pitch ad ideas, hundreds of ideas, and hope that the agency would pitch those on to the client. Most of the time his ideas failed.

And by 2019, Mike was out of a job.

But in his mind, he still had this one idea for a business. Now, if you've read the book Blue Ocean Strategy, you will know that this was not a blue ocean idea. The blue ocean is where there is opportunity and no competition. Mike decided to get into water, bottled water. As I told you, literally and figuratively, a saturated market. Bottled water is a $300 billion global industry. It's dominated by Coke, Danone and Nestlé. It is a fool's errand to try and take them on, but Mike felt like the stories about water were predictable and dull. Bottled water spoke of mountain springs, health, nature, artesian wells, about life, about water's life-giving powers. But not a single water brand was talking about death.

Of course they weren't, that would be stupid, right? Wrong. It turns out there was something of a blue ocean strategy after all. Lots of kids drink energy drinks, not water.

But what if you could put a blazing a horrifying skull and a creepy old English font on a tallboy beer can, you fill that up with fresh, natural mountain spring water? Well, the answer, of course, was Liquid Death.

Now, even before Mike Cessareo had raised a single penny to launch the brand or to make a single product, he spent 1,500 dollars to produce a teaser video.

The video was filled with macabre scenes of death all at the hands of water.

It should come as no surprise to anyone that that video was a hit. On YouTube alone, that 1,500-dollar video was viewed over 5 million times.

From the very beginning, Mike thought very deeply about who he wanted to reach, and he thought really methodically about how to reach them.

He believed, by the way...

I mean, this is a water ad.

He truly believed that if he could make water look cool, he could actually get teenagers to drink it. Today, Liquid Death, a brand that did not exist five years ago, started by one person with no money, has amassed more than 8 million followers on TikTok and Instagram, and its YouTube videos have been viewed tens of millions of times. This year, that brand is expected to reach $200 million in sales, and they just raised a round that gave it a whopping $1.4 billion valuation.

So what accounts for its growth? What accounts for its virality or for its stickiness? Well, for starters, they use humor and stories to connect with consumers. Their slogan, as you saw, is literally, Murder your thirst. If you want to join the Liquid Death Loyalty Club, which is free, by the way, you have to sign a contract selling your soul to the devil.

And for that, they'll send you a T-shirt.

Which means you will be a walking advertisement for the brand. Teenagers see their friends buying this mountain spring water in a scary, dangerous looking can, so they buy it too. Because the can tells a story.

It's a story that's different for every single consumer, but that connects with them on an emotional level. Emotions like amusement, excitement, joy, interest, surprise. By the way, these are among the 27 states of emotion identified by researchers at UC Berkeley in 2017, and 19 out of these 27 are net positive emotions, the kinds of emotions that we humans respond to, and make decisions accordingly.

We know this because this has been studied for decades.

In his book Descartes' Error, the famed neuroscientist Antonio Damasio writes about how our emotions determine our preferences and even guide our decision making.

And what Mike Cessareo understood, what all great brands understand is that if you can find the touchpoint between your brand or product and the consumer, it builds a powerful bond.

Take a look at this picture.

It's an advertisement, of course, for Heinz Ketchup. Now, almost all of you understand what this conveys right away. It takes you to a place in your mind, maybe a place of nostalgia, it tells a story many of us have experienced. We've been at a diner or a restaurant, a piping hot plate of French fries arrives to the table, you dunk it into a cool glug of ketchup, and instantly you know it's not Heinz.

It's not the taste of your childhood, of backyard barbecues, of ballgames, of summer, because that bottle, the taste, that feeling is so unmistakable that we know when it's not the real thing. This is the power of a story conveyed in a single photo.

Now, what I do on my podcast, How I Built This, is tell stories.

Since 2016, I've interviewed over 500 founders and visionaries, people who've built some of the most iconic brands in the world. Everyone from Howard Schultz of Starbucks to Sara Blakely of Spanx. And though each episode is a deep dive into how the business was created and scaled, it's not primarily a show about business. In fact, it's a show about stories.

Because if there's one unifying factor around every business, it's that every business is a story. Now, you may have heard this before, but it may not always make immediate sense. After all, a business is about selling a product or a service in exchange for money or goods, which is true. But a business is also about the question why.

Why did you decide to pursue this idea? Why do you think the world needs to hear about it? Why does it add value to someone's life? In each of these answers is a story. It's what connects you and me and everyone out there to the thing you're building or trying to present to the world.

These are the questions, by the way, that an entrepreneur named Larry Liu had to answer before he was confident that his business idea was going to work.

When Larry arrived to the United States from China in 2002 to work as an engineer at Intel, he had a hard time finding the foods that he loved. And over many years of talking to other people who'd emigrated from Asia, he discovered that a lot of other people also had the same problem. Unless they lived near an Asian grocery store, it was hard to get the things that they loved.

For many years, Larry thought deeply about how to solve this problem. And of course, there were powerful emotions at stake, nostalgia, excitement, appreciation, joy. So in 2017, he founded a company called Weee! W-E-E-E. Weee! is an online grocery store that mainly specializes in delivering hard to find Asian products, things like Chinese vinegars or Japanese fruit or Korean snacks. At launch, the company had very limited cash to work with, and they had no marketing budget. And initially Weee! had a difficult time growing the business.

But Larry understood that there might be a way to replicate an approach, that bigger brands like Dropbox and MailChimp and Slack had taken. If you've used any of those services, you know that each time one user sends another user a link or an email to someone else, well, that new person, in order to access the file or use the service, becomes a user as well.

So Larry was looking for a way to build that kind of virality, but to do it through stories, so he came up with a plan. Each time a customer ordered something from the site, they'd get an email with a unique link attached to a ready-made social media asset of the product, like a perfect Japanese cantaloupe or a Chinese sausage or a Taiwanese snack. The email encouraged the customer to post the asset on any social platform. If someone else clicked the link and order from Weee!, that new customer would get a 15% discount, the person who posted it would get a few dollars back in credit. Now, this promotion cost Larry's fledgling business a lot of money. In fact, it put them in the red for the next three months.

But in short order, it actually increased their users by an order of magnitude so much so, that by the end of the year, Weee! did something very unusual for a startup, it hit profitability.

And today Weee! is one of the largest and fastest growing players in the US Asian grocery space. A market in this country that could easily exceed $70 billion by the end of the decade.

Now, over the course of more than 550 in-depth interviews on my show, with brands or founders of brands like Slack, the afore mentioned Slack or Airbnb or even Raising Cane's Chicken, what we've learned from all of them is that the best brands have figured out how to find the touchpoints that connect you and me to the things they make. And when we have a positive feeling about something, we tend to talk about it. And that is the most powerful form of marketing. In fact, in 2021, Nielsen confirmed this when it found that 88% of consumers around the world trusted recommendations from a friend above any other type of advertising. By the way, this is a strategy, we use even on our show, on How I Built This, for our back catalog. We have hundreds of older episodes that are still relevant and instructive, and I really believe anyone can benefit from them. They're free, but we couldn't figure out how to get people to explore those past episodes, so what did we do? We invited our listeners to call in and tell us in 30 seconds about their favorite past episode and why. And each week we air that 30 second spot in our ad break, and guess what? It's given our back catalog an enormous boost. Those listens translate into higher downloads that enable us to monetize the back catalog and grow show further. It's also a way for us to not only be more responsive to our listeners, but more relevant. And by the way, relevancy is why Weee! tailors recommendations to its customers and why it solicits ideas on its platform, for which new products to bring to the platform. It's what drives Liquid Death to introduce new flavors because they get ideas through a kind of open-ended dialog in exchange with their fans. Some of the strongest brands in the world have become that way because they have figured out how to remain relevant to their customers. And how do they do that? By making things easy. Easy. Amazon makes things easy for its customers by using data and analytics to anticipate what they might need or want. Spotify curates custom playlists for you without even asking for it. Tesla literally increases the value of their cars every few months by adding features to each car through automatic software updates. By the way, these are examples of additive features, things that are given to customers for free without them asking. They add value by saving people time in a world where all of us, me, you, everyone is vying for the public's attention, that matters a lot.

In our case, in our show, in How I Built This, we're not selling anything, per se. Our mission is simple. We try to make great content that is value add that isn't a waste of time and that's free for the 12 million people who listen to our show every month. Now, if we do this right, we have more listeners. And more listeners means our advertising rates increase, so it's not entirely altruistic, of course, we need to be a sustainable show. But from the perspective of the listener, what matters is that we are offering business school quality case studies for free to anyone, anywhere, any time, and that's how we build our customer loyalty, so to speak.

Now, I want to shift direction here, ever so slightly, because I don't want to give you the impression that all the examples, I used from the companies I'm talking about get it right all the time. They don't. In fact, if you were to build a word bubble out of the 550 founders we've had on the show, one of the most prominent words that would emerge is this one, failure.

Because every successful product or initiative or campaign is the product of a culture willing to accept failure. Let me say that again. Every successful product or initiative or campaign is the product of a culture willing to accept failure.

In fact, I think in some ways How I Built This should probably have been called Build, Fail, Build, because that's also the story of most successful brands. Audible, a story we've told on the show, now the world's most successful audio book company, is the product of so many failures. Don Katz, the founder, he started out thinking they were going to sell MP3 players. By the early 2000s, that company was trading as a penny stock, it was on life support. But eventually, after years of iterating and designing and developing and trying, they came up with the model we know today. Even a story we told just a few weeks ago about MGA Entertainment, the toy company behind Bratz Dolls and L.O.L. Surprise! They come up with and try and then reject far more ideas for dolls and toys than they ever release. And even then, some of the products that are released are flops.

The point here, again, is that cultures where failure is okay are places that have a higher likelihood of long-term success because cultures that allow for failure also tend to encourage collaboration.

So one of most innovative collaboration stories, I've come across in more than two decades of studying companies, might surprise you because it's not from a scrappy startup or a tech company. I'm talking about Procter & Gamble.

In December of 2019, I had the chance to spend some time at Procter & Gamble's headquarters in Cincinnati.

P&G is a 180-year-old company. It's a multinational conglomerate. They've got 60 brands and about 20 of them are worth over a billion dollars So judging by the numbers alone, they're doing something right. They've got over 100,000 employees, so it's a pretty bureaucratic place or certainly more bureaucratic than a startup. Anyway, during my visit, I was amazed to learn about the origin stories of so many products that become would be household names, for example, in the late 1990s, P&G was working on a new plastic wrap called Impress. This was technology designed to take on Saran wrap and glad cling film, products that are owned by competitors SC Johnson and Clorox. This was a multi-year project, it was highly complex. It involved bringing together industrial designers and chemical engineers and project managers, you name it. Meanwhile, in another part of the company, another engineer named Paul Sagel was trying to figure out how Procter & Gamble could compete with Colgate, a toothpaste brand that was really threatening Crest's market share. One thought Paul had was teeth whitening.

At the time, if you wanted to get your teeth whitened, you had to go to the dentist, and Paul wondered whether you could bring that technology to the home bathroom. So for over a year, Paul Sagel and a small group in his department tinkered on an idea to make an over-the-counter tooth whitener. After many fits and starts and failures, they finally came up with a formula.

But they had a problem.

They didn't have a good solution for how to apply it to the teeth. They needed something that would fit comfortably on the tooth, that was relatively inexpensive, and could adhere and stay in place for a long time. For months Sagel and his team tried different things, many different things, but they couldn't figure out what to do.

One day, he was having lunch with a colleague named Bob Dirksing, who was working on Impress, the plastic wrap project. Procter & Gamble encourages cross-pollination. They want employees from one division to meet and work with colleagues from another. Anyway, the two colleagues are having lunch, and Paul Sagel tells Bob from Plastics about his problem, and at that lunch, Bob from Plastic says, and I'm paraphrasing because I wasn't there, but he says, Paul, why don't I cut you a strip of this cling film material we've been working on over in Plastics, come on down with me. They tried it out and in a couple of days these two collaborators had a working prototype of a product. So they pitched it to the CMO. And within a year it became known as Crest Whitestrips. In its first year, that product alone generated $300 million in sales for P&G.

That after many fits and starts and failures. And by the way, the plastic wrap project, the one called Impress that was supposed to compete with Saran Wrap and Cling Film was scrapped. P&G decided to allow that project to fail. And to this day, the company does not compete in the plastic wrap space, but the plastic wrap technology developed, in an attempt to do so, ended being a key part of what built Crest Whitestrips. Think about this for a moment.

P&G has been around since before the Civil War, and it remains one of the most innovative companies in the country, in part because of its culture of collaboration, because of its strong commitment to research and development, and how the company works to deeply understand consumers and search for gaps in the market. And of course, through its willingness to allow for trial and error and failure, and failure, as I've said, is both critical and vital to achieving a successful outcome. Now, I know you've heard a version of this truism before, but there is real data to back this up. In 2019, researchers from Northwestern University analyzed 46 years of venture capital portfolio companies and more than 750,000 applications for research grants to the National Institutes of Health. And what they found was conclusive. Virtually every winner begins as a loser.

But what differentiates those who persistently fail and those who eventually succeed is both plainly obvious and surprisingly common. The ones who make it study their failures and understand that failures are paving stones along the journey. It's like the athlete who watches her tape after losing a match, or how the US military conducts after action reports after every single engagement or exercise or simulation, and in one of my favorite examples that happened just last year, it's how NBA superstar Giannis responded back in 2023 after a season-ending loss in the playoffs. If you recall, the Milwaukee Bucks were poised to win it all. When a reporter asked him if the season felt like a failure, and the exasperated Giannis answered, There are good days and bad days. Some days you are successful, some days you're not. But that doesn't mean it's a failure, these are all steps to success. And that quote, that single quote is the story of a business or an idea or a vision or a campaign. Some days it's not your turn, and you have to shift or persist or iterate or reimagine.

But each day, each failure is a small step to success, and sometimes actually surprisingly more than you think, it's the dumb ideas, the most outlandish suggestions, the Liquid Death ideas, the ones that come from inside a culture that values and even celebrates failure, those are the ideas that inspire the stories that build great businesses. Thank you so much. Thank you. [Music] [Chris] Guy Raz, everyone.

Now, you just heard from Guy Raz, and in Guy's presentation, there were about 20 illustration styles slides.

Our producer, Joe Buchwald, built all of those visuals of Guy's presentation this past weekend using Firefly.

That's game changing. That is game changing. The stories that Guy shared and the leaders that we heard from this morning, they've embraced technology to give themselves a competitive edge in crowded markets. And these brands have built an advantage because bold leaders delivered on a vision and weren't afraid of failure. And in the age of AI, that's more important than ever because as Guy just talked about there could be someone out there with a new idea, and competitors, large and small, who has that entrepreneurial spark to change the game and invent the future. Do you have what it takes? I believe you do. We've got a great community. Together, let's change the game and invent the future. Thank you for being with us today.

Now, speaking of new ideas that can disrupt things, please remember to come to our Strategy Keynote presentations this afternoon. We have two great sessions, one on content and creativity and the other on data and personalization, so get there early for a seat, and also Sneaks are tonight, where we will showcase the standout Adobe innovation that is hatching in our labs. It's always a highlight of Summit and we promise adult refreshments and that will help you to encourage the brave presenters who demo these emerging technologies, and most exciting, our co-host tonight will be Shaquille O’Neal. I'm really looking forward to that. And Shaq, also known worldwide as DJ Diesel, will be spinning at the Bash event following Sneaks. So have a great rest of the day. We'll see you back here at the kickoff at 5:30. Thank you.

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