[Music] [Woman] Please welcome Vice President, Marketing Strategy Performance and Innovation, Adobe, Max Cuellar.

[Max Cuellar] Thank you. Hello, everybody. My name is Max Cuellar. I lead Adobe Marketing, Innovation and Performance. Today, I am delighted to be here with you to talk a little bit about how we might make the most of your marketing performance and embolden the way that we think about marketing in the context of the past, the present, and the future.

Marketing is the art and science of captivating hearts and minds, igniting knowledge and curiosity, and driving commitment to action. That experience has never required more for marketing than it does today, and it's important. Research shows that 8 out of 10 customers now consider their experience with a company to be just as important as the products and services that they interact with.

And while 80% of companies surveyed believe that they provide a superior experience, less than 10% of customers agree. That is a problem. On this tight rope as marketers, we're navigating between innovation and soaring expectations in markets that wait for no one and in a world that is awash with complexity and it's only growing. In this world, as marketers, we must contend with both email open rates, campaign performance measures, but also total customer acquisition performance. We must understand churn and cross-sell and also, what are the fundamental drivers of customer retention and lifetime engagement. We must be across promotion and channel performance but also the drivers of total lifetime loyalty, and all of this in a context that continues to evolve rapidly. It's a dynamic and complex media landscape. Channels and formats continue to rapidly evolve, social with 5 billion active users and mobile with almost two-thirds of all consumer media continue to expand their reach and relevance even as ad tolerances are decreasing.

Consumption of media and exposure and engagement have all continued to grow even as consumers are spending two-thirds of their life engaging with digital media. This includes sleep. But ad tolerances are lower.

Two-thirds of customers will skip or pay to avoid ads. Almost half already use ad blockers and an almost equal amount simply refuse to watch them. This evolution also includes the innovative application of methods like market mix modeling, multi-touch attribution, often improving spend efficiency by over 50% and overall marketing efficiency by double digits.

Despite this, high fidelity, high impact measures continue to be elusive for us, and the change continues. Media continues to diversify, cost per continue to increase, and accuracy on impact continues to be very difficult to achieve, even more so as we move into a world of patchwork privacy regimes and the loss of traditional signals. Look, numbers tell a story and all of us are obsessed with numbers and metrics, but this is not going to be a session about weights, balances or workarounds. Instead, today I'd like to propose that we look at past, present, and future and embolden the way that we think about performance as marketers. So let me tell you how I'd like to spend the rest of our time together today. I'll talk a little bit about how I see the world evolving and how we might prepare for what's next. I'm going to welcome a very good friend of Adobe's, CMO Lisa Melton, who will tell us our AAA Northeast managed to turn her tenure over six years into a period of absolutely record growth despite flat budgets. We're going to hear from Ali Nazer, our Senior Director of Product Management who will go deep on Adobe's plan for product innovation. And then we're also going to show two incredible demos by my colleague Jennifer Qian, Adobe Solution Consultant, that's going to bring this experience to life. And finally, I'll finish up with one thought. So I'm really hoping you walk away today with some new ideas about how to enhance performance, some bigger ambitions, and a good sense of how we might work together to bring this to life and achieve some breakthrough impact.

So here we go. We're at the tail end of what's been about a 100-year journey. This is the era of managerial capitalism. It started about a century ago. That's when most organizations were getting way too complex to be managed the way they had traditionally been managed, mostly by family entrepreneurs. The first corporate jobs were in finance and shortly thereafter in marketing and sales. Finance was focused then as it is today, accounting, budgeting, compliance, forecasting, and performance management. Around the same time, sales and marketing became professionalized. Companies sought to expand their market reach, build relationships that endured with customers, and drive overall demand. Very quickly, organizations realized they needed people that actually knew what they were doing. And that was the beginning of our relationship, a relationship I'm sure you all know well, finance, marketing, and sales talking about functional performance, ROI, past and present. That was about 100 years ago, and surprisingly, not much has changed even as our methods have gotten much, much better. But this isn't going to be a history lesson. It's really about looking ahead at what's next and how we move beyond functional performance management to the bigger questions. So this is a true story. I actually started my career as an anthropologist looking into the history of how companies evolved in this area with an eye toward the future. And as happened to some anthropologists, eventually I went native. So over the past 20 years, I've been a practitioner first then an operator and eventually a leader in the world of marketing and data living in both the B2B and the B2C spaces. Not surprisingly, over that time, I became an Adobe customer myself, and now I'm here on stage as someone that has the opportunity to be part of the leading company in this space, and looking ahead with all of this experience. I believe we have an opportunity to do better and to seize the moment. Okay, so how? How do we seize the moment? I have three ideas. First, we've got to make marketing the business. The performance of marketing going forward must be understood in the context of what drives value for customers and the business as a whole, the entire business. Marketing is the heartbeat of business growth. It drives success. It guides strategy. It fuels profitability and embracing this idea is the key to breakthrough relevance, moving beyond performance management that's functional. Of course, as a marketer, brand awareness matters, consideration, lead progression, email performance, platform engagement, all of that still matters. But in the ServiceNow of driving end-to-end customer acquisition, customer retention, customer loyalty, lifetime engagement, and lifetime customer value. This is not a suggestion simply to buy a marketing automation tool, train a model thoughtfully, build a great martech stack. The key is to begin by articulating what marketing does for the business as a whole.

This big picture is crucial, especially when the picture is rapidly changing. So what if we imagined as marketers doing two things, growing a much stronger backbone and embracing the full set of advancements brought to us by technology and data today? What might that look like? It would mean building out and living in a connected ecosystem where the marketing experience is the business experience delivered, and this would link how we prospect, engage, develop, attribute, measure, end-to-end performance. In the moment, we'll talk about just that with AAA Northeast about how they use Adobe Experience Cloud to bring this very idea to life, and this stuff is profound. Customers expect us from best-in-class brands like those of you in the room. Adobe's platform will help you amplify value realized and delivered in the context of the whole customer experience, and so Lisa's going to talk about just that, breakthrough performance despite flat budgets, but turn the question on its head. What you really did was to build a foundation to deliver meaningful sustained performance improvements year-over-year for the past six years, and that's what we're talking about. Second idea. And you've heard a lot about this already, Embrace GenAI Now. We're at the cusp of sweeping technological changes profoundly driven by the evolution of GenAI. This will significantly evolve our capacity for data analysis, insight generation, predictive analytics, capacity for personalization, for targeting, automation of reporting, continuous optimization of content across platforms and audiences and a lot more. This evolution will also help develop a deeper and more meaningful understanding of the nonlinear recursive buying journeys where people opt in and out constantly and embrace something closer to the reality in which we live that does not look like this.

Enhancements in analytics spurred by GenAI prove the point that the basic funnel not only doesn't exist, it's never existed. Life is more complicated. The world, our customers' worlds, can be presented closer to what it really is, not how we historically have tried to simplify it to be.

Melding customer journey analytics with GenAI can enable us to get to know these recursive ebbs and flows and engage better than ever before. Without GenAI in the mix, advances to measurement strategy are a lot more elusive, and we continue to live by that linear notion of a funnel and perpetuate a false sense of delivering superior customer experiences, that lead to the customer expectation mismatch that I shared at the beginning. The 80% of companies that believe they develop a superior experience to deliver and the less than 10% of customers agree with them. That is a problem we must solve. But when thinking about leveraging GenAI, keep in mind that there's a blind spot for many GenAI models and that's a lack of context, business context and human context. And I'll talk a lot more about this in a minute. I believe that GenAI-- I do believe that GenAI will reshape every aspect of marketing from planning to execution to analysis, and it will also enhance the quality of our human capital. Winning companies will be the ones that understand how change becomes a skill. They will both lean into the adoption of GenAI, but also the development of their talent or workforce.

At the moment now, Forrester survey data shows that over 80% of decision makers in the space are ready to adopt GenAI, decision makers like you, executives like you, but desire is not enough.

And this leads to the third point. We must maintain a firm root in authenticity. Our belief at Adobe is that GenAI is a force multiplier for innovation. This is rooted in our commitment to change your world, but also the world at large. And to do this, we have to be authentic about what we do and how we tie the impact of our work and the meaning of our work to the world around us. GenAI will undoubtedly continue to transform our world and while marketers seem by and large to understand this, in fact, two-thirds say it's extremely important to the value they're going to deliver in the next year and almost equal proportion say, by the way, we've got no GenAI guidelines in my organization. 98% of marketers, almost 100% intend to use or experiment with GenAI this year despite the fact that 80% say there's neither training nor education on the topic in their organizations. Just think about those mismatches. So look, at Adobe, a core tenet of marketing is trust, and authenticity is a foundation for trust. Authenticity applies more than ever with GenAI in the mix.

Trust and ethics become more important than ever.

We cannot lose the human element in marketing, and this is how Adobe approaches incorporating GenAI with our customers. In some cases, generating hundreds of thousands of images for our customers in a bedrock of trust and ethics that is resolutely committed to communicating authenticity and integrity in the work that we can do together. Don't put an untrusted algorithm between you and your customer. This is bedrock at Adobe. We're committed to advancing the responsible use of technology for the good of society in ethical, meaningful, innovative and human centered ways. Or to put it more simply, at Adobe, we believe GenAI is a force multiplier for the human endeavor. So it's time to put a 100 years of history behind us and embrace the future with the knowledge of what's ahead. This moment can also serve to dissolve traditional barriers across our teams and enable a profound shift, and we're going to hear about this in just a minute when we listen to Lisa's story from AAA Northeast. So to summarize the big three ideas, make marketing the business, be prepared to embrace GenAI at a greater scale across a connected platform and keep authenticity at the heart of what we do.

Remember at the beginning of this session, since the evolution of managerial capitalism, marketing has been the front door for innovation. We have brought profound changes over the last 100 years to the way our organizations work. Third party research, segmentation, embracing digital, data, analytics, decision sciences, marketing time and again has been the front door for innovation in companies.

In this regard, this time is no different.

And I look forward to doing the best alongside with you, bringing the best technology and the best minds to bear. So now, to our featured speaker, I couldn't be more excited to introduce a total rock star of marketing who has an amazing real world story to share. She'll leave inspired not just to improve your performance, think about ROI and insights that you can apply to your own marketing efforts, but also inspire you to increase your empathy and understanding of customers as you do it. In case you don't already know, AAA meets its customers where they are, in my case, often in times of need. And over the past years, I'm happy to say we've worked with AAA Northeast to grow their membership subscription by double digits and help them shift away from very traditional channels and approaches to marketing. So not only does AAA literally meet you where you are and when you need them, but also figuratively in that journey, and we're delighted to have AAA Northeast here today with us at Summit. So please welcome to stage Lisa Melton, CMO of AAA Northeast.

[Lisa Melton] Thank you, Max. Thank you.

Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you, Max. As Max said, I'm Lisa Melton, Chief Marketing Officer at AAA Northeast. I have had the pleasure of being at AAA since 2017 after spending about 20 years in the insurance industry. Interesting fact about me is that although I'm up here on stage talking to you about marketing, I didn't actually set out to be a marketer. I kind of fell into it after being on the business side of things for many, many years. But as someone who believes that everything happens for a reason and someone who loves living outside of my comfort zone, I like to think that this is right where I'm supposed to be. Before we get started, I wanted to send my well wishes to Mark Pelletier, who was our Senior Vice President of eBusiness. Mark was supposed to be here on stage with me today, but couldn't travel due to unforeseen circumstances. What I'm sharing with you as a result of the strong collaboration and partnership between our marketing and eBusiness teams, and Mark has played a key role in it all. This story is something we often share together, so I feel his absence here today.

I know that many of you are familiar with AAA North, excuse me, with AAA, but what you may not know is that AAA is a federation of clubs across the United States and Canada. Collectively, we serve more than 64 million members, and we have affiliations with other motoring clubs across the world. AAA Northeast is one of the largest clubs in the AAA Federation, serving over 6.5 million members across 6 states. You probably know that AAA offers world-class roadside assistance, but we also do a lot more than that. In addition to roadside assistance, AAA Northeast members have access to a wide range of products and services, including auto, home, and life insurance, a full service travel agency, competitive rates on auto loans, mortgages, and student loans, discounts on everyday purchases, and driver training programs that create lifelong safe drivers. I like to think of AAA as a lifestyle brand, as we can help you and be with you throughout every stage of your journey.

So I know this is just the first day of Summit, and I know you're going to spend time over the next few days listening to a lot of great success stories. That said, I thought I'd share three things upfront that I hope you take away from our story. The first is that at AAA Northeast, our marketing and eBusiness teams are viewed as strategic partners to the business. I'm really proud of this as I know that's not always the case. And in all honesty, it didn't used to be this way at AAA Northeast. But today, we're seen as enablers of growth, and it's the work that we've done and our partnership with Adobe that's gotten us here. Second, my marketing budget hasn't increased in the six years that I've been at the club. Yet, we continue to experience year-over-year record growth. In fact, our business partners can't hire fast enough to support our marketing efforts. Let me say that again. Our business partners are hiring more people to support marketing.

And third, it's important to know that everything I talk about today was done iteratively. We took one step at a time with one Adobe product at a time and continued to build upon our success over time. So on to our story. Over the last six to seven years, AAA Northeast has been on a journey to grow and mature digitally. This journey was initiated by our CEO, John Galvin, as he understood the world around us was changing, and our member expectations were changing. So we needed to rethink how we ran our business. John knew that this wouldn't happen overnight, and he knew that at the core, it would be our people, our process, and our technology that would help get us to where we wanted to go. So first, we invested in our people. Being headquartered in Providence, Rhode Island, we found ourselves competing with Boston Tech Firms for talent. But what we quickly realized is that we found great success hiring mindset over skill set. We don't necessarily look for people who have experience with Adobe products. We look for curiosity, those who try to make the most of opportunities and overcome and learn from setbacks. If someone has that strong foundation, we can train the skills they need to be successful. All of this has led to a new attraction of talent in a difficult to hire Boston area market and a retention rate of more than double the industry norm.

Once we had the right people, we focused on developing a deep culture of empowerment. We empower our teams at all levels of the organization with the autonomy to act. At the core, they take a member first and data-driven approach to rapid experimentation and digital optimization. And they do this through the data. Our source of truth for our digital data comes from Adobe Analytics. We started with web analytics and then quickly began tagging all of our marketing campaigns to understand our performance in near real-time.

This is our foundation. If a marketing tactic can't be measured, we don't do it. And the best part is, is that it's not just the highest levels in marketing or eBusiness looking at the data. All levels within our departments leverage Adobe Analytics daily. And as a collective team, we talk about that performance every day. If something worked, we do more of it. If something doesn't work, we learn from it and try something else. There is no fear of failure. It's all about testing and learning. And because we have near real-time data and are looking at it daily, we can easily react to not only what's happening in the performance of our campaigns, but we can also react to external factors that maybe impacting us. We've had significant market shifts in many areas of our business over the last few years, and we've been successful because we're able to shift dollars, tactics, and channels seamlessly. This is our foundation, and we continue to build upon that foundation with Adobe. We started with Adobe Experience Manager, which allowed us a concise, clean way to provide content on our website. Then we went on to real-time website optimization and testing of our content and CTAs with Adobe Target. Our goal was to put our members in the driver's seat when it came to their digital experience. We started small, and today, we run hundreds of tests on our website every year. It's important to note that we don't make changes to the website unless something's been tested and positively confirmed. That discipline is what supports our goal to let our members lead the way.

With these efforts in good place, we moved on to Adobe Campaign as we wanted to be able to transfer the same great experiences we were offering on the website to email. Developing our audiences was also an important step here, so we brought an Adobe Audience Manager to help with targeting for our emails and our digital marketing efforts. And then things started to get really fun. With the success that we saw and the strong foundation we built on the web and in our digital marketing efforts and with our ability to understand our performance in near real-time through analytics, we made the decision to bring our digital media efforts in house. Prior to this, and like many marketing departments, I had an agency managing our digital media efforts. But we were constantly questioning their data as it never matched ours. Their definition of conversion was different than our definition of conversion, and their reporting on our results was always delayed. And frankly, being a complex business of businesses, it was really difficult for them to understand our business like we did. So in 2021, we launched Adobe Advertising, taking our paid search and programmatic efforts to the next level. All of this is managed by AAA Northeast employees, and we've spent the last few years testing and learning in these channels as well. I truly believe that all of the work that we did to build our foundation set us up for this to be the shift where the magic really happened for us to optimize our efforts and spend less to get more, a lot more. We have real measurable outcomes that have been driving our business forward. Since 2017, our website funnel conversion rates have significantly improved. Using membership as an example, our join funnel conversion rate improved 123%. Our membership upgrade funnel experienced 180% increase in conversions. And our membership renew funnel saw conversion improvements of 50%. To put this into context, we have about 65% of our new members joining online, and with over 6 million members renewing annually, there are millions of transactions happening online each year.

One of my favorite parts of our story goes back to one of the key points I mentioned in the beginning, that we're experiencing accelerated record growth without increasing marketing spend. Specifically, we're leveraging the search engine marketing module in Adobe Advertising. And since we implemented advertising in 2021, we've seen significant reductions in cost of acquisition and cost per lead.

For example, the cost of our auto insurance leads has reduced 88%, our home insurance leads down 69%, and the cost for our travel package leads has gone down 92%. On top of this, our cost of acquiring new members through search has been reduced by 50%.

You might think that this lower cost, with the lower cost, we'd have a lower volume as well, but that's not the case. To illustrate with auto insurance, our leads have increased by more than 74% last year, and so far this year, they're up by more than 85%. All of the money that we're saving to acquire new members and bring in leads is being reinvested right back into our marketing. We're having a direct impact on our business without increasing marketing expense. And again, we're bringing in more leads than our business can handle right now, so we work very closely with our business partners to make sure that we're aligning to their staffing models. As soon as they're ready for us to turn up the volume, we're ready to make that happen.

We're really proud of how far we've come, but we're not stopping here. Everything that we've done to date has set us up for the next part of our journey with Adobe Experience Platform. We're in the beginning stages of leveraging the power of Adobe Real-Time CDP to create unified customer profiles from online and offline sources and use them to create personalized journeys across channels and devices. And with Adobe Customer Journey Analytics, we'll have the ability to measure the impact of our marketing campaigns on key business outcomes such as revenue, which I think we all agree it's a very important metric.

We've done some early testing with Adobe Experience Platform's one-to-one AI-driven targeting, and the results are astounding. During phase one of testing some of our email campaigns, we saw sales increase between 30% and 70% while reducing our email list size by over 90%. To highlight a specific example, we tested Experience Platform's propensity model in the emails for one of our business lines. In the tests we ran, we sent 98% less emails, got 77% more transactions, and 75 times more sales per email.

In addition, nearly 40% of our website visits are being exposed to offer decisioning capability in Adobe Journey Optimizer, which provides one-to-one personalization when our members visit our website. By showing our website visitors customized offers for auto insurance, we were able to increase our yearly number of leads by 7.5%.

To date, the changes that we've made have transformed our marketing and eBusiness teams. We've unleashed the power of small empowered teams that have a shared vision and purpose. And ultimately, it's helped drive engagement, retain top talent, and build a culture that is resistant to challenges. And these changes have also resulted in a significant shift in our business line strategies with an increased focus on conversion of digital leads. I'll share a quick story with you related to this. A few years ago, one of our business partners was in my office very upset that we were changing the frequency of our print publication from monthly to six times a year. At the time, he really felt that the only way that we could get the phone to ring for his business was to mail our print publication. That same business partner is now our biggest evangelist for our efforts. He frequently talks about the benefits of search engine marketing and has, at length, explained to others his excitement around hybrid optimization and how our digital efforts has transformed his business. And he didn't even question our recent decision to completely retire our print publication and replace of our digital publication.

This is the power behind our efforts. We've proven that we're stronger as an organization when we have our people, our process, and our technology working together.

So where are we going from here? Wherever our members take us, however, whenever, and wherever our members engage with us, we'll be there alongside them. This is where we've always wanted to be, to deliver the right message to the right customer for the right product at the right time in the right channel. And with these tools and with our partnership with Adobe, we can optimize our performance and deliver exceptional member experiences at scale.

The world is changing fast, the more we find opportunities to create connections with our customers and with each other, the more we can adapt and thrive in this ever-changing environment. Thank you very much.

And I'm going to welcome Max back to the stage.

Thank you, Lisa. We've talked about past and present, and we've talked about how looking ahead it's about asking and answering the bigger questions. So in that vein, one question for you. How does this all go over with the board? Great question, Max. I have to say that we are very fortunate. We have an incredibly supportive and enthusiastic board of directors, and they've been very excited with the product progress that we've made, especially around leveraging technology because it's really allowed us to improve efficiency, but also to create a better member experience, which is really what we're here to do. So it's been a wonderful journey and they've been along that journey with us. And I would also say our CEO, John Galvin, has been instrumental in really making all of this happen. He's been the champion to create a culture that really is one that's about testing and learning and no fear of failure. And he's often always the one coming and asking, "What do I need? What do I need?" But I think he might regret that at this point, at least sending me here today, because after those keynotes this morning, I think my list just got a lot bigger. But we've been very fortunate in that regard. Terrific. Well, please join me in a round of applause for Lisa. Thank you so much for sharing your story. - Thank you. - Thank you so much.

And so with that, let me welcome Ali Nazer and Jennifer Qian to come on stage and talk a little bit about the technology itself and what's ahead.

[Ali Nazer] Thank you, Max.

As Lisa mentioned, it all starts with enabling your people. One of the things I love about the Adobe culture is how we partner with those same people at our customers to build our products. Only then can technology drive the business results that we saw at AAA Northeast. AAA is also a great example of how these products work together to drive personalization at scale, from media planning and measurement to advertising offsite to continuous engagement and optimization on their own properties.

This is all fueled by the flywheel on the inside, which starts with a 360-degree view of your customers. This is accelerated by insights from analytics and ultimately drives the content that you generate to experiment, personalize and learn more about your customers. As Max mentioned, the market is never static. In partnering with you, we're always looking to help our customers adapt to and take advantage of these key changes. Today, we're going to cover three such areas, marketing in a cookieless world, leveraging GenAI to drive a step function change and impact for your organizations, and better alignment of enterprise B2B sales and marketing.

First, one of the biggest recent changes to our marketing landscape is the upcoming deprecation of third-party cookies. This will impact our media campaigns, our ability to deepen our understanding of our customers with data and how we measure paid marketing.

Measuring the media impact without cookies in an increasingly fragmented world is going to be a big shift. There will no longer be a one-size-fits-all model. Marketers will need to use a mix of measurement and experimentation to understand their performance, and at the center should be media mix modeling. Built on the Adobe Experience Platform, Adobe Mix Modeler drives an understanding of your omnichannel incremental performance, letting you build and optimize your online and offline marketing plans via our self-service AI-based product. As you can see, this not only drives better returns like we've seen with AAA, but just as critically, we see our customers moving at the pace of the market by making decisions in weeks, not quarters or halves.

The second disruption in a cookieless era is about data sharing. While first-party data strategies have been critical to this point, we can only understand so much about our customers from our own data. For instance, if I market cars, I might know about the person that bought my product, but if I zoom out, there's much more to that person. They probably have a AAA TripTik in that car, and that's where data, especially second-party data or other brands data can help paint a more complete picture of that person and how to better market to them. And while cookies are going away, there's more and more addressable audience data through emerging channels, like connected TV, retail media and new social destinations.

We know cookies made the sharing of data easier, but now sharing has become more complex and hard to manage and slow. In order to bring simplicity and speed to this world of data collaboration, we're announcing RTC, Real-Time CDP collaboration.

Our product is purpose-built for marketing organizations and publishing organizations, helping to assist in media planning, driving audience activations, and closing the loop with outcomes based measurement. More importantly, collaboration will be 100% interoperable within the ecosystem, whether it's infrastructure, agencies, data providers, or publishers. And this includes collaborating with non-Adobe customers.

And of course, without 3rd party cookies, marketers will need new strategies of re-engaging with unauthenticated site visitors. How do you start to convert these into loyal customers? Adobe can help with that. Adobe Advertising is launching a new integration with ID5, a probabilistic ID solution to reach this valuable audience in programmatic media.

The other area, of course, is GenAI.

Many have heard about our investments into tools like Adobe GenStudio, which was announced this morning. This leverages the power of GenAI while maintaining controls for your brand. This will ultimately help accelerate content production to the right velocity required for experience-led growth, but understanding what content to build is still critical. To drive these content insights, we're announcing upcoming functionality through Adobe Content Analytics, which bridges the gap between content and audience.

Leveraging AI-driven techniques for classification, Adobe Content Analytics will identify what content themes are driving the results on your painted own channels, whether it's new campaign creatives or more experiments for your own channels, you get deeper insights to make more informed decisions. Now since I'm a visual person, I like to see all of these innovations in action. So I'm going to pass it off to Adobe Solutions Consultant, Jennifer Qian, who has an amazing demo to bring these innovations to life.

[Jennifer Qian] Thanks, Ali. And I want to thank Lisa and AAA Northeast for letting us use their brand in this demo. The data you will see is fictitious. However, the results and impacts are really real. AAA Northeast uses Adobe technology to drive marketing performance and ROI throughout the funnel, from acquisition to engagement and retention. Now let's go on a road trip and we'll take four stops. First, effective channel planning based on my budget. Second, identify and target my audience. Third, engagement and experimentation. And last but not least, performance and measurement. Let's start this adventure. Recently, AAA Northeast launched a multi-channel campaign targeting my high propensity audience for auto insurance. First, as the consumer browses on social media, and targeted ad is shown to drive auto insurance sign-ups. And later, as their favorite show on NBCUniversal goes to commercial, another targeted ad is shown to reinforce the messaging. Now let's go behind the scenes into Adobe Experience Platform and take our first stop, effective marketing channel planning. Adobe Mix Modeler uses AI models to calculate incremental impacts across AAA Northeast multi-channel and omnichannel marketing efforts. As Lisa mentioned, her budget has stayed flat for the last six years. It's critical to maximize impact on every single marketing dollar. I could see plans that combines historic performance, as well as external business factors and campaign spending to drive incremental ROI. Let's take a look at the trended change for ROI. Hey, so it seems like the external business factor is informing us that there is a growth in car sales, and if we increase the spending of our connected TV, we can potentially capture this new car purchasers, and hence, capture these increased revenue. I would love to take advantage of this trend and change. I can also consider other business factors that are relevant, including membership, weather, S&P 500, and even the self-driving car registrations. So let's update this plan based on these business factors. Now I can see a side by side view of plan comparison. Of course, I can manually input constraints across different channel in terms of spending, but since the AI-generated plan actually yields a better result, I'm going to go ahead and take its recommendations to increase my spending on connected TV and social. Now I have my plan, I need an audience. Using customer AI, part of Real-Time CDP, I have identified an audience that is high propensity for auto insurance, and they also tend to be young and tech savvy. Of course, I can activate natively from Real-Time CDP to target them on social media, Adobe Advertising, as well as search, and now I could even target them on connected TV. Using Real-Time CDP collaborations, now I can securely collaborate with premium connected TV publishers. And since I have already set up a relationship with NBCUniversal, I can dive deeper into my audience insight and assess whether or not there is a good overlap between my target audience and NBCUs to refine my targeting audience strategy. So looks like there is a great and high overlap between my high propensity audience from AAA and NBCUs. So let's activate them and target them on connected TV. Now that I have activated my ads, let's see how I can use Journey Optimizer to continue my engagement.

AAA Northeast has more than 6.5 million members and since they get to decide when, where, and how they engage with AAA Northeast, the marketing team must be ready. Luckily, after I select a goal, I can add an AI-based decisioning step to automatically navigate the right individuals to the right experience down to the right branch in my journey. And before I activate this journey, I want to take advantage of another AI-based feature, and this was showcase on Sneaks last year, and now added to the roadmap.

After selecting a goal, journey simulation will showcase the predicted traffic and conversion down to each branch of the journey and this predicted insights assure me that I would receive great results once I activate. So let's do it, let's activate. Now jumping forward in time, the campaign has been live for two weeks and in Journey Optimizer I can see that my journey is performing really well. But I need more data, I need to understand where to spend my next marketing dollar, and on what audience, and what content, and what channel to prioritize. With one-click, I'm in Customer Journey Analytics. Not only I could see the same journey performance, I could also add additional dimensions and calculated metrics to dive deeper and understand how my performance, how my journey is doing. And I could now also drill into specific asset performance using Content Analytics feature.

So it looks like the asset that are featuring the young and fun folks are converting more regularly. Specifically, the asset Girls roadtrip to Vegas.

Lastly, I'm back where I started. Adobe Mix Modeler continues to provides update every week. I no longer have to wait weeks or months. And as predicted, connected TV and paid social have been providing much incremental value. As you can see, marketers are now empowered through Adobe technology to continuously plan, learn, and optimize, making marketers true partners to the business. Thanks, and back to you, Ali.

Thank you, Jennifer. All of these products that Jennifer just demoed are critical for not only B2C, but also B2B marketing organizations. But there's a multidimensional problem in B2B. This is, sort of, like the complex vortex funnel that Max showed you, but even more complicated because there's multiple people all in different stages, which means decision cycles are not only complex, but much longer. The depth of your personalization is key here to drive those business results, and this requires a new type of orchestration tool. We're announcing Adobe Journey Optimizer B2B Edition to drive this level of personalization through the entire customer journey. At the core of this is the buying group and the importance of understanding people's roles and where they are in their buying process. This is a novel concept in B2B marketing automation. This will help marketers not just focus on individual leads, but on the set of people making the critical decisions. It will align the sales team to help focus on the right people within the account, ultimately driving impact across the customer lifecycle. Once again, I'm going to hand it off to Jennifer to bring this to life. Thanks, Ali. Now AAA is looking to partner with accounts like Adobe that have more than 1,000 employees to provide corporate membership to their employees as a new perk. Who doesn't like new perks at work? I do. I'm thrilled to show you how Adobe Journey Optimizer B2B Edition can align marketing and sales in converting accounts like Adobe around the concept of a buying group. As AAA marketing team working to launch this new campaign, they can also assess buying groups for purchasing this new benefit. Journey Optimizer B2B Edition automatically assign leads from Marketo Engage to a buying group template. And it also includes completeness score and engagement score to inform us upon what next action to take.

So I noticed that one of the key decision maker, Adobe's Chief People Officer has not been identified. Identifying missing members helped AAA to build a very concise contact acquisition strategy and that drive impact and optimize spend.

As Ali mentioned, the B2B role is much more finite and tangible, and since I know exactly who I'm targeting and selling to, the opportunity to maximize moments that matter at that's bigger than ever. I'm going to show you how Journey Optimizer B2B Edition can enhance these experiences using AI-based decisioning and by really focusing on the orchestration of the entire buying group. This is a journey I have started designing for this specific go-to market motion to target accounts like Adobe. AI-based decisioning automatically determine the next best action, either for an account, as well as members within the buying group, such as filling out the missing member or engage them, till the entire buying group reach a specific threshold, so we can progress the journey. Now AAA marketing team can also create personalized messaging using GenAI.

Let's first target our decision maker.

I want to highlight information about the corporate membership.

We wait. Excellent. It looks great and that was generated on the fly, thanks to GenAI. Second, let's target our procurement folks.

Wow, that looks amazing. And this is game changing. As now, at my fingertips, I have compelling content that is personalized, customized for each role within the buying group. So that looks great. Once the journey is live and running, I have complete insights across each of the journey and accounts and also seeing how far each of the accounts are through the journey and at what branch and also dive into specific engagement at a specific touchpoint. So far I have talked a lot about the marketer experience. Now sales can also have an active voice since they can access the latest information from Journey Optimizer B2B Edition. Without even leaving their CRM platform, sales can now have an organized list of buying groups and opportunity. And when we select one, we have the latest information at our fingertips, including the buying group highlights, the key members in the buying group, as well as the recent engagement, all automatically generated thanks to GenAI. So if sales wanted to report an issue or update information about the buying group, their contribution will sync automatically back to Journey Optimizer B2B Edition. So there you have it. All new innovation coming to Journey Optimizer B2B Edition, and I hope you're as excited as I am. Thank you very much.

Good job, Jennifer. - Thank you. - Yeah.

So thank you for being with us today and as promised I'll finish with a final thought.

I took you to the history lesson because I believe it's time to ask and answer the bolder questions. That is what I've bet my career on, and some people will miss the mark, and you can ask them about it. They'll have a lot of time on their hands. Some may be retired soon. So don't miss the moment. For those of you that choose to embrace this moment, the future will be yours to shape. Thank you for joining us. Thank you very much.

Strategy keynote

Maximizing Marketing Performance and ROI - ASL - SK2-1

Closed captions in English can be accessed in the video player.

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SPEAKERS

  • Ali Nazer

    Sr. Director of Product Management, RTCDP & AAM, Adobe

  • Jennifer Qian

    Sr. Practice Lead, Solutions Consulting, Adobe

  • Max Cuellar

    VP Marketing Strategy Performance and Innovation, Digital Experience, Adobe

  • Lisa Melton

    Chief Marketing Officer, AAA Northeast

Session resources

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ABOUT THE SESSION

The pressure is on—never has more been expected of marketing. While marketers have always had to deliver growth and performance, budgets are getting more scrutinized than ever, and marketing decision-makers feel the pressure to amplify performance and show the ROI of every dollar spent. Max Cuellar, VP of Adobe Customer Solutions, will show how you can maximize both the impact and the return on your marketing investment. You’ll also learn from Mark Pelletier, SVP, Digital Business, and Lisa Melton, CMO of AAA Northeast, who transformed their marketing approach to achieve profitable growth in a new age of hyper accountability.

Presentation Style: Thought leadership

Technical Level: General audience

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