[Music] [Barry Latimer] We're here to talk to you about taking charge and really driving your maturity through using the Adobe Ecosystem. What we're hoping that this presentation gives you is some basic steps about how you mature your practice and how you can take some simple steps to really help you and your organization get better as you start to move into all this amazing stuff that you've learned over the last couple of days with Adobe and really the new features that they're starting to offer. So my name is Barry Latimer. I work for Merkle. I've been there for the last 13 years. I look after what we call our CDP practice. So you think about anything under the Adobe Experience Platform, my teams help implement and manage.

[Sayantika Sikdar] Good morning. Hope you all had a great time so far. I'm Sayantika. I've been also part of Merkle more than a decade now, and I've started this Adobe journey with Audience Manager. Me and my team focuses on developing strategic vision use cases, how to drive value and super charge Adobe Martech Ecosystem. So I'm looking forward to engaging with you all today, and again, thank you for your time. The theme for today's session is really advancement, and in this session as Barry was mentioning, we really want to ground all of us in the same definition of advancement and how to achieve Martech maturity through all the investments that you have made. Now, some of you are probably at the beginning of your journey where you are still trying to set up the first product and then many of you might have already gone through that and is now looking to mature that and drive further value for your organization. So whatever be your situation, we wanted to share a more formal approach that we have taken with many of our clients to continue to drive that adoption and advancement as you progress through your Martech journey.

We can think of this notion of advancement and maturity through the context of gaming. I'm sure we all play games here. You go through different levels to reach that end destination. So whether it's gaming or it's business, we're always on a quest. And in case of Martech, it is to drive value for your organization, but more importantly drive relevance and establish customer equity. Because we have seen brands that deliver matured experiences and have at once capabilities can charge more, retain their customers higher and have happy employees. Yet, there is a significant gap you're seeing between the expectation versus reality that consumers are going through. Eighty percent of the companies believe they deliver super experiences, but only 8% of the consumers agrees to that. So this is something you don't have a choice anymore because this is becoming more and more of a given that consumer expects a certain level of maturity, certain level of services, certain level of engagement with the brands, and we're seeing this more with landscape shifting with the predominance of usage of AI, which was theme of this year and with several market leaders like Netflix and Ubers of the world. So in some sense, advancement is market driven and you need to solve this equation around industry trends, your consumer brand expectations, challenges to overcome to really carve out those opportunities, build those moments that matters for your brand with your consumer. Because if it's done right, it's a distinct competitive advantage because you don't want to be the next Bed Bath & Beyond. So the million-dollar question really is, and I'm sure you all agree at this point customer equity is important, so the million-dollar question becomes how do you do that? And the way we think about this as we have worked with our clients is first, establish a maturity framework. Second, have an advanced roadmap because that will be your step by step guiding North Star. And then think of an integrated ecosystem that will push your capabilities and help you to evolve. So let's take a look at the maturity framework, which is the first one here. The first step in this process is really to identify all the key dimensions that are important to make your Martech a success and this will also serve as a self scorecard to assess how mature you are across all these dimensions. So as you see on the left, these are the different dimensions that are critical, that we have seen are critical and you need to consider as part of your maturity framework. Then, what are the business problems we are trying to solve across each of these dimensions? How do you think about the initial steps that you really need to take? And then what are the subsequent advancements you need to take? I know this is eye chart. It has a lot of information but trust me, every single sentence here is super valuable especially if you are in the midst of a Martech maturity. Barry and I are going to tag team to go in details for each one of them. So let me start with the first one which I think is one of the most important aspect of any Martech program. We have seen organizations do really well when they have right use cases defined upfront that are in sync with the Martech and reflects the capabilities of the technology. And we have seen unfortunate situations as well where things didn't really go well because of poorly defined use cases. So you really need to start with the right use cases and then find a way to mature them. And while doing it, be really purposeful. So let's take a look at the first step. Step one. Start with any net new capability that your Martech can unlock which is incremental compared to our BAU. We have seen real-time triggered campaigns can be a good way to start. Use those high value intent signals to drive engagement with your customers. So this stage is really about relevance and the way we have seen results shaped up is having higher engagement rates, conversion rates because you're delivering timely and relevant messages. Next, immature your identity. You need to be able to recognize your customer and true prospects and also customers across devices and platforms. The benefit of increased understanding of your customer and prospect is now, you can deliver accurate targeting and also bespoke experiences. Once you have solved identity, the next iteration of maturity is then to orchestrate and deliver next best actions. Leverage your customer data to power next best algorithms and use different machine learning techniques to decide on next best content, next best channel, next best creative to really engage with your customer. So this stage evolves you from knowing your customer to delivering and actively engaging with them throughout their adoption or conversion journeys. Now once you have solved that, then have some advanced use of AI and machine learning techniques and also orchestrate omnichannel experiences. One way of thinking about this is to maybe include voice of customer platforms like Qualtrics or Medallia where you're capturing consumer sentiments. We can combine all of these structured, unstructured data and apply the pros of large language models to really analyze this large data datasets and then find different patterns, insights and then automate to deliver hyper personalized experiences. So definitely, each organization has their own way of maturing the use cases. This is just a framework, but think through these lenses on how it can be applied for your brand and how to solve it for your customers.

Yeah. One thing I just wanted to comment on this is we see this as the new way Adobe is going to market as well. It's not about use cases and no longer capabilities. So the idea here is doing the use cases. What we're trying to show the business and your executives is what is the value of the investment. And so you can slowly start to build that. And as we're going from level one to level four, that value starts to get bigger and bigger and bigger. But we want to start small, so we build up champions, and we start to start the process of the organization adopting to the new way of working. So the next one we want to take attack is tech stack and governance. So tech stack is used a lot in market texture. And the intention here is this is a diagram that's supposed to align the organization. It's not an architecture diagram. We're not talking about all the arrows and the way everything works. But what this is, is this is supposed to be a diagram that helps your company get together across analytics, across marketing, across IT, and sort of work out when we talk about a Martech stack, what is that one going to look like? And so this is an exact an example we have with a company we were working with. And so there's a couple of key points we really want you to take away from this is we define this in your terminology. So you'll see, in the middle, we talk about the audience hub. This is not Adobe. It's not technology. This is how the company works. This is how their teams are organized. And so what they do is by using these sort of generic terms, we can have alignment across the organization and agreement on how the tech stack should come together without getting into discussions about is this an Adobe product? Is it a Salesforce product? Is it a Google product? This is our internal view of the world and how we're going to align. And unlike the use cases, we start from the end state. This is where we want to end up. As an organization, once we're in nirvana or we're delivering the amazing experiences, these are all the boxes that are going to be filled in because this also helps create the roadmap. Then once you have that sort of alignment, you can then start to plug products in there. You don't necessarily have to own them right now. What you're trying to do is just get alignment with everyone who's going to own these particular boxes? And then the final thing we start to do is we take the organization through? How does data flow between all these boxes? Who's going to build the predictive models? Is it going to be in Box X? Where does that model flow to? If we want to do a triggered email, where does the trigger start? Which box does it end in? So we're starting to help the organization think about how does data move between the different boxes in the different areas. And once we get this, we find this as sort of the blueprint that we can walk around. Now, obviously, this changes over time. But we're going to bring everyone a starting point that the organization is aligned to, and we've stopped the fights around, I own Real-Time CDP, or I own CJA. It's like, no, no. You own audiences. You own analytics. And so we've created a language that the internal organization can speak to. And from there, this leads us into the governance piece, which is super important as we start to do that. Because what we've done is we've created these areas of ownership, and we can quickly say, okay, who owns the Audience hub? There'll be an area, but who is the stakeholder who is ultimately responsible? And that becomes theirs. Then we've also got areas in our little plan that we don't have products for. It's like we wanted a modeling environment. We don't have Databricks. We don't have Snowpark. So we know we are going to need to make that in a purchase at some point. So we're starting to point out, hey, there's gaps in our ultimate goal. Then we can start to also talk about the tools we have. Where do they fit? And this is really useful because as every organization knows, all these tools do similar things, and we end up with massive amounts of overlap. So this starts to help us decide what tool is going to be responsible for doing segmentation? What tool is responsible for sending email? What's responsible for personalization on the web? Is it AJO? Is it Target? Is it Optimizely? Like, we start to have those conversations and put them in the box and says, who does it? Then we also go into the day to day, which team is going to be in the tool running it, and this gives us the training plans we need. And finally, once we've gone through this process, and it does take weeks, it's not unfortunately done in a day or two, we end up with a governance committee because we have identified the stakeholders. We've identified what tools they own. We've identified the gaps. And so we can now have a governance committee that meets monthly to talk about what is the organization doing in regards to the tech stack, the training, the organization. And we'll always have a plan that is ahead of the organization. So it starts and that's why we start from the end goal and work backwards is ultimately to get to that group of people who needs to be basically making decisions.

So now you have use cases and you have your Martech and governance, but how do you know all of this is effective? And this is where measurement becomes a critical piece of the puzzle. I'm going to share something personal here. I read this somewhere and it sort of resonated with me. It says something along the lines, if you can't measure, you cannot manage. And if you can't measure, you cannot improve. So with that in mind, let's start with phase one of measurement. You really need to identify what are your business drivers, what are your North Star for your program, for your organization, map that to your value drivers both for your business and your consumers, and then establish a KPI framework which has primary, secondary, tertiary KPIs because you will need all of these to measure the performance of the campaigns that you're launching through this new Martech platform. Now I'm sure you all might have gone to a certain situation where you have really long sales cycles and you might not be getting that sale immediately, but you still want to understand if your audiences are tracking along the journey, you have laid out for them. And that's where your secondary and tertiary KPI's become important. And all of these together forms your KPI framework which is the foundation for your measurement. Now once you have solved for your KPI strategy and business goals, the next step is to have a robust learning agenda because that will help you to measure the incremental impact of your actions and then demonstrate success. As we move further along the measurement maturity framework, having accurate and reliable reporting which provides constant feedback on the performances of your campaigns is critical to continually measure success, ensure your campaigns are moving in the right direction, and also it provides fuel for further optimizations. But you don't want to look at just one channel, right? You want to understand the performance of your audiences and campaigns across channel and also in tandem. And this is where more complex measurement techniques like attribution, marketing mix model will really give you a view into those cross-channel insights, cross channel halos, and also additional insights and impact that'll help you to make the next set of investment decisions appropriately.

Perfect. And then so the next part is we're talking about, how do we start to mature on the data and identity side. So we put data and identity together, and the way we look at it is the foundation of everything you're doing. You'll have a CDP. Obviously, the first thing you need to do is collect data to make it useful and informant. So obviously, the first thing you focus on is first-party data. How can we engage customers? How can we start to collect email addresses from them? We start to talk about progressive profiling. We know this person. How can we start to get to know more about them? And this is all that zero party and first-party data strategies that we start to do. So this is the very, very basic stuff we want to do. And as we're getting here, this is where we're going to form those unified profiles that everyone's talking about. Analytics offered, and it's that stage zero. Get it stood up, off we go. The next thing we want to do, and I have to say, Merkle does have an identity product, so this is why we focus it here, but there are others. You need to start to identify your customers prior to authentication. Like it's all very well and good to deal with them after they've logged in. But most of your customers are not logging in unless you're in financial services. If you're in retail, a lot of their experience is anonymous. And so we want to basically recognize them and personalize them there. And so there's a whole category of providers out there now, identity providers, Epsilon, Merkle, Acxiom, LiveRamp. And they're really helping you to understand what your customer's doing, pre-authentication. So it's important in two things. One is it helps you reduce the number of anonymous profiles that you have sitting in your CDP. And then secondly, it increases your personalization. So you remember saying, because stat about only 8% of consumers think you could deliver a good experience. That's because the majority of time that they arrive at your website, the personalization doesn't match who they are. So this is really getting to this, and this is a huge uplift as we see it.

The third part is really about enriching your profiles. So anyone who is a direct marketer or has ever done direct mail or any of that, this is the bread and butter. As we've gone into digital, it sort of got lost, and it's coming back again, which is how do you get additional information about your consumers that's not first party, but third-party information? No. I can find out about household incomes, number of children in the household. Are they looking at buying a car? Have they gone on a vacation recently? All these datasets around still exist. Even though cookies have gone around, it's still a common thing for direct marketing organizations to buy. Digital marketing organizations don't do it. It was announced at Summit that now Adobe Real-Time CDP has the ability to do this. And this is very powerful. We actually work with a bank who uses this to personalize their credit card recommendations because this is information, they'll never get off you. It's other stuff. And so this helps drive recommendations right from the start because you're able to use third-party data with identity to recognize people that you've never seen. So when you think about customer acquisition and prospecting, those two things are very strongly are linked. And then finally, this is one that everyone laughs at, but Barbie is an amazing example of second-party data. Before they even launched the movie, they had 57 partners that they had worked with to create this thing. And at first, everyone's like, hey. That was just cosponsorship, brand awareness, all the rest of it, but it wasn't. It was also data partnerships. So as an example, they worked with Airbnb to build a Barbie house in LA that you could rent. But what it was that they were really after is all the people who were searching it on Airbnb, Barbie actually got access to their hashed emails so they could go and advertise to them on paid media. And they were getting consumer group that they would never access through the standard Barbie channels. So in Adobe speak, in the Summit, they called it segment match. So this is really where you work with a partner company to try and work out where do your audiences overlap and how can you help each other. So in the keynote, Delta talked about their arrangement with Paramount Plus. So these two companies are coming together to provide an experience that goes beyond just their brand. But what it does is it creates a halo effect because their brand seems better. And so this is a really, really big thing that you can start to expand on. And you think about this is also where you're seeing a lot of innovation in things like retail media networks. You're seeing a lot of people basically this is saying, my data customer data asset not only is useful for personalization and all the rest of it, but it adds a new revenue stream to our company that can really help us expand. So it's something to think about in the future.

And then we look at, you know? So we've talked about the use cases, what we want to deliver, how we measure it, the data we're collecting, and the final thing is the experiences. So what's the content we create? So the very first step is they call it experimental content. And, really, the first thing you have to do is learn how to measure your content. And that's actually a lot harder than people think. Everyone thinks that's easy. But most people measure their emails, their web pages, not the pieces of content that are driving those experiences. Because as we start to talk about omnichannel one, I'm using the same piece of content across channels, and we have to measure how effective is it on channels and stages.

Then once you can actually do that, you start to move into tactical. And believe it or not, most of our customers jump into this step, but they can never measure the content they use. So we create customer journeys. Jan's going to see this paid ad. She's going to click on it. She's going to go there. The site's going to be personalized. She'll add it to the cart. She'll leave. We'll send an abandoned email. But what we often don't do is we don't know what piece of content drove her to make those decisions. And so this part is really about forming those journeys and then sharing the content across it, so we have consistent experiences.

Then the third one is operational, and this is really content supply chain. So Adobe is talking about that, which is how do you cut start to create a workflow that is managed to create content at scale that you can continually monitor and make sure you're doing it? And the reason why it's third, even though a lot of companies are doing it earlier, is you want that analytics to tell you what type of content to create and also what type of content is not performing. So we at Merkle are part of Dentsu, which is a very large media agency. So we have a big content supply chain. And the biggest thing we're looking at every couple of hours is what are the low performing content ads? And they switched off a media, and a new media ad is replacing it. So they're not concerned about the click-throughs or anything. They're just looking at the performance of the content. And so we can only do that by having the first two things in place. The fourth one is amplify. Once you're doing all of this, you're creating content, you're doing personalized things. Basically, Adobe is going to bring you on stage and ask you talk about the amazing things you're doing with the Adobe stack. And our final one is you're differentiated. And literally, you are the Uber of your industry, and everyone else now talks about you and how you guys create new content. And so it's just supposed to be a little bit fun with content. Content is a huge topic in itself. But the idea is start small and understand if you cannot measure it, everything else you do will sound amazing, but you're never going to be sure if you're producing the right type of content. And so what you'll see with Adobe is they're coming out with content analytics, which is really going to empower GenStudio. So, but start to think about how can you measure your pieces of content at the very start to deliver the rest of it. And once you do that, the last two steps actually happen really quickly and easily because the content supply, we know how to do two and three. Those two things are actually bit that hard, but we know how to do them. It's number one that we're really stuck on.

Okay. So now we have talked about all these dimensions. To really bring this to life, you need to have the right process and people because every Martech maturity brings an element of change management that you really need to acknowledge and embrace. The biggest shift that I personally have seen is looking through the lens of consumer now versus looking through the lens of a campaign. And, to me it sounds like an orchestra performance where you need to have that pinnacle of synergy and exchanges between each stages and everything. So any organization that's really going through major technology change or transformation really need to establish plans. At the beginning, the first three phases, you really need to think about what's your target state team structure? What are the roles and responsibilities required? How will your marketing processes change and how will you drive efficient collaboration? Because that'll help you to establish the change readiness. But you cannot stop there and that's where the last two phases is really about how you're going to enable it, implement it and sustain it. How will your operating, you're going to operationalize your operating processes and change management recommendations. And one way we have seen success is with more a pilot-based approach to test out these changes. Instead of doing a big bang approach, do it iteratively. Establish a center of excellence, identify what those capabilities should sit within that center of excellence because these all will help you to progress in the right direction. But more importantly, change management shouldn't be an afterthought because we have seen a lot of organizations stand up their technology and then they think about change management. You should start thinking day one about change management and how you're going to embrace it. So first three phases really identify the chain champions who are going to take this journey with you and then in the last two, it's really about how you're going to enable and sustain those changes that you have identified.

Perfect. And then so that was the maturity framework about how you do it, and then we'll move on to the advanced roadmap. So the advanced roadmap is really helping companies decide between strategic and tactical. So what we went through is the eight steps of maturity, as we call them, and we've defined each of the steps. And we've defined what we're going to do in those steps. That forms the blueprint of this roadmap that you see. And so then what happens is you need to now sit down and align with the organization. When are you going to do each of these things across those eight measures? And what you're trying to do is balance a bit of strategy and tactical. So you want to make sure you're moving things forward at all times. That becomes the tactical things you're going to do. Whether it's you're going to engage an identity provider, whether you're going to do new use cases, Then, strategically, you're looking at how is this affecting the organization? How are we starting to do change within the organization? How are we starting to add different revenue streams on that we never had before? And we map these out. And what we're trying to do is not overwhelm the organization. There's only so much change we can process before the organization just starts to fall apart, and we don't do what we need to do. And that's the big thing as well as we're going through this that we need to remember. We call it BAU, business as usual. You need to get out the standard emails. You need to get out the standard test personalizations that you have to do to deliver your jobs as this happens. This happens on top of that. So this has to be paced to what you can afford to do. And the other thing we've found over time is this cannot stretch too long. We've had companies who have tried to do this over a three-year time period. And in year two, they get what we call change fatigue. Too much has changed. They can never get into a rhythm. They can never get started. And, basically, they end up dropping the entire thing because the organization just cannot sustain it. So it's got to be fast enough to be useful, but not too fast that you end up in the position where we go and change everything out, and then everyone's stuck unable to do their jobs. So we're as a consultant, we come in, like we don't have to run your day-to-day business. So we can run as fast as you want, but it's really about balancing that. And so you have to press your partners, Adobe, SIs, on like what can you achieve? Because at the end of the day, when they leave, you guys are left owning this. So really balance that and push on both sides.

And then finally once you have your tech stack, you've got your marketing ecosystem running, it's really about how do you start to apply that with other areas. And so what we're saying here is you've stood up the entire Experience cloud. You have all the wonderful new features of Adobe working. How do you start to reach across other parts of the organization to drive value and interesting things? So these are some of what we consider the plus ones. You start to add in. Get your house in order, didn't talk about-- What about loyalty and promotions? There's a huge value in the loyalty area. They know a lot about customers, but it's often post purchase. So often marketing tends to not be involved with loyalty. Decisioning. So decisioning, even though in marketing we often talk about next best action, should Barry get the shoe ad or that the shirt ad? But decisioning often exists as a separate group in a lot of big organizations, and they will drive segmentation with a big S. All the customers is going to get this. So start to incorporate them into marketing. I can share about the experimentation with the client. So just think like any Martech or solution you're deploying, it's not going to exist in silo or isolation because if you integrate them, it really exponentially improves your capability. So for one of our home improvement client, they already had the stack. We helped them establish an experimentation center of excellence. And what it helped them do is like run and automate hundreds of tests on their website and app and that they could do it within a quarter. Now a lot of the organization already runs A/B test today, right? But the biggest challenge is to do it at scale. And now since they were able to do it at scale, that significantly pushed their customer experiences because there's a constant feedback loop that's being set up and those insights they can then reuse to drive those further seamless experiences. So definitely think about what are those plus ones for your organization. Every organization varies, but that'll help you to really push your envelope in maturity.

Okay. And there was one thing coming out of the Summit that we wanted you all to think about as you sort of walk away from it. So I was going to give you a couple of seconds to try and guess what it may be. Any guesses before it shows up? It's the slowest brain in the world.

And it's AI. We're seeing AI everywhere like regardless. Whatever conference you're at, Adobe, ShopTalk, anything, everyone is talking about AI. And so it's something you need to do. And so what we are seeing is brands need an AI approach. You don't need an AI answer right now. You need an approach to AI. And from our research, 50% of all executive teams are focused on AI for content and content systems. The other 50% are all over. And so, basically, as we're advising customers, we're saying choose one of these four areas to focus your AI efforts on initially. So insights and analytics is pretty simplistic. We all know what that means. Really understanding your customers, getting AI to help you create new segments, understand the performance of segments, really start to dig into that. Content supply chain. That's been spoken about a lot here, and it's a really big focus, which is Firefly. Like, how can you use GenAI to help drive faster and faster content? This is really depends on your brand. If your brand is in Fiserv, healthcare, or a heavily regulatory industry, there's just a lot of hurdles that you need to get through. And so our advice is stay very close, but wait for people like retailers, travel companies to basically launch this so you can get the learnings off it and understand how they're regulating it. Because what we saw is Coke and Kraft have already launched a GenAI content ads, but their brands are very strong. They can afford it. They had a funny looking Coke bottle go out in a TV ad. Like, people know who Coke is, so it wasn't a problem. Whereas you can imagine, someone like Pfizer or GSK, they can't afford mistakes about their drugs. So depends on what your brand is around content supply chain for GenAI. Personalization at scale is obviously a big one for all of us that we're really interested in. It's very, it's going to add huge amounts of value and bring out a lot of cost. It's just a very complicated technology. So you need a very high investment with your IT team. And what we're recommending is for most people focus on operational efficiencies. We know coming out of 2023, basically, every company had budgets cut. Everyone's focused on ROI. Everyone's focusing on doing more with less. GenAI can really help us push the envelope here on doing our jobs. So for every one of us, we have developers now who are faster using Copilot. We have QA people who are faster with test cases. We have marketing people who can use it to help generate email copies. So these are the things that we're finding generate a lot of value very quickly, get out of the hole, how do we regulate it, how do we control it, how do we manage it. It's part of our workflow instead, and it really helps us to continue to advance even with less resources that we're all dealing with now and constrained budgets. And the organization knows what the outputs are, so they're more than happy to see the results.

And so this is our blueprint of how we're applying AI for our clients. And it's really around the who, what, when. And so we're looking at who do we target? The identity, the profiles, using AI to enhance this a lot. And so you're starting to see-- A year ago, we had probabilistic versus known identities. We now actually have AI identities, where AI is bringing us together in real time. Offer. We've always had next best offer. We've had rules and everything. We're starting to see GenAI take over this and decide the offers for us. So really start to try it. And when is the timing? And so we use this term German English, and it's sort of complicated for our customers. You went from campaigns, you ran a campaign to always on journeys. And now what's happening is we're moving into this journeyless thing where AI is going to decide the next best interaction for you, and so it's not going to be predescribed journeys. So as you start to think about how you can do it, that's the Merkle way we're putting it together and taking our clients through it.

- Go ahead. - Yeah. I wanted to say, we do know how all this works. We do promise, we've done it with lots of big clients all over the world. And what we're finding is regardless of the industry you're in, the problems are the same. From a cruise company who's looking at how do they transition their customers from direct mail and call center into digital channels to an alcohol company who's looking at how do they now engage millennials and who are no longer interested in just beer and wine. They want fancy drinks. The challenges are exactly the same. And that's why we use that maturity one. They're trying to mature through it. And the industry is less relevant than what it was five years ago because the digital interactions with people are the same and happen all the time. And also, but the other thing as well is to realize that data and people's sort of exposure is different. So one of the interesting ones we had was with a car rental company. They have a big loyalty base, 28 million members. And so we did the CDP. We stood it up. We're moving into identity, trying to identify them. We were doing really well. We knew 30 million people. We tried to advertise to them on Google. And what was interesting is we only knew them as Barry at Merkle, the businessperson. So when we pushed it to Google, we got really low match rates because Google knows me as Barry at Gmail. And so we weren't able to chase them and advertise them. So it took a whole new approach of understanding me as a car renter, as a person, not who I worked for. And so they would set up in the past where all the points would go to Merkle there for my rental. So they had to change that to basically get them to encourage me to expose more information about me and partner with other companies who could give you information. So that's how that sort of maturity starts to build out to give you better experiences, but more information about it. Is there anything you'd comment on? I think I've covered it. Yeah? And so, finally, we want to sort of cover what to take away from this is it's not easy. It's really not. We've not seen a single customer jump in this, do this, get it right first go. It always takes a couple of codes, so just keep going through it. Keep pushing.

Experiment and hypothesize. Yes. Experiment. I get the word. And hypothesize. It's really, we live in this experience economy. So the way forward is really you have to start small, fail fast and scale rapidly. And we all know the thing is Rome wasn't built in a day. So any Martech maturity also takes its own time to shape. So you really need to experiment and learn from it because that will pave the path forward. Yeah. And have a forward-looking focus. In other words, the world's changing. GenAI is changing it faster. So we've got to stop being concerned about what we did last year, what we did the year before. I can say, I ran a campaign execution team who does direct mail. Amazing number of clients have moved away. So in direct mail, we used to spend six weeks planning the mail, and we'd drop it 90 days before it went out. All of a sudden, companies are coming to us and saying something just happened in the Olympics that we want to now advertise tomorrow. So we're just going to drop the entire direct mail process so we can get out and have those conversations. So we're going to realize that things are changing, and we just have to keep up with what's changing and give it a go and try and move into those worlds and not be concerned about how our organization does it. And this is especially important when you connect that to the measurement frameworks as you've got to help the organization understand what are the KPIs that are going to matter tomorrow versus today. Because everyone gets stuck in the fact that I have to hit my KPIs, which were tied to what you did, not what the market's asking after you. Yeah. Obsessed with those outcomes and results is my favorite.

We have seen all these organizations get stuck in the processes and how we are going to operate but you need to show results good or bad because what matters is you're progressing, and you are learning from it. So we have seen organizations that kind of have that value centric, outcome centric mindset. They kind of move faster towards that maturity. And finally, challenge the status quo. If you've seen any presentation that talks about leaders, there are always people who have broken what everyone else does. And big companies can do that as well. So we've got to be constantly asking the question, why do we do that? Why does it take us two weeks to approve that? Why does it have to be that way? And this is important because you think about it. And my favorite company in the world is Purple Mattress, because they were the ones who first started the mattresses in a box that got delivered after and they completely changed an industry overnight. Not because they were better, but because they challenged the whole process of selling a mattress, came up with something different. It worked. I think now they might be bankrupt or brought by someone. So, but what they do is they change things. They challenge things. So just constantly think how you can do that in your business to change what you can do and how you can have new growth currents. [Music]