[MUSIC] [Andy Watanabe] Thank you. I'm happy to have you here to our session today. This is unveiling marketing calendars and tools for end-to-end campaign planning. We're really excited to talk to you today about some things we've been working on for quite a while.

So just to get started and set the stage, it's been about 14 years since Adobe acquired a fast-growing digital analytics company called Omniture in Utah. And that was the first of many acquisitions that became what we call the digital experience business unit today. And those were all early steps toward enabling companies to change the world through digital experiences by creating, managing, and measuring those experiences within a single connected ecosystem.

And that was the driver behind Adobe's intent or Adobe's acquisition of Workfront about three years ago, a little bit more than three years ago.

Now, I'm Andy Watanabe and I joined Adobe about seven years ago, and I transitioned to the Workfront team a little bit after that acquisition to help Workfront become a part of the Adobe product ecosystem. And what we're going to be talking about today, lays out a little bit of the path to what that looks like.

Workfront was a natural fit for Adobe, with thousands of shared enterprise customers needing to manage their workloads, streamline their content supply chains, and otherwise, deliver campaigns at enterprise scale. And we accomplished that through our enterprise-grade project and task management, work in taking routing, sophisticated workflow automation and governance. And when you contemplate the need to usher digital experiences through the complex end-to-end marketing or operational lifecycle all the way from content creation to delivery and measurement, it's clear that there's only one company that's really, truly positioned to cover the entire lifecycle at enterprise scale, and that's Adobe.

But when I talk to customers like yourselves and I say, "What does Workfront mean to you? What does Workfront do for you?" What I typically hear is a simplistic, or a simple boiling down of all of that into "Workfront is our home for work execution." And that work execution happens in the context of a broader set of marketing activities that we are going to refer to today as the Marketing Lifecycle Labyrinth. And we're calling it that because it feels that way, doesn't it? As I talk to customers like yourselves on a regular basis, I often hear this idea that the complexity in your organizations, the complexity and the fragmentation of tools and technologies and people and silos and processes makes that marketing lifecycle truly complex. And the end result, the outcome is that it's very, very difficult to make the most optimized decisions.

And it really does take a village to make those decisions. If you have a little bit of a thought experiment with me for a minute. Let's explore what it might look like to have a typical three-month omni-channel campaign from the perspective of decision-making.

We're going to estimate that it takes about 80 people across leadership, campaign management layers, work execution layers, external partners, and support, and those 80 people are going to make around 1000 macro-level decisions over the course of the planning and execution of this three-month omni-channel campaign. And those decisions are happening across many different disciplines.

And then when you layer in the micro-level content decisions, you can easily reach around 3000 decisions that have to be made to support your omni-channel campaign here.

And this is important because if you don't have good context, you can't make good decisions.

Like this guy trying to figure out what he is about to touch. And if he doesn't have the context to see it, understand it, it's going to be very difficult for him to do that.

And that context typically decays over the course of the operational life cycle. You might start strong in your planning phase when leadership and folks at the stage know what they want, they know who they want to target. And then as you pass data through silos and across stages of that life cycle, that context starts to diminish. And by the end of it, the people who are actually delivering the marketing experiences, they typically express that they don't feel very connected to the strategy.

And we can see that the disjointed experience there creates volatility and it creates costly decision-making challenges. A couple, that I'll just point out here, we've seen that 62% find it hard to understand their company strategy or articulate their own goals. And this is this is a McKinsey study. And then, 250 million is the expected annual cost of that lack of ability to make those consistent decisions. The complexity of decision-making as an environment for a typical Fortune 500 company on an annualized basis.

And when you layer in the challenges related to decision-making to other challenges that are present in the operational life cycle, it becomes even more clear how complex this is. We often hear this. "Are Campaigns the same as Programs?" I thought we were calling those something else last week. "What's the difference between a Tactic and a Channel?" And I would suspect that if any one of us sat down and we had a one-on-one meeting, that you'd have an answer, but maybe your coworkers would have a completely different answer. And it becomes really hard to operate when everybody speaks a different language of marketing.

And this is one that I just experienced last week where we were doing our own planning, and somebody said, "Cohorts? I thought we were calling them Audiences?" And for all of us, this becomes a challenge.

And there's a few more challenges to highlight. And these are a little bit more specific to the process of writing briefs and keeping records about those briefs.

We've seen that when briefs are in standard document formats in these free text document Canvas editors, what happens is you don't have governance over what people enter into those briefs. Let's say you have a brief document that highlights a region and somebody writes AMEA this week, and somebody else writes Europe next week, and somebody else writes something else the next week with an acronym, and it's the wrong one. And now, because the information is not consistent, you can't adequately report on it. You don't get a single view of what that is and how it works.

And because most of these briefs tend to be written in these free-form ways, either in documents or slide decks. What we see is that they tend to be more time-consuming than they should be. And the outcome there is that people spend more time thinking about layout and design than they do thinking about strategy and planning and how to really achieve the right outcomes.

When briefs are stored in, files, or folder storage mechanisms, they become hard to find. They often are a lot more bland than we want them to be. I talk to marketers who tell me all the time, we feel like we need to convey the message of what we're doing with energy and with feeling, but we can't because we just don't have the time, or our template is just this 60-page document, we've seen those, we've seen them short, we've seen them long. There's all kinds. And then, there's a lot of manual data entry. And this is especially true when you're transitioning from writing a brief into your work execution platform, such as Workfront, where we see a lot of people who are going to copy and paste from a document that was stored somewhere else into an intake form inside of Workfront. And that disconnect between the planning and the execution of the plan creates challenges there.

And then, of course, here at the end, if all of these briefs are in these folder storage places, then you cannot easily aggregate them to do reporting and to understand what's planned. And can we see a global campaign calendar of everything that we're planning.

And so what people often feel like is that they had this idea that a marketing system of record was going to be this wonderful thing, and they haven't quite realized it in completion yet. Maybe they have for various stages. We know the Workfront's done great, especially at the work execution stage, but we still hear people say, "we need something more for planning." And so this idea of a true marketing system of record for the whole life cycle has been a bit of a beautiful dream, but it hasn't totally been realized.

And I almost feel embarrassed that this is so dramatic. Until now.

And we're really pleased to introduce Workfront Planning. As a matter of fact, we would have called this session 'Introducing Workfront Planning', but we hadn't named it at the time. I had to submit the session name, but we're really excited to introduce Workfront Planning to you. Workfront Planning is an entirely new set of capabilities from the Workfront team that's designed to unlock the ability to solve those problems we were just talking about. And to introduce it, I'm going to play a little video.

Let's see. I think we're not getting audio on the video.

[Narrator] It's with a mountain of challenges every day. There is constant and growing demand to build and deliver seamless, personalized customer experiences. The orchestration and level of collaboration that goes into building exceptional experiences is tedious. And a complex Martech stack with fragmented data only makes this more difficult. As a result, teams struggle to plan strategically, stay aligned, and deliver results. Introducing Adobe Workfront's new Planning module, a central solution for marketing organizations to manage the entire marketing lifecycle. Bringing together fragmented tools, teams, and data. Ensuring you start and end every project on the right foot. From ideation and camping planning through delivery and execution. Workfront's advanced planning capability allow you to derive meaning from your marketing operations. So what does this mean for your organization? It means that you can take work visualization to the next level with highly interactive marketing calendars customizable to your teams and stakeholders. You can dig into the details of your plans with a spreadsheet-style view that displays the relevant data points based on your custom filters, or ensure that everyone knows the purpose, priority, and details of campaigns through dynamically created campaign briefs. Workfront's Planning module gives you a single source of truth that connects the full marketing lifecycle, from strategy and campaign planning to content creation and activation, with the help of generative AI, centralizing work so your teams can launch and optimize campaigns faster than ever.

Alright. So again, we're very excited to introduce Workfront Planning. We think this is going to be a big shift in the way that you can achieve the ability to have a true marketing system of record.

And Workfront Planning is this hub for visibility, alignment, and collaboration on plans and your planning metadata. And what it does is it does three primary things. So we bucket the capabilities here in these three categories. The first is you can now model your own operations completely using custom records. In the past, what you had to do is you had to stick within a strict, rigid hierarchy of records, and now what you can do is you can completely transform that by creating your own fully custom records. So if you're marketing operations speaks the language of campaign tactic activity, three words that traditionally did not exist in Workfront as objects, you can now create those, and you can have campaigns, tactics, and activities, and you can link them together. And when you link records together, you define how data passes. So now you can define, you might think of it as a custom hierarchy, if you will, where you can choose to roll up data through your custom records in order to tell the story end-to-end of that operational lifecycle.

And the last is that once you have a place to store and manage your own custom operational model, you can get visibility into it. And we've built a set of new views that help you get that visibility that makes it easier to make decisions. Those use include calendars, tables, and timelines. And we'll show you those in just a moment.

So let's talk about modeling and governing your operations. It starts by building your own custom record types. And that could look like this. Creating a record type, in this case, it's called Accounts. You get to pick colors, you get to pick icons. And then once you have those, you can organize those records into your own workspaces that are relevant to a specific group of people who are operating in the same way. And after you've done that, you can then begin to add fields into your records. So if you create a custom record called products, and then you want to connect it to your custom record campaigns, you can do that by adding a field. In this case, we're creating a connection field that lets a person operating in a campaign pick which product it's for. And product is, again, it's another custom record that's part of that system. And by the way, I should have mentioned this a minute ago. This QR code is going to flash up here through a few of these slides. And you can use this to sign-up for our waiting list where we will be happy to have you come and join in and get prepared to come into our beta.

So again, once you've created those custom fields in your records, that defines the schema of a record. So if you created a campaign object or a campaign record type, you can now choose what fields exist on a campaign. And that means you're defining the record's default starting point. You don't have to apply a custom form to it anymore in order to modify it. It just is your custom record. So if you want a campaign record to have 30 fields, including an owner start date and date, target audiences, you can have all of that on your campaign records.

And then you can configure views of these records. Again, we have calendar, timeline and table views now. And we're going to be building out more views as we continue into the future. These views allow you to set a configuration of how it looks, how the data is filtered, how it's sorted, how it's grouped, and then once you have those views created, you can now have a reference point to go back to, to continue to get the same visibility, time and time again, such as creating a calendar of campaigns.

And our filtering, grouping, and sorting is, it's multilevel. So you can have layered groups. So maybe you want to create a record called a Deliverable, which is grouped within a record called a Tactic, which is grouped within a record called a Campaign. And you could put that all together in one timeline view.

And of course, there's color coding, row height, field visibility and more configurations that you can apply.

And of course, these views are shareable. So once you've created and configured the perfect view and maybe you've done this to support a team, now you can share that with that team. And they can continue to operationalize out of that view. So that if you wanted to have a quarterly campaign calendar, you could create that, and you could filter it to a specific group of people or business unit or team. And you could filter that or group it based on however you want to operationalize your teams, and then you can share that with them. And when you share these use, they are shareable with permissions. So you can share with either Manage Permissions which will allow the people you share this with freedom to continue to configure the view. Maybe they want to change the filter a bit. Maybe they want to change a time period that's displayed. Or you can give them view-only access, which will mean that they can just see it. They can't change it, but they can interact with the records that are in it.

And we're also leaning into generative AI. With generative AI, we can build-in the ability to import records from a brief. A brief could be something, again, like a PowerPoint file or a Word document or a PDF. And you can simply drag-and-drop that in here. And we'll use the power of AI to generate the record for you automatically.

And in many cases, a brief won't exactly match what marketing or creative operations wants to track. In that case, the AI can automatically fill in additional fields for you, recommend what those should be because it's present here and it knows the structure of your records because you've defined that as part of this process.

And we offer templated layouts for improved design. So inside of an individual record, you can drag-and-drop fields to reorder them. You can apply cover images. You can create groupings and sections of fields so that we make sure that you give the relevant information to people who need to come and look at an individual record, like a campaign or a tactic or a deliverable.

And now, I'm going to turn the time over to my colleague, Vazgen Babayan and he's going to walk you through a demo of how this works.

[Vazgen Babayan] Thanks, Andy. So... one second.

Does it change? Okay. Okay, so, we are going to walk through a fictional example of a global food retailer. And they have multiple business units, dozens of brands, and thousands of employees. And recently, due to economic conditions, continuing supply chain issues and the rising costs of materials, they should decide it that they are going to do a hiring freeze for the marketing department. But at the same time, their ask is to continue to provide more and more within existing resources. So there are several personas in play here. So first one is Cynthia, who is the marketing leader who makes that ask to the team. How can we deliver more with existing people by optimizing our processes? And Jackie is the marketing operations administrator who needs systems to provide the real-time view of all campaigns across all channels so that they can make informed decisions. Visibility is a key to optimizing operations.

Now, Jeremy is a campaign manager who is operating within the confines of that system. And for Jeremy, the need is to be able to see just a calendar across all teams, to see just what everyone is working on so that he can plan the work accordingly.

And then we have Lizzy, who needs the context coming from the campaigns. So if that context is missing, Lizzy can't create an asset and the strategy might change and she doesn't know about it. And as a result, she just wasted hours of work.

So here we can start with our demonstration on how it works.

So kind.

Okay, so here we have a calendar view and we start from Jeremy. And this calendar view is working view for Jeremy. And here he can see the campaigns organized by their target audiences. He can see the status of the campaigns, the owner, and the visual representation of what that campaign is all about. So that view gives him visibility into what is happening across the board. But at the same time, he also sees that there are multiple campaigns targeting the same audience, but he needs more information here to make a decision. So one piece of information is the cost, the spend of those campaigns. And in order to do that, his track team work from projects. But that information is not present in the view. So he asks Jackie, who is a marketing operations, to add that information so that he can surface it in the calendar.

And Jackie was the one who actually created this whole structure of a whole system, as we mentioned previously. That structure is composed of core records, which are the campaigns, tactics and deliverables. And these are the records that organize the work for the whole marketing team of Fréscopa. These records are also further enriched with additional metadata. And that additional metadata can be target audiences, products, channels, world regions, and any customer records, customer information that is needed to enrich those.

Jackie has also defined the schema, as I mentioned previously, the fields and the connections between those tables. Jackie has built all of that, and now she wants to solve the ask from Jeremy to add that information from the project. Conceptually, projects do not link directly to the campaigns, and they are more aligned with a deliverable object which she has created. So she goes into the deliverable object and adds a connection to a project type. When she does that, she's able to select the fields from the project that she wants to bring into this system. So here, she selects the Actual Cost and aggregates it by the Sum, and also, she creates the Percent Complete field and aggregates it by Average, because she knows that someone will ask for the Percent Complete later on.

So now, this information is already in the schema. So whenever a new project is connected through this schema, the information is coming straight from the project.

So now, in here, we are going to do a little detour and switch to Lizzy who is working in the projects like she was always previously. She doesn't need to know about all of that system, and what Lizzy does is she goes in and just updates the tasks as she would do previously. She just completed all the tasks on the project, and she also logs in the expense for this project with $1,000. A very big expense. So now she goes into the deliverables in the table, you see that that information has been updated already in real-time. So the campaign manager doesn't need to refresh the view to see all of the up-to-date information. So now, if we go back to Jeremy, Jackie told him that this field is already there, so he can go in and actually add the Spend from Tactics. So there is also an aggregation between those objects that were defined, and now that information is embedded in the view, for Jeremy. Now he sees that there is a lot of money already spent on the first campaign. And the second campaign for Artisan Coffee Craft is just getting started. So he makes a decision to actually push this out into the future so that he can focus the resources on the first campaign and not create an audience fatigue for the same audience. So he clicks on it and actually selects the start date here to be August 1st. And this review is saved. And he clicks away, the calendar visualization updates accordingly. And the campaign is now moved.

So that allows Jeremy to actually solve a problem and prevent audience fatigue while using the same resources and having visibility into the full campaign cycle of every campaign that is happening, across the board and their associated information from Workfront and from Workfront Planning alike.

So with that, we actually worked with Nordstrom and Leslie is here with us. These are her exact words on the slide. So for the first time we can see a single holistic view... by utilizing flexible object levels, collaboration, automation, and campaign calendar views. So this already shows that there is value in this type of solution, in visibility, that this type of solution can provide across all stages of a marketing lifecycle.

So with that, I'm going to open up for Q&A. And you can see the same QR code here. You can scan the QR code to join the waitlist for Rebecca.