[Music] [Nicolai Schöppenthau] Hi, everyone. Thanks for coming. I'm Nicolai. I'm Director for Content Platforms and Digital Experience Platforms at Merkle DACH. So I lead that business in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. I'm located in Frankfurt, so this is actually the first time I'm attending Adobe Summit in person. So it's really cool to be here today. Really great to be on stage. We had some cool sessions and discussions in the last two days already. Yeah. Really, really cool and really excited to be here today. With me is Tim Locke from Celestyal, who's going to introduce himself in a second. And Tim and I are going to talk about Celestyal's fast track to hyper-personalization today. And before we jump into what we've been doing with Celestyal and are still doing at this very moment, I think it's important to give you an idea of the specific business context that Celestyal is operating in to give you an understanding of the reasoning behind their overall approach. And I couldn't think of anyone better in the world to explain this to you than Tim. [Tim Locke] Gosh. That's a lot of pressure. If you don't mind. I'm going to come down. I actually feel really dangerous up here. So does it still work down here? - [Woman] Yeah. - Yeah? You can still see light bounced off my head. I can't believe I'm the only one in a creative actual session with AI who actually hasn't got a Photoshop photo. But there we go. Never mind.
I've actually got a relatively easy job in this session. I'll move away from the actual speaker. I actually just need to actually introduce Celestyal, tell you actually what we're up to our objectives, what we're going to, what our commercial plans are, and then basically the headache we actually gave Merkle and Adobe to fix. So my one's relatively quite easy. I suppose the most complicated thing to actually explain to you guys is who actually Celestyal Cruises is. I go to a lot of sessions and I have to do a lot of presentations. And it's quite a few people who come up to me at the end and go, "I actually came to this session because I actually thought it was celebrity cruises, and I just thought the organizer actually had misspelt it." Absolutely not. Celestyal Cruises is a real thing. It's an absolute general cruise line I'm going to explain to you. And all people say is, "Is it a real thing?" Because obviously, it's Celestyal spelled wrong. It is. There is a quirk and there's a whole another session why it's got a Y in it. Our brand team love it. Our SEO people hate it. But there we go.
When I told my brand team I was coming to Vegas and there's been a lot of people who wants to talk about Celestyal, they got terrified at the fact that they thought that I was going to stand here and explain who Celestyal was. So I had to make a deal that, actually, I had to show you a video, one of their brand propaganda videos, so to set the scene about holidays and cruises, before we get in to actually talk about the nitty-gritty of the actual business and the challenges and the headaches we've got. Nicolai, head in.
There we go. So we do exist. So hopefully that everyone has been in the holiday moods and the actual feeling of actually wanting to go on a cruise. We've locked the doors. You have to pay a deposit before you leave on this session. Thank you very much. So just to give you a bit of information, background of information about Celestyal, we've actually celebrated our 10-year anniversary either last week or the week before. Somewhere. It's something like that. So we just celebrated 10 years. We're only a fleet of two ships operating in the Mediterranean. So we basically cut our teeth on the Greek islands, operating three and four night cruises around Mykonos, Santorini, Ephesus. You can go party in Mykonos. We're all about port intensive, so we do two ports a day. And then the other side, we do seven night cruises as well, the ground of Greek islands and up towards Venice and down. We used also to do the Eastern Mediterranean to Egypt and Israel. Obviously, that's off the cards at the moment. And that was all more about longer stays. So our actual proposition there is you stay in Santorini longer than other cruise lines. You go into smaller cruise ships. So we have mid-sized cruise ships with around 1,300 people on board.
And this year, we actually took one of our ships in the winter down to the Arabian Gulf. So Dubai, Doha, floating ship for the F1 Grand Prix. And I obviously just hit something there.
And at the end of this year, we'll be taking both ships down to the winter. So we'll be moving to all around seasons. We are VC owned by Searchlight Capital. That happened in 2021 November. Before that, we have some fantastic heritage. We were owned by the Lewis Group. Lewis Group is based in Cyprus, was the original founders of tourism in 1930.
Their marketing back then, they used to take an orange and used to take it to travel agencies. How wonderful if a supervisor in marketing would be right now if we could do that. So most of us would be out of the job, but on that side. So we were obviously owned by Lewis Group, which is hotels, airport handling. Until 2021, as you can imagine, COVID had to change things and needed injections on that side. So we're VC owned. We're sourcing over 35 markets. So we're active in anything from Latin America, Australia, North America. And remember, this is just for two ships in 35 countries. We deliver our marketing in eight languages. We're onboard in 12 languages. It really is like the United Nations onboard. And North America is our biggest market. Nearly over 50% of our actual business comes from North America. So that's just a bit of a flavor of where it comes from.
As I mentioned, we're going to talk about business objectives translated into our commercial objectives, translated into our digital objectives, and then how that translates into our challenges we've got. As I mentioned, we were owned by Searchlight Capital. So this happened in 2021.
Celestyal is a very, very profitable cruise line coming into COVID for two cruise ships, phenomenal margin that it operates. When Searchlight took over the business, they're a debt VC. So they take on for basically, a limited time, four to five-year project. And these are the objectives that they stat us. So stabilizing the business post-pandemic. Pandemic cost us 100 million in costs. So it was a devastating effect. So our first priority was to stabilize the cost. And then we moved into what are the value creation projects that we need to put on this company for us to be sold on or moved on for new investors, for us to grow into new regions or into ship three, four, five, and six. So we renewed the fleet. You saw in that video, we had new ships. When we were in COVID, we actually had ships from the 1980s. So think about it. We had a seven-night ship, what had 50 balconies on it up until 2021 into-- All right. Sorry, up until 2023, we now have 200 balconies. We had a three and four night ship what had seven balconies on it. We now have one that has 150, and it's just had another 50 added in the last four weeks. So real changes in our actual business right now that we then have to translate, not only into our commercial strategy, but also have to translate into our digital strategy. We're going to that more premium model. We took the ships all year round. As I mentioned, we cut our season, our teeth on the Greek island cruises, Mediterranean. We've now gone into the Arabian Gulf all year round season. By the end of this year, we'll be going all round. So again, we'll have a business and a commercial strategy what has to fit business now, which is not just seasonal, but all year round.
And then obviously, the commercial transformation, which is about the fact is, like I said, we've changed our fleet. Back in 1980s, we didn't have specialty restaurants. We didn't have great big spas. We didn't have the premium suites, the bulk of service, the concierge. We do now. So we have to work on a commercialized transformation. How do we actually take our revenues to 80 sets bigger to create that value creation project for when the next investor comes over for us to be able to unlock how we grow the fleet? How do we have ship three, four, and five? And then, how do we move out of the region to other regions for us to operate, to grow as a business? So a slide actually that Merkle gave me, and I kept it in, is basically just to show the size of the prize. So this is the size of the actual cruise market. It's growing. It's even bigger than it was before the pandemic. You know, 6.8. The actual business is now worth 3.9 trillion. Celestyal is just a miniscule on that. If you look in the news, obviously, over here in the US, you see it. Obviously, the orders for cruise ships are growing. You have every taste now from basic cruise lines to premium cruise lines. You've even got Ritz-Carlton now for cruise lines. There are so many flavors. There are so many charters. This business is growing. And the most important is the percentage of new cruisers to come. Actually this market is growing and growing. So this is one way, actually, we need to make sure that our commercial strategies is fixed and ready to go for this growing market. As I say, this is a market that VCs are all over at the moment invested in.
So taking that last box of commercial transformation, when we started this project, we had to sit down as a commercial team. Some of you might be familiar to this. I've just taken part of our house, of our vision, mission, and where we want to play. Our vision as a business for our commercial strategy was, "Hey, we want to create unmissable experiences at sea and on shore. We want to be able to create the best service on board, the best experiences." Whether that's in the spa, specialty restaurants, at sea, on board or in the shorexes, or even if it's like pre and post hotels. And the two areas that we saw that we wanted to play in was growing experiences. How do we grow our basket value? How do we actually make our basket value much bigger? So before the pandemic has come out, we were all inclusive. We actually used to give free excursions in our cruises. All our drinks were included. All our foods included. We've unbundled that now. We made it à la carte. So we've now grown a home portfolio to actually grow our experiences, how to put the hotel in the basket, how you can actually book the restaurants, different drinks packages, different specialties whether it's private or non-private. And then obviously the strength in partnerships. One of the things about Celestyal is over the years, it's been a very B2B-driven business and not B2C. B2C only accounts for 12% of the business. It's been very much tour operator and travel agency led. So the brand's never been there, but we have a wealth of actual connections globally, whether that's in Australia, North America, Spain, LATAM, you name it. We've got this-- So we actually do have the volume in place. So it's about pulling on these two levers that we actually want to bring into our commercial house and obviously, they want to utilize in the digital space.
So the framework to deliver. So when we sat down and said, "Hey, how do we take these business objectives and we take that box for the actual commercial was this basically framework?" So we looked at each of these areas. First, we looked at the foundations. Do we have the right systems? Do we have the right contract structures? We even said, "Do we have the right people?" Somehow I survived that. I have no idea, but we're still here to tell the story. And then we started to look at these different buckets, brand and customer experience. So is our brand fit for purpose? Is it actually resonating with the market we want to be? Is it what we want to sell it to be? Now we've got new ships. Now we're going outside of the Greek islands to the Arabian Gulf. Is it landing the messages we want to do? So we had a piece of work to do there. Experiences. Do we actually have the products on board the ship and off the ship that people want to actually buy with us? Again, another bucket that we had to work on. And then distribution. What channel do we want to work? Do we want to sell with travel agents? Do we sell to tour operators? So for us, we said 50% of our business for North America comes to us for the Greek Islands. That technically might not work for Dubai or for Doha. That might mean that we might need to go direct in Spain, or we might need to go to another model out of Australia. So another area that we had to look at. But underneath all of that, we underpinned it with a digital first strategy, and that's what we were looking to do. No matter what we were doing here, we needed to basically encompass this all into a digital first strategy.
So this best basically came to our digital first. So it came to and my team was, what do we want to do? Well, it was obviously want to grow the direct footprint. Now that doesn't mean that we wanted to replace the travel agency business because obviously we want to grow the business. But we wanted to move from 12% to maybe something more healthier. So there was a healthier distribution between travel agents, tour operators, and direct. On the travel agency side, we wanted to try and provide a more frictionless way of doing business. So how can a travel agent log in? How can a travel agent educate themselves? How can they get the marketing tools? How can they make a booking? How can they do stuff that they don't have to normally liaise with a contact center, or the friction of stuff that they have to do? Increase the pre-departure revenue through CRM mobile app. This one's a real wacky one. So up until 2023...
We had zero pre-departure revenue. We left it all on board because we were selling all inclusive. We switched on the basic CRM program and we generated 10 million in the space of 12 months. Sounds real basic stuff, but this business is really moving from an analog world to a digital world quite quickly. So one of our objectives is how do we actually integrate this? How do we actually get this to 25 million? How do we get this to 30 billion? Again, the personalized journeys. Everything we do at the moment, sometimes a bit spray and pray, we send out the broadcast messaging. How do we bring that personalization in? How do we have touch points? How do we make sure that we're delivering the right products to the right personas, not only on the website or the website, in the CRM, and obviously through the mobile apps? And then obviously, we have to do that in the bottom by achieving. So we talk about this controlled channel contribution. What are we willing to pay? So we're obviously competing with travel agents. We're competing with tour operators. So in the direct space, how much do we actually want to invest in that digital channel to acquire that customer? How much do we actually want to invest in the market for travel agency tools versus actually, hey, that might be better to be working as a GSA model in a certain country? And then lastly, is to make sure that across all of our digital spectrum that we have consistency across our brand and we have a seamless channel for both digital and customer experience.
So again, just another slide, actually, Merkle shared in my style, is really about the actual offline-online when it comes to the cruise industry. So the industry standard is 22.25% to book direct. As I said, we're at 12%. So we're massively under indexing right now versus the market. This is why it's critical that we came to Merkle and Adobe of our challenges and says, "Hey, we have ambitions to grow. We have ambitions to go quite large. This is the current industry standard, render indexing. We need to obviously not do this slowly. We need to do this very quickly to be able to catch up and start to be actually a market leader." And then last thing I wanted to share before I hand over to Nicolai just really was our challenges that we were bringing to-- Were the challenges that we're bringing to be able to scale. So obviously, when we look at all of this, we basically, before we go running out to an agency or look at new partners, we work out, do we have the capabilities already to be able to do this with ourselves? We always sit down and, "Hey, hey, I can do this. Do this for a few hours." First problem, our platforms are not scalable. We weren't mobile first friendly. So last time we built our website was during 2020, 80% of our traffic was desktop, 20% was mobile. We're in the space of 18 months, 80% of our traffic was mobile, 20% of our desktop. Platforms got dead. So it wasn't scalable. We had unusable technology, silo technology. So we were using multiple platforms that were having to put sticky tape over to try and actually make them work. Not possible. We couldn't connect flight, hotels, and transfers. The system we had to be able to make that happen just wasn't there. And the way for it to work was too difficult or too expensive for us to be able to implement. From a qualified audience point of view, our strategy is really heavy on B2B. B2C, we have a bit of a love-hate relationship sometimes with it. So we obviously have consultants come in a lot that say, "Hey, we should be this, we should be data." So sometimes we have complicated. Reachability. We have only certain reach with our marketing money. I go back to an earlier slide where we're saying, "Hey, we compete in 35 markets." That's a pot of money that we have to spread. And sometimes we don't have the actual analytics for us to be able to go and say, "Hey, this is the best market for us to do," you know. We didn't have the actual platform which gave us that whole ecosystem of unification for us to say, "This is what's going on." Say, "This is good business." Was what we actually asked Merkle and Adobe to do for us. We asked them to say, "Hey, we would like to get our direct bookings up to 30%, 12% today, but we'd like to get up to 30%." At the same time, we want to try and slash our customer acquisition cost by 30%. The fact is, if you've got a non-mobile first website, it means that your page optimization is low. It means you're paying more for cost-per-clicks and stuff like that. So these were achievable targets that we're putting in to say, "Hey, we believe we can grow, but we also believe that we can optimize our cost per acquisition as well with better data." We said we want to increase our basket value. So we want to make sure the website works. We want to make some better merchandise our website. We want to sell our premium products much better. We want to, obviously, merchandise our hotels and transfers. We want to merchandise our onboard sales. We also said we want to include our customer satisfaction. Our NPS score is pretty good onboard. We're about 83%, which is one of the best in the industry for the cruise lines. And again, but there is more room to actually grow. The shocking thing in this is the repeat booker rate for Celestyal is 3% because we've always gone and chased new business because we used to be a cruise line that had three and four-night product and that we never had any variations. We've got new ships now. We're outside of the actual-- We're expanding out into another region. So we have this ability now to put the whole loyalty scheme in, repeat booker rates on that side. And obviously, on the B2B side, we obviously want to improve our conversion rate by 25% by using the tools that we put in. We want to get people off the contact center. We want to get them into actually our travel agent.
And then the real kicker in the teeth for these guys was we said we want to do this all at pace. So we have a saying in Celestyal right now where we're in this whole VC cycle. We say one week in a normal business is a day in Celestyal's life. What people want to try and do in the most business during a week, we need to try and do in a day right now to be able to meet our objectives. And we asked these guys to do the first part of this in three months. And Nicolai will tell you how he done that.
Thanks, Tim.
So when we started working with Celestyal, we were actually asking ourselves one key question. How can we address this vast array of business objectives, of business issues that Celestyal is having in a connected way to bring value to them fast but robust and in a way that is scalable for the future? So Merkle is an experience-driven company, so we decided to look at the view of the customer first to look at all the individual moments that customers are having with Celestyal. And that's the customer life cycle for Celestyal that you're seeing here. Now the cool thing about the customer life cycle in the travel and hospitality and especially in the cruise industry, is that it's really fun and engaging to work with because you have a ton of micro moments where you can really deep dive into. You have a lot of potential for optimization throughout, but that also means that there's a lot of necessity for optimization because the competition is not sleeping. If you want to stay ahead of the competition, you need to optimize every individual step of that funnel.
So we were looking at a model. We were looking at a way on how to actually bring this live, where do we even start with the full blown digital transformation project, basically redoing everything from scratch. And what we did was we applied something that is called the Business First Transformation Model. How it works is we took all of the business objectives for Celestyal. We threw them into this continuous loop. We analyzed it. We looked at how we can act on individual business objectives, how we can operationalize on them. And what came out of that was a set of KPIs that we were then able to map a business decisional dashboard. And you can see that we've split it at the end in three major stages. That is setting the foundation, that is securing and fueling growth, and that is optimization, optimize what we already have, and securing the bottom line.
So foundation meant for us, starting with a website as the ideal point to start with additional transformation. As you can see here that this mostly relates to the before the cruise phase of the customer lifecycle. There were multiple reasons why we decided to start with the website first. The first thing is that it addresses B2C and B2B target groups. So Celestyal, as Tim made evident, is not selling boat rides. They're selling experiences. They're selling the chance, the possibility to craft, to create lifelong experiences with your loved ones. And we believe that website is the ideal channel for marketeers to create these experiences to bring them in front of the customer and to engage with client because you have near limited possibilities on what you can actually do. And that is also true for the B2B target groups. So B2B clients and in Celestyal's case, that's the travel agents that are mostly interacting with them via a learning portal and via a brand portal where they can download assets and documents from Celestyal. They're expecting the same level of experience that they have in their private life when they log off and relax on the couch after a hard day of work. They're scrolling through Instagram, interacting with their favorite brands. And they expect the exact same level of world class experiences also in their B2B world in their daily jobs. So that was a really important one. They're basically expecting hyper-personalized experiences in their work life as well. The website also meant we were able to push direct and indirect sales. That's extremely important if you want to increase the share of direct B2C revenue. But it also was a chance for us to secure a healthy B2B sales channel, to keep the B2B sales channel healthy. And if you want to move into a more B2C revenue world, you need to work on brand awareness. You need to bring your brand to the customer. You need to compete with the share of mind. You need to acquire clients. You need to make sure that they actually find a website, that they come on your website, and they engage with your content. And in an industry where SEO is extremely competitive, a well-crafted website can make a real difference here. Website also gave us a chance to immediately start tapping into previously realized upsell potential. That's what Tim explained with all of the upsell that they're doing now for the base cruises. And the last point is arguably one of the most important ones. It gave us a chance to start building high quality customer data. Now you heard Celestyal had a website before we started working with them. But from the way it was set up, from the way the content was structured, and from the way the analytics was set up, it was extremely hard to turn the data collected there into an operationalization, to turn it into something where we could actually craft personalized experiences out of and to actually find out at which stage in the customer life cycle clients, customers are actually at when they're interacting with the Celestyal website. So for us, that means if you want to start, if you want to embark on hyper-personalization eventually, you need to make sure that your baseline that is content, CMS, that's commerce, that's a booking engine for Celestyal, and the connected customer data collection in order. And we decided to fix that part first.
So when we pitched for Celestyal for the very first time, the technology was actually not yet decided. So Celestyal was looking for both a technology and an agency partner. And in the end, Adobe Edge delivery services came out of as the technology of choice. And let me start by saying that EDS was at that time a pretty nascent technology. Everyone had limited experience with it, and we had to do some convincing with Tim and the team to be able to actually push through with it. So that wasn't an easy one. At the end, there are three main reasons why we decided to go with EDS at the beginning. And the first one is that it enables us to create well performing websites from a page speed perspective. We knew from the way that EDS works that it would allow us to achieve top tier Google Lighthouse scores, which is extremely relevant for SEO, which results in more acquisition, more engagement, more conversion in the end. And that's the important second part. We know from all the work we've been doing with countless clients over the last years, we know from statistics that hold true for all industries that a well performing website results in a higher conversion. It results in clients being less likely to stop to jump off mid journey. And it results in clients being more likely to convert in the very end.
Second one, rapid development. So when I talk to the engineers in my team about EDS, they tell me that it requires a certain shift of mindset because it works differently than what AEM used to work in the past, and they have to adapt a little bit to it. But it's well worth it to invest a bit of time upfront and to create a team of seasoned front-end engineers backed with seasoned and experienced back-end engineers to actually push through with it. Because the way that EDS works, the way that its features are set up, the way that, for example, local development setup works, the way that testing works, the way that the repository less publishing works, all of this combined, and especially also the way that the actual creation of components of the EDS blocks works, enables us to build website faster than we were able to do it with, let's say, the old AEM. And it also frees up time on our people to work on actually creating experiences, and that's always a good thing. And number three, empowering authors. And that's actually why we believe that EDS is now ready for virtually all enterprise scenarios. And that's the integration between EDS on one side and the AEM Multi-Site Manager and Universal Editor on the other side, what used to be called project crosswalks. Because it allows the authors, it allows Celestyal's marketeers in that case to craft the high class experiences that they are envisioning with the top tier tools that Adobe provides. And that has always been one of the key differentiating factors of Adobe. Clients have been choosing Adobe because it gives marketeers the possibility to work with the best tools on the market and to actually empower them to craft the best experiences possible.
So a really cool piece of technology we had at hand, but that, of course, does not mean that there weren't obstacles that we had to overcome during the project. And Tim mentioned earlier the most important one, and there was timing. So from project kickoff to go live date, we just set four months in total. And we started with nothing. We started from scratch. We had no UX design. We had no site map in place. And because these guys wanted to be live just in time for the holiday season, we could never have convinced them to push that date back. So we knew we had to be live in four months. And therefore, a full website from scratch is tough timing.
And how we approached this is was something that I think a lot of us did a lot more before the pandemic. We basically locked ourselves in between Merkle, Adobe, and Celestyal, both virtually and physically. And that means that Adobe has a lot of teams that engage with clients, especially in these earlier project stages. And we decided to leverage that support and that expertise to the max. And I can only encourage everyone to do the same thing. Use the tools, use the resources that Adobe provides to you. We were able to enroll Celestyal in the EDS, all the adopter VIP program. So we had a Slack channel where our engineers would directly collaborating, shooting messages back and forth on how to best use features and how to best work with the new tool. With the Adobe engineering folks, they are actually working on the product. They were having constant calls, email, back and forth, you name it. And the same is actually true for business. We make sure to constantly align between Adobe, Merkle, and Celestyal to keep everything aligned towards the strategy and towards the goal to be live in four months. And that was mostly virtual. But we also did a lot of connection in the real world. So during that period of four months, we met almost on a weekly basis all over the world. We met in Zurich. We met in Geneva. We met in Belgrade, where a lot of the development team is sitting. We met in Greece to actually check out the Celestyal ships to get a firsthand experience on what cruises feel like. We met in Munich, coincidentally, just when Oktoberfest was happening.
Yeah. So we basically had a lot of active collaboration going on, and that meant that it was really easy for us to keep the team engaged to keep the pressure, and the team spurred up. And it also meant that we were able to decide really quickly when we needed to decide on things.
Which brings me to a second point. It was about prioritizing the actual business value. Now the KPIs that you saw earlier emerging out of the business value transformation framework was something that we always held in one hand. And every requirement that came up for the website was challenged against these KPIs. And we had some really tough discussions, because there were a lot of features that didn't make it in the end that would have been nice to have for an MVP, but they didn't make it to the MVP in the end because they would not have brought immediate and long lasting business value to Celestyal. And that was a really key point and that meant we had to be really hard on keeping a tough grip and a sharp eye on the scope. And that's extremely important in a project like this.
So at the very end, we were able to actually-- And I hope the second video is actually going to work now. Let's see.
It does. Yeah. At the end, we managed to push through. We managed to go live just in time before the very important Christmas sales for Celestyal four months from kickoff to go live date, which resulted in an almost immediate 30% increase in SEO rankings. So client happy, agency happy. And we successfully built the foundation to fuel that hyper-personalization journey in the future. And I'll just leave you for a few more seconds with some impressions, what the team, what the designers, consultants, the back-end, front-end engineers were able to create in that short time frame.
So, of course, if you want to start with hyper-personalization, and that was the end goal. That's also the name of today's session. That's not where it ends, right? That was the very foundation of what we were building, but we actually had to do more. We had to look at additional things to connect and we had to find a way to address the business challenges that Celestyal gave us in a way that allowed them to craft a fully interconnected customer journey throughout all of their channels, and not just the website.
So that's a simplified view. But you can see that the MVP saw the go live of the EDS website, of the B2B portal that I mentioned, of an analytics tool...
Of the booking engine that Celestyal is using. And all of the other boxes were the additional building pieces that we were looking at afterwards. So there was a mobile app. There was email powered by Adobe Marketo for both B2B and B2C use cases. There was display and SEA ads. It was Adobe Target for website personalization. And it was Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform to connect all of the data and to fuel all of these channels to create the actual hyper-personalized experience.
And...
You might see some continuity here because how we decided to start working on this was lock ourselves in again between Merkle, Adobe, and Celestyal...
For multiple days to do something, what we called the industry lab. And what that is that we brought vertical experts from the Merkle tech account, and additional teams. We brought Adobe experts with their years of hundreds of customer projects experience. And we brought, of course, Celestyal because no one knows their business better than they do. And we started with the questions that you can see on the right. Which moments are helping us the most to achieve our 2026 targets? And they were ambitious. Which personas are we actually targeting for the first iteration of the hyper-personalized customer journey? And do we have any sub targets that we also need to take into account? And what we did is we further sliced the customer life cycle that you saw at the beginning in more than 25 individual micro moments. And we looked at each and every one of them individually in the group of Celestyal, Merkle, Adobe. And that is an example of the pre-cruise phase and the ready to sail moments. So we were looking at what's the audience we're targeting. In that case, it's buyers. It's people that already bought the cruise, and they're now waiting for the cruise to start engaging with Celestyal throughout the timeline. What are the channels that we know we can target these people on? In that case, it's social media, it's web, and it's email. What are the tech enablers and capabilities that we need to talk to these people on these exact channels? And the last one, and this is where the industry lab approach and the combination of expertise really came to fruition is we brought use cases together. We ideated together on use cases for each and every individual of these moments. And then we further mapped these use cases into quick wins and into strategic decisions.
And the implementation roadmap that we then built for 2025 was a direct result of us putting the quick wins, strategic decisions, tech enablers capabilities on a metrics to decide which of these use cases do we want to go first, which are we going to employ in the first step to build the first hyper-personalized customer journeys for Celestyal. So you can't do everything at once. You have to start with a set of use cases that bring the most value in the shortest amount of time possible. And the timeline, again, for that was very ambitious because we want to be live with all of that by fall this year, so just one year after website project kickoff. And I'm going to hand back to Tim to give you a glimpse on what the roadmap for this year looks like. I completely forgot about this slide. So let's have a look at it together. So-- Yeah.
So yeah, I'm not going to deny it. We did set a really ambitious target. As I said, we are moving really quickly because we will need to show value creation. As I say, we have a timeline of our VC. We have a timeline of our business so we want to achieve stuff. And then we said the other buckets brand as their team wants stuff delivered, the experienced team. So let's say the B website kicked off in August last year, delivered MVP for December. You guys delivered the backlog in January. Well done, on time. That's good. We're currently working on Marketo right now, migrating our CRM system email over. We should be live by the end March onto Marketo for B2C and B2B. That's great for us because that actually interacts a lot with our, obviously, customer journey. And then we start to build, we start to get into the CDP, and we start to look at the 360-degree view of the customer. That's probably going to take us all the way through to July. We're hoping we're going to get Adobe's new GenStudio.
It used to be called Success Studio. - Success Studio. - It's called Web Optimizer. They're showing this great thing in the EDS. And if any of you guys who are clients and you haven't got it, don't knock on their door. It's this thing where, actually, it self-diagnoses the problems in the website, and it tells you, do you want to go to go and fix it? And this is what we believe the fix is going to be and this is the revenue uplift. It looks amazing. Getting the queue after us. We're still waiting. But, hopefully, they promised that in May. That's the most exciting thing I'm looking forward to. Something where I can say to my boss if we can fix it. And then literally, as we go through the year, we've obviously got the next facilities. But as I say...
What are we missing? Marketo in March. Target is in April. May is Adobe AI tags. And then hopefully by the end of the year, we should be by-- Page two, we should be launching our vacations business, which is the next iteration of the website where we'll be selling the full dynamic packaging flights, hotels, transfers. So some of our websites will change. So the UK market, for a good example, is a real barrier for us right now. Our cost per acquisition is really, really high because ultimately we're selling a product cruise only, where it doesn't fit with the normal buying habits in the US. We should be able to deliver that by July time onto the website platform and then be able to actually improve that. And, obviously, right now, we have, phases of, I think, it's every two months. Every two months right now, we're delivering the next phase of the website, the next iteration. The new ideas will come through. As I say, it's very aggressive. We have a very big team. We have an interesting budget. I would like to personally thank the CFO for following us on this one. But, yeah. This is our ambitions right now that we have at the moment. So as I say, we're working on all fronts. But for us, the number one to try and by we get to the time before, is to make sure that we got full personalization in place. So when we get to next year, and we're at that interesting time about, "Hey, can we activate ship number three and ship number four?" we're ready for the business to be able to scale growth.
And that's it. Back to beautiful pictures. Thanks. Thank you.
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