[Music] [Man] In 1886, one American dream was bottled in Atlanta, Georgia, a drink that would refresh generations. [Music] How about a bottle of Coca-Cola? [Music] [Man] What a time to be alive? [Music] Yeah. That's a winner. - [Man] Yeah. - Oh, yeah. And I know winners. [Music] [Ryan Housman] All right. Hello, everybody. I am Ryan Housman. I am in marketing capabilities at the Coca-Cola Company. I am joined with Mallory Meissner, who's a peer of mine in marketing operations as well, as well as Aashish Nohria, from the Adobe Product team. And we are here to talk a little bit about how we are transforming ways of working with Workfront at its backbone at the Coca-Cola Company. There we go. - [Mallory Meissner] Yeah. - All right.
All right, so we are on a journey, and we have been on a journey for the past four or so years now to transform our marketing organization, not by a little, but by a lot. Our objective more than anything, is to become the world's best marketing organization by a long shot. And we have a couple of behaviors that we ask of our associates, all of our marketeers, in order to bring that to life. Number one is making sure that we are continuing to work together, driving collaboration and co-creation wherever humanly possible. Two, that we are focusing relentlessly on learning. And down at the bottom here, it's reducing duplication of effort as much as humanly possible. That is the bane of our existence in a large organization and an enterprise like Coca-Cola. And so making sure that we are doing work once, not seven, or nine different times, is what we're always focusing and striving for.
So why did we identify that we needed to transform? Just set a little bit of big picture context before we get into the piece of the role that Workfront plays in this for us.
This five-year journey started during the pandemic. As we identified, one, we needed to dramatically accelerate our ability to recruit consumers through a much more streamlined portfolio of brands. There is a massive shift and that we all feel every single day in how consumers actually engage with media. So we had to massively shift from traditional media to much more digital-led experiences and integrated experiences. And then the last one is that, before the pandemic or before COVID, we had over 6,000 marketing agencies that we worked with across the globe.
So we really tried to focus on a new operating model with WPP, in order to balance the scale that we are looking for, reducing duplication of effort and balancing that need with intimacy in each individual local market. Again, at the end of the day, our business happens in each local market, in each local outlet, and we need partners that are going to continue to bring that to life every day. And so a couple of things that we anchor on is, the idea of a network model. So why a network instead of a matrix organization versus hierarchy? If you were in the town hall yesterday or the Keynote speech yesterday, James mentioned this first day as CEO of our company, he wore jeans and a jacket, not drinking Coca-Cola. We were a very, very rigid hierarchical chart of authority-driven organization in the past. I actually remember one of my first days when I started in sales. I used to manage a bunch of local outlets in Buckhead, and our old CEO actually came into a store with a color card to measure whether or not the products that we were selling on shelf and the messaging was actually Coca-Cola red or not. And that was just the way that things were. So we moved away from a hierarchical organization. Instead of a matrix organization, which a lot of companies do where you've got functional reporting lines, as well as project-based reporting lines, where associates oftentimes get stuck between functional requirements or functional direction and project-based direction. We decided to really identify a network model where we could, one, prioritize speed and flexibility. Number two, is that, we force the organization to collaborate and co-create by design. So there are starve resources at the center, in our center functions. They have to partner with each of our marketeers and each of the markets to bring their ideas to life. And then three, really focus on specialization and centers of excellence where it really makes sense. So this is the way that we have been working for the past 4 years across our 1,600 marketing associates and the rest of our structure as well.
And what makes us complicated and what makes marketing operations complicated in getting work done across our 1,600 people every year? Recognizing that, there are about 750,000 total associates when you take into account our franchise bottlers that interact with customers and end consumers every single day.
One, we execute about 3,000 different projects every single year and even split between new products, new packages, as well as marketing campaigns. So a very large number of campaigns, new products, innovations that are brought to market every single year. We have just under 200 brands that operate in over 200 markets across the globe. So when you think about a large number of programs that happen across a large number of markets, it becomes a matrix and a web of what content is needed for which market when. Milestone tracking becomes incredibly important for us. And in the past 5 years, we have spent about $35 billion in DME. And then you throw on top of that what our bottlers spend, our franchise spend in each market. This is just the Coca-Cola company spend of that, which is really responsible for marketing the brands and what we're going to focus on, as well as the concentrate the syrup that we produce, that our bottlers and our distributors produce, physically put in packages and ship out to outlets.
Spend a tremendous amount of money across all of those brands, across all of those campaigns, constantly looking for efficiency and effectiveness. And so as part of this transformation, we decided that we were going to start augmenting our ways of working overall. So when you think about our transition from a matrix organization and a hierarchical organization in some functions to a network, what we identified very quickly is that our processes, our tools that we used, the decision rights, and how decisions were actually made weren't fit for progress and weren't fit for growth. So we decided that we were going to really focus on digitizing work on a couple of key focus areas. Number one, we want to help our associates deliver better work. We believe creativity is a central part of that, but its better quality content, better quality activations, done faster. And our cheeky little take on it is that, work should be fun. So we need to make sure that this is an enjoyable experience for all of us as well. So what we are constantly focusing on these three goals. And so with that I will transition over to Mallory to start talking about our journey with Workfront. Awesome. Thanks, Ryan. So we've talked a little bit about technology, our ways of working, how we started to transform into a network. So I'm going to share a little bit more about what we actually mean when we say tech-augmented ways of working. So we're really focused on how are we building a connected marketing ecosystem. So the first piece of that is on connecting work. So this is really where Workfront really leans in. So going all of the way from ideation, prioritization, all of the way to execution, really using that to bring our work to life. But the second piece of that is really connecting experience for our marketing associates. So creating an ecosystem that allows them to utilize technology effectively to make their work easier, better, faster, hopefully with some fun along the way. So bringing together how the process works, where they can connect to other experts, communities of practice, where they can get more details on Nielsen data, on our end consumer, really bringing everything they need into one ecosystem. The third piece then is on solutions. So while we can really control a good bit of how the work is orchestrated, we also need to connect with other pieces of the Coca-Cola system. So whether that's our financial systems, our analytics, how we're doing in the market, making sure that we're using seamless integrations to really bring all of that to life. And then the last piece is on connecting capabilities. So while we talk a good bit around, this is going to help us do this work faster, really increase efficiency and effectiveness, we want to embed learning and capability building with our associates along the way. So it's not just on internal delivery, but also how are we helping the associates at Coca-Cola learn and grow as we do our work.
So to start out with all of this, we obviously start from ideas and prioritizing. So starting from strategy, we look at what are the opportunity spaces that we have, do ideation around those opportunity spaces, and even do some quick validation with consumers to understand if we are really focusing on the places that are going to drive lots of effectiveness and impact at scale across the marketing organization. From that, we start to use Workfront and we start to collect ideas against those opportunity spaces against our various brands, against the different platforms that we have, and really start to have a good list of all of our opportunities. And then we've identified some key metrics that really help us to prioritize those opportunities. Once they're prioritized, we have a great healthy backlog in Workfront that is really allowing us to have visibility across the organization of all of the ways that we could bring things to life. And then from there, we're making sure that we are actually scaling those for impact. So are we focusing on the right priorities, the right combinations in the right markets, making sure that we're pairing all of that together to really ensure that we have impact across the organization? So then we start to execute all of those ideas. So we have them in Workfront, and then we start to really lean into the core capability of that tool, work orchestration. As Ryan talked about, we have a very complex organization. So we have global categories, we have operating units, we have markets, and then we have 200 brands that are happening across those 200 plus markets. So we really needed this tool to help us keep all of that in order and orchestrate all of the work. And that's where it's really, really helped us is, now we're able to connect things that are the same. So easy to understand Coca-Cola Christmas, things that we do every year that are going to be activated in a similar way across markets using a similar tone of voice. We can connect all of that, but also allow some local, regional nuances to be captured. But the thing that Workfront has really helped us with is building that one approach to marketing. So we're able to ensure that the components that keep us consumer-centric are really embedded into the work, into our templates, that it's data-driven, that as we're doing our different phases of building the marketing experience, that we're bringing in the right data on our consumers, on our customers, that we're really doing this in a networked fashion. I think there's been a lot of statistics around asset utilization, reuse. So how do we ensure that we are not duplicating efforts, but we're doing this in a networked way? Really having transparency and consistency in how we do that. And then that is getting us to effectiveness at scale and really having one voice.
So all of that sounds great. I will tell you we did learn along the way.
So occasionally, we are building the plane as we are flying it. The first piece that we really started to learn on is what we call dynamic project structures. So Aashish will break that down for you a little bit more in a few minutes, but that is the hierarchy that we use within Workfront. So it is using the portfolio program project structure, but we quickly learned that all of our things don't neatly fit into that. So some examples that you might think of could be FIFA, Olympics, things that are going across different portfolios, different brands. We needed a way to actually have all of that coordinate within our tool. So Aashish is going to break down how we're doing all of that. But that's really been something that Workfront and Fusion has really helped us to drive by giving us that flexibility to really automate and connect the varying pieces of the work together.
And then also learning on the job, being able to build templates within the tool, being able to customize those templates for various operating units, markets, things that are nuanced across, different regulatory requirements, all of that we've able to build within the tool, and that's really been useful for us, also building in nudges and ways for our associates to learn along the way.
So as we start to wrap up this section, the key thing that we're focused on within this is, how do we really break down the silo of work and learning? So for us, tech-augmented ways of working is really reaching that ultimate goal of how do we break those down and make them be interconnected, a continuous loop that's happening. So as we have all of the work coming to life in Workfront as we're prioritizing, as we're then determining the resources needed to deliver the work, have the process clearly defined whether it's a marketing experience or an innovation project, we're also building learning along the way. So we're ensuring that we are injecting capabilities, that our associates are able to build their own experience profile, understand areas where they can learn and grow, see projects and opportunities that have that in them, partner with other people through communities of practice, and really putting our marketeers at the center to ensure that we're not separating work and learning but that it's interconnected across the system.
So then the last piece is really on the game changers and accelerators for doing that. So we know that about 75% of learning is done on the job. Does anyone know how much learning you lose after about 24 hours of taking some training? [Woman] 90%. I heard 90. That's very close. So after about a week, you lose 90% of it. After about 24 hours, you're losing about 70% of it. So that's something that has really been an accelerator and game changer for us is being able to bring that right at the point that our marketeers need it, so that they're learning it and then immediately applying it. So really that stickiness factor is happening. We're focused on doing that through AI, also through personalization. So there's so much information that we can have. We're really trying to ensure that we're connecting information, democratizing information, removing the tribal knowledge that you previously would need to have within an organization. But in doing that, you then need to be able to pare that down and really personalize and have it to where an associate can see exactly what they need. So based on various job roles or interests, actually building in personalization for the associates as well. Integrating, so that we can easily know, here's what we planned from a strategy perspective. Okay, how are we doing from a budget standpoint? How are we tracking that overtime? We said that this program would be effective because it was going to be activated in X number of markets. Are we actually doing that? So making sure of it, all of our systems are integrated to really allow that. And then ensuring that, as we see new capabilities, we're bringing those in a very thoughtful way to our associates, at the right time, through the change curve and really bringing them through this with us. So we have a short video to show you some of the capabilities that we have built-in Workfront, and then Aashish will dig into those a little bit further. Okay.
[Man] It all begins here with ideas, lots and lots of ideas. Our system helps us to prioritize these ideas using cross-functional people on our team to ultimately set us up for success.
When you log in to Workfront, you'll see the Home screen. One of the system's benefits is a new request, which allows user acceptance and prepares AI, not users, to do the bulk of the work. Simply click on the Request button to create a new request. Then fill out the Intake Form. You'll answer a variety of questions from your project description to adding in comments to when and how the product is launching. Then the system will create a project. You'll see a project plan that will show you the tasks you need to complete in order to prioritize your project. The system will give you a high-level project plan and allow you to assign people.
If you do assign someone, that team member will receive a notification.
Once the task is done, it will be marked complete here and in the full stage.
Gating is something unique for us and something not many companies do. Here, we're using proofing to capture digital feedback and alignment to reduce meetings. You'll simply type in the name, select My Meeting, and it will automatically pop-in a date here and on the project plan as a whole. The system will determine when this phase will be done based on when you registered your project for a meeting date. To help match what you should be working on, you can register for a Gate. The system will automatically create documents to help decision makers understand the project scope. They will be able to see things like, how the project aligns with franchise. If the channel plan has been created, people needed. And if the project is a strategic fit, this same document goes to a network committee for final prioritization to review, approve, reject, and make any changes needed.
Gating eliminates long unnecessary meetings and allows project team members to get instantaneous feedback.
Dashboards are available to highlight individual operating units and categories, providing real-time tracking and visibility to work across the marketing network. Our system takes all of our great ideas and streamlines them into one thing. Our company's success, all powered by Workfront.
[Aashish Nohria] Thank you, Mallory. And talking of efficiency, a 2-minute video to summarize a 4-year-long journey and a 60-minute presentation. Brilliant, isn't it? Excellent. So let's see how is Workfront driving success within Coca-Cola's marketing network operations. So first of all, Workfront is the core work orchestration and management solution that connects projects from different organization levels and help the business share and collaborate. Then there is Workfront Fusion, which serves as an integration platform, which extends the Workfront capabilities through powerful automations and integrations allowing to connect Workfront with other Coca-Cola applications and even third-party applications.
By automating repetitive tasks, reducing the time spent on manual effort and optimizing data processes-- Workfront Fusion helps teams stay efficient and focused on high-focus work. Workfront Data Connect, which is the data lake solution, is the central repository for marketing data supporting complex analytics, which drives data-driven decisions. So these combined elements collectively is driving the success within Coca-Cola's marketing network operations.
Now you heard Mallory talk about dynamic project structures. So what are these? Dynamic Project Structures or DPS is one of the core capabilities that basically brings synergy and inter-operational efficiency between global, OU, and market-level initiatives. It is essentially a multilayered project hierarchy driven by a combination of both Workfront and Fusion. It helps connect initiatives by maintaining a hierarchy of execution, brings work traceability and transparency between the global initiatives, OU initiatives, or market-level initiatives. It encourages collaboration between different teams and helps with various levels of execution. It maintains a standardized workflow for different types of project executions, while at the same time allowing for customizations at the OU level and at the market-level. It serves as a PMO, simplifying basic project management capabilities.
Now let's see what this project hierarchy really looks like. It is essentially a custom framework that builds a multilayered hierarchy between global, OU, and market-level projects.
It allows market-level markets to be able to leverage the work done by the global initiatives by joining the initiatives as a participating operating unit or a market. By maintaining a hierarchy between global, OU, and market initiative, it helps improves intranetwork collaborations and bring operational synergy across the board. Now has anyone wondered? We talked about project structures, so what is the dynamic piece in this? Did anyone wonder? At least one person raised the hand. So let's talk about the dynamics. So if you are aware of the Workfront capabilities, we have portfolios, programs, and projects. But because of the complexity of the network, the marketing network ops that Mallory and Ryan talked about earlier, we needed a more dynamic structure, which basically should fit whether a global charter requires an OU to participate, or a market to participate, or whether it's just going to be a single market project, right? So what we did basically is that with a combination of Workfront and Fusion, an OU could say, "Well, okay, there is a global initiative or a global charter." I'm going to join that charter, and fusion depending on certain data architecture or data attributes within the project will spin up an OU level project with its own project template. And then if a market within that OU decides, "Yes, we are also going to activate this within our market," they can say, "We are going to do this as a part of this particular OU," Fusion will then go ahead and spin up a market project with its own template. So essentially, depending upon whether you're a market, whether you're an OU, whether it's a global charter, or as an example that Mallory took about FIFA, where you have multiple categories activating a single initiative in multiple markets. Fusion and Workfront together will create a dynamic project structure. What it does is, it helps you visualize where the projects are being activated, at what level, what work is being done at the global level, what work is being done at the OU level, and what work is being done at the market level. It allows the teams to work collaboratively across these initiatives. So that's where the dynamic piece comes into play. Also, another thing to consider here is, by standard, Workfront offers portfolio program and projects. However, if you think about here, we're talking about more than three layers of architecture here. So we have global categories, then we have global charters, then we have OU charters, then we have market charters, we might have single market projects. So all of that, this is where the combination of Workfront and Fusion together, as I said earlier, Fusion helps enhance, extend the capabilities of Workfront to do all of these things. So that is the one single most core capability that Coca-Cola is utilizing for their market network operations.
Now as we saw in the video earlier, we have also deployed something called gating functionality. In Workfront to streamline, the decision-making at various stages of the project. Now meetings and agendas are managed within the tool itself. The pre-reads, which is essentially a project brief required for the gate meetings are generated through Fusion automatically. So the Fusion scripts would read the data that's being collected for the project at the various different levels. That data is then consolidated in a structured template. And the Fusion will go ahead and fill in those data points in that template, create a PDF, which is then used as a pre-read. Additionally, it also have the ability to upload additional background information, additional documents, which Fusion then automatically combines into a single document, creating one single pre-read for the stakeholders of that gate meeting to review during the gate meeting.
Workfront proofing is used to digitize the feedback and reduce meeting times.
These capabilities drive efficiencies by reducing manual effort, streamlining decision-making, and optimizing meeting times, ultimately leading to faster project execution and time savings. And Workfront provides a centralized system where meeting records, approvals, feedbacks are captured in real-time.
Right. Data, as we all know, is the cornerstone for a strategic decision-making, driving efficiencies, innovation, and sustainable growth. Now as the central repository for marketing data, Workfront enables data governance, which basically ensures compliance and accuracy across the board.
Data is pushed in real-time to update analytics in Power BI, which then connects other datasets to suggest how projects are scaling across markets and categories to increase both scale and decrease effort.
It enables real-time insights for faster, better data decisions. It powers automations and integrations to reduce manual effort in data entry, processing, and sharing. It helps leverage learnings from previous projects to adapt to the current ones for success. In essence, Workfront helps transform data into actionable insights, driving smarter decisions and operational efficiencies.
Someone agrees. I guess.
Now from a maturity perspective...
As Ryan mentioned, it's been a very long journey, and we have been tracking the maturity as well as we go across through that journey. So what we do is we track user maturity across a variety of features to deploy and sustain change. And the majority model is aligned across feature development, change management, and comms. In this model, we are moving associates from Learn it, basically starting with the basic capabilities. To Live it, which is a more targeted adoption, and using the tool in their day-to-day work. To Love it, which is where they become masters and advocate for the benefits of the tool.
The feature roadmap is also aligned to this particular maturity model to ensure that we're not building tools that are beyond the capabilities of the organization itself.
And with that, I will hand over to Ryan to talk about progress. Yeah. So again, it's been, what, three or four years of a journey. Those of you in the room that are part of the Coca-Cola Company know that has been bumpy along the right way. We have certainly had all sorts of learnings, made a ton of progress, which is great, but, we're-- I would say we're well on our way at this point. So a couple of things as we talk about our workstream overall. So number one, as we're talking about the importance of dynamic project structures, again, if you think back to 2019, or 2018 pre-COVID, pre-network organization, we had a holiday campaign happening. You would have that holiday campaign developed in North America. You would have that holiday campaign developed in Europe, and probably multiple markets differently within Europe. You would have the same thing happen in Latin America. And ultimately, we would massively duplicate our non-working dollars, but we would also really not create a consistent voice for our end consumers. And so number one thing that we are focused on is making sure that we are linking projects together in that dynamic project structure as much as humanly possible to focus on scale, focus on multi-market participation. And what we've seen in the last even 2 years alone is that we've seen a 3x increase in participation, in network projects or multi-market projects in nature without really changing the number of true end consumer interactions that we have at a market level. So if you say we were still representing and still driving 3,000 projects, but instead of them being 3,000 individual activations there, now it's about 1,000. It's massive, massive efficiencies in terms of how we are driving and executing the work. We have been able to reduce our meeting times for making decisions. Again, network organization, stakeholder management becomes incredibly important to us. We've been able to reduce the amount of time that it takes to align stakeholders and have discussions about what feedback do we need to give to a project team by 50%. So we are well on our way towards our overall objective. Again, if we've got 1,600 person marketing organization, we've got about 2,000 people actively using Workfront, every, call it month or so. A lot of them are very heavy users. We've got a lot of light users as well, though. But the objective is that we want to be able to give about a hour of time back to each of our associates every single day to allocate towards higher value activities. And through all of this efficiency that we're driving through our deployment of Workfront, and this tech-augmented ways of working, we're seeing the translation to better outcomes in market as well. So linking it back to our transformation overall, we are recruiting more consumers pretty consistently, not only across all of our established brands, but the new brands and the new products that we launch every year. We are continuing to see low double-digit increases in marketing efficiency and effectiveness. That changes a little bit market-to-market, but we are making leaps and stride progress in terms of how we are driving efficiencies in the dollars that we are spending to create content, distribute content, and iterate and leverage what we've already created instead of relearning things that we already know. We're seeing higher success rates. On innovation, it's about a 3x increase, campaign effectiveness as well. We're seeing much higher engagement rates overall. And at the end of the day, we've got most of our associates onboard with the idea of driving scale, driving that efficiency and recognizing that, I don't have to relearn what was institutional or as Mallory called it, tribal knowledge in the past. So if I didn't know that, say, there is one associate left that worked on New Coke back in the '80s, that, what is the learning plan associated with that? What are the key insights that we thought we understood before we launched it or what went wrong in the activation? All of that now is not only documented in insights and analytics, through Power BI, but also in Workfront in order to say, this type of project is very similar to something that is already working well in market today. Are you sure you don't want to just take that and just reduce your operating cost by 20, 30, 40% and increase the amount of time that you could or decrease the amount of time that it takes to get something out the door.
So it really has been a wonderful journey for us, with a long way to go though. I know I am certainly excited about the Keynote speeches and the product and future of Workfront session that we just sat in. I know that we're going to be keeping our ACS and product team very busy as we think about rolling out the features that we saw. So with that, turn it over to Mallory to talk about where we're going.
Thanks. So lots of progress that we've made which we're really excited about, but we know that's really just the tip of the iceberg that technology is rapidly changing and advancing. And we're very excited to continue to mature in how we're utilizing the tool and integrating it across. So our first thing that we really are focused on is, how do we achieve greater maturity? So how do we really look at the vast options of features that we can activate within Workfront? Ensure that we're focusing, and then we're moving our users through that Learn it, Live it, Love it model, really increasing the maturity of our user base on the things that are going to be most valuable for them, that are really going to have the most benefit for them, and that are aligned to our mission of better work, faster, easier. The second piece, which I know everyone might be tired of hearing AI, but really how do we start to utilize AI within our processes? So how are we using AI to really data mine our processes, make our processes more efficient. If our users are constantly skipping over certain tasks, we can really evaluate, are those needed? Taking that as Ryan kind of alluded to all the way to the beginning of the process as they're putting in information for a potential opportunity, connecting that to say, "This looks really similar to something that we have done previously." Have you considered that? Ensuring that we are really considering adaptations, reapplication, reuse. So using all of the technology, the AI, to really help us clearly understand that and really shine light on those opportunities. The other thing that has been really exciting that we want to continue to build-on is all of the data that this really unlocks for the organization. This might be shocking for an over a 130-year-old company, but we have not had this level of transparency and visibility to our work ever before. So really for our leadership, continuing to have that level of visibility to really understand how we are going from the global network initiatives that we're putting together, how those are actually penetrating down through our operating units and markets, and then what we're also doing to build upon that for the local needs within those areas to understand how our entire portfolio is coming to life, so that we can make informed data-backed decisions about all of the work that we're doing across the marketing network. And then the last piece is how do we continue to really expand the bounds of where we are? So right now we're really starting with annual business planning, utilizing the tools to get to that, going all the way through delivering our marketing experiences, our innovation projects, and then now how do we continue to push past that? How do we have all of the data analytics for everything as it goes to market, connecting that back to projects? How do we push even further on the frontend? How do we have our long-range plans becoming visible sooner, so that we are really looking at all of the key performance indicators across, that we're able to look at our objectives across the marketing organization and clearly tie all the way from three to five-year plans down to initial, end activation that's happening within our markets.
And just to close out, we were very excited last year to be named Creative Brand of the Year at Cannes. And our CMO Manolo shared there that, "Really we believe in creativity, that it's a superpower for growth, and that inspires people, and brings change to the world." And we're very excited that we're actually bringing that change, that creativity, that superpower to life through Workfront. So with that, we're happy to take any questions that you might have.
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