[Music] [Prakash Arjunan] Good afternoon, everyone. I guess I don't need the mic, huh? Nice to meet you all. It's always interesting to do a session right after lunch on a massive multi-thousand person conference, but we really appreciate everyone coming to this session. And you're going to have some amazing content and hopefully, we can also engage you some discussion after. My name is Prakash Arjunan. I'm a Managing Director at Deloitte Digital and I've had the amazing pleasure of being able to work with Matt and Rebecca here who will do their intros. But you'll hear from them a little bit of story. We're going to get some additional discussion going, and then we'll open it up for anyone that may have any questions. So over to you. [Matt Pickering] Ladies first. - Yeah, please. - [Rebecca Hood] Thank you, Matt. - Oh, here. Go for it. - Hi, all. Do you want me to click? - Yeah. - Okay. I'm Rebecca Hood. I'm the Director of Marketing Acceleration at The Home Depot. I am in the marketing operations organization. My team is responsible for delivering process and technology solutions for all of our marketers and creatives who are tasked to deliver great content for all of our customers, and we work really closely with Matt and his team. Thanks. Yeah. So I'm Matt Pickering, Director of Marketing Technology. So my group essentially oversees marketing, data, content management, personalization, and activation through owned and paid media channels. Yeah. Thanks for having us. I'll let you start us off, Matt. I'm a wander over here. Okay. So this slide here really outlines our journey and where we're going to and where our North Star is. So as you see over in the explorers and contender space, this is where we were hovering in FY '23 and '24. And some of the key work we needed to do as a larger enterprise having, obviously, more of a direct to consumer business, but then a little bit of a business to business with our pro-business. So we have a lot of different data, a lot of different customer types. So one of the key things we need to do is get our customer data foundations in order. So we spent a lot of FY '23, beginning of '24, really building out well-structured and organized enterprise data warehouse as we knew that was going to be, some of the foundational block and tackling we need to do to eventually unlock personalization at scale.
Now on the content side, we also spent a lot of time with our digital asset management platform, with all of our metadata, cataloging of assets, and really I work on some of those foundational items, right? And so now we're in our FY '25, we see ourselves hovering somewhere in the contender space but obviously, we want to gravitate toward the leader space. I'll turn over Rebecca to describe how we're going to work on some of that stuff. Yeah. One of the major components of our personalization strategy is our content platform. So we know that our customer is complex, our business is complex, and for us to be able to speak to them and deliver the messages that resonate with them, we need a lot of content and a lot of variations. And so we need a best-in-class content platform. As Matt said, we've done a lot of work with our digital asset management program, and now really focused on content experience management and we are implementing AEM. The thing to call out we want to enable our teams to operate really seamlessly across this content platform so that we can deliver those best-in-class customer experiences, but it takes a whole lot of people to make that happen, and that requires a lot of cross-functional work and a lot of coordination. And I think just the way that we have grown up over the years has not always been the most seamless integration of process and technology. It looks a little something like this. So this is what we in technology call spaghetti architecture. So if you want to get to leader space, it can't look like this.
And so this is just to show obviously, the classic challenge statement, here's where we're at today. We obviously need to improve and get a little bit more structured and organized. But when I think about trying to get to our North Star vision of personalization at scale, getting into that leader space, basically breaks down to these four categories that are represented up here. And I'll describe some of the challenges that we're trying to solve in each. So the first one being our data ecosystem. So today, we have a lot of different customer data segmentation platforms, CDPs, and they're very fragmented by channels. So marketing teams might have one solution or CDP, they're leveraging, our online teams leveraging another one for our dot-com business. Then we've obviously got these nuances where we have a pro-business, and that's a separate org and a separate team. They have different solutions that they're using. So what I always say is I'm selling some of these things up to my leadership is that it's one customer traveling between stores online and marketing channels. And if you're leveraging multiple tools to segment that customer and then turn how you speak back to them, you're never going to be giving the customer the best experience that they can have and obviously, translating into better business performance.
The second space is within our workflow management. So today from a content standpoint, we have a lot of manual processes. And those all obviously had back stories. I'm sure many of you in your companies deal with on a day-to-day basis where teams need to be small and scrappy, budgets were tight, right? But it's led to us again, being scrappy with solutions like PowerPoint, Smartsheets. And we know we need to unify that process a lot more if we want to deliver content and speed in scale.
And then hopping over to our content management ecosystem. So this ties back to what Rebecca was alluding to and what you'll see more of the details of this presentation dive into. But leaning more into a proper content management system for marketing and that being AEM and all that comes with that platform having more consistency around templating and process. And we believe that'll be a key component to unlock the personalization, speed, and scale. And then lastly, from an activation standpoint, getting better in the way that we orchestrate those journeys to our customers. With many larger companies, we're sending out pretty sophisticated marketing messages and trigger-based messaging. But really to understand what the right message is for the right person, the right channel at the right time, we believe is going to be critical to unlocking that personalization at speed and scale. And there's a lot of data science interplay there whether you have a more mature data science organization or whether you're leveraging some of the models that Adobe offers out of the box. We believe that combination of data segmentation, content to eventually drive journey orchestration is really the key to our architecture. And again, whether you're a large enterprise, smaller, medium size, that combination of AEM and AEP is largely, I think what everyone's striving after. Whether you're using all Adobe products or using a combination of both that are more composable, but that combination of content, data segmentation to drive the personalization, I think is ultimately the key to unlock. And we know that we have a lot of work to do to get our technology in order as Matt saying there's one customer, so why would we have different technologies that tell us how to talk to those customers. But the way that our teams operate and the processes that they leverage today is also very siloed. So in coordination with new technology, we're really looking at how we transform the way that we're working across this content lifecycle as well. So starting all the way up with strategy and planning, historically, we've had teams that plan how to talk to our customers separately and they don't always coordinate those plans. And so we're really looking at how we leverage this marketing strategy, really figure out how to pull it through in individual channels, which do need their own strategy as well, and then sort out how to hand over a cohesive intake, or strategy, or brief to a creative team who will be able to take that and execute on it. In this creative and content production space, we're doing a lot of work, obviously, implementing AEM for our email and paid media channels, but it's a new tool. They don't leverage this tool today. They've got five or six different tools that they're leveraging to build this content. So for us to really push toward content reuse and to enable them to be faster and to really increase the speed to market, we have to build operations and process and really change the way that they're working today. So there's a lot of process work happening here.
The goal really is to create more variations of content, so we can speak to more audiences in a more personalized way with incremental content variations. We're going to need to be able to activate, publish, and really deliver that. So that's an increase on the teams that do this work. So really looking at eventually optimizing a lot of this with technology, which Matt can talk about in a second, but we're also looking at how can we just make the processes that they have today more efficient, how can we automate where it makes sense, and then really underpinning all of this with the metadata that's needed for us to both track performance, give our measurement program, more capabilities to glean insights that we haven't had access to in the past. And we also know that that data foundation is really important for us to be able to automate processes across the entire content lifecycle, as well as leverage AI, so really setting the foundation for how we're going to do that. And then because we're changing and really transforming the way that we're working across this entire content lifecycle, we need to really upgrade our workflow management program that we have today. So we leverage Workfront. It works great, but it has grown up with us in this siloed way. And so really making sure we can break down those barriers and using the technology to help us do that is important. So that will be really key for us when it comes to a planning process, how we track the projects through their lifecycle, as well as manage all of our resources. So a lot of work happening across the content lifecycle and we're really looking to anchor around that implementation of AEM to really drive a lot of this change. And so that's been the catalyst for how we're planning on implementing this and rolling it out.
Okay. Thanks, Rebecca. So we talked a lot about the what and the why. So this slide focuses a little bit more tactically on the how and how we're rolling out our implementation of AEM.
So phase one's really been focused on getting the foundation right, building those scalable templates and components that will set us up to expand to whichever channels we want to push into, whichever variance of email and paid social we eventually evolve into.
So we're actually working on wrapping that up within the next few weeks. I think we're down to weeks not even months at this point. So that'll be great to knock that out. And I think just showcasing value internally, right? So with any implementation, it's a mixture of selling the vision, but also showcasing these iterative value drops to leadership to say, "Look at what we've done in a short period of time, look at the value this is creating and showcasing how that's eventually going to achieve the longer term vision." So then our phase two is largely going to be focused on building more scale, working off that foundation, scaling out to more email campaigns, more paid social campaigns, but at the same time, making sure that these parallel tracks of some of our enterprise CDP work and AEM are eventually going to converge into one and get us to a more journey orchestration and personalization at scale. In parallel with AEM, as I mentioned some of the data challenges, we've also kicked off more of an enterprise CDP work stream to combine some of those different channels, siloed challenges that we have into one more cohesive solution.
That's still running a little bit behind where AEM is but I think we really want to make sure that we're thinking about those two things holistically versus in silos. And then phase three there's a little bit more blue skies, but I think when you hear the Keynote this morning around some of the GenAI capabilities, I think we clearly see both the content space, as well as the customer segmentation space eventually taking on a lot more of the AI capabilities, making people's jobs a lot more simplified and efficient, and ultimately getting content and messaging in the hands of the right customers through the right channels.
Okay, so more tactically, I wanted to talk about outcomes, and why does all of this work that we're telling you about matter, right? So within this space on the left, within email and paid social, really improving campaign speed to market, and building these flexible, re-usable templates. As Rebecca described, there's just a lot of manual process in place, and this will greatly streamline people's jobs internally, a lot better operating efficiency. But again, it all ties back to the customer, right? If internally we are working more efficiently to get campaigns out the door in a more timely manner with the right content, the customer is going to get a better experience. And ultimately, in a retail business, it's obviously all about the customer and delivering those experiences.
And then within the social channels, driving more omnichannel engagement and some of that upper mid-funnel strategy and how we can keep that messaging cohesive between all of these different channels.
And then, Rebecca, I think you want to add a little more. Yeah, I think from the outcome standpoint, when we talk about making things faster, just to put some context around what we're doing with this phase one implementation, our goal is really to take-- There are a lot of different campaigns with different levels of complexity. Our goal is to take something that might have taken us 10 weeks in our previous world to take 6 weeks. So we're looking to trim that by about four weeks with the implementation of a lot of process, some automation, and then AEM. And then, obviously, as we move over to the right side of the screen, which Matt will talk to you about, we'll look to shave additional time off of some of those standard timelines that we have. Yep. Yeah. I know I hit on a little bit of this in the last side, but we really believe the CDP and orchestration is going to be unlocked to more of those individualized, personalized journeys. And for us, we're in a very unique business where our customers are really organically traveling between stores and site. Whereas with a lot of other businesses, I think that could be more forced, where maybe you're an e-commerce first business, we want to build more brick and mortar presence or vice versa. You've traditionally been brick and mortar trying to build out e-commerce. So for us, I think it's really key to engage and retain our customers by having that connective tissue between going where they shop, right? So I mean, for example, I can be more of a digital-first customer, so I'm going to be more of a stores first customer. And especially with the assortment that we offer at Home Depot, there's always an opportunity to either cross-sell, folks, or pair them up with a different product segment or just understand more about who they are and what they do. Obviously, with the springtime coming up maybe you understand that I go in and I buy mulch and fertilizer. So maybe I need some lawn tools or a lawn machine, right? But serving that more personalized marketing is just giving the customer a better experience and helping them think less about what they need and make that shopping experience easier and less friction filled. Yeah. We have a lot of work to do from a technology standpoint, but really just putting a point on the fact that we have to prepare our teams to really operate in the same way. So just like Matt is saying, we have this type of spaghetti workflow tech architecture today, but really, when we look at enhancing the technology to build more cohesive experiences for our customers, we have to prepare people to do the same and to build the strategies and to build enough content to meet those needs as well. Yeah. And I'll give a shout out here to our Deloitte partners.
So Deloitte has been with us and working on the AEM implementation, but they've also helped us with some of the strategic thinking through the scale and reach they have and industry expertise. So they've been really great partners working alongside us on the AEM implementation. And what I've really loved about the partnership is that they're also teaching us how to fish for ourselves, right? So eventually, the goal is that we transition some of this work to our internal FTEs and staff up teams and build out skill sets because within my tech team just being honest, I didn't have any AEM people, so to speak to start, right? So we needed to onboard those skill sets, train up people who are already in, in seats. And I think they've just been great partners in helping us think through the strategy, but also helping us eventually take the baton when we're ready.
Yeah. So to sum it up, this is where we are today. We've talked a lot about all of the work that we need to do to improve it, and where we're trying to go is just a more streamlined, cohesive workflow, where the people can leverage the technology they need to deliver the best customer experiences that we can.
Cool. Thank you, Matt and Rebecca.
So hopefully, that at least some the content was insightful.
I wanted to just start off asking a couple of quick questions, and then we'll open it up to the audience if you all want to think about some questions to ask.
As we've gone through this journey, I was actually thinking back. It's been almost a year since we got through this journey thinking about some of the requirements and use cases and going through the process and all of that. I know that for us and our team, there's been a lot of lessons learned that we've been able to takeaway coming out of the year or so, and as we go through the rest of the phases here.
Lessons learned for you, Rebecca, if you want to start and then-- Yeah. I think, really making sure that we sell the value and get everybody on board is really important.
There's a lot of change, and that is very difficult for people to adjust to. And it's not just the technology, and training is not going to fix it, and documentation is not going to fix it. It's really about people understanding where we're going, why we're going there, and what we need to do. So we need them to understand what change we're asking them to do. We need them to understand why they need to do it and want to, and then really have all of the knowledge and ability like Matt was mentioning earlier, they need to be able to adopt. And so I think, moving forward will be really important for us to continue to drive value and drive alignment. Would you add anything, Matt, or do you have-- Yeah. I'd echo off that. I think what comes to mind for me is just instilling teams and functions, people to think with an enterprise mindset.
When I was describing one of the previous slides of how we've got a bunch of siloed solutions by function, right, I think you could remember the historical context that people built those tools out for a reason and are very passionate behind them, and it might serve the one need for their function really well. But again, if you're thinking about Home Depot as a whole, and what's best for the consumer and what's best for Home Depot's business as a whole, excuse me, you got to think with an enterprise mindset, right? So I think it can be tough at times I think for folks to adjust that way, but I think it's really critical to achieving the goals and the mission.
And then the other thing I'll say is just making sure you have the right ecosystem set up even outside of your working teams, whether it's with implementation partner, obviously, with the right support from Adobe and their folks.
Adobe's obviously a big company, right? There's a lot of different departments and roles to navigate through. But I think in addition to partners like Deloitte, I think Adobe can be really helpful and their team's really powerful, if you understand how to navigate between customer success teams and architecture teams and your account teams. So I think really getting that structured from the start and how the whole collective team is going to operate leaning into something like this, I think was a big key for us. Yeah. I mean, that last point is so important. I think I know a lot of you sitting in the audience are either have gone through a transformation or about to embark on one. One of the thing or I guess two things that really stood out for me was, obviously, our partnership and then partnering with Adobe as we were building out what that roadmap and the plan was going to look like. That worked really cohesively and effectively. We obviously had to fine-tune it over a couple of iterations, but it worked well. But the second thing was, which I think having spent a little over 12 years in the Adobe space and this is probably my 20th year in the CMS DXP space, and having seen so many retailers and CPGs having gone through this, the difference in our journey was we were very intentional at every step of the process. We're like, "Listen, we have to do this. Time is of the essence, but let's do this right." That was the key critical component. So every organization undergoing a transformation like this are going to have roadblocks and missteps. But at every step of the way, we took the time to say, "Okay, listen, we have to move fast, but let's also do the right thing because we are building for what needs to be an extensible and a re-usable future." So that was also a key something that was important for me.
Last thing ask you building off of the Keynote, the demo those of you who were there for the Keynote, the last product demo that they did the three of us, we caught up after at lunch. We're like, "Hey, they hit on a lot of the points that we're actually doing as part of our transformation journey." GenStudio for Performance Marketing, Content Ops, and everything else. Rebecca, start with you again like, vision, excited, early days, obviously, two hours after the Keynote, right? Really excited. Since we're going to solve all of our problems. Right. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. No. I think it really was validating I think, for the plan that we've put together. We know we have a lot of foundational work. There's a lot of foundational technology. We need our teams to be able to adopt and adjust to the new capabilities that we're going to have, and that's really that phase three of the implementation that Matt was talking about setting the foundation, building the capabilities across CDP orchestration layer. And then, yeah, GenStudio just looks really exciting and particularly excited about capabilities within paid social, which is always can be difficult.
Yeah. And for me, I think what stood out the most was just really how Adobe framed up the harmonization of AEP and AEM. I mean, going back to what I was saying earlier. And then this is the exact way that I pitch it to my leadership internally, but it it's the combination of the data component and the content component that's really going to drive personalization at speed and scale. And if you distill it that way and then look at how Adobe is set up with AEP and AEM and again, it's modular, so you don't have to be invested in the complete Adobe Stack even though I'm sure sitting at Adobe Conference, we should lean that way.
But anyway, I think it's really just key to think about it through those two tracks. And as you're all teeing up your vision and your North Star, I think that's been a really helpful way to compartmentalize the vision and then break it out into the more tactical work streams and chunks to get there. Sure. Cool.
We've actually talked about this before, and we're like, "Should we give people time to ask questions?" We did decide that we're going to give you time to ask questions. So anyone wants to ask any questions, we’re game.
I think we're all done.
Cool. Well, thank you, everyone. - Thank you. - Thank you for coming, joining us.
Appreciate your time.
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