[Music] [Heather Freeland] Well, maybe as the last few folks trickle in. Just a big welcome to everyone and thank you for joining us today. Hopefully, you all have had a great, first official day of Summit. And there's been a lot of great content and incredible speakers and we're here to build on that. So first, I'm Heather Freeland and I'm the Chief Brand Officer at Adobe. And I'm joined on stage today by Jason Oke who's the Global Client President at dentsu. And one of the reasons we wanted to do this session today is because dentsu and Adobe officially, about a quarter ago, entered into a partnership as one of our preferred agencies. And the origin of that partnership came from an agency RFP process that we ran last year. But-- [Jason Oke] It started like a week ago to like-- - Exactly. Exactly. - Sorry, sorry, year ago this week-- We were just reminiscing about that and what was really special and different about the RFP process was that we decided to lay down the gauntlet and say, that for any of our agency partners, we want them to work with us to become the best in class example and the industry-leading example of how to build the ultimate content supply chain. And also how to be customer zero using Adobe's own tools. And so when we connected with the dentsu team, we were particularly excited about the work they had already been doing with our tools, with other clients around the world and what we could continue to raise the bar for ourselves on, but then also what we could build together heading into the future. Absolutely.
So we are excited to walk you through that journey that we've been on and how we've been looking at it. But we also want to make sure this is an interactive session. I know there's a lot of questions going on too. So we'll speak for a little bit, but we really have carved out a lot of time for Q&A. So be sure to tee them up in your mind as we go through the session.
So I've talked about a little bit, the relationship that we're on and one of the really special things about the journey is we are looking to really build a global ecosystem for the development of content. And not only do we want that to be powered by Adobe's Gen Studio, but we really want to bring in all of the incredible new generative AI tools as well, and see ourselves as the-- What we refer to internally as customer zero, which is how do we both use the tools but also influence what our product teams on what is built.
And this becomes that much more important because, like many of you in the room, I'm sure we are dealing with the massive explosion in the demands for content. And you see it every day, but there's constantly a need for not just more channels, but we have more products we're marketing, more languages, more formats, and, of course, the demand for personalization.
So the content ecosystem has become not just that much more complex, but the demands for more content have grown exponentially. And as I'm sure many of you all can identify with, the resources, both funding and people does not grow at the same rate as the demands for content. So it's incumbent upon us to really figure out how to make the most of these tools and products to really help accelerate that.
So I'd love to hear maybe a little bit more from you, Jason, about what you're seeing. I know we're embarking on this journey together, but I'd love to hear your observations on what you're seeing across clients at dentsu. Yeah, for sure. And I think listening to the conversations over the last day, we're all facing some version of this. But we're seeing this four interlinked factors behind all of this. One is, we're all dealing with the fragmented media ecosystem. Right? More and more channels. Just looking at my streaming bills every month, I think, is one example of that. Hundreds and hundreds of channels. The second thing is more and more customer segmentation. Right? I think now we're often dealing with dozens of customer segments because we have the increasing ability with first party data, to have really sophisticated audience strategies. But that just means you need more and more content to be able to speak to each one of those audiences and drive the right level of engagement. The third thing is there's a demand for constantly refreshed content. Right? Content gets stale really quickly, and especially, with things like seasonality or trying to keep up with social media trends, news cycles, all those things that churn incredibly quickly. I think there's just a demand that we all have to be creating more and more content week by week. So as you can see on this slide, with a relatively small number of variables, really quickly you get to hundreds of thousands of assets, which is just impossible to do manually. Right? You'd have to have almost an infinitely large team in order to crank out that many assets. And as Heather just said, none of us had infinite budgets. The fourth thing though is, in an increasingly competitive environment, I think there's just a demand. Our products are launching faster and faster, right? Whether you're in the software industry, hardware industries, like phones and computers, food and bev, trying to launch new flavors all the time, deals and offers, to respond to changing market conditions. I think we're all in the situation of just having to create more and more content to keep up with the demands of the business. And Adobe is a great example of this, Heather, because you guys over the last couple of years went from launching products, maybe a couple of times a year, to launching new releases almost every week or even more than once a week. Yeah. Absolutely. It is the bags under my eyes probably reveal that. But, yes, it's the pace of innovation, particularly in the technology world, has just grown exponentially. And it really is mind-boggling how fast that's coming and again, the increasing pressures it puts upon us to increase the amount of content and diversity and how we're going to market. And it's so interesting for us is for a long time, we had this very linear creative process. And what we see really is now a bit more of what I like to refer to as the spaghetti mess. I see a lot of people taking photos. This probably feels very familiar and maybe cathartic to know that you're not in this alone. We all suffer from this spaghetti mess. Because as we have infinite reviewers and approvers and channel owners and what have you, it just gets more and more complicated. But it's also more and more difficult to keep track of it all. And with the volume of content we're producing and the needs for personalization, we really need that, a system to help keep track of it. And also not just keep track of it, but help us drive continuous improvement to understand our own content operations and our own metrics of how we're performing as a marketing team in terms of how we're producing. And so we've made a big shift over the last couple years in investing much more in not just standardizing our workflows and implementing new tools, but putting a greater, level of importance on operations and program management to help make sure that we are flowing everything through the system as efficiently as possible and again getting away from that spaghetti mess. There's still some spaghetti. Yeah. There's still some spaghetti. Yes. He is our agency so he knows our spaghetti. - So-- - Delicious spaghetti. Yes. Exactly. So the risk of not addressing this though is very real because if you continue to have this complexity and you're not getting it under control, as things continue to get even more complex, it will get even messier.
So I think what we need to do is in what the journey that we've been going on since we joined forces has really been to say, "Okay, how do we get started in wrangling this and streamlining how we work together?" So maybe take a step back, Jason. As you guys have embarked on this with us, how did you think about getting started? Well, first, just to build on what you just said. Right? Working that way with that spaghetti mess is not just time-consuming, it's expensive. - Right? - Yes. It results in poor quality work. It results in teams being burned out and stretched to the max. And ultimately, it results in a poor customer experience. Right? And none of us want that. So this is a very real problem that we need to address and we need to fix, for all of those things to be more sustainable.
And when we first started working together, we did a bit of an audit and discovery of how you are working, and noticed things like content sitting in lots of different places. Right? So some things on SharePoint drives and Dropboxes, and AEM Assets, in Figma, sitting on somebody's desktop, on their computer, or on a hard drive under somebody's desk, or on a thumb drive somewhere. Right? You have content all over the place. And so you have no visibility really into, what even is the problem that you need to solve. So one of the first things that we had to do was to do a content audit. If you're going to operate with this volume and this velocity, you need to at least know where your starting point is. And you need to have one seamless view across everything. It's not just us as an agency. Adobe also has an in-house studio. There's other agencies in the IAT mix media agencies and other creative agencies. And so we had to step back and diagnose what the problem was to begin with, in order to get to that single unified view.
So the very first thing you have to do is just to do an audit. Right? Like, how much are you actually dealing with? And you guys did a huge amount of work to actually give us very, very long detailed spreadsheets about all the hundreds of thousands of assets that were being made all over the world.
And so that was the first starting point.
And it's not just counting the assets. It's also looking at what's your taxonomy, what's your metadata look like, how your assets actually being tracked all over the world. And so that was the first stage to really just gauge those, the organization readiness between our two organizations about what's the problem and how ready are we to deal with this.
So that sets you up for success. Right? The next thing was, we had to do a real change management exercise too, to understand, like, how do we change together. Right? Who do we have to bring along for this journey? Different departments within Adobe, making sure all the agencies are all marching together. And so don't underestimate the change management that's required. Right? This isn't just buying a new piece of software. It really is changing the way that you do content, end to end and transforming the internal processes and the entire agency ecosystem.
And you need to have a plan to, what are you actually going to do with generative AI? Right? That's a huge part of this, and it's a huge unlock, but you also have to know what you're getting yourself into. Right? Are you doing this to let your creatives focus on higher value tasks by removing some of the mundane day to day things? Firefly is great at that. And you've seen some of the presentations today automating and allowing you to do some of the day to day creative tasks really, really quickly so that your creatives can focus on more strategic things, concepting, ideating.
But also just automating things, like pulling metadata through, content tagging, bringing the data directly from your briefs into the platforms and into the deployment, frees up a lot of time for the teams to work on other things. So there's a lot of questions that we had to ask going into this about what we wanted to get out of it.
And that all ties into measurement and optimization as well. Right? What you tag is what you can measure. So we had to think really clearly about what are we actually tagging, what does that metadata look like, so that we can then track the right performance and efficiency KPIs. And Adobe was really clear that they wanted to see certain efficiencies and certain productivity gains, not just for their own benefit, but also to be able to tell that customer zero story that Heather talked about to other companies, about the benefits that could be realized from this. So there's a lot of pressure on us as a joint ecosystem to document what we were doing and make sure that we were really clear on the benefits we were seeing.
Yeah. So-- Yeah. And it is funny because I think, when we embarked on this partnership, we saw this as much as an opportunity for us to change internally too. It was not just asking, dentsu to come in. It was like, how can we raise the bar for how we operate overall? So it was definitely a lot of change management for sure. For sure. And it is interesting too.
I think that the notion of what we're trying to do and what we're trying to accomplish together is not new. - Right? - No, it's not. And the need and how we build content together has not changed over time. It's just how we're doing it. Yeah. For sure. The content supply chain isn't a new idea. Right? Like, you think about planning, briefing, creating, deploying, measuring, those are things we've all been doing for decades. Right? So what has changed? Well, what's changed has been things like automation and AI systems, platforms are changing every single one of those steps. Right? So you can actually have generative AI help you write a brief now. Right? Take previous briefs or take previous learnings and help you write new briefs. So that strategy process can get a lot faster. You can have generative AI help to create content faster. You can have automated deployment. Right? And measurement and optimization cycles. So the whole thing can actually be a lot more efficient and a lot faster, but it's still the same steps. Yeah. And it is funny because I think what's changed about them too is they're not totally linear. - No. - Always either. And the need for agility and the need to pivot with the moment, I mean, as we're launching products into the market super fast, sometimes what we are going to go to market with literally could change based on the technology days before we're about to ship to localization as Jason feels very, very deeply, when we throw changes their way at the last minute. But I think we need to build systems that are not linear in the same way that they once were. So what I love about GenStudio, what I love about this is you actually start taking all of these tools, that used to be separate things. Right? As a team, you might be in Workfront, and then you'd go into Creative Cloud, then you might go into Frame.io to do some reviews, go into AEM Assets, to figure out where your content was. What I love about GenStudio is you're starting to bring all that together into one user experience, into one dashboard. You can actually have everything all at once. And it's not-- There's a high switching cost. Right? If your teams are switching back and forth between platforms all day long, even if it's all within the Adobe stack. I love what Adobe's done about bringing all these things together to actually start having the same unified environment where you can plan and create and produce and review and publish and measure all in the same space. And that really is a game-changer. Yeah. It's absolutely helped us really streamline how we operate. And we're continuing to grow and learn from it every day. I mean, I think one of-- We had a working session yesterday with our teams and part of that was-- And this is any great agency client relationship but just having open dialogue about what's working and what's not, what we can improve upon and where we can get clearer about our role relative to yours, how we can get clear about how we're using our tools, how we can make sure those handoffs are much more seamless using our tools. And so that's just been-- That's an important part of the change that we're driving as well. So it's interesting. We've been using all of these tools for as long as they've been around. We've always been customers' customer zero. But let's talk a little bit about the model that we've established. And I mentioned before or Jason mentioned as well that change management is half the battle. And I tend to think about this in five different dimensions because this is not just onboarding to new tools. This is not just changing new workflows but it is really examining every part of your entire content supply chain to see how it can evolve based on these new ways of working, these new tools, this new technology. And so the way we've done it is we've evaluated things on first looking at our content operations. So how do we look across everything from the tools we use to our workflows and what that looks like. Then we have examined all of our technology. Obviously, we have the gift of working for Adobe. So we get all of our tools first and foremost, many before they come to market to help pressure test them. But we've had to look at every single tool we use and evaluate, how we use it as a part of the ecosystem. We've also been looking at, like, what's the right way to pilot new tools and scale what we learn across the organization. And I think that's the other key piece of this is as you're using new generative AI tools, finding a way to seamlessly integrate them into workflows is not a foregone conclusion. And I think you do have to be willing to make some of those changes. Now this is an interesting, so brand expression is another important piece of this. And this is one that's often forgotten. But one of the things that's really critical to being able to scale your content and go globally much more easily and much more seamlessly is having a really clearly defined brand expression. And we went through a brand redesign, we have been going through it over the last two years, and I think that's what's enabled us to be able to scale much more easily, to build templates, to put things in Express, as you saw this morning so that we can scale, to other markets or in other channels. And so getting really tight and clear on your brand expression, and enabling you to use AI, to help scale it. and our other creative tools is really critical. We've also had to look at our whole content ecosystem. So previously, we had literally hundreds of agencies we worked with around the globe. And if we wanted to get everything in one place, if we wanted to move quickly, if we wanted to examine our content metrics and how we were performing, we literally had to consolidate so that we could really see things in one place and get the most efficiency out of all of this. And so we had to look at all of the partners, all of our whole ecosystem in doing this to make sure that we were getting this right.
And then, finally, we've had to evaluate our talent and org model. You need people who are going to be willing to jump in and get their hands dirty with new tools, who are going to forge new opportunities on what you can do and build with them. You need people who are willing to change and adapt at this moment, and it's incredibly critical to do that. And as I alluded to before, we also had to look at how we were set up internally to make the right investment in a streamlined content supply chain from an operation standpoint. We've even identified entirely new roles, like creative technologists who-- They are the people who are helping run these pilots. And so there's a lot of different things to consider as you go through this entire journey. But as I said, the content ecosystem and the partnership with dentsu has been really strong in terms of helping us to navigate our way through this, for sure to help us move further and faster. Yeah. And we just see so many benefits to this. So just even the workflow piece, getting that data, that workflow data is such a game-changer. So you can start to see how efficient different teams are. For example, they're one team who's always getting things done faster or more efficiently or with fewer reviews than another team. And then you can figure out, well, what's working over there and how do I port it across all the rest of the team. Or another team that has 15 rounds of review. Or a team that has 15-- No one has that, I'm sure. We don't talk about it. And so that's a huge thing. But we've also had situations, where maybe something went wrong or there was a missed deadline and you start pointing fingers. Well, now you have a single source of truth. You can actually go and find out where the issues were. Whereas before, maybe you would have had to go, and pull time sheet data, and go and look at email chains, and look at workback schedules that are in various Excel spreadsheets, and things like that, where now you actually have a single source of truth to go, well, where did we actually miss a step in this process? And you can figure out and fix it next time. So again, having that single source of truth to pinpoint where the issues are can really change things.
The other thing that I think we love is that to come back to the generative AI piece, I think often there's a bit of a fear that maybe creatives are not going to embrace generative AI, because it's maybe competing with how they work or might replace them someday, things like that. And we're finding the exact opposite that our creative teams absolutely love the generative AI capabilities in these tools.
And they're so excited by what it lets them do. Right? Firstly, it takes away a lot of the mundane tasks. Right? If you grew up as an art director or designer, you often had to be pushing pixels around taking things out of the background, and all that can then be done at the push of a button with some of these tools, that Adobe has launched, like Generative Fill.
And there's also just this ability to have something in your mind and see it immediately. You type the right prompt, and all of a sudden, it's there. You don't have to sketch it out in pencil. You can actually see it. And that is such a gift for creatives to really be able to have it come to life so quickly. The other thing about this just as an agency is it really is an interesting use case for an agency. If you think about the content supply chain it shows why you need to have a creative agency partner that can really do end-to-end creative. You need the right production partner who knows how to produce in these kinds of environments. And dentsu, we have a scale production company called Tag, that is really an expert of this stuff and has leaned into a lot of the automation and offshoring that's required. And you need to have the right software implementation and CX capabilities, which we have through our company Merkle. So it really becomes a great use case for why you need to have the right agency partner that can put all those things together to be able to help go on this journey. It's interesting too because what Jason was saying about generative AI, and how that can be such a huge unlock. I mean, we've used a lot of this in all of our campaigns but what we find is that it enables our creative teams to really focus on the big idea and not the minute details of execution in the same way that they once had to. I mean, we used to have to literally handcraft every version of every resize, every different localized version and now we have the tools that can do that in a much more seamless way. And I think one of the things that we think about as we're embarking on using these new tools is, like, how do we think about what might be next and how do we build systems that are scalable and flexible enough so that we can continue to adapt and change as the tools enable that much more for our teams, because it's only going to continue to accelerate. And as Jason said, sometimes that can create some fear but at the same time it should create a lot of excitement for all of us about what's going to be possible. I mean, Lara, our CMO spoke this morning on stage about how creative can be the heart of building a brand and ultimately what enables to differentiate your brand and set you apart and drive deeper connections with your customers. And so if we are all clearing the way for people to focus on the big idea, to focus on the work, not focus on how the work gets done, that's just a massive unlock. And so I think as we've built campaigns like some of the ones you're seeing here before, it's just that much more critical for us to be flexible, to bring these tools into bear and to be able to focus on the big idea of the creative and let the rest flow.
It's super interesting. I always joke that technology is a lot easier to change than people are. I know I feel that very deeply myself.
But it is also about creating an excitement and energy about what's possible with our teams, and what they can be capable of with these tools at their disposal. So I'm curious to hear what you're seeing with other clients as well. Yeah. No. For sure. And I think this is the last slide, so get your questions ready, because we'll start-- Stopping for Q&A in a second. But what's exciting about this is, I think, every conversation we have is different because this is such a bespoke journey for each company. Companies are coming in, starting in different places, and have very different needs. Right? We've had conversations with clients in the food and beverage space where you're all of a sudden talking about, can generative AI create the right melted cheese look for the cheese pull for my pizza, or having the right freshness of a tomato or an avocado? But you can also have conversations about if you're a highly regulated company, very conservative company, like, how can I make sure that my generative AI content is going to be ADA compliant or is going to be FDA compliant? Right? So you end up having very, very interesting conversations. But I think there's four basic entry points, that we've seen, which you can see up there on the slide. The first one is people just being overwhelmed by that spaghetti mess, and all of a sudden, I need to create 500,000 assets. So I can't keep up with my content needs, or I can't scale to meet the demands of the personalization and all these different platforms. Or I'm trying to be more global, but I can't keep the right local and regional nuances involved. The second thing is around that content, asset management ecosystem often being really messy. And so what we talked about, you might have content on a SharePoint and on Dropbox and on people's hard drives and on people's desktops. So I can't find the right content. I know where there's great content. I know we created the right campaign, and there's assets I want to reuse, but I don't know where they are. I can't find them. Right? And so that kind of content, ecosystem thing is a big one. The third one is around content analytics, and not knowing what's working. I think a lot of people have invested in media analytics, over the last 5 or 10 years. So you know what media channels are working, with some level of sophistication, but you often don't know what content is working and how do you separate out your content from your media channels. And so trying to figure out how do you measure content is really, really important. And the fourth thing is around process improvement and automation. Right? I was talking to a customer recently who said, "I have a 2025 marketing vision, but a 1992 org chart." Right? And so, "My systems are outdated. They're broken. They're not fit for purpose. People are using Word Docs and Excel spreadsheets. Every team is using a different process. How do I get everyone on one shared system and one shared source of truth, to be able to drive that transformation?" Like, that would be such an unlock to helping us move forward. And then what's the right change management? Right? And so the other way to look at this is the demand we're seeing from a few different verticals. Right? So one of them is highly regulated categories, like finance or health care, pharmaceuticals.
Content governance is so important if any of you work in those categories. Right? These are categories where if you run the wrong asset, you could get fined millions of dollars or you could go to jail. That's a pretty high bar for you to get your content. Right? And so having that right content governance so you know what's being created and where it's being created and where it's being deployed is so important. And Adobe has put a lot of care, and you saw some of it in David's presentation this morning, around some of the compliance layers. Right? You're not just having generative AI create stuff and put it out without any human review. There's a lot of guardrails that we put in. Adobe has been really thoughtful about this. The same with the generative AI capabilities with Firefly. You can make very brand-safe content because it's been trained on the right kinds of stock. It hasn't been trained on the open internet or on your baby photos.
And so you have a certain level of safety, which is great, and we're finding customers really respond to that. The other use case that we're seeing a lot of is in the retail segment. Right? Because there's a lot-- If you're working retail, a lot of price item stuff. Right? So bananas might be on sale in Phoenix, and avocados are on sale in Chicago. And we just ran out of eggs in the entire country, so I have to pull all the egg advertising. And if you're a retailer, you might have tons of different banners across the country. So having the right geolocation is really important. So there's a huge need for sophisticated content ecosystem to manage all of that. Thank you all for joining. We appreciate it.
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