[Music] [Hilary Cook] Hello, everyone. As Anjul mentioned, my name is Hillary Cook and right off the bat, I need to admit something. I feel as though many of us during our careers have gotten the advice and the feedback to act like you've been there and fake it 'til you make it. But I've never been here.
And I'm not good at faking it. So, this is my very first keynote, and I've certainly never spoken in front of thousands of people. So thanks in advance for being a really fantastic audience. [Applause] [Hilary Cook] I don't know about y'all, but between yesterday and what we've seen today, there are some pretty incredible innovations coming our way. And what I'm curious about, particularly for the other practitioners in the audience, is how many of you are as excited as you are perhaps skeptical of your ability to actually implement what you're seeing. Is that fair? [Applause] [Hilary Cook] The question that I ask myself every day, and I'm curious if you do the same, is, are we as marketers and technologists, truly ready to take advantage of these innovations? I'm going to say what I think we're thinking, which is that we're not. But I do believe that readiness is within our control, and it's far simpler than we thought.
So let's talk about how we actually do personalization at scale. Are you game? Thank you. Marriott operates over 9500 hotels around the world, more than 30+ brands, 10,000 destinations 350 campaigns annually all around the globe with thousands of marketers and associates trying to reach our customers and serve our more than 220 million Marriott Bonvoy members. Helping our customers connect to these opportunities, as I mentioned, are thousands of associates and marketers, and while they are focused on creating amazing, memorable experiences for our guests my job, my team's job is to focus on serving them. As the leader of marketing operations. I hear those stats and immediately start thinking through the implications. Can our marketers access the content they need easily? What manual work is slowing them down? Are we reaching customers in the right channels? What does success look like? And do I have the data to form the insights to measure that success? Do we have a consistent taxonomy? Do we have a taxonomy? Do we understand the relationship between our brands, our destinations, our partners and the digital assets our customers will interact with? At this scale, even in a perfect world, it's pretty complex. But here's the thing, the biggest barrier is not the technology. It's us. In 2027, Marriott will turn 100 years old. Whatever challenges you're facing in your organization, I promise you same.
I was speaking with someone at a dinner the other night, and we were talking about how across our industry, for those brands that have been around for more than 40 or so years, many of our marketing databases and capabilities are actually built on the idea of sending direct mail. It was a single touchpoint. It was a very easy process. It was simple assets. And our digital industry has not only grown but exploded. And we sit here at the precipice of how to leverage AI. And so two and a half years ago, my team and I decided to be really bold. We took off rose colored glasses, we looked the future in the face, and we found an objective way to assess our readiness. AI is not a silver bullet for fixing decades of debt. It is, however, an incredible amplifier if you're willing to do the right work. Otherwise, I believe it's just a shiny object that will never get adopted at scale. So the question we all have is where do we start? And I tend to find things, that other people find boring, really sexy. So this happens to be one of my favorite slides.
There are four things I believe that every marketer in here needs to know and have in their arsenal. And for those of you who are our partners, I come from the partner side, I spent the vast majority of my career implementing before I moved over to client. And the thing that I didn't realize when I came into the client side is that any time brands get together in a room where partners are not the first thing we all say is, all right, so what are you really doing? How are you really doing that? Is that real? And the key for me that I have found since being client side are these four things: Document your process flows. And one of the things you're going to find is that as you ask all your people in your organization how you take something from intake to end market is that no one will tell you the same thing twice.
When you get a report that gives you data and insights, that you then make business decisions on how to proceed, trace that data back to its original source, all the way. When you start to implement technology actually document the original set of use cases you used to implement it. Because when you go to add on to that technology or say, well, so-and-so told me that tech would do this, how you chose to implement it from the beginning has a massive bearing on your ability to scale it afterwards.
And the last for me is accountability. And I'm going to show you what I mean, tell you what I mean. When we started this process and we did these three things, we found some pretty astonishing things. We felt them. But I didn't have the numbers or the data or the documentation to tell my leadership. On average, we were 110 days from intake to end market, 349 steps, 45 disparate processes that were all interdependent upon each other. But those 45 different teams did not know it. So one would make improvements to fix theirs, and then they would cause complications in three other processes they weren't aware of. One of my favorite stats and learnings is that 43 artifacts, documents, intakes were collected. 41 were duplicative in some manner.
We chuckle because everyone in here recognizes that in yourself. There is very real power in being able to name and quantify your pain points. By doing this it gave us the map to take to our leadership and come up with a game plan. The first thing we did was gain executive alignment, and I am incredibly fortunate to have some incredible leaders at Marriott, many of whom are in the audience today, across marketing, global technology, digital and data. And they went all in and have continued to be incredible champions of our work. Once we had our data in order, and we had executive alignment, we were able to stand up, for us, a really robust CDP, and have a single view of the customer. This was incredibly important, because when you think about the five regions that we have, and the thousands of marketers, if I have marketers defining an audience in different ways, it leads to a very disruptive customer experience. I'm standing on this stage, so it won't surprise you that we chose the best in the industry, Adobe AEP, to lead the charge for us.
As we had a centralized view of the customer and federated data, this means that I now have a strong foundation to begin maturing all of our marketing activation capabilities.
We chose to stand up what we call MAPA, Marriott loves an acronym, Marketing And Personalization Accelerator. For us, this looked like taking our marketing capabilities and matching them with very real use cases that our marketers were trying to drive. This was a cross-audience strategy and data activation, content acceleration and syndication, and orchestration and decisioning.
When you build with purpose and in partnership with your marketers, experimentation fuels capability building and you prove value while ensuring long-term success. You may hear many of us at Marriott talk about it in terms of Pilot, Scale and BAU. This means that we're able to experiment in a very agile and fast way. And then as we start to see that succeed, we will then build more use cases into it until we've reached enough scale that we say this should be true for everything. And that way we stair step into our maturity. The fun thing about going about it this way, is that for us, it works. There are two first use cases that we did around our welcome journey, which, from a legacy perspective, was three touchpoints, now it is over 17 across 100 days, and our retargeting series, which we've had since, I think 2016/2017. But we felt that there was incredible unlocked value in that. And when we did the process documentation and we said, these are the things we want to fix, we want to get our process in order, I want to make it easier for my marketers, and I want to leverage these capabilities. We took 45 processes down to one. We had a unified view of the customer. We were 93% faster about being able to update content or offers for an existing campaign into market. This means my marketers actually can prove their destiny. If that campaign is not working, they actually have a chance in real-time to update that content. We were six times ahead of our revenue goal, and I sat in a meeting in September where I said, I don't know how we're going to meet this. But because we did a pilot scale approach, it meant that as we built and became more mature, we also started to accelerate. And so in the last three months of the year, I went from not knowing if we would hit it to exceeding it by six times. Which is the same thing, you see, and I promise this is a true stat, is in our content. We went from having static, complete built campaigns, to now having more than 500,000 variations of the welcome journey. Well, on our way, very close, in fact, to being over 2 million. And if you look across our content, we're now in the tens of millions of variations. With a 70% reduction time to market. [Applause] [Hilary Cook] Thanks. [Applause] [Hilary Cook] As we've scaled across our use cases, all that hard work is allowing us to accelerate the value to our customers and our business. At the end of the day, we are all here because we want to be on the cutting edge of innovation, and to make our customers' experiences better. I don't believe the future is happening to us. I believe it's ours to build. And remember, hard work does not have to be complicated, and taxonomy is sexy.
Thank you so much for the time and for being an amazing audience, and I look forward to continuing the conversation. [Applause]
