[Music] [Jen Krempa] All right, everyone. We are at 4 o'clock, so we will go ahead and get started.
We thank you all for being the brave souls that are not yet at a happy hour and that are instead here deciding to listen to us talk about content supply chain. So you already get an award.
So my name is Jen Krempa, I'm a Chief Strategy Officer here at LeapPoint. We are an Omnicom company that really specializes at the Adobe content supply chain and bringing that to life with clients and partners. One of whom I have here today who is a wonderful partner, and she will introduce herself here in just a second and as well as introduce Newell Brands. But really what we're going to be talking about today is how Newell Brands is tackling key marketing challenges and embracing an AI-powered tools and automations to really transform that content supply chain and drive value for their business. So you heard about that a lot today in the Keynote, and I'm sure a lot of the other sessions. And so what we're really excited to do is share the journey of how that maybe actually comes to life, and how you can go through implementing that within your own team. So ready, Sam. [Sam Tuttle] Thank you, Jen. My name is Sam Tuttle. I'm the Director of Marketing and Commercial Excellence at Newell Brands. As Jen mentioned, we partnered with LeapPoint over the years, but specifically on this Adobe implementation for the past few months. So you might be thinking, who is Newell Brands? I've never heard of Newell Brands before. But certainly, you've heard of our brands and products. So we have household brands such as Sharpie, Graco, Mr. Coffee, Yankee Candle, Coleman, to name a few.
And our top market is in the US, but you can see the top 10 markets internationally here. Our headquarters are based in Atlanta. So as we talk through this presentation, we'll be mentioning some of these brands throughout. Awesome. All right. So we are going to target about 45 minutes of content. We want there to be time for questions to have this be relatable to. Okay. What are the challenges that you all are going through in your own businesses and brands that Sam can speak to, that we can speak to together? But we want to ground, of course, in-- This is coming at a time, these business challenges are at a time of monumental shift for Newell, but also for many of the industries that several of you are in. Right? So I'm going to back up for just a second to ground in the macro context of what's happening in the CPG world. Some of this will be specific to CPG, but some of these are also challenges that I'm sure no matter what your industry is that you are facing. And as we talk about, one of the things Sam's going to walk through is how to build a business case around doing this transformation. And we often find that being able to frame it in the larger macro context is really helpful. So hopefully, there are some things in here that you can even steal and take forward. But from a CPG standpoint, really over the last decade, 15 years, there's been a shift where for a long time, CPG brands were overperforming from a margin standpoint. And in 2010, that started to change. Right? They started to underperform for a number of reasons, inflation being one of them. And what that really did from a business standpoint is it said, "Okay, we're going to focus on cost down initiatives. We're going to become more efficient as a business as opposed to investing in new capabilities." There have been several challenges that CPGs have faced over the last decade, that are really necessitating change. There are content, there are-- I said content supply chain. There are actual supply chain challenges, as we think about COVID, as we think about materials, materials costs, and also consumer consciousness around their buying patterns and what they're looking for from producers, from CPGs, around things like sustainability. What are those practices? How do we have to be producing? Product pressures. Right? Need to create more product or differentiated product in the marketplace faster, which can be very challenging from a CPG standpoint when you have huge supply chains organized around this.
Retail reliance and that omnichannel experience being very reliant on the relationships with retailers. Having a DTC and e-commerce approach. What do we do? How do we get our first-party data? When do we go direct to consumer? When don't we? When do we continue to work through retailers? And then data. Either having a dearth of data, we don't have access to our first-party data, or we have so much of it that we don't know how to activate it into actual insights. So that is a lot in a few very quick breaths. But what that really boils down to and what is consistent across all of these business challenges is that it ties back to digital? How are CPGs showing up digitally? How are they leveraging data to improve every component of their business? How are they tying that back to their products? Right? That is the core of the business model that they have. And then, how do those products then translate to user experiences either in store for retailers or online through e-commerce? And so where the CPG overall has been going through a big shift of-- Okay. They've been really focused on cost reduction, but that's not enough anymore. Right? They also need growth through these new models. And what that really has produced is an imperative for change to their businesses.
Because the thing that underpins all of those four areas is content. Right? That is what brings that to life and brings that together. And so even according to McKinsey, in their 2024 CPG report, content and new marketing capabilities tied to content was one of the two accelerators for change within the entire industry. This was not a marketing report. This was acknowledging that content is a driver of growth for business, irregardless of-- This is very specific to CPG, but irregardless of industry, that is something that resonates. So as we think about content though, we all know this is the theme, one of the themes of this conference, is that it is not just content. It is the content supply chain. Content in a vacuum, if it is not structured, if it's not produced, if it's not orchestrated, if it's not ultimately activated, it doesn't add the business value that we need to drive as brands. And we all know you've seen this number, it was mentioned earlier today. Right? But there is expected to be five time content demands for CPGs even higher over the next several years. So how do we keep pace with that without drastically increasing headcount, drastically increasing agency costs, so on and so forth? And so these are things that you have heard, that you've seen, but all of that content results in an untenable scale. As we think about all those brands that Sam just shared, this is very specific, of course, to Newell. Think about all those skews. Right? We're talking about brands. We're talking about products. We're talking about specific skews, but multiplied by region, multiplied by market. There is so much, and that content needs to be produced for digital merchandising across all of our retailers. There is just a tremendous amount of content production that needs to happen. Also tend to be lagging consumer strategies for CPGs, frequently changing retail requirements. Right? So if you're working with a retailer, those requirements are changing frequently. And then also faster evolutions of product, which also require updates to content. Think everything from instruction manuals all the way down to those marketing and campaign assets.
But this is something that we see across industries. Right? This is not specific to CPG. Brands are showing up in new ways, in new places that require more content and innovation.
This is what consumers expect. Right? They expect more personalized experiences. It's also the CMOs from this survey agree that it is getting harder to produce content on a global scale. How do we localize? How do we do this globally? And a lot of creative time is spent on and you've heard this as a reoccurring theme on non-creative tasks. Right? On those manual administrative or lower level production tasks as opposed to those more strategic tasks. Which is really why at the end of the day, it's imperative to take not just a new approach to content generation, but a systemic AI-powered approach to how do we generate and then ultimately activate the content that we're generating. And the reason that we're all in this room today is because Newell saw all of this. Everything that I just said, is really been things that the business has been thinking through. And the really cool part is that they mobilized and acted, which is really what today is all about. So as Jen said, the current capacity today is not going to meet that end goal of five times more content. We have a world class internal design team and creative team that is amazing, but we can only create so much content at the capacity that we're at. So we have to underpin it with certain technologies and certain automations so we can meet that five times goal.
So some of the challenges that you all might face, as well as Newell, are disconnected workflows, siloed systems, so systems may not be talking to each other. A great example of this is metadata. So we have to input certain metadata in one system, carried over into another system, and that same person is inputting that same data in multiple systems. Creative and production. As Jen mentioned, localization is a huge limiter, as well as scaling content in a variety of ways and variations. So making sure that we are able to automate some of those ways with the technology. Another challenge is asset management. So while we have a good asset management system today, it's not great. So there's a lot of users in there today that can't find certain things because they're not tagged appropriately, or the taxonomy is not great to follow. And this is, again, underpinned by a repetitive manual task that someone is doing today, and a lot of those folks are actually our design team today that we want them to get out of. So we want them to actually do what they were hired to do in design or creative.
So the vision for success, renewal, and for others.
I'm going to talk, I'm going to be very brief here because I think that one of the things that Sam and I have talked a lot about, and Sam is going to speak to here in a minute, is that there is-- I'm going to talk broadly about what we see as bringing-- We just talked a lot about the challenges. What's that vision then for the future? What's the answer to those challenges? But then making it very specific to your business, which is I think what Newell has done really well through this process that has resonated with both their leadership and the teams that are actually doing the work day to day. So as we think about all of those challenges that I just outlined, we need to do more, we need to do better, we need to meet our consumers where they are. This is often what we see from a market standpoint. Right? That marketing organizations operate like this, that it is more relationally-driven as opposed to process-driven. There is an element of enterprise chaos. And that in order to unpack that, we really need to start with, who are the people? Right? Who are the users? What are they trying to do? What are their ways of working? What do they need to accomplish? To be able to say where and how they can be interacting and fitting within a thoughtfully designed ecosystem that meets their needs. So being able to translate that into an end-to-end process before we start thinking about how do we layer the technologies over top of that process. So that we are not bringing bad process into a tool, but really thinking strategically about where and how we're using the different tools that also leads to less confusion. Right? There is so much power in these platforms, but if they're just thrown haphazardly to teammates, they'll feel confused, they'll feel frustrated, and not be able to get the full value out of them. And so that framework stretched straight looks something like this, where it is able to move across the entire marketing life cycle, orchestrated with Workfront as the backbone is the goal. But we're talking about content. Right? So it's not just a backbone, it's also a heart. And so if Workfront is the spine of content orchestration, AEM is the place where that blood is flowing. If that content is what we are moving through the system, it is the element that brings all of that to bear. And then within that Firefly, I like to say is the jet fuel, which totally breaks the body analogy, but it is fine because it works. I tell myself that. So this is really what we think of when we think about that content supply chain ecosystem for the creative piece is how are we generating and how are our creatives creating the content? How is that flowing into Workfront and being orchestrated from a task standpoint through Workfront, reviews and approvals, and then coming into AEM Assets both for derivative creation, automation, finding, and then ultimately pushing downstream to activation platforms? To drive these outcomes, these are really then the benefits of being able to have something like this activated within your platforms.
But what's really critical is to define the vision for your business. And we were talking about this actually at a round table earlier today of-- There are so many values here. What is the one that resonates with your business, with your model, and with the challenges that are most pressing? And this is what the team has done really well. Yes. So the vision for Newell specific to this topic was driven by leading AI technologies. Newell aims to strengthen our commercial capabilities by transforming our content supply chain. So focusing on that commercial lens, making sure that we are going to be reaching our end consumer based on all the content that we will produce. So one thing that we need to do is design an integrated ecosystem with some new capabilities that we're bringing on at Newell and then also upgrading our capabilities. We've had Workfront for several years. We wanted to upgrade. We've had our DAM system for several years, and we wanted to upgrade that. And then also influence with AI technologies where we didn't have those today and certain automations where we didn't have those today. So creating an ecosystem is really important for creating this vision and tying it back to the end goal.
So just to highlight a couple things, the connected workflows through Adobe Workfront, this part, specifically, the end-to-end data, metadata management with connected workflows is going to be a driver for us for one of the goals that we will follow. So within Workfront, making sure that all that metadata is attached to specific assets before it ends up in AEM will be a game changer for us.
And then content at scale with the power of Adobe Firefly, specific to certain API connections as well as Generative AI for generative expand and tools like that, those are going to be automated production of assets and content variations, where those one of those challenges were for Newell.
And then last but certainly not least is the consistent asset management with assets. So smart tagging metadata and automated image renditions is going to be a huge leap forward for Newell and specific to tying back to our vision.
And the roadmap. So how do we get to implementation? And I will tell you guys that we are not completely implemented today. We are still very much at, I would say, through the beginning stages of some of this product implementation. But we wanted to talk about today is how do you build this business case? How do you talk to your executive leadership about how to build this business case and then ultimately get their buy-in? And you've got to get all of your stakeholder buy-in as well. So we'll go through the journey to implementation. So building the business case.
We really need to define the value that will increase the focus of here. So obviously, all the executive team, they want to see the value that they're going to get out of this. "Great. It's a cool tool. We're going to make some cool AI stuff." Like, what is the value that we're bringing? And so some of the methods that we use was just go through this exercise of how do you define the problem or opportunity around your content? Does that problem tie to the company's strategic objectives? If it doesn't, which we may need to talk about, if it doesn't, then you may not have as much buy-in with your executive leadership if it's not tying to the overall company's strategic objectives. Also, evaluating potential solutions and expected benefit. So gathering some of the current data points that you have around your content supply chain and evaluating those time and cost savings, and also paired with the increase in content volume that you're gaining, you will really benefit from putting this in your business case to leadership. And then, third here, select the best-fit solution that meets your needs. So gaining that leadership, buy-in as well as stakeholder buy-in for the selection of the solution before moving forward. And then, obviously, outlining the implementation approach. So designing an ecosystem to support all the ROI that you found within that business case.
And some of this outlining, the building of a business case for transformation, specifically in these eight steps here, the stakeholder interviews and workshops is vital. So you really need to get on the floor with people that are the doers and the users of these systems to confirm what is actually going to change their day to day and then multiply that to see what is actually going to be impacted down the road.
Also with some of this is the use cases. So specific to creating use cases, that is going to be the center of what you develop for your project implementation after this is approved. So the use cases is this tried and true source of truth that you're always going to refer back to make sure those use cases are valuable, they tie with ROI, and then you can actually deliver those results based on the pilots that you run.
Do you mind going back to there? - Yeah. - Just one second. Because I want to just also give the room a sense of, you all probably spent two to three months-- Yes. Doing this business case process to be able to have just a very well thought out ability to bring this forward that ultimately went to the board and got board level buy-in from a public company. Right? And so there was that level of discipline. So if you're walking out of here and being like, this is-- We want to implement this. Yeah. Definitely try to talk to Sam afterwards. Yeah. But it's just important, I think, to know that there is that level of rigor, but it can actually accelerate then once you've gone through that process because those are still, and we're going to talk about this in a second, the guiding principles that we're using as we continue to implement today that we keep coming back to. Yes. But the other thing that I think is really important about this stage, if you are going into this, and this is something we've talked a lot about, is also setting the expectation of, "We're doing these stakeholder workshops now. We're going to be coming back to you when we start actually implementing to go deeper." Right? That this is not the last time that you're speaking to us, that this isn't comprehensive of all of the discovery that needs to be done, but it's starting to get that buy-in and starting to ideate at enough of a level of fidelity that you can be confident in the solutions to say, okay, this is how we're going to move forward. And then we're going to iteratively refine the layers of detail as we move into implementation to really fuel those solutions. So those are just a couple of callouts I wanted to add to that as well. Yeah. Great callout on the timing because it did take a little while. It doesn't happen overnight, obviously. So some of the biggest pain points for how we work today are in line with some of the challenges that I outlined earlier. So this should be part of your business case to confirm, these are the challenges that we're going to address and the pain points that we're going to address. This will also help down the road when you go into change management. So addressing those pain points here and then also carrying them through within the change management scope. So you're telling specific teams or users, this is what we're addressing here, and this is what we found through all of our discovery. That will help you immensely down the line when you go into implementation.
And then designing an integrated ecosystem, as I said earlier. So the parts and pieces of this ecosystem should include streamlining and orchestrating your work and workflow, also the creative production and supercharging creative teams specific to the AI, Generative AI tools, specific to Firefly, for example. And then the delivery and activation, power experiences and performance, part of that ecosystem, and then obviously measuring that performance. But the heart of all of this is the asset management piece.
Something that we did was we developed several different use cases based on that ecosystem. So within each rung here, we had a list of several different use cases based on the pain points that we heard. So we wanted to address specific use cases and pilots to make sure that when we went to go into implementation, we were addressing those like dead on. And then sometimes those use cases will evolve. You might get into a use case and you figure out, "This isn't actually what we're addressing, but we actually are addressing this other problem." So that's something that will evolve as well.
Okay. So building the team. This is probably one of my favorite parts. Building the team to support this execution. This should not be people's night jobs. This should be dedicated support that you can actually carry through. Everyone think it's real. Yeah. This is not just some like thing that you're going to implement at night or on the weekends. This is something that should be very dedicated and very thoughtful for implementing. Because there are so many parts and pieces to this, it is someone and a team's full time job to do this. Again, Executive and Leadership Sponsor, vital for this to make this happen. You want to be talking about this implementation at town halls. You want to be talking about it in team meetings. You've got to have that executive and leadership sponsor in order to push this through. Program Leadership. I am actually the program leader for all of this implementation, so I would obviously say, "Yes, you need a program leader." It is a lot. It is a full time job. You need some dedicated support there. Workstream Project Management, specific to all the workstreams that you're answering to according to those use cases. You really need a strong project manager in multiple areas to carry through that project management. Subject Matter Experts. SMEs are very, very vital because I am not a creative expert, but I have creative experts on my team that I can refer to and get feedback from. Those subject matter experts are also vital. And then last but certainly not least is Change Management Champions. If you do not have change management champions or change management, this is all just a wash. You need to have an enablement plan in order for you to prepare the organization for the change that they're going through.
And then, this is just an example of what we've put together at Newell. A core project team, we've got executive sponsors up top, so that's our chief marketing officer and chief information officer. We've got our executive leaders, so there's several different disciplines within design, IT, and marketing that are vice presidents. We've got program owners, and then we've got support from information tech and business. So that's primarily the marketing and the design teams. And then underneath, you see that we've got several different workstreams. So our stakeholder list across the board, and remember, Newell's a very large company. We've probably got a 100 people that are stakeholders. Now those people, that is not their full time job. We are tapping into them to make sure that we're making the right shots and getting the right feedback from people.
And this is just a fun slide. We've had a few different on sites. You can see this one was hybrid, so some people in person, some people online. But we like to have fun also with our on sites and making sure that the stakeholders are heard and get excited about all this because it is super exciting.
Awesome. All right. So within that program structure that Sam just talked about, and I'm going to brag on Sam here for a second. I think they do-- The Newell team has done this incredibly well with that staffing structure that you just saw. Right? That they really have the structure nailed here in terms of truly appointing a program leader who is charged within the business driving this forward. Right? And is able to focus. I don't know how Sam manages it all. And is also paired with an IT lead. Right? So we are seeing more and more across clients that one of the most successful combos is when there is a strong marketing leader paired with a strong IT leader to drive that transformation together, which is exactly what you have here. And you can see the embeddedness of the IT teams both from an executive leadership standpoint. Those executive leaders are VPs that are both on the IT side and on the creative marketing side. So just a big shout-out to this team is they have a framework that they use on these transformations that is very, very effective.
Okay. So start with strategy. So then, we have the team. Now we're going to dive in. What do you do first? Where do we go first? So this is at a high level what that now we are truly ready to start implementing. What the implementation approach looks like? And this define phase is really, really critical, and what we're going to talk about in a little bit more detail here today is about how do we make sure we then translate from all of that good work we did on the business case upfront into getting to that next layer down of what does that actually mean for our business. So again, we've done the business case. The team had set as a part of that planning Adobe implementation goals. Okay. We're doing this transformation. Here are our core goals. What that did was then that informed our AEM program goals. We translated that and we broke that down and said, "Okay, here's what we actually need to deliver for value to the business." And at the same time, we got team input, we got leadership input, and we brought best practice to the table. Right? Because that's something else that we've been very jointly focused on, is that Newell doesn't want to just take what they're currently doing, put in a new tools. No. No. No. No. This is about leapfrogging. This is about the new capabilities that they need to move their organizations forward. But what we often say is you just take like best practice off the shelf and put it into an organization, no one's going to adopt it. Right? It doesn't feel like it resonates with the specific needs of the business. You're not meeting and designing on how to move the organization forward. So you need to be infusing best practice, but also listening to the team, listening to leadership to ultimately identify the business requirements. And from both of those two sides then, identify the future state process. That meets the more detailed business requirements, but also aligns back to those key objectives that you have set as part of this business case, and that becomes your North Star of what you're working toward.
So in order to do this, what we did collectively, our joint teams very embedded with one another. Over an eight week period, we went through 37 cross-functional learning sessions, and 20 change readiness interviews in which we interacted with over a 120 stakeholders. So there was a lot of listening, a lot of documentation, but this is also really critical, especially from a Newell standpoint, but this resonates with many of your businesses, content starts a lot earlier than we tend to think it does. Right? From a CPG standpoint, we went through the packaging processes, the new product development life cycle processes. Right? How is product being developed? How does digital merchandising tie into all of this? These are not separate processes. So being able to look holistically across that. To really understand what does success look like for each of these teams, make sure they were heard, translate what success looks like into actual business requirements for, again, what is the value to each of these teams? So these are just a few of the high level things for some of the questions that we asked. These are the consistent themes that we heard back from the teams. And this is for everyone from design teams to D to C teams, to sales teams, to digital marketing teams, and being able to bring all of that together, to continue to inform the direction that we would go. We also then translated that into understanding the personas. I had a slide earlier. It all starts with people. What do they need to do? What are they motivated by? Exactly the same things that we do for our consumers. Right? Our customer profiles, we need to do internally. Who are our users? How do they want to work? What do they need to accomplish? And how can we think differently about helping accomplish them? So really started to build out and understand who those individuals are. And we took high level product process maps for key product workflows that the team, that the Newell team had internally already started doing tremendous work on, and we identified all of the asset related touchpoints across that process. Then we also took-- And Tessa is here, so I'll give Tessa a shout-out. Tessa, in her team's process work around how does the design team work and translated those asset life cycles into the next layer down of, okay, this is how assets are created. We stitch those two things together and incorporate all of the inputs from the teams to really walk away with a comprehensive understanding of how the organization was working today, to be able to then design the future state process. So these are some of the outputs that you would expect coming out of a first phase. This is where we've really focused our first phase of effort and have produced, over the last 8 to 10 weeks collectively, these outputs. I've talked about a couple of them. Metadata schema is a big one. Right? As you think, data is the foundation of so much of this, being able to actually activate that content in personalized ways down the road. But for now, finding assets. As Sam talked about, how do we automate that metadata from Workfront into AEM? That's a key business priority for the team. And so really leveraging this opportunity to step back and say, are we-- Huge amounts of metadata are being collected today. Collected, meaning there were fields there.
A very small fraction of it was actually being populated. Right? So what's useful? Doing analysis on usage and data today, but then also looking forward towards the future. And so then this is where, this is bringing, this is from one of our on sites. But designing the future, these are just a few things that we always recommend and that we've gone through together too of just actually being able to build out that future. In terms of identifying the pain points, of course, we want to start addressing those. We want to evolve the future state to meet those objectives. We can indicate opportunities for automation. That's a big one. Right? What are the overlays for where there's the technical capability meets the process pain point? Focus on areas where there are multiple uploads and downloads. That was something that we found throughout the process that we can tackle and tackle easily. Right? That is low hanging fruit as you're looking for places to optimize. Clarifying ownership and engaging teams at the right time. That was a big theme of our learnings as well. And then also considering where data originates as key places to synthesize.
Excuse me.
I got this tickle, and I was like, I hope it does not come in the middle of the session. - And it just did. - You're close.
I'm so sorry, everyone. All right. I'm going to-- - Sam, maybe hand it to you to speak. - I'm going to do this. - Sorry. - Yes. So some of the brand engagement and alignment approach. So out of our, I think it's 60 plus brands, how were we going to select some of the brands that we're going to go first in this implementation and first to launch? So some of the brands that we were looking at, we wanted to make sure that they had a wide variety of assets. We wanted to make sure that it could be a good representation for what we call our business segments or divisions within Newell. And then we wanted to make sure that, we had IT and creative representatives to expose across the brands as well as brand marketing, and then validating the design and metadata with other brands through a survey and follow-up meeting as needed. So for example, like Sharpie, they're going to have metadata tags that, what we call the nib, which is like the actual marker tip. They're going to have certain tags within their assets that Graco, our car seats for babies, they will not have that metadata tag. So making sure that we not only have a standard set of metadata and understanding across these brands, but we also recognize that there will be nuance because our portfolio is so diverse.
- You're good? - Okay. I think I'm good. Thank you. Thank you. You're the best. And I'm going to go back to this one just for one second because I think something else that's really-- And I do apologize for the cough drop. But something that is really important as you think about this, and we hear these, we heard in the Keynote today so many great things, right, about what these technologies can do, and they are powerful. But really taking the time to understand what are the capabilities of these platforms. And so this is something that an exercise that we go through and say, "Okay, great." And this is specific to AEM. This is just an excerpt from AEM. Right? Really familiarize yourself. Okay. AEM has advanced search. You can do automated and smart tagging. Okay. We have different levels of flex permission controls. Get down to like what are the capabilities that we want to enable for our organization? What is more basic and what is advanced? And how do these capabilities then map to what we're trying to accomplish as a business so that you're not trying to boil the ocean. Right? There is so much here. So being able to really be thoughtful about mapping the technical capabilities back to the requirements is a great place to start to think about a future, and really design that intentional roadmap across brands as Sam said.
So the other next principle is design with data for outcomes. So again, tracking back to what we said at the beginning. And something that we always like to say is that you have more data than you think you do. And you might think you have a lot, but you have more than even that.
So when we think about metadata, you might be like, "Yeah, we're not using a lot of metadata," or maybe, "we don't have a metadata schema if we're not in a DAM today." One of the things and exercises that we've gone through together is not just-- And in this case, the team does have a DAM. So we were able to leverage all of the metadata and do analysis on that for what exists today. But that shouldn't be the only source input. Right? Think about your brand guidelines. Think about digital playbooks, shot list templates, custom fields for briefs, intake forms. All of those things are collecting key data that someone in your life cycle needs to do their jobs. And if they don't, it shouldn't be there. So how can we get more intentional about really thinking through the data that exists today? That's a key part of this first phase is looking across that to really optimize the data foundation from a metadata and taxonomy standpoint.
The second piece that we did is we focused on what we wanted to know for the future in much more of a workshopping way. Right? What do you wish you could search on that you can't today? And we asked brand managers this. We asked design teammates this. We asked D to C colleagues this. And so we workshopped, what do you wish you could search on? What do you need to know? What do you care about for personalization? What do you care about for product? To really crowdsource ground up, and then we compared those two things. Right? Based on what people are interested in or want, what are the gaps with what exists today? What is best practice? How can we adapt that data to meet the needs of the organization? And then, don't forget the people. Yes. Don't forget the people. One of the fun things that we did within Newell, and you might do this at your own companies as well, is we selected a project name. So, obviously, marketing design, we love, love, love to brand things. We wanted to brand our project. So we actually asked our wide variety of stakeholders, to submit project names, what description do they have with that project name, why did they pick it. I know some folks went to ChatGPT to have inspiration.
So it was a really fun thing that we did, and people got to vote on the specific name. I won't tell you what the name is, but I'll tell you some of the names. So some of those names were Nexus, Kaleidoscope, Mosaic. So we picked one of those names and then branded it. So two designers on my team actually were able to design and brand a logo for our project because this is a multiyear program.
It was just a really exciting fun thing to do within Newell.
Some of the change management themes that, Jen talked about that we interviewed around a 120 stakeholders. And so some of the change management themes are not surprising. Right? They really want clarity. So clarity was a very prevalent theme in many areas. They want clarity around how the process works? How the system works? Is my job changing day to day? How will the system influence my job day to day? Effectiveness. We want to make sure that what we're implementing is actually effective, and it's not another thing that they have to do on top of their already full plate. Strategic Vision. So making sure that stakeholders specifically that are involved in the project understand the strategic vision for this change that will become also our change champions. And then, obviously, like I said before, strong leadership, support, and involvement, making sure that everyone is aligned and on the same page so we can have the proper talking points to disseminate throughout the organization.
And then what does that plan look like? So having an extremely detailed change management enablement plan, including communications, what type of channels are you going to be communicating in for these new updates and new changes? What training are we going to use? Are we going to use our current learning management system for training? Are we going to do in-person trainings? And then how are we hitting the right people at the right time to prepare them. So one of the examples is we just had a 90 days to launch meeting. So anyone that touched one of the Rubbermaid brands specifically, we actually had a meeting with them to discuss, "Okay, this change is coming. It's not for another few months, but this change is coming, and here's what to expect." So even things like that, making sure that you're touching the right people at the right time, is extremely important for change.
And then a quick note on AI. So some of the Firefly use cases that we've been working through, address some of the content at scale. So what does content at scale look like for us? For a specific use case for us for web banners specifically, we wanted to accelerate the creation of renditions and sizes for banners for specific campaigns or, in some cases, retailers where applicable. And so one of the solves for us was a Photoshop Plugin designed for efficiently generating banners at scale, and then at times using generative expand when needed. So utilizing the AI automation, but also that generative fill, it powers us to be more asset at scale.
And then I think you were going to do this one. Yeah. So as we think about using Firefly, we've heard a lot today. We're going to hear a lot tomorrow, just overall around leveraging these generative tools. Things that we'd like to encourage people to think about is let me say, don't let it be a cool tool. Right? It can be a game-changer. But 20% of that is technical, 80% of that is governance people change. Right? How do we integrate these tools into our ways of working in ways that people adopt and are meaningful? And so as we think about how we do that, we like to think about three things. Personas. Right? Again, who is using these tools? That we're talking-- Again, this came up at the roundtable earlier today. If creatives are using these tools, where in their process, right? And starting with something specific. Okay. We're going to use this for concepting or ideation. Right? We're not saying we're trusting this to go live. We're not doing final touches on derivative creation, then it's getting right pushed into a syndication platform. No. We're not going to start there. We're going to start earlier in our process. Get people used to doing this. How do we write appropriate prompts? How do we start to integrate this into our workflows? How is this plugged in to create to Photoshop or to Illustrator? So where are they working? What are those ways of working for those personas? So those two are very tied together. Because for the ways of working standpoint, reviews and approvals.
If we are creating all of these new assets, who's approving them? Right? When do they need to approve them? If it's coming from a source asset, do we have a different approval tier? Do we need a different approval workflow? Are those approvals this is something that we have made some decisions on with Newell, like, okay, this is where different asset types flow based on the preapprovals, the level of application of AI or of auto cropping. That's a really important one. And then storage and activation. These tools are fun. They can be fun for designers. Right? But if the assets that they are just proliferating and creating aren't actually going somewhere, if they aren't being tied with the data, if they're not getting into a DAM, and if they're not ultimately getting into market, we've just created more cool stuff that means nothing. Right? And that is what we want to avoid. So it needs to be built into the process and into the other platforms to actually be activated, stored, used, reused in ways that are really meaningful. So taking the time and thoughtfulness as the organization say, how are we actually adopting this, can be really, really powerful, and this won't happen overnight. Right? In the sense of start small. Get it into those key places and then expand. So those are just some lessons learned and perspectives as you might start down this journey.
So as I said before, we're in the beginning stages of all this. So I don't have outcomes or results quite yet. Hopefully, in a couple months, we will. But what are the intended outcomes for us? So some of the intended outcomes really revolve around improving our stakeholder satisfaction. So obviously, within our DAM system today, it's not being, it's not-- The needs are not being met by our stakeholders. We want to improve stakeholder satisfaction, our adaptability to market demands. So that obviously addresses the content volume that we are expected to make, and then also greater creative flexibility. We want to make sure that we hold true to be flexible on our creative pieces when we're either localizing or we need different renditions. Making sure that we have that flexibility for all the different design teams within Newell.
So what's next? Adobe Experience Manager will launch in June, not with all brands, but with some of them, and we're super excited for that. We're very excited for the teams. And in that 90 days to launch meeting, I can tell you that even though the meeting was held virtually, I could feel the excitement from all of those teams that they were so excited to move into this new platform.
So some of the phase one capabilities that will be included here, obviously, a single source of truth. Everyone wants that. An integration with Workfront and our PIM system as well as commerce. And then we've got also approval workflows in AEM for asset variation. So from, within Workfront, we will have those approvals, but some of them will flow into AEM, especially as it relates to resizing assets. And then reports on expiring assets 30 days out. So some of the things that we struggle today with our talent expiring or let's say, audio or image expirations, we don't have a good grasp on the reporting that comes out of our DAM system today. So that's one of the capabilities that we'll see.
And then what comes next? So within this June launch, we will have a brand rollout and migration. So like I said before, we have a lot of different brands, a lot of different systems that they're integrated to, and a lot of different needs required. So within this next few months and then going into next year, by September 2026, we hope to have all of our brands globally in our AEM system. And that will also come with AEM enhancements and expansion. So you saw phase one capabilities. This will include the phase one needs that are met for those specific brands, but we know that there'll be enhancements needed to be implemented along the way, as well as additional integrations. So as you can imagine with the diverse portfolio that Newell has and the acquired brands that we've done over the years, there's lots of different systems, lots of different integrations that we want to make, as well as an opportunity to clean up some of those integrations and systems. And then a further Workfront expansion and connection, so making sure that certain teams that maybe are not specifically working in Workfront today like, I think one of the teams was direct to consumer, a portion of them. They may be integrated more into Workfront according to this new workflow.
And then brand rollout consideration. So if you are a company that has multiple brands or may be have different product lines, how do you formulate your consideration set when you're looking at-- I have all of these brands, how are we going to roll these out? And how do we figure out who goes first and who goes last? So some of the considerations that we had were brands with significant asset or process tech stack outliers should be implemented in smaller groups. So we have a very, very-- I was about to say small. It's not small, but we have a couple brands that are more B2B facing and the rest are B2C. So making sure that that B2B business may have different requirements that we may want to stagger them later in the launch or earlier in the launch. And then consider the people side of change. So how are the brands staffed? If you going to tap into multiple teams within marketing and also design, making sure that the seasonality of their business is not affected by this launch. So we are not going to be, for example, with our writing utensil brands like Sharpie and Paper Mate and Elmer's, we don't want to bother them during the back-to-school period because they are busy. And then also consider the business value. Which brands experience the most pain today, that they would see the highest return? So figuring out-- I had a conversation the other day with one of our brands that they're not in our DAM system today. They're doing SharePoint. So they were so excited to hear about AEM and figure out how can we get there even if it's manual for us. We want just one place.
So in closing, these are my key takeaways so far. I think if you ask me six months from now, they might be a little bit different. So right now, set clear goals and expectations and refer back to them. So like I said before with our vision and the use cases that we've built and the value that we've associated with those use cases, refer back to them. Your leaders will be asking you. So make sure that you have clear expectations upfront, and then create proper communication channels and meeting cadences. There were a few things that we learned along the way that we were like, "Wait, we need to inform a whole group of stakeholders about this entire project." I can't tell you the amount of times that I've already heard, "Hey, I was only involved in AEM Assets, and now I'm learning about the Firefly use cases." That's great that they can make that connection now. And then engage the right team members, a combination of subject matter experts and passion. There are quite a few people at Newell that are super passionate about this topic, and those are the types of people that I want to work with on this because they're already invested, they can see the vision, and they want to help. And then last but not least is be open-minded. So there's going to be stumbles along the way. There's going to be things that we need to change up. Be flexible, be open-minded, making sure that if your path is going to change a little bit or shift, that you just refer back to those goals and you're saying, "Hey, I need to change this goal just a little bit because of this new information that I just got." So those are the key takeaways. I would also add, like I said earlier, this is not someone's night job. This is a dedicated team, a dedicated position that really can implement and change in your organization.
- So I think we're out of time. - Yes. But we can hang around just for a couple minutes if there's any other questions. - Thank you, guys. - Yeah. Thank you all so much.
- We did it. - Yay! [Music]
