[Music] [Kiyoshi Ihara] So we are in the Plan, Reach, Measure, Repeat: How Adobe Transforms Customer Acquisition session. I hope you're on the right spot, especially after we all got the tech stuff sorted out. So I am Kiyoshi Ihara. I run Product for a Mix Modeler. We're going to do more of an introduction on myself, Zoe, Will, and Shawn, who are panelists in a little bit. But I thought it might make the most sense to just define what customer acquisition means, at least for this session so we can get all on the same page.
This is a lot of text, okay? Put simply at the most basic level, customer acquisition is all about finding more customers for your brand, right? That's what we're looking to do here. Taking a click down, you probably heard this over the last couple of sessions or definitely over the last 24 hours, it's taking the unknown population that is just out there and trying to make them known to your brand and vice versa, okay? Meaning, we as marketers, we as customer acquisition marketers, performance marketers, we go out there and use a means of many different channels, right? Digital, paid search, display, CTV, affiliates, retail folks, comparison shopping engines, travel folks, travel aggregators, all of the different ways that you speak to customers, potential customers, and, of course, offline, right? All of the old stuff, radio, TV, direct mail, that's still going on. Any different ways that you can to communicate with your potential audience to drive acquisition.
But let's be real here. It's not just an introduction. We're hoping these customers transact, right? They become customers then. So I know we've been calling it customer acquisition in this session in Adobe, but oftentimes, I just hear you all say growth, right? Drive customer acquisition in order to get growth. And that's what this session is going to be all about, okay? So a little bit more introduction on me. Again, my name is Kiyoshi. I come from an acquisition background before I moved over to the tech side. I ran a portion of Discover Cards acquisition business specifically on digital for paid search and display and on-site optimization. And then in Amazon where I worked in the video game space, right? That was a fun one trying to get folks to become customers of various video game publishers like Microsoft in order for them to get more games, more playing time in.
Then I moved over to tech, right? Building technology to frankly help acquire customers for brands, partners, agencies. What was common across all of these experiences was there was always a ton of numbers, ton of equations, lots of math, right? And there was always some sort of curve. How efficient are we? How are we going to drive more growth? The other common point was the arrows were always up into the right. No. I'm joking. Like, they'd better have been up into the right, right? And frankly, if we're honest with ourselves, they all weren't always open to the right, especially for acquisition, right? Acquisition is hard, and that's what we're going to talk about today. But as you'll see over the next couple of slides when I get into the stats, I want to keep this in mind. There's all different kinds of quotes that we've seen in the past. Numbers never lie, right? Numbers never lie.
They're simply telling different stories depending on the math of the tellers. I love this, especially as an acquisition marketer. Hey, my numbers were down. Yeah. But look at this over here. That was up. Or hey, the numbers were down. It wasn't my fault, okay? Even this stat, this quote, because it's not a stat yet, is not from a mathematician. It's not from an analyst. It's not from a data scientist.
It's actually from an author, a poet, which is actually perfect. So we're going to get into some of this today, right? Taking a look at these metrics, taking a look at how they apply to customer acquisition, our panelists are going to come on and talk about how they drive customer acquisition and growth for their companies.
But I'm going to say three letters that maybe most of you are going to be fearful of. Let's do a quick QBR of where we actually stand as a team of customer acquisition folks, performance marketers, and let's take, hopefully, a more honest look at some of the metrics that we see out there. And first, I'm going to thank Gartner for allowing us to use their metrics in order to tell this story, right? I know I just beat up telling stories with metrics, but I'm going to do the same thing right here, right? So let's take a look at this first one. How are things going now? How are things going now? How do we all feel, right? And this survey from Gartner is actually looking at marketing leaders, and what marketing leaders said was that the majority of survey respondents were dissatisfied with campaign performance. And on average, almost 90%, lifted 87 to 90 tells a better story, report that they experienced issues with campaign performance in the last year, okay? So campaign performance, campaigns driving growth, not going that great, okay? Let's keep going with the story.
Almost three quarters I did it again, 73 is not three quarters it's close enough, said that they're being asked to do more with less. I'm sure that's resonating with a lot of you, all right? I see it every day with the clients, right? Less budget, less resources, less people. That's not a great combination. Performance isn't going that great and do more less with less stuff.
Not a good equation right there, right? Now let's see what we all did about that, though, that combination of stats.
We did more with less up and to the right.
44% of total campaign marketing budget was spent on campaigns. It's 31 increase in year-over-year. So yay for us, we did more with less. We made more campaigns. We're going to go acquire more customers.
But the story didn't stop there and neither did the numbers, so bear with me. I got a couple more numerical slides to get through.
All right. We're going to do this again. I'm taking even more liberty with the numbers. I'm going to say almost three quarters of us, again, with that 70% had moderate or significant challenges in measuring ROI. So we did more with less, but we don't really know if it was worth it. That's an issue, right? My sincere hope is it's just difficult and not impossible, that we all in this room had some way to measure success, and we got there eventually, right? But let's keep going with the story.
One more step from these marketing leaders, okay? That's too far off to say three quarters. I got to say 60%. 60% said that they have moderate or significant challenges.
Aligning campaign strategy with business objectives.
The last stat was bad, and this one's damning, right? We don't really know what happened, but 60% of us are saying we don't know why we did what we did. That is problematic, right? But up into the right, the whole market's not down, but it isn't on accident that we're succeeding.
That is an issue. So let's drill in a little bit more, right? What are we doing? We've done more with less. We don't know why we're doing what we're doing, and we don't know if it was worth it, okay? So on that dire note, we're going to get going a little bit more.
And I know we're all seasoned marketers here, but I just want to come back to basics for a second. Again, I mentioned I was going to define customer acquisition. We're going to define just these basics real quick. But put simply to acquire customers, you need to do these three things. You need a plan, you need to reach, you need to measure, right? Plan. How and why are we doing this? What's your plan? What's your strategy to go acquire customers? What's your budget? How are we going to go invest? Reach. Who are we talking to? Who do we think potential customers are? How do we find them? Is there anybody else that looks like them? How can we grow this population, okay? And do we need help finding them? And then measure. What worked? I don't mean after the fact, right? When you're planning and you're coming with your strategy, we all need to figure out how are we actually going to measure success, or now we're going to be honest, or failure, maybe something in between, right? But let's all get on the same page about how we're going to measure the efficacy of what we're doing.
So we're going to drill down, and now I'm going to fulfill this promise. Like, this is the last set of numbers on the slide, okay? When you click into each of these, plan, reach, and measure, there's further surveys out there about how we and our teams all feel about these three words, okay? And there's some hopeful numbers in here. 61% think that there is better ways to actually plan to get to better efficacy of investment to drive growth through marketing mix modeling, right? So there's confidence there in that 61%. Reach, 62%. 62% say that they're planning to transact directly with their networks, their partners in order to reach the right audiences to drive growth through those needs. And the measurement is not necessarily positive, but it's interesting, right? 66% are saying that they have challenges showing the impact of these campaigns to their stakeholders communicating what was actually done. So a bit of a mixed bag, but there is some hope out there, right? So when we look at this, we're not done on those three, right? Those are the basics. Now we get into that level 201 course. At least my college went 101 to 201. All right, so now we're adding one more level of complexity. Do everything that we just talked about, but do it again and again and again. Nudge that performance, right? Optimize, right? That's the word that we talk about, okay? Doing a better job of planning your reach, measuring, but now do it over and over again so that you're not just launching the ship, you're steering the ship, or whatever overused metaphor we want to use. But we want to make sure that just because we're acquiring customers or hitting some target or pace whether it's over, under, or what we expect, we want to keep improving, right? Optimize that, right? Don't just set it and forget it. Be able to adjust.
Now I'm preaching to the choir here, this is super hard to do this well, to do this right, and repeat it consistently, right? Repetition and consistency. It's super hard to do this, right? It's no small task.
And there's existing processes, technologies, organizational structures that do all of this today, right? You got to get the campaign brief. Someone's got to write that campaign brief, come up with a strategy. After that brief's done you got to figure out how you're going to allocate budget against that brief to hit your goals.
That's the planning stuff that I was talking about. How are you going to reach audiences? Who are you going to reach? Is there enough of them out there to hit your targets? Then you get into creative development, right? Making sure that you're having the right message out there, placing those messages in the right places, again, in front of the right audiences.
And then you've got activation, right? Executing against this entirety of the plan, making sure you're buying in the right places and hopefully, with an investment buying for the right amount, right? And then measurement, right? Measurement, ideally, the collection of all data happens, right? We get that optimization step, and you get this wheel of measurements so you see actually how things are going with underlying data. And I got to put AI and ML in here. Every presentation's got to have it, right? We've got AI and ML hopefully helping with all of this.
So Zoe's going to show you a demo, at least from an Adobe stand what we think, like, could be needed to help in some of these. So she's going to show you what this actually looks like in product instead of just a bunch of slide work, okay? And really, you can see almost like our conversion funnels. I'm whittling things down. I'm going to whittle it down further to two, okay? What we're addressing at Adobe is really focusing these things into two key areas to drive impactful change and add value to all of this process. And first is strategic collaboration.
And what we mean by that is specifically strategic collaboration amongst some of your partners through RTCDP collaboration that just got announced. And that allows you to connect directly with publishers, leverage critical first-party data, scale that into your publisher partners, and first-party data in a privacy safe way to quickly find potential customers and forecast the reach, right? It hits that reach element that we've been talking about. And then second, unified incrementality, measurement and planning with Mix Modeler and CJA, right? This is meant to remove the pain point of having disjointed analysis and overreliance on antiquated ways to measure where the last thing that the customer sees or interacts with gets all of the credit, right? We want to move away from that. Show the true incremental impact of all of your team's efforts in driving acquisition.
So bringing these teams together, we want to have an honest look, right? I know I've been cherry-picking a couple of stats, but we're not saying we're going to recreate the wheel, right? Instead, we're going to give better tires and navigate the bumps and twists and turns that keep throwing at you, right? And we're going to go through the bits and pieces that can make sense for you all as we progress through the demo and the fireside chat.
Forgot to build my bad. All right. Now I just mentioned a bunch of tech, right? If you're worried at Adobe, we build a ton of tech. But taking my Adobe hat back off and putting my old marketer hat back on. Let's be real here, tech isn't enough, right? It's tech and people. And we're going to talk about how Adobe Marketing specifically has addressed both of these and as an example in the next couple of slides, right? But both are needed to effectively and efficiently acquire customers, especially at scale, right? You need you need your teams, your organizational structure, your processes, even, like I said, the definition of success to be in place so that the tech can enable all of these folks to have as much success as possible. And those teams need to have the, excuse me, autonomy and structure to use those tools to acquire those customers in the best way possible.
So looking at this, we're going to take a look at a real example of what we did at Adobe Marketing and show their evolution over time, and how they got to acquiring customers as they do today, right? So Adobe, we've been around for decades, right? Photoshop is a thing. It's a solution. It's a verb at this point.
But acquiring new customers is not as straightforward as it used to be, right? So even Adobe Marketing, we took an introspective approach and started analyzing how our processes or technology where they fit for the need of the day to acquire the customers and the growth that Adobe expected to have, right? And again, if we distill this down, what they found was two main challenges with the specifics that ladder up to it. But the two main challenges were, number one, there's a huge focus on the price tag of creating experiences, right? Price efficiency, driving things based off of cost over the needs of the people who you're creating them for, our potential customers, so that was issue number one. Issue number two was across our enterprise we had inconsistencies in our approach and how we invested in our marketing and execution, right? And that was actually a huge one that some of these specifics will later up to, right? Our channel execution teams, that's the first one, operated independently of one another in a fragmented approach, right? Those channel teams, I'm going to hone in on that one, the channel specific teams have their own way of going about execution, not necessarily around a conservative effort.
And then these different teams worked with different media agencies, which, of course, executed against those channel-specific teams, right? So then the problem started to compound. There was no common path to execution and even what a win looked like universally across the board. And then with the evolving media landscape there's more channels every day, right? Open publishers are gating up, becoming walled gardens.
Yeah. There's just more and more channel interactions that our customers are actually interacting with, right? And those are more opportunities for us to communicate with them, but that compounds a series of problems further, right? More channels means more channel focused teams, which means more disjointed agency strategies. Yeah. And then we had a very huge focus on multi-touch attribution, right? I mentioned this earlier before, but just looking at how Adobe did things. I went through the whole list of how we talked to customers, right? So many of them are offline, right? Half of budgets are still offline. A lot of online budgets are just not measurable from an MTA standpoint. So when you're anchored so much in MTA, we in Adobe land we had a hard time understanding what was working, okay? And now here's the cherry on top. Everything got more expensive, right? Everything got more expensive. But that was actually a bit of a forcing function about, "Hey, let's take an honest look about how we can improve things." And we feel like we did. We feel like we did, right? So the solution can be summed up in two words, consistency and innovation, okay? So we changed our operating model.
We went ahead and changed our operating model because you said, "Hey, that's not going to fit the need for the growth expectations that we had, and we got top down buy-in, right?" The execs that you saw on stage from Adobe over the last two days were a key part of this, and they drove this change, right? They saw it was a benefit for their teams, but also for themselves. So moving from those channel-focused teams that I talked about with this joining strategies, went to regional-focused teams that had end-to-end ownership across all channels so they can execute against those regional nuances regardless of what channels we were talking about. Then we established a global media center of excellence to ensure that all of the agency partners were operating off of the same playbook, right? All operating off of the same playbook. So now no one was going rogue.
And then we created a new team that was directly responsible, right? I'm highlighting directly responsible, right? They had ownership over the operations of the strategy, making sure that it was implemented the right way, right? There was actually someone who cared about enabling this, okay? And I know it's just one slide, but this took quite a bit of time, but the results speak for themselves. Over the last 5 years, we had an 80% improvement in incremental ROAS at Adobe, right? And it was not just process, right? We had new technology that got built, which I'll talk about in a second, and Zoe's going to show as well, right? But, really, the other benefit was those execs that I mentioned before finally had a single pane of glass that they can go to figure out how the business was operating, right? Remember those stats I was talking about? I'm like, "Hey, why are we doing things, and is it even working? Was it worth it?" That got all answered for the Adobe execs. It was all with all of these efforts into a single view, right? And their teams could truly understand what was working or not. So coming back to the optimization step, they can come first whole full circle, and continue the optimization steps that were on plan, reach, and measure to acquire more customers more effectively. And looking at the technology specifically looking at two of them.
RTCDP collaboration first, right? Adobe's running campaigns through that system right now, right? It's a new tool set. It allows them to change the way they work with key publishers that they partner with. Remember we're talking about reach. Do you need help? Where can you find these folks? They're using RTCDP collaboration to do that. And they're reaching more qualified audiences at scale, and they can continually optimize the demand creation against the campaign metrics that they care about that they've established in their briefs and progress customers through that funnel for driving growth. And looking at AMM, AMM is an interesting one. All right? That's our acronym for Mix Modeler. Mix Modeler didn't exist before this process. Mix Modeler was a series of technology that Adobe Marketing decided that their teams needed in order to enact this. And then it was just homegrown as one of the outputs of this exercise to improve the customer acquisition efforts at Adobe, right? So that's really what ended up leading towards some of this 80% lift in ROAS. So all of this sounds great in theory, and I've hinted at it twice. But now we're going to invite Zoe on stage to introduce herself and do a quick demo of what this actually looks like in the product set, and then we'll move over to Will and Shawn for our panel.
[Zoe Nash] My name is Zoe. I am on the Expert Solution Consulting team covering the Adobe Experience Platform. And, of course, I'm going to be running you through the demo today. So we'll swipe into it now. But my goal today is to show you how brands more strategically plan, reach, measure, and optimize their customer acquisition campaigns using Adobe solutions. Now for the demo today, we will be using everyone's favorite demo brand, Luma, which is a fictitious athletic apparel company who is getting ready to launch their 2025 Luma Kicks Spring Campaign.
With aggressive growth targets and a question as to what our budget needs to be, the Luma marketing team knows they need to make the most out of every single marketing dollar in order to prove the value of their efforts in this campaign. So to do that, we're going to start in Adobe Mix Modeler, of course, where we can analyze historical campaign performance and spend tied to business metrics such as ROI across all channels, both online and offline, no cookies required.
So we can see here that, excuse me, paid social and TvTube, which is a fictitious streaming platform, have been performing really well in terms of conversion and incremental orders. We also see that we have a bit more room to spend in these areas. We're getting more than a dollar back for every dollar we are spending, which is great insight for me to have going into our 2025 campaign.
We're also going to continue to spend in a couple other areas here. We can see that linear TV is performing well, sponsored shopping and radio. So we'll invest in those channels throughout this campaign. And hopefully, that won't pop-up anymore.
But having all of this historical context in mind, we're now going to create our plan.
Now I know that my manager wants to drive $20 million in revenue. So a hefty goal here, but with the newly announced goal-based planning from Adobe Mix Modeler, we can set that target here. And then within Mix Modeler, it will tell us not only if we are able to achieve this goal, but if we are, it will tell us what the budget needs to be in order to achieve the $20 million. So let's see if we are able to do this. We'll create our plan, and it looks like our target was achieved. So we can see that Mix Modeler is telling us to spend $4 million which is good to know in order to achieve that goal of 20 million. But before we move on, I want to compare this plan here to my plan last year to be able to justify to my management why we might be spending a little bit more this time around.
So we'll select our two plans and click Compare. And it looks like we are spending a bit more, we're going up to 4 million from 3 million, but I have the data here to back me up. It looks like heavying up in paid social and TvTube as expected here is going to yield higher ROI. So that's great for me to know in order to justify this budget to my management.
Now that we have our plan in place, it's time to create our audiences.
We're going to jump into Real-Time CDP to create our audience. And with a natural language prompt, we can go ahead and leverage AI Assistant to help us create the perfect audience. So we'll ask what our top audiences are, and we have a couple options here. I'm going to ask a follow-up question to better understand what the forecasted size of this audience is. So it looks like High Value Cart Abandoners will be the perfect audience for me to use for this campaign. We're going to go ahead and save that here in our audience portal, which is where we have our centralized repository of all of our audiences, which helps me activate these audiences at scale.
Now in this case, as we know, we're going to activate this down to social destinations as indicated by our Mix Modeler plan. So we can activate to channels like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and more. And in addition to activating to social, we also want to work with those premium publishers as a strategic resource for my customer acquisition campaign. So with that, we will use Real-Time CDP collaboration to accomplish this. I'll be able to connect with premium publishers, reach new audiences, and directly activate my campaign all without having to run complex SQL statements or having to commingle, expose, or copy any underlying customer data.
Now I can either work with Real-Time CDP customers, the hundreds that we have today within this platform, or I can work with non-Adobe brands and publishers as well.
In this case, as we know, we're working with TvTube. We've worked with them in the past, and our plan indicated that we should work with them again for this campaign. So we'll create our project here, and we can see some audience insights already. I want to swap out this audience. You'll notice here that because of the interoperability between Adobe solutions, the audience that we just created within Real-Time CDP is available here for me to use within seconds.
So we're going to use this audience to overlap with TvTube's audiences in order to have instantaneous audience insights.
Now I just want to reiterate, in the past, this process would have taken multiple days. I would have had to set up a SQL based clean room, worked with engineering to onboard my customer data, and then run complex queries to actually pull these insights. But as we can see here with just a couple clicks, we're able to get these insights for our audience overlap.
Now we also are matching based off of partner ID and hashed email, which is maximizing our impact and reach for this campaign. And it looks like reality TV viewers has a very high match rate for us. So we're going to go ahead and retarget this audience while they're streaming the TvTube app.
In addition to leveraging this audience here, we also want to use this audience as a seed for TvTube to create a lookalike audience for me. This functionality is coming to the product later this year. We'll go ahead and create this lookalike audience. And it looks like TvTube has substantial volume for me to leverage with my prospecting efforts in order to help me reach those conversion goals that I have.
All right, so from here, we will share with the publisher. And in just a few clicks, you saw how we were able to expand our first-party audience and also retarget them all while using technology built on Adobe Experience Platform.
And with that, our campaign is live. So we're targeting those High Value Cart Abandoners on the left side with our social platforms. We're also targeting them on TvTube, we can see on the right. And we're targeting that lookalike audience in order to drum up some new business.
In addition to these digital channels, we're also targeting customers on non-digital as well. So these are channels like radio, linear TV, billboards, and more.
Let's say that this campaign has been running now for about two weeks. I want to start to assess what's going on, what's working, what's not, and see if there are any economic influences that might be affecting my campaign on the outside.
We'll start in Real-Time CDP collaboration to measure how well TvTube is performing. Now we can see within the measurement module here that we have gained total impressions of 3.2 million which is awesome. This is at an average of 2x frequency, meaning our total unique reach is about 1.6 million. So these are great insights for me to have moving forward. What's great about this is that I'm not waiting until the end of the campaign to see these insights. So I'm able to have more control and access over the reporting while this campaign is in flight. In the past, I've had to rely on publisher off the shelf reports in order to get this data, so this is definitely a game changer for my strategy here.
Now this collaboration data can also be an input in Mix Modeler so that I can analyze how well TvTube is comparing to my other channels from an incrementality perspective. So let's head there now.
We can see over here that Connected TV as a whole is performing really well and driving those incremental conversions. And more specifically, our TvTube campaign is contributing to that as well. Paid social, of course, is doing well. And if we go back over to this summary, we could see a couple other metrics. It looks like comparison shopping is outperforming affiliates for now, and linear TV continues to be a steady stream of revenue for me.
Now some of these channels have click-based or behavioral data tied to them, and that's going to allow me to dive into multi-touch attribution analysis here.
So this is important for me to better understand where in the journey these channels are making the most impact. For example, it looks like Connected TV is doing really well at the start of my campaign, and paid search is a really great closer. And it looks like email is a really great buffer in between. So these are great insights that I can bubble up to my leadership. I also will definitely let my colleagues know on the journey management side to lean in to those personalized email marketing campaigns leveraging Adobe Journey Optimizer.
And remember those external factors that we were talking about that are running in the background? I can see some validation of that here. It looks like the downturn in the stock market is not having as much of an impact on my campaign as I would have thought. And my promotions that I'm running are helping to offset any impact of inflation. This is really great to have just to tell a better story of my entire campaign and have some context for my leadership to have.
And the reason we're able to access all of this data during the campaign versus after is because Mix Modeler is purpose-built on Adobe Experience Platform. So we are constantly streaming in data on a deliverability data specifically on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis, and then we can use that to constantly rescore or update our models in order to analyze what's going on, like we see here.
So our last stop within reporting will be our plan, performance to plan. So what we're doing here is understanding what actually happened in our campaign versus what Mix Modeler originally planned for us to see. So I can confirm that we are pacing really well in terms of ROI, which is great to report up to my management. We also are doing great in terms of orders. We're seeing 50,000 incremental orders from this campaign alone. But on the flip side, if we go over to our budget, we are underpacing in terms of budget, and we have not yet hit that $20 million target. We're just about a million dollar shy here. So I will make a follow-up task to rearrange some budget and create a new Mix Modeler Plan to really maximize our revenue here and get to that goal that we're wanting to achieve. In the meantime though, let's jump into Customer Journey Analytics to see if we can analyze any other pockets of efficiency or insights that we might want to share in our status call next week.
So Customer Journey Analytics is bringing together data from multiple different data sources both online and offline. For example, mobile app data, web data, point of sale, call center, you name it. In the future, we will also be able to layer in alongside this customer journey data, metrics from Adobe Mix Modeler and Real-Time CDP collaboration, such as acquisition metrics or paid media. So that'll allow us to have a full picture of our campaign tactics in one single system.
I will also be able to engage with AI Assistant to actually do data analysis for me. So for example, I'm going to ask what my total orders were for the last 30 days. And when I ask that, CJA AI Assistant is going to create this great visual for me. And I'm going to ask a follow-up question though. We know that this is showing us orders from both online and offline, but I want to know incremental orders, which is data that would come from Adobe Mix Modeler. So we'll ask that follow-up question, and then we'll see that AI Assistant will break out our orders for us and show us that incrementality element.
So in addition to looking at the breakout here, we can see that there's a bit of an uptick right here around November 16, November 17 timeline. I want to dig a little bit deeper and understand what's driving that uptick in orders. So we'll go ahead and drag in campaign, where we can break down the campaigns to know exactly what's driving incremental orders. And unsurprisingly, it is our TvTube activation campaign. So that's great to know. From here I want to dig a little bit deeper specifically into customer interaction and data, looking at some cross-sell analysis. So I want to better understand what are people buying with Luma Kicks. We'll add that filter in here, and we can see that the number one cross-sell item is Luma Sweats. This is great insight for me to have in order to run a retargeting campaign to suggest the perfect next purchase for my customers. So what I can do here is create an audience from this selection and I want to target people who have bought Luma Kicks, but not yet bought Luma Sweats. Go ahead and give it a name, and then we can publish this back to CDP and to Adobe Journey Optimizer for a retargeting campaign.
Okay, so that is the end of the demo. All in all, what we saw was really the ability of the Luma marketing team to shift the narrative. They were able to prove the value and the impact they had on growing the Luma Kicks product segment by leveraging a modern marketing and measurement framework and real-time audience planning capabilities all using Adobe software. So now we will jump into the panel with Kiyoshi and Will and Shawn, and you'll hear directly from them how they have driven customer acquisition at their respective organizations. Awesome. Thank you, Zoe. Thank you.
All right. Come on up, Will and Shawn. [Will Edmondson] Yeah. Cool. All right. So yeah, so we're using our data to try to grow our reach, try to engage baseball fans, and ultimately get them to stream, buy tickets, and other business outcomes. [Shawn Hushman] Great. So I oversee for Adobe actually, the marketing planning and analytics functions. So my team spans our digital experiences as digital media. I've been with Adobe about two years and prior to that was with HP and ran data science and analytics along with Cox Automotive, and then went to HSBC and Clorox. So quite a few years in data science and analytics, and actually leveraging media mix to answer a lot of the questions we're talking about today. It's just-- I'm always amazed we're still talking about last click, but that's something, maybe when I retire, that'll be solved at some point or the cookies will eventually just go away, and we won't have to worry about it.
Awesome. Thanks for the introductions. All right. We got great experience up here across different parts of the acquisition funnel.
- Will, I'm going to start with you. - Sure. Will, so tell us what's a top concern or what's top of mind for your acquisition efforts or in MLB right now? Yeah. Well, opening days in a week, so it's the busiest time of year for all of us. So there's a lot top of mind. Sleep is top of mind. But I think for us, there's a couple things going on. First, baseball's had a really good run over the last few years. We're on a really good trend of positive momentum around viewership consumption. We changed the rules a few years ago, took a half hour off the average game time. So you can take your kids to a game on, excuse me, a night game and be home by 10 o'clock, which is amazing for parents. So a lot of really positive momentum, but we're also dealing with some macro-trends in terms of the mostly in local media and the media landscape changing significantly. So I think for us, it's a combination of making sure that we can navigate the headwinds, like media effectively, making sure that we're still able to get baseball fans to stream and watch the games that they want to, while also making sure that we capitalize on this moment of extreme positive momentum. And I think a big challenge and something I think about a lot is, "Are we winning by enough?" I think a lot of people see green numbers and they rest, and they say, "That's it. I'm up. I don't have to do anymore." But if you're only up 5% and every other indicator is up 50%, you're really down 45%. And so you need to make sure that you make hay while the sun shines because like in any business there are up moments and down moments, and you need to make sure that you capitalize on the up moments. Awesome. Thanks for that, Will. How about you, Shawn? So you're going to hear a theme with me, and it's I'm not a bitter cookie person, but I think that our biggest concern is this narrowing of aperture in how we measure, and it's starting to focus on highly click-based media. And so what's happening is we're getting into a bit of a doom loop of just focusing on absolute performance and then not thinking about the next quarter, right? And so when you're in that, you lose your headroom, you can't spend it efficiently. You have nothing buoying the brand. And so what we're trying to do is extend our outlook on other media and really bring that awareness organizationally and hopefully drive better decisions. Nice. Thanks for that, Shawn. So with this next one, we're going to put our fireplace in the background. I'm sure you guys have seen this before, right? We got a nice fireside shack on, but we're driving gross. We got a big old pile of money, which is going to give you guys an opportunity to brag, right? Brag in front of this big chunk of cash in the fireplace. What's something you're most proud of that's going on in acquisition space, right? Like, Will, you touched on a couple of them, but is there one in particular or one additional one you'd like to talk about that that's really succeeded. Yeah. A pet project of mine is actually the minor leagues. People think about baseball as the 30 major league teams, but there's 120 minor league teams. And so we sell about 70 million tickets at the MLB level, but we sell about 30 million tickets at the minor league level. And if you look at the map geographically, minor league teams really fill in the holes, where there aren't major league teams. So for many Americans, domestically obviously, the closest ballpark is a Minor League Ballpark. And so if you think about baseball and you think about fandom of a sport, you need to be able to think about all of the touchpoints for the sport and create really tight connections between major and minor league experiences and offerings and the journey to the major leagues. But it's also a huge opportunity for us to meet new fans and learn more about existing fans. And so one of the projects that we're working on right now is to identify minor league buyers and to store them alongside major league buyers so that when you start thinking about brand collaborations, and I know we'll talk about data collaboration in a little bit here, but when you start thinking about ways that you can activate against audiences, you're not limited to just the 30 major league entities. You're thinking about baseball as a sport. So one thing I'm very bullish on and very excited about is ways that we can continue to build a national database of baseball fans, and then work with brands, and partners, and others to really activate against the sport, which obviously, there's hundreds of millions of people in this country that have a positive view of baseball. So it's a huge opportunity, and we're really just starting. So it's been a big focus of ours, but it's something I'm pretty excited about. Nice. It's a really interesting way to look at reach and growth. Another league, that's awesome. Shawn, how about you? What do you want to brag about? Wow. Let's see. So big one for us is, again, really thinking about the upper funnel and the true benefit that that provides throughout the funnel, all the way through to performance. And so there's a lot of work that's been done on direct effects, which is usually upper funnel eventually gets some kind of contribution to the subscription or the purchase. And if you do that math, the return on investment's horrible because usually you're looking one quarter. But if you truly are looking at the life of that campaign, of the channel that unless you're delivering that campaign, you get closer to break even. But what we're finding is there's an indirect effect. And I think we all know this in our hearts that as you start to lift the underlying momentum of the brand, you get benefits on all of your media. The higher-- I mean, the more top of mind you are, people are noticing your ads, they perform better. We're actually now able to estimate that indirect effect. So an example would be performance media coming at a return of 2.5. We're finding that 0.5 of that is actually directly attributed back to this underlying momentum built by upper funnel investments. So now when you stack up the total returns, it may not happen in quarter, but it happens and it's a core driver to, again, how much we can spend in performance, how much we can spend in some of these more direct channels and, again, getting the full return of the momentum and build of the brand. Yeah. Defining what that success and how you're going to measure, right-- - Yeah. - Super critical. - Yeah. - All right. So shifting a little bit, more for guidance to the audience, what's a common mistake you guys have seen and possibly a way to fix that or just a common learning that you guys have seen that that might be interesting for the audience to learn about? How about you, Shawn? Going off first. Okay.
I'm the measurement person.
So I'm going to say this. I think thinking about data first, before you move through execution and then somebody asked what happened. I think I've heard this so many times and I've experienced it myself, which is, you sign up an agency, you bring them on, they run a campaign, and then you say, "Hey, I'd really like to get that data, so we can run our own measurement." And it becomes a nightmare. You're getting Excel files, CSVs, if it even gets delivered. And many times, there's a fee associated to it. So I would just say, as you're thinking through your relationships with agencies, when you're thinking through just your delivery, making data and the delivery of that data foundational. Okay. Thanks, Shawn. How about you, Will? Yeah. I think two things that I've seen many, many times. One is that, you have to be confident in the fact that it's not going to be perfect.
I think there's a huge especially when there's big budgets at play here, there's a lot of biases towards measure, measure, measure, make sure, make sure, make sure, aim, aim, aim, aim, but no one ever shoots. And I think you need to acknowledge that all of this needs to be something that you optimize, and you can't ever get it right the first time. So I think letting perfect be the enemy of good is something I've seen many times. And then conversely, a lot of times I see that people get really wrapped up in the campaign or the effort, and they really, really want it to be successful. And that clouds their judgment of whether or not it actually is successful. And so you need to be really objective about what the data is telling you, and you really need to be objective about what the goal is, and make sure that if you're doing something and you're not just throwing this pile of money in the fire because you want it to be something that it's not. So I think being really honest with yourself about how things are performing, and not seeing what you want to see, but seeing what you're actually seeing is something that takes some time and experience, but ultimately is really important. Yeah. That tolerance for truth is so critical. Great. So last one and then we'll move on with the key takeaway. So free for all. It doesn't have to be the measurement acquisition, right? But, like, hope. Like, what's the emerging technology, emerging thing that you're hearing, the org structure that you think is really going to drive some of this in the future? Yeah. I mean, for us, it's data collaboration. I mean, the idea that we can activate our core partners and new partners against a sport, not just a league, but to think about ways that baseball can help brands tell their stories and help us, reach new fans is extremely important. So we're making a lot of investments and making sure that our data is open for business, so to speak, and making sure that folks understand that we're interested in using or reach our investments in the minor leagues, as I mentioned, to try to help people tell their stories. And then, conversely, to try to see if there are strategic partnerships we can make with a AAA or an AARP or other huge registries of people where we can bring baseball to people who otherwise are not experiencing it. So I think data collaboration is endless possibilities for us, and so we're really excited about that. Nice. Thanks for that. What do you think, Shawn? This is going to sound crazy, but I just want cookies to go away. No. I really I think just this dependency of partial information and it's becoming more and more, I think, blurry, and it's causing us to have to try to connect things that maybe aren't even there. And so I think that's a huge piece. And just for context, see 7, probably 8 years ago, we did a study at Cox and we found that we were basically losing about 40% of cookies. And that grew to 70 to 80% when we were just at HSBC. So I'm sorry, at HP. Massive. And yet we're still trying to piece and part this together. And all it's doing again is pushing us to a click. And it's going to get to the point where the only click you're seeing is pretty much search or some paid social that you just go, "I'm not I can't put all my money there." So just pushing that envelope and really opening up the funnel to driving consumers is I think going to be huge. Great. Thanks for that, Shawn. Thanks for that, Will. So a quick hand for our panelists. Thanks, guys.
So we're going to wrap up with a couple of takeaways and a reminder for the survey, okay? So we had a couple of cheesy things in here. We're continuing with the motivational posters. So very, very quickly, we're going to distill the takeaways down. You heard Shawn and Will actually get the quite a few of these, right? You got conviction, focus, and resilience, right? We talked about this a little bit throughout the presentation, but when it comes to conviction you're going to want to get all of the stakeholders aligned and ideally have a pretty powerful exec sponsor if you're going to shake some of this stuff up, right? To some of Shawn's points some of these things have been around for 10 years, right? It's part of your acquisition pipeline. So part of that is coming to truth, right? Having tolerance to have an open and honest, sobering conversation about what truth even means, right? And then that sponsor, hopefully can have drive a common understanding of who's responsible for that truth, right? So that's where the conviction piece comes in.
Second one's focused, right? Determine where you're ever going to start, right? Not everything's going to be a winner, right? But at least have a start, right? We had that giant slide that was talking about all of those different parts of the acquisition pipeline. Figure out where you want to start. What's urgent? What's the black box, right? If something's working like you had mentioned, what if something's working, what happens if it's not working the next day, or why is it working? And then what can't be disrupted and why, right? Politics is part of all business. Acquisition for sure, especially when there's so much focus on making sure that everything's a winner, right? So if there's something that's going to be difficult to change or even question at least know that upfront, and that's where hopefully that super powerful sponsor is going to come in and help shake things out. But have an honest conversation with yourself and your teams to see what hurdles you're going to have to go through to change some of these things that might be a little touchy. And then resilience, right? Keep putting wins on the board. I had to put some sports thing out there, but keep putting wins on the board, right? Even if you're hitting your targets which I have said before, I've talked to so many customers where I'm like, "Hey, how are things going? What are you measuring?" "Oh, we're hitting all our numbers." It's like, "Okay. Cool. Why? Or what's driving that?" "And it was like crickets. I have no idea." It's like, "Well, even if you're winning, find out why. See if you can do more, right?" And then ensure again, I know this is a repeat, but ensure that there's a common understanding of accountability, what success looks like, and how you're going to get there. So thank you very much. Enjoy the rest of the Summit, and thanks again, guys.
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