[Music] We're here to kick off, this session on how the NFL orchestrates exceptional fan experiences. And I think it's great that we can talk about the fan experiences here. We have customers. We talk about our customers as customers but it would be great for us to be able to think about them as fans. Now I know you're all Adobe customers or prospects. I don't expect you to be wearing Adobe red face paint like some of the NFL fans do but it would be fantastic for us to think about customers and think about that obsession in the same way. And I think you may think about that with your customers as well.
So, my name is Mike Maffeo, and I'm a Group Product Manager at Adobe. I've been on the Adobe Journey Optimizer team for about three years. I'm joined here by Haley Brunner, who is the Director of Performance Marketing for the NFL. We wouldn't be able to have this presentation without Haley. So we are super excited. She came here, and she's going to give us a behind the scenes or should I say-- Let's use some football terms during this presentation. She's going to give us a field level view of how the NFL were-- The work the NFL has done over the years to optimize and amplify these exceptional fan experiences. So it's my pleasure to hand things over to Haley. She's going to kick things off with some takeaways that we want you to get out of this presentation in this session today. And also give you some incredible facts about the NFL and their fans. And talk about some of the bases for their fan engagements for the NFL. [Haley Brunner] Thank you, Mike. Thank you for having us. The NFL is very excited to be here and thank you all for coming. I'm sure we have a few NFL fans here in the crowd. And I'm sure we have a lot of you who have been a part of our journeys whether you knew it or not. So let's get into it. So we're going to cover a few things today. The first is just a little bit of background on the NFL's fan engagement program and how that's led us to be so connected to Adobe's products. The next is a few examples of campaigns that I've used Adobe Journey Optimizer, Customer Journey Analytics, as well as many other Adobe products. And then a little sneak peek into what's next for the NFL.
Right now, the NFL has unparalleled breadth and depth. We have an immense ecosystem of different partners that we work with, and largely that's just due to our ecosystem. Some of our channels are one-to-many. Some of our channels are one-to-one, and some fall somewhere in between. But collectively, we believe our strategy is to bring our fans together and really deepen their engagement regardless of where they may come in from.
So we started a fan engagement program around four years ago, and it's called the NFL Fan Engagement Program. And it's really hinged on three key pillars, to see our fans, to know our fans, and know more about our fans, and lastly, to engage meaningfully with our fans at scale at a one-to-one level.
So before our program started, we used to be in this disjointed state where you had a fanatics or a club or the league communicating with a fan without the other entities really having any understanding of how they were all communicating with that same fan. So you ended up with a lot of redundant messaging, no coercion happening to understand how is that fan supposed to be communicated? What does she want? And now in this new state that we're working in with Adobe's tools and our program, we really have this great ecosystem where we're all talking together and there's this orchestration where we all understand how we're all individually talking to the same fan. In layman's terms, that's the right message to the right audience at the right time.
Now a few years into our program, we have over 300% active contactables. We know more about those known fans, and we're also engaging those fans more meaningfully.
Great. And so when we started thinking about this presentation, this session, one of the slides that stood out to me that Haley and I were talking about is this fan engagement timeline. And I'm going to talk about this a little bit from an NFL perspective but trying to actually talk about it more broadly to every corporation, every customer perspective. Because all of us have some timeline where we've started in engaging programs. We started out with some of the basics and then added on top of it. So in this case-- And some of this may be very familiar to you. But to go back from the NFL perspective, started out with a handful of Adobe products at the time but really started with the foundational element six or seven years ago, which is really about a singular channel focus, really focusing on a specific channel, thinking things from an email perspective or a channel perspective, which again, at the time, was what the tools were able to give you. And then over time, you're starting to build more performance, more data-driven experiences. Starting to look at more segmentation and then jump into the 2023-2024 and beyond where some of the Adobe products, I've tried not to use the three letter acronyms so much but the slide only had so much space. But things like Customer Journey Analytics and Adobe Journey Optimizer and Workfront and the CDP product really allowed for NFL and other customers to really get into the Journey Orchestration pieces, where it's really about personalization at scale. It's about real-time decisioning. And from a fan experience perspective, as Haley pointed out, it's really about that entire ecosystem.
And reaching that right customer across that. So the takeaway from this slide, yes, this is the NFL fan engagement timeline. But I think you can put your own timeline into this as well. And to understand, you've got to start somewhere. Start somewhere and you could build on that over time. You don't have to go to the advanced class right away.
From an Adobe perspective-- This is one of our internal Adobe slides. This is really how we think about Adobe Journey Optimizer. And it's really about that being at the center of the experiences that you want to deliver. And we do that in a number of different ways. So we have a breadth of channels that you're able to initiate and engage customers with. This can be all done inside of one existing journey or it can be broken up into other journeys. But we're trying not to bound people to be channel-specific. If you want to deliver an experience, you can deliver that through Adobe Journey Optimizer. As well, we know that enterprises have multiple teams. So there's the concept of team is literally how we think about teams inside of companies and how the NFL potentially thinks of teams. But really about different organizations inside needing access to certain things, not needing access to others, really have that taken care of. We have the concept of multiple sandboxes built into the platform. So whether that's a development environment, a stage environment, a prod environment, you could also slash it down by region. However you want to use the sandbox piece, you can do that to tailor that to your needs. And then multiple content sources and multiple data sources. So we know content can come from everywhere and content does come from anywhere and data comes from anywhere. So while we do have the data platform, we also know that there's data spread out throughout an organization, and you could use those data sources inside of AJO, Journey Optimizer. So we're going to get into more details on this throughout. So I'm going to intersperse some of the Adobe pieces with Haley talking through some of the NFL pieces. So you can see how we can weave these things together. So to continue our football terms, I'm going to hand off this back to Haley, as she takes us through the blueprint for how the NFL is able to deliver the fan experiences.
All right. So we're about three, four years into our adoption of Adobe Journey Optimizer. And if there's three takeaways that we want to share with you depending on where you are in your adoption, they are these. Number one, Define Your North Star. For us, it's been fan-first. Now fan-first might seem generic but we strongly believe when you actually put the fan at the core of all your marketing and drive meaningful engagement to them, that revenue will follow. And now a key to that is orchestration. Before we had AJO and before we moved into this program, a lot of our channel strategies were bifurcated. So you had one channel strategy in email, you had another channel strategy in Push, and they weren't really talking to each other. So orchestration has been fundamental to making our whole vision come to life. Lastly, Crawl Before You Jump. There's a lot of capabilities that Mike will talk through that are available with Adobe Journey Optimizer as well as the full Adobe CDP stack.
Crawl before you jump. What we've done is test into them. So we understand one and then adopt and then optimize from there and then understand another. To go all in and use all of those capabilities at once, you won't understand how each is working for you distinctly.
So our North Star. Like I mentioned when we started this program, it was a cross-functional program. So we're working with our data team, our MarTech team, a lot of the clubs, and we all had our independent strategies and goals that we wanted to accomplish with this program. But we set up a fundamental set of guardrails and principles to keep us grounded and make sure that regardless of what we each independently were doing, that we really made sure we kept the fan at the core of everything we did.
Now this slide is a mess and it's intentional. It's intentional because the fan journey is complicated and it really is not the same for each individual fan. A lot of fans might repeat this. Some stay at the same place for four months. Some go back and forth between two steps. And the whole point of this is it's not linear. And this is just what we're up against with our journeys and why we've been so dependent on AJO to help us unravel how complicated this is for us.
And so what we did to try to understand this and make it somewhat linear even though we knew it's not, is we did a lot of research to understand from our fans what were key moments to them throughout the season. And what we found through that research was not all fans started the same point in a season. Some started Super Bowl. Some started draft. Some started kickoff. We also found that they don't end at the same time. So sometimes your team is out in November, and so then your season's done. Sometimes you're excited for the playoffs or you're excited for Super Bowl. But what we found is our work is really in the middle. So if we can either extend your journey with us towards the end of the season or start your season earlier, that's really the power we have to mature our fans.
You can have the best journey out there but if you don't have, again, that governance and messaging hierarchy around it, it's not going to be successful. So we spent a lot of time with the clubs to understand what were all the different campaigns that both clubs and leagues were doing to communicate with fans. And what we did is we wrapped all of those communications. There's many pages to this of all of our different campaigns and we said, "Okay, for this campaign, this is going to be the brands behind it and this is going to be the primary communicator." And then in some cases, you need an amplification. That amplification, in some cases, doesn't make sense to be the league. It makes sense to be the club. So we really mapped that out, and this was critical to make sure that we had that, again, messaging cadence, and we weren't over saturating our fans.
Thank you. So what Haley was saying there is exactly what we are talking to customers about and have talked to customers about. So when I saw those slides I immediately knew which one I wanted to go and grab and talk about and it's really, again, something that we always discuss is disrupting the channel-led mindset, unlock so much about how you should be thinking about, delivering more consistent and engaging experiences. So let me talk about that, a little bit. So when you're thinking about a customer-centric approach, it's really about just changing the orientation of the experiences. You really start inside and out. And you really start thinking about what is the personalization that you're going to need. You start thinking about how the campaigns and journeys will interact with one another by themselves. And you also think about which channels you want to light up and which channels you want to expose as part of that. What we've noticed is that if folks start from the channel-based approach, they're really locked into experiences based on that channel. And it limits the thinking, and it limits some of the things that customers want to do. And the biggest takeaway or the biggest thing that we see, it's not necessarily a technology-driven conversation. It's an organizational level conversation. Because the email team is run by this person over here and the mobile team is run by this person over here. And I see people nodding their heads. That's the same way in every company. It's the same way in the one that I work for at times as well.
We're doing the customer-led approach and have been for quite a while but it's still there. It takes some time to get around that. So what I urge you is to whether you can do it initially or not, is think about the experiences from a customer-centric view first, and then map those things out, and then it goes back to the organization, internally to work through that. And you may be able to make progress or not but at least you have the customer forefront in your mind throughout that. And the experiences and the outcomes will be better, for that, we believe.
So with that, what I want to do is give a little bit of the overview of Adobe Journey Optimizer earlier. I want to get a little bit more in-depth into Journey Optimizer for those who know about it, or need a little more information on it. So some of the key capabilities of Adobe Journey Optimizer is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, is it's built on top of the customer profile and the same audiences that you have in the CDP space. So moving data around, moving profiles around, no need for any of that.
From a channel perspective and the omnichannel engagement perspective, we can connect with virtually any channel out there and we have some new roadmap announcements that we're going to be discussing, where that becomes even more so. So thinking about, whether it's reaching them inside of one journey or multiple journeys that can all be done. There's the intuitive journey and content design. So a marketer-friendly view on how to create the journeys and the design of the journeys, so that you can orchestrate what you have in your mind to what is going to happen inside of the product. We have that real-time journey orchestration, which we also have it. If it's a onetime thing, works just as well. But the real-time journey orchestration, where you can start talking to customers on a one-to-one level, that's one of the base functionalities inside of Adobe Journey Optimizer. And from talking to customers-- We're going to talk about this a little bit later. Talking to customers, it's a lot about one-to-one but really the true magic is when one-to-one and the batch type of things work together in parallel, you really amplify what you can do. And then finally, in this slide is a lot of intelligence. So inside of Adobe Journey Optimizer, there's experience decisioning, there's experimentation. There's a ton of value in the optimization and decisioning pieces built right in. And as we talk about, some of the pieces later on, you can unlock those as you go or as appropriate or you can dive in right away. So that is the overview of AJO. We're going to get into more details later on.
I'm going to go and now pass this back to Haley. Again, we're talking football references. So pass this back. Dad jokes get me five out of five on the speaker review at the end. So, Haley, why don't you go and talk a bit about orchestration and what that means for fan experiences.
So orchestration can mean a lot of things to different people, to different teams. At the NFL, orchestration and journeys isn't just email. It isn't just email and Push. We're talking seven or eight different channels at the same time. And we understand different channels have different powers and it depends on certain campaigns. Might really help you with reach. Other campaigns, Push might help you in those real-time components. For us during those live games, Push is incredibly powerful.
And it's been really complicated to understand what is the power of email versus the power of Push versus our web activity or SMS. And Adobe Journey Optimizer and Customer Journey Analytics have been really critical to unlocking those channel learnings and really understanding the power of all of them together at different moments in time.
A great example of this is our D2C product NFL+. So during the season this year, we had six different journeys going on for NFL+ with, as you can see, seven or eight different channels. And what was really cool using Adobe Journey Optimizer and the Orchestration tool, is we had people moving in and out of these journeys throughout the season, and that was all depending on their channel activity. Were they engaging in email or not engaging in email? Were they opening that Push or not opening that Push? What were they doing while the game was playing? What were they doing on non-game days? All of that we were able to move them in and out depending on that. Again, letting the fan decide what their experience should be.
Another example, Schedule Release. A lot of you might be more familiar with Schedule Release. It's our biggest ticket selling day of the year.
But what we found through this program was some of our fans live in five, six, seven different club databases. They all believe that those fans are their fans to communicate on this big Schedule Release day. But what does that mean is that not only six clubs are communicating with that fan but the league are communicating with that fan, Ticketmaster is communicating with that fan, all of our partners are, and that really quickly adds up and you get a lot of fans getting the same message on the same day. And really that one entity, maybe that one club that they really want to hear from isn't breaking through because they're just getting inundated in all those messages. And so what we did is we really orchestrated with more than 30 different clubs for a scheduled release to make sure that the actual entity that fan wanted to hear from was breaking through. And this had this immense opportunity and performance for us compared to doing it in the previous way we've been doing it.
Cool. And I think Haley talked about the club and league relationship, and I know nothing about that. Right? We'd work in industries where we don't have that. But I see the parallels to a lot of the organizations that I work with where there are different teams that have data in different places and are trying to communicate with their customers and where that happens. So that resonated with me even without being in that type of environment. So I alluded it to earlier, and Haley talked about it now. But what we really find, to be most valuable is when you're able to flex and flex between campaigns, so one off campaigns and real-time engagement across the customer lifecycle. So it's not an either/or, it's like an and. We believe that that is what resonates the most. And when you're able to do it or you have the need to do it, that's where those pieces come in. So examples that we have here are, things like a welcome message, might be something that's scheduled. Maybe that's something that's done on Monday mornings or Tuesday mornings. Maybe in some organizations, it's done after a download and that's an immediate thing and maybe you wait an extra day because you don't know about time zones and things like that. But essentially, it's really understanding the different experiences you want to deliver over that customer lifecycle and understanding if they're going to be best served by a campaign or best served by a real-time one-to-one communication. And I think the answer is always, it depends. It depends on how you want to reach your customers and how you want to talk to your customers.
And then we're going to dive a little bit deeper now into-- Excuse me, into Journey Orchestration. So gave you an overview of AJO as the product and where that fits in and now going to get into the Journey Orchestration component to the product. So we're really looking at a secure and extensible architecture. We talked about this earlier, which is, how do you reach customers where they are, and what channels are you using, and where is the data coming from. And that's a primary focus of what we've done inside of AJO, inside of Adobe Journey Optimizer with the Journey Orchestration pieces. So if you have data, if you have content, we can extend to that.
There's an intuitive journey designer. So that's what you're seeing here. So it's really about taking the ideas that you may have in Miro, or you may have in PowerPoint, and really how do you bring that into the product. And there's the journey designer does that. We've talked about the optimization and the intelligence pieces. We try to offer the capabilities, and we'll talk about some things that are coming out. But really talking about optimizing those journeys, continuously having them run, understanding what's happening so that you can modify them, and then comprehensive insights with our reporting piece. So from a Journey Orchestration perspective, a lot of what we have inside of the product is really what goes ahead and powers a lot of the experiences that customers, like the NFL, want to utilize for their orchestration needs.
I am going to throw this over to Haley now to discuss the delivery and some of the more advanced journeys that the NFL has started, which are based on top of their foundational journeys.
As we all know, real-time is key. Fans and consumers alike are demanding everything in the now. And so when we moved into Adobe Journey Optimizer, we were really excited to set up a lot of real-time journeys. And they've been working really great for us. But what we've also learned is not everything needed to be real-time. In actuality, there's a beauty to having batch campaigns alongside real-time campaigns. And so a unique example of this is abandoned cart for NFL+. Now abandoned cart might seem like a pretty generic campaign. A lot of you are probably running this. There's not a lot to it. However, when we did it for NFL+, which, mind you, is still a relatively new product, three or four years old, so we had to test into it. It's not like a lot of our other products. So again, learning as we go. What we found was that actually when fans abandoned on a non-game day and they received that 15-minute real-time communication, they were not converting nearly as well as when fans were abandoning on a game day and receiving that 15-minute real-time communication. So what we did is instead we added a wait step. We actually made it not real-time if you abandon on a non-game day, and we waited till the next game day to send you that abandoned cart message, and the conversion went back up. And so what that told us is, "Okay, we'll keep real-time for that game day engagement, people who are consuming on game day. We'll keep that in real-time, and we'll actually make it batch for people who are not, abandoning on a game day." And that's the blend that we're talking about here is don't assume everything should be real-time. Let the data tell you what should be real-time.
Another example that AJO has helped us expand our strategies is around away games. So a lot of the clubs in the league used to primarily focus on their home game ticket sales. But there was a really big opportunity that was being missed. And when we looked at all the data from this program, we started to see that we actually had a lot of fans that were displaced from their favorite team, and that meant that they couldn't go to those home games. And so what we did is we created this moment for them. Working with clubs like the Lions, we said, "Okay, there's a lot of fans who actually could attend those away games in the cities where they live." And so we worked with a lot of the Lions partners and we created this awesome moment so that fans who can't go to those home games can now go to those away games for their favorite team. Again, that's just meeting that fan exactly where they are. We know them and we are making sure that they aren't missing out on all that opportunity.
Very cool. So I think what Haley just said, definitely resonated with the optimization pieces, understanding about batch and real-time. As we start taking a look at the basics of the programs and getting more and more advanced, what I wanted to do is give an overview of Adobe Journey Optimizer features that are maybe a little new to some. There's going to be some slides in here that are talking about features that are going to be announced at a roadmap session that's happening in an hour and a half, maybe an hour by now. So you're actually going to get that before people go another roadmap session. But we'll get to those pieces later. But for 2024, we've had what we would describe as like 33 major new capabilities introduced in Adobe Journey Optimizer.
Some of the bigger ones are around some of the new channels that we unlocked, whether that's across mobile with things like content cards and code-based experiences and in-app messaging. Lots of great new native channels that we've introduced. There'll be more coming in 2025. I can't highlight everything here. But things around decisioning, new features around-- I am using the word AI, the AI assistant. I'm sure you've heard a lot of that, during these days. And there's just so, so, so much more. And when we start thinking about moving beyond the basics for AJO, it's really these, from a channel perspective, these mobile messaging and extensible channel capabilities. So again, we want you to meet your customers wherever those customers are. So we have extensible channel capabilities. We hit on some of the experimentation. We have more and more experimentation built into Adobe Journey Optimizer, which unlocks a whole other set of value. And then experienced decisoning and being able to make the decisions with that product, so that you're able to deliver the next best decision, the next best offer to that customer.
This is just some of the things in 2024. I'm going to talk a little bit about some of the things that are coming in 2025. So the caveat that I have here is this is in no way representative of every single thing, okay? So don't come out of this saying this is the roadmap for Adobe Journey Optimizer. This is just a small, small, small fragment of that. Which leads me to Reusable Journey Fragments. We'll talk about that, a little bit more detail. But things like Multi-action Campaigns are coming. Things like a Journey Dry Run, being able to understand what's going to happen to your journey before it goes live. And then the ability to send communication, outbound communication in waves. So to be able to do some nifty things there. I'm going to go into a detail on the ones that we didn't cover.
Journey Fragments is one of the cool ones. Actually they're all cool but this one's like my personal favorite. And I'm not even the product manager for it. There's somebody else. But it's really going to save-- We believe it's going to save tons of time because you're going to be able to identify parts of a journey, the nodes and everything around those nodes, and save those off as Journey Fragments. And then there's going to be a library of Journey Fragments, and you could reuse this in whatever journey comes next. They're going to be copies, so there's no relationship between the fragment that you have but it allows you to quick start and move ahead really quickly. So if there's always going to be a journey that begins with an audience and email and then a decision that goes to a Push or an SMS, all of that can be reused in subsequent journeys. Saving a lot of time and making that efficiency gains in creating those journeys.
We're also going to introduce the notion of Quiet Hours. And what Quiet Hours allows you to do is set times and periods when communication shouldn't be sent to the user. We'll use either a time zone or we'll infer the time zone based on information that we know. That is going to be a great way for us to reduce fatigue. There's some regions and countries that rely on Quiet Hours. There's some channels like SMS that rely on things like Quiet Hours. So we're going to be able to offer that functionality in 2025.
Another Journey Orchestration feature that I think is relevant, to a lot of the folks in this room, as we talk about the Orchestration pieces, is the real-time pause and resume of a journey. So the capability of being able to pause, make changes, resume those changes, make the content different. So you don't lose the folks that are inside of that journey, and you can resume that without rebuilding the flow.
There's a lot of complexity behind the scenes on something like this. But the team has done a great job putting this together. And we're getting closer to launching this. And then one of the ones that, in addition to the first thing I talked about, this Journey Path Optimization. So my AI slide that we all have to have as product managers. I'm joking but we do.
Because there is so much great stuff coming out. And it's really being able to use a lot of the technology, a lot of the functionality we have to optimize that flow of the journey. So think about that as Path Experimentation, as well as Path Decisioning. So we have decisioning today that delivers content, delivers offers inside of a channel. Think about that decisioning coming inside of the journey designer, so that you're able to put that decisioning onto different nodes. So that you can intelligently route people to different parts of the journey based on the decision that you have set up for this. So lots of cool things. Again, this is like tip of the iceberg. At 4pm, there's going to be a roadmap conversation that's happening today. It's a full session but you might be able to crash it. And there, they will be going into a lot more detail on that. So this was just a bit of sneak peek that I wanted to give you all here in the room, and just urge you to either go to that session, try to get in, or I believe that content, is going to be online. I'm running out of football terms, so I came up with, I'm going to snap the ball back to Haley. That one was bad. Snap this back to Haley for her to wrap things up.
All right. So you've heard a little bit of our learnings of what we've done so far using Journey Optimizer, and you might be curious what's next for the NFL as far as some exciting things. You guys have probably seen we're starting to have more and more games abroad. That's only going to continue to expand. And we're not only bringing our games abroad but we're bringing our products, our tech. Everything is moving global, and we're really working with our tech and our teams to make sure everything is working with the nature of the nuances of each of the global markets. Just like we've learned the domestic markets are different, we're understanding all of the setup that we need to do to expand globally.
Again, like Mike said, artificial intelligence, I'm sure you guys are all exploring it as are we. We're really excited for it to bring more precise unique optimization across our content and our campaigns. And then lastly, Multi-Touch Attribution. This is a big one for us, for products like I mentioned, NFL+ especially when you have that a lot of the one-to-many and the one-to-one channels, trying to understand what is the power of those and how can we use each of those together to really drive that end conversion.
And as you all leave here to go create your own customer journeys, because you're just so excited, remember three things. Define Your North Star. Have that shared goal. Number two, Orchestration is Key. Combine those channel strategies together. Bring those teams together. And three, Crawl Before You Jump. Dominate those fundamentals and then test into the new.
Very cool. Thank you, Haley. That wraps up.
Thank you, Haley. That was awesome. I do have some administration things to go over on this. There's no test or anything like that. This is maybe the boring part. But wanted to give you all a little bit more information ways to go about and find out more about Adobe Journey Optimizer. We have things like the Experience League Live, we have got a Journeys E-Book as well as the ability to play around with the AI Assistant. I'll let you guys take your pictures or get to the QR codes or anything like that.
The next piece is a survey so we urge you to submit a survey, fill that out. Get a gift card. One of the people in this room will win a gift card. One person each day will get the headphones. So urge you to do that. We appreciate the feedback on that so that you give us that information on how we can improve on this going forward. So with that, that does conclude everything here. Haley and I are going to be upfront. If anyone has any questions, we have some time. We're going to take some answers up in front of the room. But we really appreciate everyone coming out and really urge you to go out, start taking a look at some of the other sessions and really get back to the office thinking about a lot of the great things that Haley was able to talk about today. So thank you everyone. Thank you.
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