Content & Experiences: The Beating Heart of Personalization

Transcript

All right. So we’re going to go ahead and jump into today’s content. Welcome and thank you for joining today’s session. My name is Katie Cosby. I am a senior strategist within Adobe’s integrated architecture team and I will be your host for the Connecting the Dots webinar series. I will note that this session is being recorded and a link will be sent out to everyone who has registered for today’s event. So without further ado, let’s take a moment to talk about why we’ve decided to kick off this Connecting the Dots virtual event series and why we are all here today. So there has never been a time where the ability to scale personalized experiences to every customer has been more expected, more needed or more possible. In fact, 100% of everyone that has registered for today’s session owns five or more Adobe solutions and you have likely registered to learn more about recommended strategies to tie everything together and effectively personalize at scale. I myself am a member of Adobe’s integrated architecture team and we continually work with customers to support them in executing business strategies that move across digital experience products, unlocking the ability to personalize its scales. So in today’s session, our objectives are what you see here to share Adobe-led best practices, discuss challenges, and provide an opportunity to share and learn from your peers. So with that, let me go ahead and share the agenda for today’s session. So next up, I will be turning things over to my colleague, Pasha Sims, principal strategist within the integrated architecture team to take us through an overview of content and experiences, the beating heart of personalization. After that, I’ll welcome everyone to come off mute for a roundtable discussion portion of the event. Here you’ll have the opportunity to surface any questions based on what Pasha shared or, you know, share with us any challenges or successes that you’d like to talk about as it relates to content and experiences for personalization at scale. At the end, we will close with next steps and give everyone a chance to provide feedback on today’s session via quick three-question survey. But before we engage in the presentation portion of today’s event, I’m curious, Lauren, if you’re comfortable, do you want to come off mute and share with us either something you’re hoping to learn today or a, you know, challenge that you’ve seen with your organization when it comes to creating content and experiences for personalization? We are kind of very new to the personalization journey with Adobe, so still kind of scoping out where our challenges are, but I might have a better sense of what I can share after the presentation’s done. No worries. And again, as Pasha’s sharing, if any questions do come up for you, feel free to put those into the chat and then we’ll just surface them at the end before we wrap up and kind of dig in further from there. So at this point, I will turn things over to our presenter today, Pasha. Great. Thank you, Katie. I’m going to share. No, I’m going to share that. And I may go off camera because I’m on a laptop and I don’t want to distract myself. So, all right. Thank you and welcome, Lauren. Appreciate you joining and taking time out of your day. So our goals for today, really quickly, why content? We’re going to talk a little bit about the context for the purpose of this webinar. We’ll talk about the common struggles that we see most frequently with our customers and how it impacts their efficiency when developing enough content for personalization. And then we’ll shift into shifting the mindset. And this is really around thinking strategically about content. And then I provide an action plan for getting started. So let’s dig in. I don’t know if you’ve seen this slide before, but this is something that I always try to open with, that the need for content is growing and growing. And a lot of our customers kind of are experiencing the same thing. They have a thousand of products may create millions of variations and not only just images, but video or 3D images. But they also have to have localization requirements for deploying them into regions. And of course, there’s thousands of customers. And to make the content personalized and engaging, there’s a lot of behind the scenes work. So hopefully, what we can do is we can shift into what this means we need to have. So from my perspective, I lead the content and experiences practice, which means for the integrated architecture team, we’re talking about how do our customers manage the requirements for content and experiences. It’s basically thinking about it as a digital capability that helps them kind of understand internally what their content supply chain looks like. From the beginning, when you come up with an idea, you go into planning, and then production and delivering that asset. There’s multiple teams working to create the content itself, but even understanding how effective that content is. So from my perspective, this is kind of the context. I’m going to move into the main challenges. A lot of our customers are struggling with delivering content at scale. I think Lauren, you mentioned that you’re getting started with personalization. We can spend a bit of time in the roundtable discussing sort of how you’re thinking about it and what you’re experiencing, but you’re not alone. There’s a couple of different things that customers are struggling with holistically, which is disjointed execution with internal and external teams. So there’s collaboration challenges. There’s not managing workflows efficiently. They’re fragmented. They’re not able to create content because they have to have multiple tools and revisions and things like that, and they can’t really integrate everything. Then there’s roadblocks to delivering and optimizing those experiences. A lot of the customers that I talk to, they talk about how not everything is in one location. They are creating multiple versions of the same asset.

It leads to waste. They’re not using them or they’re not sure what’s the most effective. Really, there’s the time, there’s the cost, there’s the missed revenue, and then it leads to dissatisfaction with customers. These challenges have real-world impacts. What we wanted to focus on is how do we reduce that? How do we streamline and cut through the noise? Because as you can see, this is a very complex journey that content goes through.

How do you make sense of it all? Let me go to the next one. It’s shifting our mindset. What I like to think about is starting with what is the value of the content and elevate it to a strategic priority, meaning that it’s your primary vehicle for delivering high-impact experiences and specifically for personalization at scale.

Try to think about the scale and efficiency in a way that helps you kind of build a better environment. Think about templates, leveraging workflows in an automated way, and then optimizing that process over time. You’re not going to really be able to start immediately, but you can think about what is the workflow, what teams are experiencing, when they’re working with the content. Are there particular workflows that they are challenged with that reduce their effectiveness but also wear down their productivity and their morale? Then finally, think about your assets in a way that focus on the high value. Also, try to make them modular, reusable. That’s the goal, is to reduce the amount of work that your teams have to do by thinking about it’s not just campaign-dependent or local. It’s like, where can we reuse it and how can we reuse it? How can we make sure that we’re not just a team? This is just an example of the content supply chain. I was talking a little bit about the team, but this is what they do. Starting on the left, where we have the creative teams, we have brand creative or studio creative, and they start to create their briefs. They start to create their own content. They start to create their own content. They start to create their briefs. They start to come up with ideas. They’re coming up with campaign ideas. Then they move into design and collaboration once they complete their briefs. Then the campaign managers are working along the way saying, okay, are we doing it? We’re managing it in there. There’s review and approval processes. Once those are approved, then there’s assets and variations and automation that happens to deploy those out in delivery.

The impacts are pretty clear. I’m not going to read through it, but I want to make sure that these are highlighted. At the end of the day, content for personalization requires consistent content and it requires fast approvals. It requires efficient delivery.

Let’s get into the foundational pillars. What I usually talk to customers, we start with content governance strategy. There’s a reason why. It helps us say, what is the content for? What are our goals? How are we going to know it’s successful? The second step is really understanding how much content we actually have. I mentioned this earlier. There’s customers that have content stored on multiple dams. Sometimes things are walled off.

We don’t know where to put work in progress assets. Having a content library that’s organized helps us develop that inventory so we know what the gaps are.

We can identify the overlaps, but also we need to figure out what the high value content is. We also need to separate the old and stale content and we need to archive that.

I talked a bit about the teams involved. Again, there’s tons of people involved and they need to be able to do their work quickly and efficiently with minimal disruptions.

Identifying who’s responsible for things. Sometimes we’ll see that there’s really heavy review and approval processes simply because of the way that’s the way it’s always been done, but we don’t know if it’s truly effective. Is it helping us or is it hurting us? Then there’s the content standards, of course, which is style and tone, but also image quality.

The content standards could extend to metadata. What attribution? Some regulations require models to have a specific age or there needs to be a photographer and the copyright needs to be included. Those types of things have to be identified upfront and then you can set up workflows to manage those. Then the last two are really governance, privacy, and measuring and reporting on effectiveness. Obviously, the effectiveness of your content is not going to be a good thing. The effectiveness of your content is going to help you inform what works and what doesn’t and helps you determine what you should be leveraging for your personalization plan. I think from this perspective, this idea of what are the types of content that can be personalized your governance strategy. Moving into collaboration, we talked a bit about workflows, but there are so many teams also beyond those creatives that are involved in not just creating the content but measuring it or doing analysis on the other side. It’s really important to say, here’s what we’re doing, here’s our goal. We want to understand what content is working and what isn’t. Then you can bring in the analysts. Sometimes the IT and the technical teams or the creative don’t often talk to each other, but those two teams working together can really create a powerful synergy, I think, in developing the workflows and helping to automate and break down inefficiencies. Then obviously, there’s the technology and tools. I think on the architecture slide, there was, again, all of the tools. I didn’t include what the solutions are that are tied to those, but the creative tools where branding creative or developing, for example, Adobe Creative Cloud has an integration with Workfront.

Also, there are integrations between Creative Cloud and AEM. The planning and project management, that’s Workfront. The digital asset management, AEM, Adobe Experience Manager, to marketing automation platforms where you can say, here’s the content we want to push it to Marketo or Campaign.

With all of these, we’re able to say, okay, let’s figure out what assets are most effective and go back to the beginning in our planning phase to inform what our creative process should start with. Again, going back to measuring, what is the most effective content that we should be? We do that through gathering insights. I just want to go to this piece of it, which is creating an action plan within 30 days, within 60 days to really think about how to start developing content for personalization.

Again, starting with the content governance strategy, I always try to say within the 30 days, if you haven’t had a content audit or you don’t have a fully fleshed out content library, those are the things that I would always start with because those will help inform, what is your class, classify your high-value content, what’s your old stuff, and separate out the two. I know that this isn’t a set it and forget it type of experience. What you want to do is refresh this. Have in your planning cycles, be prepared to revisit, to say, is the content governance strategy working? Do we need to do another audit? Because as with most content and experiences programs, content gets created and then we’re not sure what we do with it.

Through developing those strategies, we can start to think about how do we through developing those standards, you dial it in and you get it really streamlined. It’s operating like that machine and then it powers that content supply chain.

Within the 60 days, then you can move into your personalization action plans, where you’re quickly moving back and forth saying, okay, let’s use this use case, create that content, and then moving forward with that. This is the action plan for the content supply chain. I would say there’s planning, production, delivery, but the reason that I’m saying this is that there’s little activities within here that you can say, okay, in our process, how are we doing our campaign planning and intake? Do we have existing content that we can use for it? How do we know whether it’s effective or not? Then in the production, how are we designing it? How are we collaborating? What is our review and approval process? Can we automate any of it? There’s some synergies to be found in those things. Then there’s finally delivery. Again, rapid asset deployment, connecting things with Workfront to push things out quickly once they’re approved.

This is meant to be a foundational discussion. I’m going to turn it back over to Katie after I close with these main ideas. Start with the content governance strategy.

Identify where your pain points are with your content supply chain. Start with strategy, but boost the content that you have and that you know that works, and then leverage those action plans to get started. All right. Thank you. Thank you for walking us through that. At this time, I’d like to open it up for everyone. If you want to come off mute and surface any questions or share any challenges that your organization has seen when it comes to the content supply chain for your personalization at scale program, feel free to come off mute and let us know. While you guys are thinking about that, Tasha, you talked about the importance of collaboration. I’m curious, how would you recommend an organization really starts fostering that robust collaboration mentality? Ooh. One thing that has always worked is actually having a facilitated discussion or workshop with the various teams that I’ve done this myself, where we’ve come into a customer, I won’t name them, but large higher ed customer comes to mind. We brought in teams of, basically, they were spanning I think four to five. We had a really interesting discussion around analytics, but there were multiple people within there that had their different areas that they were talking about. It wasn’t just on content, but it was actually on the experiences. They had three separate portals where students had to go through and each had its own experience.

This was the first time that they were brought together. Having a third party come in, us, Adobe, facilitate the discussion helped kickstart it. It became less of, oh, we work in these silos and our work is separate. They started to realize that, oh, no, no, we’re very connected.

I didn’t know that. I didn’t know that this person was working on that. Sometimes having a third party come in to facilitate can be very effective or the change can come from within.

I hope I answered the question. Yeah. Thank you. I love the real life example, too. I think that always helps tell this story. Anyone else on the call run into any common challenges around fostering collaboration or any hurdles in your process overall that’s really restricting your velocity? Yeah. I can offer one. We are just starting the personalization journey on our side. I do feel as though we have the right party at the table. We’re collaborating well. I think for us, it’s a matter of how we can better automate. We do have a wealth of data available to us. I think we’re fortunate in that sense. I think how we can most effectively use it with the resources that we have available might be our biggest challenge. I know you briefly touched on automation, but if there’s anything else you can give from a tips and tricks standpoint to help elevate that would be helpful. Automation of creating the content itself? Yeah. Just to clarify also, we have a ton of assets available to us. It’s more just how we can version appropriately in order to use the content most effectively. So that’s wonderful that you have a wealth of data. I think that in some cases, if you don’t have a central data model and you’re not able to quickly understand how you’re going to segment and target, that can be very challenging. But from an automation perspective, are you using AEM sites or assets? Can you give me a little bit more detail on the types of content that you’re trying to personalize? Is it landing pages or is it email? Yeah. It’s all of the above. We’re not using…

I believe we’re using right now, we have AGO, we have Adobe Target, we’re leveraging the CDP from a data perspective, so AEP. But just starting to use Adobe Target specifically and AGO, so I think it’s how we can build some automation into that if at all possible, or if there’s other integrations that we would need to support that. Okay. That is an area that I am not… AGO is specifically not my… I mean, I’m familiar, I just don’t have a ton of experience in it. But if it’s the types of content that you’re creating is sort of like, okay, it’s offers or it’s recommendations. Is that how you’re… And forgive me, I don’t know what company you’re with. Oh, that’s okay. No, that’s okay. So we are an entertainment company. So we offer out of home experiences where we have movie theaters, we have large scale kind of entertainment centers like arcades, the record and palladium. So all that sort of thing. We have a lot of content in that we can leverage film content for studio partners, that sort of thing. So it is exactly what you’re saying. So likely offers and personalized recommendations. Gotcha. Okay. So there are capabilities within AM sites specifically. I don’t know if you’re using sites, but one of the nice things about it is creating variations based on regional offerings. So you can say this particular region has these entertainment options to it. And then you can tie launches to those within the UI to say, okay, here’s when it needs to roll out. And you can automate it and schedule it. In terms of the automating of the actual content itself, there are some… Again, launches is a good one. There’s some generative AI, interesting things coming from that, that you can apply to your own images and assets. I would say that I’d be open to having another conversation with you to dig in a little bit more to what you’re doing and poke around. I think that from my perspective, if you’re working with very lean team, and I don’t know if you’ve got a light model or a heavy operating model, heavy operating model, it depends on your schedule of when you’re actually releasing content. Because if it’s entertainment or films, movies, the movies are cycling through and you have specific areas of… It’s like maybe it’s the summer months that you got the big blockbusters. But if you have arcades and things like that, or other venues, I’m assuming that there are other things that are associated with those too. So I would recommend…

Let me see. It’s hard for me to do this on the fly. And I can’t easily look it up. No, that’s okay. It’s boring. I don’t want to fumble around and waste your time. Thank you. Now I’m intrigued. Okay. We actually don’t have AEM sites, so just to clarify that. But yeah. But anyways…

Are you housing content within… I guess what I’m asking is where do you keep your content and how is it created? So we have an in-house creative team and we have a separate asset storage software that we leverage. Okay. Okay. Gotcha.

But yeah, it’s all good. We can take it away. I appreciate the response. Yeah, absolutely. Katie, anything? Yeah. Yeah. I was just going to add, is there any other questions based on anyone seeing similar challenge? If not, another question that would be interesting to maybe delve into is, what does successful measurement of performance and effectiveness look like? What are the glycosidase-like measurements that you’re looking for? What does effectiveness look like? What are the common metrics and how are they managed within an organization? Tasha, are you there? Are you asking? Sorry. You were asking. Yeah. Yeah. In regards to the content supply change, when it comes to performance and effectiveness of that, what are some good metrics that are leveraged? Yes. I apologize. I was reading a Slack message.

The most common metrics tend to be the engagement metrics.

Sometimes there’s content velocity metrics. In terms of how quickly content is produced and published, there’s a very popular pet store and they have different metrics regarding the advice hub. Those are on actual number of unique visitors to their hub.

In terms of the metrics, it depends on what the content is for and the goals driving it. Your goals, for example, like Sony and their PlayStation site would be obviously conversions or whether they’re able to sell a certain number of consoles. That’s very transaction-oriented. But if you’ve got content and it’s designed to share information, then there’s a deeper use case that’s driving it. The cool thing about if you’ve got engagement pages where you have advice articles or things like that, using the pet example, where you’ve got those pages, you can actually push dynamic content to those and make recommendations. Again, that is more on the personalization. That’s deepening the engagement, deepening the opportunity for creating more metrics around it. I think it really depends on your content strategy and what those goals are. I hope that answered the question. Yes. Thank you. Yes.

Then Miracle Harper, if you want to come off mute. Are there any particular challenges when it comes to content creation or personalization program that your organization is running into that we could delve into? That you want to surface? Our biggest challenge right now is really laying the foundation for us to be able to personalize. We’re still trying to figure out how to serve up the proper products of a top products in Adobe Recommendation. We have over 70 home pages based off of who you are. We’re still in those phases of trying to make sure that we’re able to fire that content. I’ve just been joining these trying to take notes for when we are in that place that we can actually utilize and optimize the personalization. But we’re just not there yet. There’s a lot of… Are you… Would you…

Oh, go ahead. I was just going to ask, are you more in the strategy phase right now, or have you started with your implementation? Are you refining it? No. So we’ve implemented it already. We actually had, I guess, six or eight weeks with Adobe Success Team back over in the fall. But we’re still not where we need to be. So I’m actually going to try to see if they can help us continue to try to figure out where we’re at so that we can continue to make progress. But we’re a long way from where we should be. There’s a lot of potential. So…

Agreeing.

And good plan. I can please continue to feel free to reach out to your Adobe team. It’s common that, okay, once you get through the first few steps, there’s a new set of challenges and questions that naturally just kind of surface as you mature your program. So definitely feel free to reach out for more support there.

Thank you. Yeah, of course. And Natasha, one more question. When it comes to governance, what is the level of effort involved in something like a content audit for an average size organization based on your experience? That’s a loaded question. Okay.

Content audits…

Usually, depending upon the average size, I think, Katie, can you give me what you’re thinking average? I would say just kind of based on what you typically work with in your day to day.

A thorough and complete content audit could take a couple of weeks, because it really depends on the number of factors. Like how many assets are they? Are they in the same location? Who’s in possession of them? Who’s the owner of them? And it could, like I said, it could span across multiple sites or families of sites.

For example, if you’re doing a content audit and you just want to know how many videos, how many static images, how many stills, those type of things, that can go pretty quickly.

But it’s when you go into trying to discern whether you have high value content or how old something is.

There are some situations where customers will get into, and they’re like, well, we don’t know if it’s actually active because they have millions of pages and they don’t know if this one image is out there somewhere.

So that kind of limits their effectiveness in performing a content audit.

So if you start with a focused content audit on a specific area of the site, sometime that you can break it down into something that’s more manageable.

So yeah, I think it varies. I don’t know. I don’t have like a, oh, it should take you two hours. No, it’s not. That’s fair.

Okay. All right. And just to shift gears a little bit, how can an organization develop dynamic content and build really engaging experiences that resonate with their target audience? Any tips there? How can an organization develop dynamic content? So when we talk about dynamic content, there’s, I always go to scene seven where you’re like, oh, we can resize this image back up and down, and we can change it and we can serve this video. And it’s a short form and cool things like that. Dynamic content, what you’re talking about is really pushing experiences to a specific place to target a specific audience.

So first of all, you have to know where they’re going and what their purpose is in going there. And then I would say, start with that content strategy.

Knowing why you’re, if it’s behavior-based, if they’re going to be able to target a specific product, if they’re going there for a specific reason, and then you can layer on dynamic content that may be a fit for that audience, that’s a good strategy. And I don’t know if I’m answering your question or if I’m adding more. No, that’s great. That definitely helps to support the perspective I was thinking of there.

We talked a little bit about automation and strategy. One thing that hasn’t come up too much yet is automation and AI.

Lauren, I’m curious from your perspective, you talked a little bit about some, you had some questions regarding generating content automatically, but are there any other discussions that your organization focused on how these emerging AI technologies might be leveraged in a responsible way, or has that been on a back burner? It has been, but not in a way that I can probably share.

Okay.

Dasha, any recommendations based on maybe questions that you’ve had or what you’ve seen come up in your day-to-day? As far as AI, I think, yeah, there’s ethical considerations.

And I think it varies between the industries.

What is the content? How are you processing it to create, if it’s generative, what are those considerations ethically? I think that starting with the governance strategy around that and trying to ask those questions early on, at least I would say that that’s an important inclusion if you’re going to go through the process and start to discuss it. It’s like, well, what are the implications? Are we regulated? How are we regulated? What should we, are we exposing ourselves to liability with this content? And specifically around copyright.

Entertainment specifically, it hasn’t been fully explored yet. And there are, there’s great opportunities in the medical field for improving care, but there are also patient privacy concerns. So I would say it just needs more thought is what I would say. And I would agree, Lauren, that probably, yes, there’s discussions and we can’t really talk about it because we don’t know. We have to be careful.

That’s my two cents.

All right. Sounds good. Any other questions? If not, we can kind of shift to wrap up.

All right. Well, thank you everyone for joining today. I really appreciate the time. I know everyone’s got very busy schedules and thank you, Tasha, for walking us through today’s content. As you leave us today, we hope that you take the following tactics to really help streamline your ability to deploy personalization at scale, which is, number one, start with your content governance strategy, leverage that action plan, and then on your Adobe account team to support where additional questions come up.

And before you exit, please, if you can, take a moment and engage with our quick three questions survey. I’ve got the QR code up here. Your feedback is really valuable to us and we want to improve these sessions going forward. So thank you for your time. Great discussion, everyone. And we hope to see you in the upcoming sessions in the Connecting the Dot experience sessions that we’ve got running throughout May. So thanks again and have a great rest of your day.

Thanks, Katie. Thanks, Lauren. Thanks, everyone. Bye. Thank you. Bye.