Establishing Executive Sponsorship to Drive Success throughout the Content Supply Chain

Transcript

Welcome in, everyone. We’re going to give attendees a few more minutes to join. So hang tight, maybe get a glass of water or a cup of coffee or tea, and we’ll get started in about two minutes. Thank you for being here. For those who are joining and coming in, welcome. We’re going to get started in a couple minutes as folks trickle in. So maybe at 9.03 we’ll begin. We thank you for attending and being here today.

All right. I think we’re going to get started right now. So I just wanted to take a minute. Thank you, everyone, for joining. Today’s session is focused on establishing executive sponsorship to drive success through the content supply chain. What we’ll be doing next is this meeting will be recorded. I’m going to introduce Kaylee, who is one of my esteemed colleagues. She’s been here at Adobe for about four years. She’ll be hitting her five-year mark in October. So welcome, Kaylee. Kaylee, I’m going to hand it over to you. She’s an expert in the field of marketing. For those, if you’ve got questions, please put them in the Q&A or the chat, and I’ll be monitoring that while we go through this. Sorry about that, Kaylee. Go ahead. No worries. Thank you so much, Tasha. Okay. Happy Friday, everyone. I just want to start off by saying thank you. I’ve been looking forward to delivering this session, and I know it’s the end of the week, so I genuinely appreciate you choosing to spend this hour with us this morning. For those I haven’t met yet, I’m Kaylee. I’m a customer success strategist here at Adobe joining you from Denver, Colorado. To make this session useful, I really want to know where you all are coming from. So, Tasha, can we launch that first phase of polls, please? We’ll be popping up three quick questions on your screen right now. The first is, what best describes your role? Are you a practitioner and in the tools daily? A manager or strategist overseeing that process? A technologist managing the stack and the architecture? Or a marketing leader driving the roadmap? Or are you an executive who owns the budget? The second question on here is just an honest question. You’re in the right spot. If the answer is no, we’re unsure. That’s exactly why you’re here. And I know that sometimes we can have a signature on a contract, but not necessarily a true partner. And the third poll is, what’s your biggest barrier to success right now? Is it silos, budget, adoption, or the tech itself? I’ll give you guys just a minute to answer those questions there.

Okay. So, that brings us to the core of our session here. We’re going to tackle the topic that solves some of those exact problems that you guys are dealing with today. We’re not going to be talking about features or code. We’re talking about finding that champion, that executive sponsor, who can bridge those silos and secure that budget for you. So, here’s our roadmap for the next hour. First, we’ll define the role. We want to demystify what a sponsor actually does and where they fit in your team. Second, we’ll look at the strategy. We’ll discuss why a unified content supply chain is the answer to the chaos that we’re all facing today. And finally, the tactics. I’m going to share some practical frameworks that you can use immediately to identify, pitch, and collaborate with a sponsor to get that air cover that you need. So, let’s dive in.

So, why sponsorship? A few years ago, we actually sat down with over 100 executives to understand what truly makes a digital transformation succeed. Those conversations became the foundation for the value realization framework that you see here. Think of this framework as a connected system. We found that when a project hits a wall, the root cause is almost always that one of these five areas was overlooked. When you plan for all of them, you can unlock that full potential of your investment. And that’s why we designed this webinar series. So, each session was dedicated to highlighting one of these pillars to give you the artifacts that you need to plan strategically. But for today’s session, we’re laser focused on the sponsorship piece. And why is that? And that’s because you can have the most powerful technology like Workfront or AEM, but technology doesn’t change behavior. People do. And without a leader to really champion that change, the other pillars can’t hold up. So, we want to help you find a leader who can drive that. And just as a quick call out here, if the people part of this is your interest, you should really register for session number 5 on org readiness. It’s next week on Wednesday, February 11th. And it pairs perfectly with today’s topic. And if you can’t join live, I recommend that you register anyway. And we can always send you the recording. So, with that framework in mind, let’s start by defining exactly who this person is and where they fit within your team structure. Okay. So, what is an executive sponsor? And why is this role so critical for content supply chain? It’s so easy to think of the executive sponsor just as the person who signs the check, right? But in a content supply chain, they’re actually so much more. They’re a proactive organization. And so, what are the technical worlds here? Your creative teams or the art. Your marketing teams, the science piece. And your IT and ops teams, the foundation. You need a sponsor that understands that without a solid technical foundation, the art and the science can’t really scale. So, in this, we see them playing three specific roles here. First is endorsement. Active leadership. They’re the leader who signals to the organization that we trust this new process. This gives your team the confidence to step out of their comfort zones. The second is influence. This is huge. Sponsors can help shape the culture, right? They help the organization understand that adding structure doesn’t kill creativity. It actually protects it by removing a lot of that administrative busy work. And then finally, navigation. Because when you hit a roadblock, whether it’s budget or a shifting priority, the executive sponsor can really act as your compass to help you guys navigate around it. Okay. So, now let’s walk through the Adobe operating model here. This isn’t just an org chart. It’s a map of how decisions get made. At the very top, you have the executive sponsor, right? They’re your visionary. They ensure that your content strategy actually aligns with business goals. They secure the capital, but more importantly, they resolve the friction between departments. In the middle here, you have your steering committee. This is your governance engine. For content supply chain, this must be cross functional. You need the head of studio, VP of tech and a line of business lead. They really ensure that what marketing requests is actually something that creative can deliver on. And then the last pillar here is the working team. This is where the real work happens. Your designers in creative cloud. Your marketers in AEM. The power here is the collaboration loop. Because they’re connected to the steering committee, when a block appears, they can easily escalate it and get a decision fast. This model turns a messy and sometimes chaotic production process into a really nice, clean, structured supply chain.

So, let’s look at how this model supports you as you grow.

At first, in the implementation phase, this is really the build phase. The executive sponsor in building the foundation. They help ensure that IT and creative are agreeing on the basics, like your taxonomy and tagging standards, before we actually start the building. And then in the run and operate phase, once the supply chain is live, the focus shifts more to execution. Are we launching campaign faster? Are we reusing assets? The sponsor’s role here is to drive that adoption and ensure teams are actually using the new tools.

And then finally, in the scale phase, we can amplify. This is the really exciting part. Because this is where we can introduce things like Gen AI or automation. But you can’t scale Gen AI on a broken foundation. And your sponsor needs to be the one that really helps you to set that vision to take your content engine to that next level.

Okay. So, let’s bring this to life with a quick story. We worked with a global retailer who was feeling a lot of friction. Their process was a little bit of a black box. Requests were coming in via email. Files lived on desktops. And they were spending a lot of their money recreating assets that they already owned. But by putting this operating model in place, they were able to find a sponsor, their CMO. And this person was able to set a clear vision. 100% visibility. Because the team had that executive sponsorship, they were able to implement a really nice and connected workflow. And the results were amazing. They were able to reduce their cost per asset by 30%. Simply by reusing what they already had. And they were able to double their speed to market. This is a really great example of what can happen when you have that alignment.

And why executive sponsorship is so critical to making sure that your initiatives succeed.

So, now we know who the sponsor is. Let’s look at the environment that we’re operating in. And why this role is so critical right now.

Okay. So, I just want to take a moment to look at the reality here of why this work is so hard right now. We often talk about the content crisis as just a volume problem. That we need to make more stuff. We need to make more stuff faster. Right? But the real crisis is actually what we’re seeing here on this slide. The process itself is really fragmented. And for most organizations, the content journey looks a lot like this diagram. It can be a tangle of disconnected steps. You have your creatives working in one system. Marketers maybe planning in spreadsheets. Approvals that are getting lost in long email threads or Slack channels. We call these shadow workflows. And if this looks familiar, no need to feel bad. Please don’t feel bad. This isn’t any kind of failure. It’s just a symptom of growth. And now that we can see it, we can fix it. Because you can’t add Gen AI to a process like this and expect a lot of efficiency in return. Right? Because you’re just getting a faster mess. And the reason that we need an executive sponsor is because no single person in this web has the authority to untangle it by themselves. So you need somebody who can sit above this fragmentation in order to mandate a clean, unified supply chain. And if you’re feeling any of this pressure, you’re really in good company. We see this across every single industry today. You have retailers managing thousands upon thousands of personalized product images. Financial services we find are really moving away from those static PDFs and more towards dynamic video. Media companies are spending a lot of time engaging in realtime. And everyone is just trying to figure out how to meet this volume without breaking the bank or their team. And that’s the key takeaway here. Delivering relevance at scale really requires an operational engine that works. Because, again, we’re not just trying to make more stuff. We’re trying to build a foundation that allows the business to move faster while also reducing cost and reacting to the market as instantly as possible. That’s the main goal. But we also know that knowing what to do can be a lot different than actually doing it. When we look at this landscape, we see two forces colliding. The first on here is the external pressures. The market is demanding speed. Everyone that we know is scrambling to figure out Gen AI. Customer expectations for personalization are only getting higher. But when you try to meet those demands, you can hit a lot of internal blockers. Like technical debt, right? Creatives in one system, marketers in the other. IT is left trying to bridge that gap. You run into fragmented data. This can lead to a lot of asset waste. Struggling to find files so you end up remaking them. There’s a lot of governance risk. Are we using expired talent photos? That can be a big liability. And then also undefined processes. The lack of a clear racing model. Who actually approves the asset? Your IT and ops teams are often the ones trying to hold all of this together with a lot of duct tape. But with the right sponsor, the idea is that we can really turn these barriers into opportunities for efficiency. So that leads us into the next part. Let’s get tactical. How do we prepare a pitch that actually gets a yes? Because now that we understand the role and the urgency, we can find how to align with an executive sponsor. So let’s reflect on our own organization for a minute. I want you all to ask yourselves how long is it currently taking you to find an approved asset? Is it five minutes or is it five hours? Do you have any shadow workflows where work is happening in email and Slack instead of within your tools? If you could wave a magic wand and remove just one blocker, what would it be? And what is your star for content operations? Identifying that specific pain point is really the first step to finding your solution. And I wanted to include the slides so that when you guys have this deck back and you can use it in your day to day, you can sit down and have a moment just to reflect and think about your current state and why having an executive sponsor would be helpful.

So now let’s look on to validating your ideas. Once you’ve identified that pain point, the next step is really translating it into a language that can resonate with your leadership. We find that executives respond really well when we pivot the conversation to outcomes. So instead of pitching, we need a dam or we need new software, try pivoting to business value.

Instead of storage, let’s talk about efficiency, right? Like we need to stop spending budget on asset recreation. And instead of workflows, let’s look at talking about velocity. We need to cut our campaign launch time from four weeks to two weeks, let’s say. And really the bottom line here is that you’re pitching a tool, you’re asking for a cost center, but when you’re pitching an outcome, you’re offering a real competitive advantage. And that is how you’re able to get budget approved.

Okay. So here’s a quick example of what that pitch might look like. Let’s say that leadership has a goal to cut costs while increasing volume. That’s something that we’re all very familiar with and we’ve all heard, and it can be a really tough ask. You can map that goal in the scenario to three specific capabilities within the content supply chain. We can do it to asset reuse, workflow automation, and gen AI. So let’s look at that asset reuse piece. By implementing a central source of truth, like AEM assets in this case, we can really stop the churn of recreating lost files. If we can just reuse 20% more of our content, that can be a direct cost saving that hits the bottom line immediately. The second point would be workflow automation. We can use tools like Workfront to automate the handoffs. There’s no more chasing approval in email. This really targets that velocity piece. If we can shave three days off of every campaign launch, we can effectively increase our capacity without hiring a single new person.

And then finally, the gen AI piece. This is your scale engine. Once you have that foundation, we can use gen AI to automate the tedious variations like resizing, background changes, translation, et cetera. So in the scenario that pitch, it becomes we can meet your volume goals, not by hiring more people, but by fixing the supply chain to reuse, to automate, and to scale. This makes that a comprehensive solution. Because in this scenario, you’re not just asking for a tool. You’re offering a solution to their business problem. And that’s a pitch that gets heard, and that’s a pitch that gets funded.

All right. So we’ve talked a lot about the pitch. But before you sit down and schedule that meeting, I want you to go through and pressure test your own idea using this activation checklist.

So first we want to take a look at feasibility. Do we actually have the foundation built? And data integrity. This is a big one. Is our taxonomy ready? Because if our tagging is a mess or not the way that we want it to be today, the system won’t work. And that’s something that when you’re going through this activation checklist, just be really honest with yourself. Same thing goes for timeline realism, right? Are we promising a three month rollout for a nine month job? Because nothing kills credibility faster than a missed deadline, right? The next on here is value. Should we do this? Strategic alignment. Does this solve a problem that our CEO cares about? And future scalability. This is really your ace in the hole. Executives love to hear, right? And especially now that the work that we do today is for Gen AI tomorrow. You can frame this project as getting AI ready. And finally, taking a look at the risk. One of the biggest considerations here is change management. How big of a shift is this actually for our team? An opportunity cost. Sometimes the most powerful argument is the cost of doing nothing. And if we don’t fix this, will we fall behind our competitors? Another component to take a look at is security. Does this tool actually reduce our risk by getting assets off of desktops and into a secure vault? Use this checklist to find holes in your plan before the sponsor does. Okay. So you have your pitch ready. And the final piece of the is finding the right person to pitch it to and then keeping them engaged for that long haul.

Now, who is the right person to approach? In the world of content supply chain, this can be really tricky. Because, again, we want a leader who sits above that fragmented process that we took a look at earlier. You’re looking for a connector. It could be your chief digital officer, a CMO, or a COO. But at the end of the day, you want a leader who cares about that end to end life cycle from the moment a brief is written to the moment that an asset is actually archived.

Our big goal is that we want a sponsor who empowers teams to just move beyond my department and more towards enterprise thinking and thinking of the organization as a whole.

So when you’re looking for this person, what specific qualities here really lead to success? We’re looking for three distinct attributes. We’ll start first with influence. This isn’t about popularity. It’s about coalition building. Can they bring creative, marketing, and IT together? These are three separate areas that often want different things, right? IT often prioritizes security. Creative maybe wants freedom. And marketing is looking at speed. So you need a sponsor who can get everybody on the same page. The second attribute on here is acumen. Do they understand the operational reality? Do they get that rushing work creates more errors? We really need a leader who acts as a roadblock remover, someone who ensures that the team has actual resources to do the job right. And then the third attribute on here is customer advocacy. So this is the person who keeps us honest. They recognize the complexity, but they don’t necessarily lose sight of the urgency to deliver for the customer. And the last note that I want to make on this slide is a note on commitment. Just realizing and calling out that realizing value takes a lot of time. And that time is often 9 to 12 months. So when you’re thinking of who your executive sponsor is going to be, you really need to be thinking of a sponsor who has the stamina to stay engaged for the long haul. Because it is a long haul.

Okay. So this is the tool that we love called the stakeholder strategy map. And I love this view because it really forces us to stop talking about departments and start talking about people. If you look across that top view here, you see the key executives who influence the content supply chain. The CMO, the creative, the chief creative officer, and the COO. Any one of them could be your executive sponsor. But again, it’s just important to realize that they all speak different languages and to take that into account. CMO cares more about speed and market impact. Your CCO maybe cares more about quality and brand standards. While the COO really is leaning into efficiency and cost. I really encourage you to take this strategy map here as homework. Print it out and write down the actual names of people who sit in these boxes at your organization. Once you see those names on paper, it becomes very clear on who you need to align with to get this project moving. And again, who you need to actually build a coalition with in order to make it stick.

So once you’ve identified your sponsor on that map, the next question is usually, okay, but what am I actually asking them to do? And we find it really helpful to show them this road map. So this illustrates that we’re not just asking for a signature today. We’re really inviting them on a journey, right? Because in the beginning, in the define and design stages, we were looking for a visionary. We need a visionary. We need them to help us set that north star and align with other executives. In the middle here of prepare and support, we need a communicator. We need them to send the emails, announce the wins, and tell the company why this matters. And then at the end, and the adopt and sustain phase, we need them to help us measure that adoption. We need them to look at dashboards with us and help hold teams accountable for using the news process. Are people logging in and using these new tools? Are we hitting our goals? The key takeaway here is don’t just invite your sponsor to the kickoff and then leave them alone. We have to give them a specific job description for every phase of the project. This will help them to stay engaged all the way to the finish line.

Okay. So how do we make sure this relationship actually works? We like to think of this as an unspoken contract. It’s really essential to nurture this relationship because an engaged leader is the best insurance policy that you have against any project risks. So a partnership, though, is really a two-way street. On your side for the ask, you need to ask for explicit agreement. Don’t assume that they know what they’re signing up for. And you owe them measurable outcomes as well. Provide the data, the ROI, the time savings, so that they can feel really confident in supporting you. And then on their side for the give, we really need them to be active and visible. This means delivering the big messages, like sending the kickoff email. And it means recognizing the team. When your sponsor can publicly praise the team for adopting a new tool, it does wonders for morale. So when both sides are able to deliver on this quote, unquote contract, you really move from having a passive signer to having an active partner.

Okay. So we know that the sponsor does more than just approve the budgets, right? They also set the cultural tone. And in a creative organization, this is really critical. Your sponsor needs to deliver three key messages. The first being structure protects creativity. We are adding it to remove the busy work so that you have more time to design.

The second critical message is enterprise thinking. We’re moving from my department to our company. Breaking down the walls between creative and marketing. And really looking at the bigger picture. And the third message is one of psychological safety. And we really feel important. When we introduce new tools, people can get nervous and worry about their jobs. You need an executive sponsor to be the one to stand up and say we’re adopting this to make you more powerful, not replace you. That is a message that everyone can get behind and make everybody feel good. So when a leader says that, a lot of resistance will drop and true adoption can begin. All right. I want to leave you with this final framework here. We often say that content supply chain is really 20% technology and 80% people. The good news is that our next webinar is dedicated entirely to this framework. So we’ll go on a deep dive next week. I will spare you today. But I did want to highlight that last phase on here. Phase 7, sustain and review. We find that most projects fail here. We have lunch, we have parties. Everyone slides back into their old habits. Sustain isn’t a passive phase. Change isn’t just a one time event. It requires active reinforcement. It’s retraining new hires. It’s celebrating the super users. And it’s retiring the old ways of working. So there’s no safety net there to fall back on. Your sponsor is your partner in keeping the momentum going and reinforcing new behaviors so that they become more like muscle memory for your org.

All right. And then that leads us to our next steps here. So we’re just about at the finish line. And before I give homework, I have one final favor to ask. We want to make sure that we’re able to get the answers to the questions that are available for you. So, Tasha, could we just launch those final polls? Perfect. Thank you. You guys should see those popping up now. Just two questions. Did this session improve your understanding of sponsorship? Simple yes or no. And then question 2 is what topic are you interested in hearing about next? Gen AI, metadata, taxonomy? Let us know. And while you’re clicking those answers, let me just recap some next steps here. So first one is to identify your use cases. Don’t worry about trying to do it all at once. Just pick one workflow to start with. From there, let’s map your stakeholders. Use that table that we discussed to identify who your potential champion is. Use those self reflection questions to really sit with it and just have a moment before you begin that table just to make sure that your priorities are aligned. And then just another quick shameless callout is register for part 2. As I mentioned at the top of this webinar, next week is all about organizational readiness. So if the people part is your challenge, I really encourage you guys to sign up for that. And then lastly, reach out to us. Your Adobe account team is here to help. So we have templates and resources to really help you build this pitch to your executive sponsor.

Okay. And I see that we still have some time here. Maybe 15 more minutes for any Q&A.

Yes, we have one question. I’m a manager and I don’t report directly to the C-suite. How do I get this pitch in front of an executive without stepping on toes? That’s a good one. And that’s a pretty common question that we I think that we hear a lot here. So you don’t have to be a VP to start this. Use that steering committee concept that we talked about. You likely report to a VP or a head of department. And your job is really to make them the hero in that scenario. Right? Pitch this to your direct manager first. Say to them, I have a plan to save us X percent in efficiency, but I need your help to get it to the CMO. Really equip your manager or leader with the data and let them be that bridge. Your role here is to build that coalition from the bottom up. Excellent. Excellent. We have another question.

So this person writes, we have a sponsor, but they’re really quite busy. They signed the contract, but they’re so busy. How do we get them to engage? How do we get them back after signing the initial contract and seeing the value? So this would all go back to that unspoken contract that we talked about a little bit.

Sometimes executives go ghost maybe when they don’t see value or when the ask is a little vague or too vague in this scenario. Stop asking for time and start offering value. Send them a quick win. Maybe an email that says because of the new tool that you authorized for us, we were able to launch that spring campaign three days faster than last year. That’s a win. And include a quote from your team. Do you mind replying all with a great job? The idea here is to make it easy for them to win and they’ll reengage. Send them the email that you want them to send to the team and encourage that. That way it’s a quick win for them and a way for them to get back into the mix with you all.

Great. I just answered, there was a question in the Q&A pod, how to get to the recordings. So I popped the link into that in the Q&A pod, but I will also put that link into the chat. We have one last question. Which is, one of the biggest friction points is the creative team. They feel like that process kills creativity. How can a sponsor help us change that narrative? So this is a little bit of the art versus science battle, right? We find that a project manager isn’t really the appropriate one or the one that can fix the culture, the culture war, the culture differences here. Only a leader can. So you need a sponsor to be able to stand up and say, we’re not adding processes to police you, we’re adding processes to protect you. Hearing that the process kills creativity is a pretty common one. But it’s just important to reiterate that it’s here to reduce some of that admin work and really protect you. So when a sponsor is able to explain that structure can protect that creativity, hopefully your creative team then will be able to stop seeing the tool as a cage and more as a shield. And only the sponsor really has the authority there to reset that mindset. And that’s why it’s just so important to make sure that you have the right person in that seat.

Fantastic. Thank you, Kaylee. I don’t know if there are any other questions from the group, but awesome job. Thank you, everyone, for attending. I did pop the link in for the webinar site. Give it a few days to populate. And then as Kaylee mentioned, there’s the next session next week. I would recommend that you check that out if you want to learn more about change management. But then again, just thank you so much for everyone’s time. And we really appreciate you. Have a great day. Thank you all very much.