Building the Content Supply Chain with Workfront, Creative Cloud, and AEM

Transcript

Let’s start up. So everyone, thanks again for coming to Building the Content Supply Chain with Workfront Creative Cloud and NAM. I’m really excited today. I think it’s going to be a great interactive discussion we have with Citibank, and we can hear about their journey, the creative process, some of the great ROI they got from it, and some of the gaps and things that they had to resolve. So I’m really excited about this and look forward to this being a great interactive session. It’s going to be a really concrete session for a lot of folks, right? To really see the nitty-gritty of how they solve some of their problems and how they’re getting value and how they’re driving content to scale. So really great. A few things just about the agenda in general. We’re going to start off just with some introductions, and then we’re going to get into, I’m going to go for a few minutes. I don’t want to spend a lot of time, but just to give a little bit of a conceptual understanding of content supply chain. It’s a very lubricant concept. It can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but really looking to just to give that general foundation, not spend a lot of time on that. And then we’ll immediately get into the good stuff, right? We’ll get into Citibank’s story and really, really excited for everyone to get to be part of this conversation. And then at the end of that, if we have time, we can have an open Q&A where we hope to answer most of the questions. But if we don’t, we can always take a rain check and maybe email or send a communication separately. This can be a really broad topic and there could be a lot of very different use cases. So, you know, we’ll try to, if we don’t have an answer to what’s in the Q&A, we can always do our research and try to get back to you after that. But we’ll look forward to this. So enough of me talking. Let’s begin.

There we go. So just to introduce us for a second, we have Heather. Heather, do you want to give an introduction to yourself? Sure. Heather Atkins. I manage the MarTech team at Citi National Bank. I’ve been with the bank over six years. And in that time, we’ve implemented and integrated a number of Adobe solutions from Workfront, AM, Target, Analytics, Audience Manager, to more recently, RTCDP, Journey Orchestration, as well as Customer Journey Analytics. And my team in particular is also responsible for helping our marketing team leverage all of those MarTech capabilities.

Great. Awesome, Heather. And again, really look forward to digging into the details. It’s going to be great. All right. Yaswant, do you want to give your introduction? Hi, this is Yaswant Reddy-Vanakkari. I was with the bank for six years. I’m a MarTech application engineer at Citi National Bank. And in my current role, I manage our AM platform and lead the development efforts to kind of ensure our digital platform runs smoothly and effectively. Additionally, I work with a wide range of Adobe tools, including AM, Adobe Launch, Real-Time CDP, Journey Orchestration, and Workfront. My role involves implementing these tools and integrating them into our digital strategy to deliver a personalized customer experience.

Awesome. And again, thanks, Heather. Thanks, Yaswant, for being part of this. I know everyone on the call here is just really thankful and excited for you to share your story with us.

And me, Joseph Van Busker, I’m a principal strategist from Kansas City in the Bay Area. Kind of both. So this last Super Bowl is a little bit difficult for me.

But anyways, I’ve been with Adobe for over a decade. And really, my focus is on content operations and strategy from both from a started in consulting services and now I’m in customer success. So this is really in the wheelhouse of a lot of what I’ve been working with. So really excited to get to hear everything, to be able to get everyone to speak and talk about their stories around these operations. So let’s get going. A few things just around content supply chain. Not going to spend a lot of time on this, but really the idea behind it is you have these different stages of content development. You have workflow, which is basically where the planning stage or if the marketing team comes up and conceives of different ideas and campaigns. You have creation and production, which is really utilizing the design team to help build out the experience for marketing. You have asset management, which is really about metadata workflows going in and governing those final and non-final assets sometimes that come in. And then you have activation, obviously in reporting and how this content is doing. And really what content supply chain is in essence is bringing all these different five stages of content creation together. Right. In a cohesive way that drives values and that creates synergy. And that’s the content supply chain in general. It can manifest itself in a lot of different ways. I think we’re going to see a lot of focus, which is awesome on the creative and production side in this discussion. But sometimes you have those that are more focused on the workflow, the delivery activation, depending on the industry and depending on the use case. But either way, it’s bringing all these parts together.

Right. And the technical foundation of this, as we had discussed, is really work front. Right. From a technical standpoint, that’s that workflow orchestration layer where, again, you have the marketing team comes up with the ideas. You have a creative brief. It’s brought in. And then you have the creative cloud. Right. Which is really where designers live in of how those experiences are created, developed. And then you have Adobe, Adobe Experience Manager. Right. Which is really that asset, that place of where the content, the place where those binary assets reside. And it’s really bringing these three technical solutions, which are the foundation to this. And you get a lot of value markets from this, for example, and you can enhance collaboration. You can go and tie a lot of these different workflows together with resources that oftentimes aren’t speaking together. So you have like designers, you have those in production, those and as well as analysts and marketers and different parts of the operational, the different folks involved at different elements and operationalizing and optimizing content are able to work together in solutions where there’s common synergy. Right. And with that comes efficiency and comes content production speed. So that’s the technical foundation. I’m just going to talk really briefly before we get into the panel around what it means to be working together. As you take a look at this top layer here, you have the brand marketing, creative production, activation team with delivery. Really, a large part is specifically on that production and delivery end. Right. Of this universal stage of this universal content creation. Right. Where you have those producing, right. Designing, creating, working in synergy with those who are delivering and bringing all these different people together from marketing to the creative, to the production team and from the authoring and activation team down into AM and into other channels. And so that’s the real beauty of it. There’s a lot of different ways to manifest content supply chain, but at its core, it’s those value markers. And it’s really as you know, I’m using a bromide, but it’s really bringing people together to drive efficiency, ROI and content to scale. And that’s what it is all about. So this is it from like a conceptual point of view. I don’t want to spend a ton of time because I know a lot of folks are like, let’s get into the details. Let’s hear the story. Enough of me talking about the framework. Let’s get into the nitty gritty. So as part of that, let’s go in right away into the panel discussion. Right. And so I’m going to begin with Heather. How are you, Heather? Good. Excited to talk about our story. Right. Let’s let’s let’s jump right in. So I think from the very beginning, you know, a lot of companies have different objectives, different goals. And I think I mentioned that a little bit with with content supply chain. It’s a very broad concept. I want to hear about what Citibank’s strategic objectives were. And bringing this together. Sure. Well, back in twenty, twenty two, so a little over two years, basically two years ago, we were up and running. We were using AEM to manage our sites and manage our site assets. We’re also using Workfront as our system of record for all of our marketing projects and our creative studio. We’re using our the creative cloud solutions, but they were all completely siloed. And I do think that this visual kind of shows exactly how we were working.

So our goal was to integrate and automate these three tools into one unified process. And obviously we had a couple of goals there from a strategic perspective. We wanted to reduce manual work. We wanted to minimize duplication across the solutions. We had a lot of duplicate files that said Workfront on assets and then on a separate server for our creative team. We want to increase asset reuse without having most of our assets in a dam with metadata tagging, et cetera. Very difficult to know what you have and find it quickly. And then ultimately we wanted to increase efficiency, which we’d started to do with Workfront. But we really felt with by integrating these three solutions that we were already using right next to each other, we could get even more efficiency. That’s great. And reuse is so important. And this is kind of theme that we hear with a lot of different folks, especially in your industry.

So thanks for that. Let’s just go a little bit in here a little bit deeper and how you were able to bind these together. Exactly. And I’m going to I’m going to pass the baton to Yaswant. So how are you able to use Workfront and AEM together in your in your in your in your implementation? What was that journey like and and how are you both how are you able to use both those applications? Yeah. Here in the bank, we have integrated like AEM, Workfront and Creative Cloud to streamline the asset lifecycle management process using Fusion. Like we have automated and standardized task and folder creation based on the number of projects that the number of assets that the project has. For example, like when a request is received and the project manager sets the project status to in progress using a custom template in the workroom, tasks and folders are automatically created. The entire team involved in this project is notified with the specific deadlines and asset folders required for the project. I think to damn work in progress folder section from their designers can work on their task using Creative Cloud applications like InDesign or Photoshop. And if the assets are already existing AEM dam, they can check for the assets and check out them and make necessary changes to the existing assets in the dam. From there, they can send the approval to the work frame directly using the Creative Cloud application. And once the proofing is done, final assets are uploaded to Workfront’s final assets folder, which then syncs to the AEM dam with all the metadata information. From there, our dam coordinator then reviews and finalizes the metadata in AEM, making the assets ready for publishing by an AEM author. This process has significantly improved our delivery times and also efficiency because before it was used to be like a lot of manual process as three were unconnected. This reduced the manual task and increased the efficiency, which used to take days or weeks to just a fraction of the time. By this process, our team was more able to focus on the creative work and less on administrative work. I think that’s what these combined solutions brought the team together in being more creative and also reduce the manual efforts. Yeah, I think you really hit it on there too around driving automation and allowing designers to be creative. Right. That’s one of the things not managing, not saying they’re managing the process, but allowing designers to do what they want to do, which is create and being able to have both have people work in their ecosystem, but also not involved with all these manual operations and basically lack of automation that takes this time away from them. So, yeah, that’s absolutely huge. I do want to dig a little bit deeper into some of the kind of exact use cases you were trying to activate in a little bit more detail. Can you get into some of the key problems there? Yeah, sure. First, when we wanted, first we have identified several key issues that we have in the company using these three solutions. And then we wanted to build a solution that kind of addressed this. So a couple of them would be like, firstly, we noticed the duplication of files across different systems. And to tackle this, we automated file sharing between Workfront and AEM, centralizing the files and reducing the redundancy. Secondly, finding specific assets and files was time consuming for us. To improve this, we introduced a quick search and retrieve using custom metadata and tags in AEM, which sped up the process significantly. Next, we kind of had a lot of manual folder creation when a project was created in Workfront, and it’s kind of inefficient and prone to error sometimes. So we automated and synchronized folder creation, both in Workfront and also in AEM, streamlining our process and saving time. And lastly, generating assets reports manually was slow and often inaccurate for us. So we standardized and automated assets reporting, which kind of provided us with accurate, up-to-date information on like asset status and usage of these assets. So these are four things that we were able to manage, kind of achieve during this integration together. Right, right. And I think one of the things that’s kind of the common theme of what you mentioned, you know, you’re talking about duplication of files, you’re talking about manual folder creation, all these things are prone to error, right? And that’s the thing is, you know, one of the elements that we talk about, I think there’s such, you know, there’s value in terms of content creation, driving automation, cost savings. And then obviously, you know, ending, because you get that content creation more, you’ll be able to meet more strategic objectives like personalization of scale. One of the things that I think is really important, I think you hit on this, Yasmin, is this idea of having quality control almost. Because you have, you don’t have the, you’re reducing the error of having someone manually create files and someone going in and, you know, having this duplication of different files. You can basically remove a lot of these kind of these places where you can create, where you have these errors, you can drive a lot of this kind of automated folder structure, which I think is just, you know, again, it’s gonna, it just makes it so much easier to create a baseline and measurement when you have this reproducible process that the Citibank’s created. So it’s really just exciting stuff. I do want to hit into Heather a little bit. I think this is the thing that a lot of folks are going to be thinking of, which is it kind of goes into some of the themes we talked about earlier, which is the people. Like how did this help the different roles, like the producers, the designers, the project manager, like how did this affect people in their jobs and how they and their roles at the company? Yeah, I think this part is crucial and I know we have a couple of different questions on this topic about people, because really this type of anything within this space is about the people, right? It’s not just the technology and you can enable a lot of cool technology, but it’s really about getting, making sure your team can use it, right? And that it’s helpful to them. So we’ve seen different types of benefits for different roles. I think definitely starting with Workfront on the project manager side, right? Those automations that Yasmin is talking about where we’re templatizing our projects, right? That’s where we started. But now automating much of that creation. Another thing I wanted to mention, in addition to the folder creation, the task standardization of asset naming. That was a hot topic for us on this project. And it was difficult to systematize naming. Usually there were pieces in those asset names that usually needed a person, honestly, to kind of make a call or make a judgment on it. But we did the format itself. We used a task, which actually becomes the template for the asset name, which is then carried through the rest of the systems.

So again, those are different small things that I think make a big difference in the scheme of everything, right? Having your assets with a standardized naming that you can maintain in a scalable way. So that’s a big deal for our production managers as well. Also on the Workfront side, right, where we’re looking at approval processes. So our legal teams, approval of all of our marketing projects and assets, standardizing our, we used the proofing tool within Workfront. So we’ve saved them time, made it much easier to find previous approvals, which is a big deal for the industry that we’re in. And then our designers, right? Designers are at the central, I’d say, hub of what we were looking to do. I think it was also the most challenging part. And it’s the piece we’re still working on. Right, because you’re talking about the goal, right, is to enable them to work completely out of the Creative Cloud solutions. That is not always easy to enable. Also, it changes how they’re working on a day to day basis, right? And looking at what is the difference between using the plugins within Creative Cloud, right, where you’re kind of switching between the different window interfaces you have with the connectors versus tabs, where you’ve got those different solutions, you know, perhaps open in your browser, right? How does that look? And I think those are things we’re still working on. But we were able to plug in those integrators so you could run completely out of Creative Cloud, which was one of our goals to help them. And, you know, I think the other benefit of Workfront and again, why it honestly was the first Adobe Salute, well at the time it wasn’t Adobe, six years ago. Yeah, yeah, yeah, with acquisition. Implemented Workfront is that it really is the hub for all of our project communication, all of our final approvals, all of our audit documentation, and a collaboration as well. Right, so whether you’re in natively in Workfront, you’re getting the emails, whether you’re in the Creative Cloud connectors, all of that you can post and talk with the rest of your team. So I think it’s really a driving, it is the central hub for our entire marketing department. Yeah, and the people element is so important here, you know, and again, it’s like, it sounds cliche to say, but technology should, you know, should some people lose sight of that. I think I loved how you focused on that, you know, Heather, is it like technological solutions are great. And obviously, we’re a tech company, you know, we have that’s what we build, but the people, the people have to lead that. And if that’s not the case, you could have a great solution. But if it’s not unlocking people’s jobs and making their lives easier and able to, and able to have, again, that collaboration between the different groups, then it doesn’t really hit those values. And I think I love the fact that you really focus on how the teams can work together and how it helped the teams. That’s just really, really awesome.

So how, so you created this, you talked about some of the elements that brought these different personas together, working through a few other ones, right, especially with the design creative team and those operations. But what were some elements of how you kind of measured your, the value of integrations? I know a lot of folks, especially, you know, people who maybe are connected to product management, other different teams or organizations are interested in how you measure the return on value in this. I’m sorry, return on investment. Yeah, for sure, for sure. And that’s important for across all of our full MarTech stack in particular. So time spent by colleague, I’d say, has been and continues to be a key metric for us on our department efficiency. So, you know, what is that time savings by role, you know, and estimating that out based on our workload. And so far, we save over 1500 hours annually in terms of for our teams for automation integrations that we put into place. We’ve also reduced for us audits are a big deal in our industry and they used to take weeks for very manually and we’ve reduced that to hours, right? Being able to pull a specific set of marketing projects and the related assets again within hours is essential for us. And that was a big, a big time saver. So we’ve talked a little bit about asset reuse. So that’s something we’re looking at measuring as way we’re kind of in progress on that, right? How does that compare versus net new creation? Because we know it’s quicker and can be cost effective. But again, as mentioned without that centralized asset storage with all of the metadata and tagging applied, very difficult to do. So that’s a focus for us this year in terms of our ROI. And then time to market, right? The time from request to published asset. We’ve talked a little bit about that in terms of our workflows and our project templates, right? From the moment it comes in, how can we reduce and reduce and reduce that the manual times and the connection between the teams.

For us, legal compliance was also a huge delay taking four to six weeks, because we have that standardized proofing workflow now. That’s down to one to two weeks, depending on the piece. So that’s still takes a while, but that’s, that was a big increase. Yeah. And you know, there’s been some qualitative benefits as well. One we’re doing right now is we wanted to take a look at all of our assets that we’ve created, all the imagery specifically that we’re using to make sure it’s diverse, right? And that is also, we tried to do that in the past and that involved the thing heard and going and looking at them and collecting them, very time consuming. And again, now we can do with a quick search based on tags and projects that we have in the system, we can pull that relatively quickly. So those are, again, we didn’t necessarily set out as that our primary goal, but big benefits on the back end for us. Yeah. And especially when you can start bringing in those assets into a dam and you can just begin as you’re done, have that metadata pulled in as part of that connected process. So going in and having different content that’s diverse or meets your strategic goals as an organization, that’s again, I mean, that’s just, that’s a kind of a dam management 101 and being able to use that and then connected to the creative process is clearly is able to kind of fold into a lot of those overarching strategic goals, right, that your company has. So that’s really exciting stuff.

Talk about a little bit about the foundation and the technological foundation of your, of the ecosystem at Citibank and how you’re able to connect these solutions together. I know. So you’re wearing, we have some folks who might be architects on the call and they might be curious on, you know, how you are able to do this. I know you don’t have the native connector. Just to get a little bit more into the nitty gritty from your end. Okay, yeah. We initially built the integration using the native connector, but it did not meet our needs.

So this challenge has prompted us a strategic shift towards working closely with Adobe to utilize the work front enhanced connector, which better met our specific requirements. So we have implemented custom workflows and automations to bridge the gap between a work front and AEM. And these solutions kind of included like automated folder creation, version control, asset synchronization, and few data coming up from AEM into the work front. And it’s, I do not say it’s truly bi-directional because we wanted to maintain a source of record at one place, which is work front. But at the same time, we also wanted a few critical information from AEM into the work front as well. So we have a few workflows that are set up to kind of get that information into the work front and attach it to the document file. And along with that, we kind of had even subscription enabled to send it to the brand portal, like the assets getting transferred into the brand portal. Despite the initial challenges, the custom solution that have resulted as in a highly efficient and automated the system that kind of significantly improved our operational capabilities and also efficiency using the enhanced connector. Right. Yeah. And I think the thing is, is generally, I think you touched on this, Yasmin, generally, Adobe, we generally advocate using the native connector. But I think in your end, because of your team and because of the different use cases that you’re dealing with, this happened to work with you. But I think that’s an important element. Right. I mean, in the end of the day, there’s no, you know, sometimes there’s no silver bullet. Right. I mean, sometimes you just the implementation, you know, sometimes it’s it’s it’s a lot of it is, you know, a lot of it is going to be tailored to what you need as an organization and what your goals are and the team that you have. And so I think this solution really worked well. I think in the end of anyone’s more interested in the kind of the native connector connected, connected, you know, the work front, Creative Cloud Connect, the work front. Excuse me, the work front AM connector. Definitely go on Experience League and you can find information on that as well.

So in terms of let’s kind of dig a little bit kind of deeper into building this thing out. I know a lot of folks and I you know, this is you’re talking about three solutions. Yes, they speak to each other. And this is the direction Adobe is going with making these and has gone for years, which make these integrated and content supply chain. But some people, you know, are, you know, look at this and they’re from an IT perspective and like, where do we begin implementation? How and how was Citibank able to implement this effectively to the point where, you know, we have folks where where we have Citibank talking about ROI measurable goals? How did you how do you get to that foundational phase? How from an implementation perspective, what were some of the strategies that your team had that made you successful? You know, I would say in terms of things we really had to focus on, you know, obviously requirements kind of kind of a baseline. But we started out and I think the slides we’re actually looking at now are very similar to what we looked at a few years ago. And we’re like, oh, this this makes sense. We’re on board, but there’s a big it’s a big leap from the concept, as you’re mentioning, right to the day to day. And I think that’s one of the reasons first why it took us, you know, at least a year and a half to get to a proof of concept. Now, granted, we were we were implementing our dam sort of capabilities first and then we were layering layering on the integrated as a second phase in terms of the work front credit cloud pieces.

But it was I would say we had to modify our requirements as we went, which isn’t perhaps as ideal, but that that was probably required more support from our partner than we anticipated. There were just a lot of unknowns. So we did some learning as we went.

I would say some of the connectors proved difficult to also integrate. You know, again, those are things that sort of sound similar or sound simple. However, when you go to plug them in or turn them on, we had internal issues that made it difficult to enable those across our solutions. So I think that that ended up taking us a few months to honestly sort that out to get those working as we were envisioning. Sure. And then I say probably a third one on our on our strategy. And I’d say this was an area and I think we have another here. We continue to talk about the people side. I think we underestimated in our planning and resourcing on the people side. So in terms of our team and how we set it up, we had a very lean team. We had key individuals from our MarTech team, obviously our operations team and our creative team. That was the main hub. And then we brought in our marketing, other marketing partners as needed for input. But over a year and a half, you have people come and go, you have changes. And I think we didn’t necessarily have the right level of sort of team champion that we really want to have when you’re rolling out something like this with significant change to individuals behavior in their jobs. So I think our team needed to be a little more. We needed a few more folks in there and we needed folks who were really committed from a time. And I’d say aspirational. Right. They really were looking to change how they were working because that that that mindset is sort of part of it. Yeah. Yeah. That’s such a such an awesome point. Such a great point. You know, this is transformative and and having this and having evangelists right on your team who are able to internally subject matter experts who are who are advocating for. We’re advocating for the solution. And and really to the point, it’s changing the way they work. Right. We’re in a better way. Right. But it’s like getting folks out of the habit and begin. It’s almost a selling process in a way. And then going in, you have people evangelizing this. And then once you can and then, you know, and sometimes it might take is in my experience. Right. Sometimes it might take like once you take that step right and begin to say, OK, now we’re doing it. These are the advantages and treated as almost the advantage, treating as a project in and of itself to get folks on. Then once they take that step, it’s not as hard, but it’s always getting that first step. That’s always the most difficult. But I think that’s an amazing point. So so thanks for that. And I guess the last point is, you know, from Citibank, what’s in the future? I mean, you’ve created this great foundation you have right now. You have different folks working together. I think there’s some social challenges, as you said, with certain folks, which is which is normal. It’s a big change. What’s next on the agenda? Well, you know, I would say, you know, we are still rolling this out in terms of getting adoption across all of our projects. Right. We POC on very specific projects. And I’ll be you know, there were folks where this was a too big of a change. And so we had to pause because we have a lot of things going on at the bank and we’re coming back to it this year. And I think that’s that’s fair, because you have to be where your your team is, as I mentioned. So completing the rollout, you know, I I know and a couple of things I’ll kind of throw in for in terms of thoughts, just scanning some of the questions that are coming up around, you know, we use consulting services for for implementation. Again, they did a great job, particularly on the technical side, but that for our future and also kind of as a lesson learned, that investment on the training and change management side. We were way too light on what we had resource there. And so I think having a partner or making sure you have an internal commitment. And for us, it’s it’s having an internal commitment to that for us going forward to really help the folks kind of learn and practice. And what is sort of a baby step? Right. To get them to the new process. We were kind of going for. Here it is. Step into it. And that was not necessarily going to work for all the individuals on our teams. I think we’ve also continued to implement fusion for work front. I see a couple of questions about how we’ve used fusion and in particular in this process.

The yes, with mentioned right that within the request form, a project manager could say, hey, this this project has five assets. And just by saving that into the project, it would auto generate all the tasks. It would do our asset naming within the tasks. It would do a lot of assignments. And then once that project went active, it was creating all those folders, the folder naming and the syncing to am the second am was part of the connector.

So again, we’ve fusion is pretty much a quarterly implementation of enhancements that I know our operations team continues to do on the downside. We’ve been enabling more features there as well. So brand portal is the one we’ve been working on recently. So we can push out and make available those assets to more teams besides our just our creative and ops teams and give folks more self-service options. And then we’re actually looking at other ways to implement to integrate work front with our other Adobe solutions. Obviously, we’re a big Adobe partner and more fully integrating, say, our optimization, our personalization programs holistically into this process is kind of what we’re envisioning as well.

That’s awesome. That’s great. And and I think especially the last point, I mean, you know, content to scale is is really about, you know, meeting a lot of those greater objectives, strategic objectives. Again, I love that you mentioned personalization to scale, personalization to scale. I mean, that when you’re able to create content more effectively and quickly, it opens the door up to a lot of a lot of different elements, a lot of different campaigns that may have been locked before. And I think that’s the really exciting thing about this. And I think that you get a great point. I love the fact that different teams are going to adapt at different times. And I think that’s a really good point. You know, we always say like zero to one, but sometimes zero to one is different for one team member as opposed to another. And so it’s just the fact that the Citibank is cognizant of that, empathetic to that and still moving in the right direction is is is it just is really positive. So that’s that’s great. Thanks for bringing that up, Heather.

So so that’s that’s where we are. That’s the last question. I think right now we can just open it up if there are any questions. I know we’re actually doing really good on time, actually. I think we’re we’re a bit we’re almost we we I thought we would be a bit like I think we have 10 more minutes than I thought we would. So if there’s any any any questions that are coming through, I’m happy to answer those as needed. Or any other commentary. And this is I’m just going to jump in here. I had asked a few of you guys during registration what questions you had for the panelists. And so I want to just maybe answer a few of those before we just open it up to folks here on the call. One of them was a question around proofing. So I’m especially interested in what opportunities this integration can offer in terms of streamlining the proofing process.

I think what was particularly cool now on the tech side was directly from the work front credit cloud integration. A designer could upload a proof, apply a proofing workflow and then post a comment saying, hey, team, I’ve uploaded the proof. I mean, honestly, I think that was that was probably some of the coolest integration I saw on that connector. We’ve been using proof since the beginning. It’s a core piece that we’ve had. So I think that piece of sort of making it a three step panel, if you will, once that design creates that piece was pretty awesome. And then the other option is they can upload it into work front as well. And then the project manager can apply a custom flow depending on what approvals are needed.

Super helpful. Thank you, Heather. Maybe Yaswant, this might be a question for you then. Another question that came through registration was around recommendations for getting started. Like, how did you even learn Adobe Experience Manager AAM? Like, do you have any recommendations for how to kind of get up to speed and train yourself? Yeah, sure. Maybe like I would recommend like going to experience, like where you can find a lot of content structured specific to the role. Like if you’ll be a developer, admin, content author, you have courses and content for everyone. And then I would suggest like, secondly, maybe AAM websites where you have a lot of documentation that cover a wide range of topics from basics to advanced. Maybe joining a couple of AAM communities and forums where you see a lot of group members from beginners to experienced users who can help in the journey.

And lastly, I would suggest like setting up a local AAM development environment and deploy a weekend project. It is based off best practices and Adobe recommendations on it. So I think these four could help you speed up the process of learning AAM.

Yeah, thanks Yaswant. Then I’ll do my best to try and capture a few of those resources around, especially like AAM user groups and some documentation include that in our follow up email.

I will answer I want to ask one question that came through the chat and then we’ll open it up and people can raise their hands and ask Heather and Yaswant or even Joe questions. But Christina, you had posted a question here in the chat. How much did the existing structure of your content impact the way you went about connecting everything? Or did you have to rework how your content was structured in order to connect things? So I thought that was a really great question. I don’t know, Heather or Yaswant, which one of you wants to take that? But good question.

It is a good question. And I think it was actually a very, a topic we spent a lot of time discussing amongst the teams, because it was a tenant from our creative team was to keep as much of their current server structure for their work in progress and assets in our new dam.

And, you know, and that was a pretty elaborate folder structure. And there were reasons for that in terms of how they work and how they shared. So I would say we probably ended up with a hybrid sort of mix of that where we tried to simplify some of that structure. But, you know, that for them to work as they’ve been working to sort of flatten that or to significantly change it, we basically move their work in progress from what is a sort of standalone server into our dam. So again, so that, you know, adoption could be a little easier for them. That was a little more familiar, right, when they’re moving into the dam than if we just kind of changed everything completely. So it was a bit of a hybrid. But we definitely took into account the current content structures, how they had been working, and then had to also have quite a few discussions with our digital content team. Right. So if we’re talking about a creative team who has the digital assets, but they have a whole bunch of different other types of assets, how those two would live together because digital on the site assets had already been living in the dam for some time. So that was another piece where we had to have those two sort of coexist together, where you had sort of the creative team’s piece of the dam. And honestly, it is a separate piece for work in progress that’s partitioned off from everything else. And then you had your assets that are going to your site for publish, and then you sort of had another piece which were final marketing assets, so PDFs, presentations, things like that. So definitely a hybrid. And I’d say we spent several months talking through what that would look like, because that is one of the more difficult pieces of the project.

And just maybe to expand on that, then, if you talked about storing your final assets, what about storage for live design files? Where are you keeping those? Do you have a work in progress section of your dam? How are you kind of differentiating between those that are final and work in progress? Yes, so we did a WIP basically section that was by project. And so when that project started in Workfront, it would create those first folders that were created as part of the project, would go into the WIP section of the dam. And that is where they would do all their creation, all the design files. Once the project was completed and the final assets were uploaded to Workfront, and only the only final assets and proof versions were uploaded into Workfront, the rest stayed in the dam, then those final assets actually went from Workfront into our final asset folders. And that became our final section of record for final assets. We then, because storage, and I’d say that was still, that’s something we’re still looking at is the duplication of storage across those two systems, but to help kind of mitigate some of that. We had an archiving process where once a project was closed, we’d only keep the core design files in the final WIP and any kind of versioning, unless it was part of the final, anything that wasn’t necessary wasn’t kept.

But I would say that the storage thing was something I think still with Adobe, we would want to talk through because that was a big question on our end as well in terms of increasing storage, basically in both systems with this type of integration.

Awesome. All right. I know that there’s been a handful of questions that have been posted in the chat and I’ll do my best to review those and try and get them answered before the follow up email. Does anyone want to raise their hand and come off mute and ask Heather or Yaswan or Joe a question while we have 15 minutes? And in the meantime, I’m going to put a link to a survey. It’s an anonymous survey in the chat. If you guys can just share some feedback while you’re thinking of your questions. But let me just see who has their hand raised. Jeffrey.

Awesome. Yeah. Jeff Kualik from Loblaws. Yeah. Thanks Yaswan and Heather for your time today. I really appreciate the overview. So as starting from kind of day zero on thinking about content supply chain, right, there’s several different ways you could probably take your integration roadmap, looking at your different Adobe products. So I was just wondering how you approach this problem and, you know, did you look at the solutions holistically or did you kind of tackle one platform at a time? And did you really see outsized return from maybe integrating with the Creative Cloud first versus the dam or whatever order that that took shape in and where you saw the most benefit on day one? Thank you. Yeah, no, it’s a good question. We were pretty, you know, we were using all three solutions daily, right? Those were core solutions, whether it was AEM and AEM’s sites and assets were being used on the digital side. Creative Cloud obviously and the design team and then Workfront across our team. I think, so we looked at all three together. I would say that we started with enabling the dam for our creative team, right? So the only, again, we had only digital assets used in our websites. And so it was what does it look like to move our creative team and move them off a standalone server? So that was a big tenant to the strategy itself.

Then, and we looked to enable some of those dam capabilities so the team would start to see the value with why we should have all assets in a dam. So tagging the metadata strategy for bringing in those assets and having that work. I’d say the next thing was part of that metadata, we wanted the Workfront metadata, right? And that’s a piece of that integration that goes over with all assets. So setting that up was really the next piece. So it was a lot of dam work first to enable that. And then I’d say the Creative Cloud piece was probably the last one we tackled to tie those all together. Again, as I said, the impact for the designer of trying to switch completely to using only connectors is the biggest change and probably, again, the most impact on those users. The piece we use and have used from the start consistently is the integration from Workfront to the dam. So of all the connections, that was the one that we’ve seen the most value of, to have all our final assets synchronized between Workfront and the dam and having all that metadata automatically applied at the project level into the asset.

Hopefully that helps.

Great question, Jeffrey. We have another hand here from Mohammed.

Yes, we can hear you. Okay, so we have implemented content sidechain. Mostly we have seen the issues with the plugins. So we have tight security in our network. So the organization they use, we have proxy, all those things. So these plugins, they are not beneficial to us. They are either very slow or they may be having some performance issues. So I’m not sure if there are any alternatives or how to face these type of issues in your project.

I think when we are integrating AEM with Workfront, we did have a couple of issues related to setting up the connection initially. But we worked with the firewall team and also the AEM team, making a few changes in the dispatcher and everything. That sorted the AEM side. And also we have an issue with connecting creative cloud asset links as well. And it’s more of an authentication related failing with AEM. That’s the initial issues we have. And we kind of figured it out with the firewall team and we kind of put our hands into the connection and just kind of ensure that everything is working. That’s the initial issue that we have. But later on we did not find any issues with these plugins.

Yeah. So for one of the issues, even Adobe has to update the plugin because if it’s there on their side, they are not detecting the proxy correctly. So they fixed the issue and they released the new plugin.

I can break. Yeah. I guess that was the question I was going to have. Is this something that’s more about the scale of the updates that you’re making? Or is this something around the security? But it sounds like it’s more about the proxy and is it more about the firewall issue? OK. OK. Yeah. I think that’s not I think that I think the product team is working with that. I actually I can even bring that up with them later. But I think that. Yeah, that’s that’s that’s a good call out. So thanks for that, Muhammad.

Any other. Yeah. Anyone else want to raise their hand? Come off me or else I can read a few questions that came through the chat or we can wrap a little bit early. I just want to also before we even answer questions, I just kind of want to bring up what was said about the folder structure initially and like how your content has changed. And I think that is such an you know, every all the different kind of folks I’ve worked with on this. It’s always that conversation around the folder structure. That’s how people work. And it’s getting aligned on that is from at least a business perspective, like and we’re getting the designers, those and those and the creators, those who are managing the production of assets, getting that folder structure correct, because you’re going to have to basically make it consistent across the entire ecosystem is one of the larger discussions that that that that folks normally deal with when they go and try to adopt this. And so, you know, I’ve been in I think it’s very common. It’s it’s it’s it’s very common to have those discussions and the output of that being either something net new or maybe something that retains a lot of the legacy structure as well. But there’s always a balance. Right. Because, you know, designers and creators are always going to, you know, want to be able to have that structure that they’re used to. But you’ve got to kind of balance that with the change. And so very common, you know, with that with that with that with that with that scenario. Right. That was brought up. So. Any any other questions to for the team? Otherwise, I think, Nicole, do we want to close this off a bit early? Yeah, I might ask one more question that came in through the chat earlier, and it was around Genai. I think that’s a topic of discussion, especially for lots of creative folks. Have you considered looking at implementing Genai to help your creative concepts get generated from requests to or from your initial custom form? Like what is your your take on Genai in terms of your process throughout this content supply chain? You know, I would say our our company is taking a pretty conservative approach when it comes to to to using the Genai. It’s definitely something on our list as a as a MarTech team. I know our creative team has used some of those features in terms of the images and modifications and things like that. I think other than that, we’re we’re a little more. Again, there’s some there’s some hesitancy to sort of fully integrate that, but it’s definitely on our roadmap for the future.

Or anyone last seven minutes want to come off? Hold on, we have a hand raised here.

Nelmaris, and I apologize if I pronounced your name wrong. No, that was pretty good, Nicole. Thank you. Hey, Heather. Just wondering if you could talk to us a little bit about your support model for Workfront in terms of, you know, like ongoing product support and training. Could you talk to us a little bit about your setup there and just to have an idea of what you’re supporting? Do you mind sharing how many licenses you’re supporting? You know, I actually do so our marketing operations team manages Workfront, so that’s not my doesn’t sit on our team, so I do not know our license count on hand. I can tell you, though, from a structural perspective, they have three roles set up to support Workfront and Workfront is used. Obviously, it’s used throughout our marketing organization, but it’s used throughout our bank in terms of a lot of other groups have come on to use it for request management of work and general work management, not just obviously all the things we’re talking about here on the marketing flows, but it’s used throughout the bank. So, again, we have three folks, I think, structurally like a technical admin, and I think we also have a technical admin, sort of a user support person who’s dedicated to. So, I have a question tomorrow on Workfront, she would be the one that would kind of help me sort it out and then kind of a manager of that team and the new enhancements.

And I believe, and again, that we were often just like our MarTech team, we use Adobe support to kind of help us with the initiatives and enhancements just on a regular basis, because it’s a fairly lean team, both for operations and for MarTech.

All right.

I will, I think we don’t, I don’t think we have any more questions. Like I said, you guys are all going to get a link to the recording after today’s session. I’ll do my best to capture all the notes and put it all into a follow up email for everyone.

Otherwise, thank you so much Heather Yaswant, Joe for your time this morning, this afternoon.

And do you guys have any, Joe, I don’t know if you have any closing comments or Heather Yaswant? I mean, all I can say is just thanks to Citibank, thanks to Heather Yaswant for this. I’d like to echo Nicole, what you said. I think just amazing stories about your journey and some of the gaps, the value realization and where you look to be going forward. So again, thank you so much for sharing this with our team. And I think I would like to, Yaswant mentioned something about Experience League. There’s a lot of really great information on there. Definitely don’t be shy. It’s a great website. And if anyone on this call wants to just reach out to me specifically around like a question or anything regarding this topic, I’m always happy to have to respond and to discuss this. So this is really fun stuff. So thanks again. Yeah, thank you. Thanks for having us. Thanks everyone. Thank you. Have a good one. Bye.