Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  0:18  

Happy Thursday everyone. I'm Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson, a digital strategist for BWG Connect, and we are a network and knowledge sharing group, we stay on top of the latest trends, challenges, whatever it is that is shaping the digital landscape, we're on track to do at least 500 of these webinars this year due to the increase in demand better understand everything digital, and we will be doing at least 100 in person small format dinners. So if you happen to be in a tier one city, feel free to shoot us an email and we'd be happy to send you an invite, the dinners are typically 15 to 20 people having a discussion around a specific digital topic. And it's always a great time. The majority of time we spend BWG is talking to brands, software providers to understand the latest trends, challenges, whatever is happening within the digital landscape, love to have a conversation with you. So feel free to drop me a line at Tiffany, TIFFANY@BWGconnect, and we can put some time on the calendar. It's from those conversations who not only generate the content for future webinar events, but it's also where we gain our resident experts such as the panel who's here today. So welcome you all. If you ever need any recommendations on service providers within the digital space, we have a short list of the best of the best that we'd be happy to provide you. So feel free to reach out to me and we put some time on the calendar to discuss that. As we know a lot of people are hiring right now. So do you know we have a talent agency BWG talent that we'd happy to put you in contact with as well. So with that, a few housekeeping items. We want this to be fun, educational informative. So feel free to drop any comments questions you have into the chat, we'll be sure to get to them. If you feel more comfortable, you can send me an email at Tiffany@BWGconnect.com. And we'll be sure to get to them as well. And this is a 30 minute session. So we'll be ending at the 30 minute mark formally, if we have more q&a, and people want to hang on for those questions to be answered. We'll definitely stay on for as long as we need to to get through those. But you know, formally it will end within 30 minutes. So with that, let's roll and talk about leveraging data collection and a data driven strategy to drive business outcomes. The team at Red Hat Adobe and Search Discovery have been awesome partners in the network. So I'm going to hand it out to the panel if you each can introduce yourself, your organization and then we'll dive into the information. Thank you. 

Patty Behre  2:41  

I can jump in and start 

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  2:42  

and Patti, you can start. 

Patty Behre  2:44  

Hi everyone. My name is Patty Behre. I'm martec Manager at Red Hat within martec and operations, and I've been working closely with Chris Sessoms for several years. For the context of this call. We've been partnering closely as kind of non technical technical product managers for the AAP suite of solutions.

Chris Sessoms  3:08  

And hello, everyone. Thanks for having us. Chris Sessoms lead tech and infrastructure manager. And in regards to Red Hat's marketing technology and operations department have about just over 20 years of optimization, analytics martech ad tech platform experience. And as Patty mentioned, we both came in at Red Hat about the same time. So I've had the pleasure of being at Red Hat and working with Patty along side her for the last seven years with a focused around Adobe tech as well as digital transformation, whether it's analytics, target audience manager, experience platform, Workfront am damn assets, all things that are in our warehouses, and being a part of this group is led to a lot of digital transformation at Red Hat and happy to be here. Thank you, Chirag.

Chirag Deshpande  3:54  

Yep, I'm Chirag Deshpande. I'm a client services director here at Search Discovery. We are a data transformation company and have been working with Red Hat team on helping drive business and back with the Adobe solution. In the capacity we've also we are also one of the premiere Adobe partners and help with a lot of the Adobe solution activations.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  4:19  

Fantastic. Thank you. So now together you've all been on this journey, this implementation journey discovery, want to know where you'd like to start looking at do we give an overview to the audience of you know the why why did you start down this journey? And then also you know, the, the summary of the impact that from the business the outcomes that came from that journey? 

Patty Behre  4:41  

Okay. I can focus on those because I tend to focus on the value realization side of things. So, first, a bit of acknowledgement. We just to articulate as articulate as at this Are, we turned to selected Adobe Experience platform for a couple of technologies that are built on it, the CDP capabilities that it has as well as the CGA capabilities or journey mapping capabilities. And across those two solutions, the solution pillars that we're hoping to impact within the org, we're number one efficiency. So you know, I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with this scenario. But when you have your data in a disparate, disjointed environment, that can lead to a lot of inefficiency. So we're hoping to solve for that issue or set of issues by bringing all of the data that are, you know, as much data as we possibly can, which are marketers are regularly requesting to use and have access to into a single platform environment. Closely related to that, and more on the CGA front, of course, is with that data being all join together for that 360 degree view, we're hoping to be able to enhance our ability to draw and then provide to the org meaningful insights, you know, real meaningful insights, actionable insights on our prospects and customers. And then third, but also very, very salient is with this technology set, we're hoping to, you know, improve our resilience against this changing privacy landscape. You know, APS got best in class features when it comes to protecting privacy and consent. And also, as well as that first party audience seeing and how that can help Brazil improve resilience against the threats of our calculus feature. So these are kind of the three focus areas for us to dwell a little bit on the efficiency as this relates to our kind of foundational implementation phase. So I can speak to the numbers a bit better. You know, I mentioned earlier, some of these issues, I come from a disjointed data environment, we've got so many talented teammates, highly paid teammates, that are doing very redundant ad hoc tasks, right. So repeated, asked for data access, repeated, asked for datasets, repeated asked for ETL tools, these things are happening on an ongoing basis. And it's repetitive, and it's not necessary, right? So we anticipate that bringing all this data into a platform environment where queries can happen simply and efficiently, where additional skews can help automate the production of insights can free up hundreds, if not 1000s of hours, for you know, move them away from these repetitive tasks into more strategic high level thinking tasks? So we're really excited about that opportunity.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  7:49  

I have a quick question about that. Knowing all those mundane tasks and all that time that was being used and the need, who initiated the need for this implementation? Was it the ones on the frontline? Was it executive level? Was it your team, or the tech team that really saw the call to action? Or was it a team effort?

Patty Behre  8:12  

I would say it was kind of like a hive mind, which is very reflective of Red Hat's kind of ethos, we are an open ord collective, very democratic in nature. So we are very much receiving input and feedback from top to bottom. And, you know, so there from the ground down to the top level, there's recognition that marketing is changing, right? Digital Transformation is upon us, how do we stay relevant, these are things that we need to do. And of course, you know, us being part of the Adobe team recognizing this technology for what it is we're also active drivers. So I think there is a unit universal recognition that change needs to happen.

Chris Sessoms  8:59  

And I think also it was an evolution of where we work time. Now we are three, four years after implementing audience manager and knowing that we needed to improve and still evolve and progress our segmentation capabilities. Once we started to learn more about AP and CDP, and CGA and the functionality and the capabilities within those platforms. That's really where we started to say, okay, that's our next step. We know that we need to get there. What is the roadmap for that? And we have leadership that allows us to give us that leeway to say, what is the next step and being able to bubble up and really influence those decisions? 

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  9:43  

That's in for the audience. Could we decipher the Adobe Experience platform versus a CDP? How do they play together? And in the acronym Su, so a EP is Adobe Experience platform?

Patty Behre  9:57  

Yeah. Chris, I'll let you take that.

Chris Sessoms  9:59  

Absolutely correct. And then CDP is the customer data platform. So we've adopted one of the Adobe enterprise architects, visualizations and understandings of the concept of a big brain and a little brain. Our big brain is all of our data was siloed data sources, and then being able to select and be specific and strategic and which data sources do we want to ingest into the little brain of a pea, just like we have a little brain of audience manager, just like we have a little brain of analytics and target in the experience cloud. From there, we then start to parse out segmentation through the CDP. And then also going into CGA, we realize there's additional data source needs and requests from that function as well. So also making sure that we had datasets and data sources available in our little brain of experience platform that we can also parse out not only for CDP, but for actioning and visualization within CGA be in the customer journey analytics. Chirag anything you would like to add to that.

Chirag Deshpande  11:06  

Yeah, and CJ is the customer journey analytics platform where we do a lot of the analysis component of that data. And the CDP is where we do we drive a lot of the activation of that analysis and segments that we've identified and want to drive up digital marketing and digital transformation use cases.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  11:26  

Very helpful. Thank you.

Patty Behre  11:28  

So typically, I just want to return to the beginning of your question as well, because the business impacts I'm sure our viewers want to hear a little bit about this. This is the payload. But again, I referenced earlier that you know, for our foundational phase, we did kind of focus in on development of first party audience seeing strategies which then segmentation so that's going to be the focus of these highlight POCs. But, of course, CGA, which is ramping up now will be able to show I'm sure I'm similar. But just to refer to my notes. So the first highlight PFC result it relates to pay. So we started using first party audiences and suppression and certain paid media campaigns. And we anticipate that once this is employed globally, we're going to be introducing savings and about a million dollars annually. The second key result also relates to the paid space, we've started doing some very interesting experimentation with first party audiences in combination with Adobe's look alike modeling capabilities. And when we utilize these kinds of audiences, and audiences, excuse me in these sample campaign motions, we saw optimizations to the tune of 196%, decrease and CPL with a simultaneous 9% increase in CTR. And then the last POC we want to highlight is related to on site personalization. So by using first party audiences, we were able to bring in house certain transactional messages that would encourage earlier at least timely renewal of Red Hat's subscriptions. And that particular POC had a 3,000% ROI..

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  13:28  

Impressive numbers. Then what were the business problems that you were seeking to solve?

Chris Sessoms  13:33  

We had three priorities around increasing marketing efficiency, by consolidating the data needed in the business into a single platform, being a the experience platform and a customer data platform, as well as customer journey analytics. And then our second initiative or priority was enhancing our ability to draw meaningful cross prospect and customer insights. So being able to actually activate that data that we're ingesting into the platforms, and being able to cultivate useful insight and actionable insight. And then the third one was all around resilience of change. As far as privacy and the landscape, as when we started this effort. GDPR was front and center, the California legislation with CCPA. And then, of course, people in China towards the end of last year. And then the ever changing as we roll into this year, additional states within the US adopting similar California legislation. I think there's now five or six new states that are taking on those actions and legislations as well as just across the regions and being able to understand how do we go into those channels into those regions and markets with the right consent, the right opt in, and the right preferences given by the visitors in a first party context?

Patty Behre  14:55  

Yeah, so, I mean, it's very correspondent to the solution pillars that we were trying to sell For right, those are indicative of the problems that we're experiencing. And all in all, I think, you know, digital transformation to me is representative, an inability of marketers to keep up with the demands of our jobs these days without the support of technology. So that's exactly what this provides us an ability to scale up through great new automation and other features to just extend the impact of our individual work.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  15:36  

And this might be a question for Chris, as you know, what were the data sources that were brought in? And what was what did you learn along the way?

Chris Sessoms  15:46  

So when we started this process, last year, in March, the experience platform skew that was available for the CDP customer data platform was the b2c version, the b2b or the BTP. Version was still in beta and not yet available. So obvious focus point was the contacts and going into those b2c motions, and taking our marketing automation data and being able to ingest it. But then also thinking about, okay, knowing that b2b and BTP will be forthcoming, how do we now start to maybe push the envelope, as we typically do with all of our tech, including Adobe, and really start to reach forward and start to connect our contacts to our accounts. And luckily, we had teams within well across the organization that are already doing those motions, and been able to connect our contact database with our CRM and relative databases, even across sales, and been able to understand how those contacts data sources and their associated account, sales, commerce, or eCommerce and sales account data are intertwined and interconnected, they've been able to separate them. So we know who are our contacts that might be prospects that are not yet tip to a customer perspective, or might be in a free trial within a product. And given those options to be able to start to nudge individuals from different layers of known to the next progressive layer. And across that we really focused in on the contractual limitation of our profile, and how the CDP is structured in the contract. And knowing that we had, I think, at that point in time, 70 million profiles, and knowing that we gauged how many contacts do we have in our database? How many experienced cloud IDs do we have, from the Adobe side of the house, knowing that we're going to marry those together as our key value pairs, if you will, is starting at that foundational level and going to the masses and being able to understand okay, what's what's going to be upcoming once we round out the end of this year, and start to progress towards the next functionality of customer data platform, customer journey analytics, and being able to understand what other data sources might we need to consume along the way, whether that's reaching for to the future of product telemetry data, or product usage data, some of our other third party data, whether it's data feeds from sixth sense, or data Rama, or Bumble or demand base, or Dun and Bradstreet, being able to start to then do some progressive profiling and fill in some holes in our first party data and really enrich that data. So we can go to market with it in an effective way. I think that lessons learned that you asked about will quickly learn in the

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  18:44  

surprises that you're like, Well, was it but that would get to know the importance

Chris Sessoms  18:49  

of the proper documentation along the way. So one of the efforts that we had with this three prong approach of Red Hatters, combined with search discovery team members combined with Adobe consulting team members, was the data mapping exercises, and being precise and planning of what data ingestion do we have? What are we going to need? And what are we going to need to plan for easier data mining and schema schema creation? Definitely leaning towards that SDM schema that's provided out of the box by experience, platform, and Adobe, and being able to align our data in that fashion. So we now have, whether it's Google Sheets, or Google Drive, or any of our resources that are artifacts, now, we can now go back and refine them and do that rents are a repeatable pattern. As we start to ingest either new data elements, or new data sources, or even, we had already some shifts in our data where we might be doing the end of life of one data field and replace it with a net new data field. So having that structure in place and having that muscle toned reaction, and having that at practice was very helpful, especially as we start to look off.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  20:03  

And as you were putting these planning phases, and looking at the scope of it, who were the stakeholders that you had to engage off the bat that had to be in the room to make sure that this was going to be a success.

Patty Behre  20:16  

So I'd like to jump in there. You know, kind of the the non technical product manager, and I focus on these kinds of stakeholder management, you know, use case, rituals. And I will say my key learning was just an appreciation for the scope and scale of this technology. You know, if you think about how it any of you out there, how your organization operated before Salesforce, and how it operates with Salesforce, it's that kind of magnitude of change, potentially, right. And so we, of course, sat down with all of our marketing stakeholders and all the adjacent that we are typically kind of used to engaging with, right, we're used to engaging with marketing plus sales, marketing, maybe plus some procurement. But in for this in particular, and Chris can speak to this better, of course, marketing plus our data partners, and product and beyond. But even even though I think we did a pretty thorough job, we could have been more expansive still, and made that tent even broader. And we were able to make some pivots right and adjust as we kind of understood who might be impacted downstream by this. But I think that that was a key moment for me.

Chris Sessoms  21:47  

In being able to focus in on those users at a data level data level, we also really get to dive deep with the the product and platform owners of our CRM, and our contact databases and going into the motions and letting them understand that Chris Sessoms might have multiple devices, multiple email addresses in our ecosystem, but that the power of the experience platform, a customer data platform, is that identity graph that really gives you a almost like a molecule visualization of how do these EC IDs attached to these emails. In our case, we hashed all of our identifiers pointing to the platform, keeping the platform fairly PII simple. And then being able to understand as users and web visitor behaviors become more frequent, that those profiles that might be independent at beginning would start to collapse and become a unified profile, that we can act in accordance across multiple browsers, across multiple devices and across sessions.

Patty Behre  22:53  

And that's a really great call out that I didn't really specifically mention as kind of, you know, our resilience pillar, but identity resolution cookies going away. That was a big driver. Yeah, definitely.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  23:12  

And for those, because we're coming up about five minutes left, if you have any questions, feel free to drop into the chat, and we will get to them here. Before we end. Curious about the implementation timeline, how long did it take to implement?

Chris Sessoms  23:24  

So with our three prong approach, I like to give ourselves a little bit of a shout out in a pack up pat on the back between SDI and Adobe, in our Red Hat teams, I think it was six to seven months from start to finish. There was some ramp up of being able to articulate correctly to the Adobe and SDI teams, our internal data structures, and especially these disparate data sources that we wanted to ingest with a variety of marketing automation platforms, a variety of sales and account platforms have been able to pull all that together and articulate a unified vision for what we want to see and be able to act on an AP and CDP. But also being able to really move the needle quickly and be very agile. I would definitely give a shout out to Chirag and the Adobe consulting team for keeping us on task and really pushing us forward. But Chirag gut check me it was around seven months, correct?

Chirag Deshpande  24:26  

Absolutely. Yeah, I would. I wouldn't say end to end was seven months for implementation and technical work was probably around four months timeframe.

Patty Behre  24:35  

And I like to give a shout out to Chris Sessoms, who also did a mountainous amount of work.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  24:45  

That's awesome. Yeah, I mean, that is huge project in seven months. That is very impressive. So very well done. So I guess in closing then what's next for AEP in your opinion?

Patty Behre  25:00  

Sure, I'll take that one. There's so much. There's so much question for the last hour. But no, no, truly, you know, I mentioned at the outset that we focused on segmentation as our kind of foundational use case, right? Because that's, that's what you have to do at the outset. With AP, you have to, you know, build, build a profiles, and then it's just natural to go into segmentation. Segmentation, though, feeds into CJ. So, you know, we're focusing on on the efficiency pillar at the moment. But next, is that insights, meaningful insights, so we're really looking forward to, you know, surfacing all that we can with this powerful tool, because you know, now that you've got this ability to join together so many dimensions, and see our customers journeys, and what these happy paths really look like across touchpoints. We're hoping to really be able to drive some new, you know, augmented ROI.

Chris Sessoms  25:59  

We've also been able to understand evolution that we simply took between audience manager and experience platform. And now having a warehouse in am in that little brain data lake of unknowns are anonymous visitors, that we have the opportunity to now dive deeper into, and hopefully get them to fill out a form or raise a hand and self identify, register for an event, engage with chat, so many options there to self identify, but then that allows us to then push them into the customer data platform for segmentation. But having actionable audiences and segments in both platforms, and then having them integrated across multiple channels, has also led to a new understanding of digital transformation for us at Red Hat, and given us the opportunity to move some of the Adobe tech to the hub and moving the channels out to the spokes and being able to act accordingly. And being able to do multi channel and omni channel marketing in a precision fashion.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  27:05  

Awesome. Chirag any closing comments, advice from your stance?

Chirag Deshpande  27:12  

No. I mean, I think one of the things we're not specifically I mean, I think Red Hat, the dirty members have covered the core components. I think one of the things is when you're evaluating a new platform that's going to drive a big change like this is to make sure you you're accommodating for change management controls in the process as well. It involves a lot of team members involves a lot of people, processes, changes, adoption education. So you definitely have to account for all of those elements as part of your implementation. So it's not just hey, here's a platform, but it's like, Yep, I've got the Ferrari I just driving a Ferrari anymore yet. So how do I go about learning about the nuances of getting acclimated to the platform, getting the processes and governance under control so that it just doesn't go haywire or falls flat? So I think those are the other components that always has to be considered as part of such a big transformation.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  28:10  

Awesome, beautiful. Close it. I love it. So Patty, Chris, Chirag, thank you so much for your time. Great information. Thank you all for joining today. We definitely encourage a follow up conversation with Red Hat, Adobe and the search discovery team. They'll definitely be worth your time and we'd love to have a conversation with you. So feel free to drop me a line at Tiffany@BWGconnect.com And we'll set up some time to chat. So with that, have a great weekend. Take care Stay safe, and we will see you on the next events.