Hello everyone and welcome to our webinar. Thank you for joining us for today's presentation from Manufacturing to Mobility and we are so glad to have you with us. And now I'd like to hand the session over to our highly regarded host and speaker, Nirav Bansali, who is our Principal of Industry Strategy, Automotive and Mobility here at Adobe. And he will start things off for us today. Hello Nirav, welcome and the stage is now yours.
Thank you, Emily. And thank you everyone for joining. Really appreciate you taking an hour out of your busy schedules to spend time with myself and Stephen. Let's get right going. We have a packed agenda for you today. And as you might have seen coming into this, really we want to focus today's session on the how. We've spoken a lot about technology and how technology can power experiences and personalization. What we want to focus on is the next chapter of that and really what are some of the org and operating model best practices that you can start to incorporate into your strategies. And as you're building your technology foundation and strategy, ensuring that you also have the right setup in place to make the most of it. And so we're going to spend some time covering that, share some case studies and then save some time at the end for some Q&A. I'm joined today, I'm really thrilled to be joined today with Stephen Silva, who I'll let him introduce himself from Publisys Sapient.
Thank you, Nirav, and it's great to be here and it's good to see some names and faces in our attendee list from current days and past lives. I'm Steve Silver. I'm a managing director in our transportation mobility practice with Publisys Sapient, which is the digital business transformation arm of the Publisys group. We are thrilled to be partnering with Adobe and it's great to be with Nirav as we talk about something that goes beyond the conversation of the week, which probably everybody is hearing about all the time, AI, is that the intelligence part that we're going to bring up and talk more at length about today is about those people in process parts of the transformation that goes into the journey to personalization. So it's great to be here with you, Nirav. Appreciate the invite and we're thrilled to have our attendees here with us today.
Awesome. I'll jump right in. I kind of wanted to set the stage with this because, you know, again, obviously automotive, but we all live and breathe this world. But I think it's a really nice point in time, as Stephen was kind of alluding to all of the big technology changes that have been coming. Like the auto industry is not new to this. And if you just go back, I love this visual of obviously kind of taking from Henry Ford and famously his remark of moving the assembly line, you know, around workers and allowing workers to move to and around the vehicle. Right. And that kind of changed how manufacturing and lean manufacturing and everything that we know in our modern days in terms of how the vehicle is built. And I love this analogy and take it into the digital world because I ask myself, like, is there a digital assembly that really is that different from the physical assembly? And we don't think it is. And if you think about like how you all operate today to enable some of these experiences for your customers, you know, some of the things that we often like talk about and want to bring forward through our products is, you know, what if we could simplify work for all of you, for designers, for marketers, for the data scientists? What if you could connect your financial planning systems to how you run your business processes, to how you manage your work, to the end customer experience? What if content creation and production allowed you to do more with less, create it once, use in multiple places? So we're going to touch on elements of that, but really through the lens ultimately of empowering you and your teams to make the most of the tools you have available and share insights on some of the strategies that you can employ to ultimately, you know, bring this digital assembly to life at your organization.
I'll start by something probably you all live and breathe in today and deal with on a daily basis. Right. The content proliferation challenge is exponentially growing in automotive. And this is really more profound than than ever before. Right. If you think about all of the new vehicle models coming to line with EVs and fabs and all of the different electrification offerings, think about new commercial applications in the mobility space, thinking about all of the new services and digital products that you're bringing to market. This just means that across your ecosystem of dealers, partners, suppliers, even your captive finance side, it's really more content than ever. Right. And it's something that you really need to be able to take account of and think through very strategically on how you want to make sure that you're delivering the right experience. How are you doing things in an efficient manner and ultimately, you know, driving the business forward? Right. And we often like to use this analogy here. And, you know, again, this is one use case. I use this analogy of like, think about like, you know, this probably happens on a weekly basis. But when a new vehicle model is launched or there's a model your refresh happening and all of the activities that surround it in your organization, just think about the number of assets that have to be created to support that launch. Right. From the 3D assets that are used in various different forms, whether it's marketing channels or others, to the different AR and VR experiences that we see emerging or just imagery and video and immersive content that you will distribute across your ecosystem, going down further into what your physical dealer experiences look like at the kiosk. What is the customer experience when they come next to the product for the first time to all of the, you know, maybe less, you know, fancy sales collateral, owner's manual, in-vehicle content, et cetera, that all has to be updated to support that launch. And that also has to be proliferated through all the channels and touch points that customers and your partners and dealers have to operate on through all of the teams in your organization and your partners. Right. Whether those are design agencies, system integrators, creative agencies, everyone is kind of being orchestrated through this process to get this out. Right. And ultimately drive real tangible outcome, make sure that vehicle launch is successful, drive sales and drive great customer experiences. And so, again, you know, this is one example. This is not even the full lifecycle. Right. We're not talking about financing, after sales, new service launches. So this is just really to illustrate a point that it's really crucial to start thinking about the coordination. It's really crucial to start thinking about how are you set up across your internal and external teams and how are you thinking about what your content supply chain is and how it comes to life? Right. So, you know.
Nirav, one point before you go farther on that, and I think it's an important point you made on this slide and on the slide before, is the amount of variations that personalization drives in each one of these use cases. So in this model, we're expecting to deliver kind of the bespoke, the right message to the right prospect or customer or vehicle owner at the right time that would drive sort of an advance in that journey. And you think about all the variations that get added into this. And so the problem becomes even more complex to manage. So I think as we talk about it, we'll discuss how do you navigate that complexity and the dimensionality in the business. But you really nailed it with this slide in terms of think about all the moving parts. And this is just one element of the lifecycle.
Yeah, absolutely. But before we get into some of the specific research that we've gathered and insights, I'd love to just maybe hand it over to Stephen to run a poll and engage where you all are in terms of your content and personalization needs.
Oh, thanks. So, yeah, this is a really interesting topic because all of us have been hearing about personalization consistently. And so the real question is, how much more is it really a priority in your organization? Is it what we believe and what we're hearing is that it's that much greater? Is it the same as in years past? Is it less than? We can't imagine that it's that. And what's clear from the folks that are voting here is it is either greater or substantially greater than prior years. We'll give you about another five seconds to vote on this. But I think our hypothesis was pretty on point, Nirav, that it clearly is an issue that everybody is talking about and talking about with great focus. So as we navigate to our next slide here, if you'll bear with as it presents itself, I think one of the points that we fundamentally are seeing is that the focus on technology, and we all are seeing it with the emergence of AI and being a topic that every C-level executive is talking about, and just the adoption of digital being a, now it's not just the digital team's responsibility. If you look at the research from IDC and Gartner, it is fundamentally a C-level responsibility. And then when you marry that with the idea that every one of our clients in every sector, and automotive is especially the case, is focused on growth, is that the reality of it is that 10 to 15 percent are looking to try to grow, 6 to 10 percent are looking, while they're growing, they're looking to reduce the cost to serve and drive up these measurable business results in ROI. And so you have all of this imperative that is to use technology and to use personalization and to use MarTech, which has been a great area of expenditure over the last number of years, especially since the pandemic. But how do you drive the results that need to take place? And is just having the tech good enough? Will that get it done? And I think if you go to the next slide, I think what we'reSkills and then governance and transparency, right? So these are five things that across companies that were further or down the mature scale, like in that federated model operating all the way to the right, they were firing on all cylinders across these five dimensions. And so, you know, some of the learnings that we were able to get out of that, you know, kind of spend, Stephen and I will spend some time to walk you through some of those insights as I think they might be able to be applied to, you know, how you are currently operating today or maybe some tweaks that you might want to make to your model, right? So when it comes to the first one, right, assigning clear ownership, the number one thing we found was to get it, getting the clear leadership at the right level established very early on in this transition process, you know, as you're moving from center of capabilities to center of excellence to this federated enterprise excellence model. And most of the companies actually wish they did this way earlier. And it's something that's very critical to stand out. Like we've often seen this in automotive, but like these are, there are many initiatives sometimes started in pockets. They might start in a, you know, either in some line of business or aligned to a specific market. And then scaling that becomes tough because, you know, we don't have approvals at the right level. This was never bought in enterprise wide, or it was never communicated from day one that this is what has been piloted. And so there are a lot of pitfalls that happen down the road that we want to avoid if we have clear ownership at the right levels. Stephen, anything you want to add to this as well?
Yeah, I think the big thing on that last bit is that the alignment of executives becomes challenging at times, because ultimately the objectives within those different groups, I work with one OEM that has a difference in their digital teams versus their connected services teams versus their in-vehicle teams versus their new services teams. And that's a lot of folks that you need to get lined up on something that doesn't feel like it's, you know, a day-to-day worry and it just, it's not designed to solve for it in the daily run the business. And so it becomes harder to do because folks are sort of being responsible for delivering on the message or the capability, not some of the organizational sort of dynamics and politics that go into it.
Yeah, agreed. And like, you know, this actually, this kind of second slide here, kind of some of the lessons from that, you know, we asked all of the enterprises surveyed, right, like what would you do again? And obviously some of the themes on the left here are things that ladder up to why you, you know, you need strong leadership buy-in. But another insight that we also got was that typically you also really need a mind shift change, right? And sometimes that is coming from parts of the organization to help inform leadership of changes that might be required in terms of a couple of things that stood out, like thinking about the future tools and technology and not being bogged down by legacy, like illustrating that the importance of that in order to then invest the resources and time into setting up the right people and process infrastructure, right? Because that is really the most expensive change management, you know, exercise that has to take place, but you need to be able to kind of tie it back to, okay, like what are the key kind of building blocks? So we found that piece was really insightful as well.
And I think the added piece of this is that the governance and sort of the organization around this needs to expand beyond the four walls of the OEM or the captive or the dealer group. They need to expand into the agency and consultancy community. And the reason for this in many cases, those agencies or consultancies are working for those individual business units or teams around the common real estate of a digital property or the various touch points. And so if you don't really have kind of leadership governance that can kind of say, hey, let's get everybody in the same boat, you're going to continue to have sort of random acts of personalization that will conflict with each other. And it's not just frustrating, it undermines the real goal of personalization, which is to deliver a bespoke experience that lifts the conversions in those instances. And if you end up with these collisions because you don't have the right governance, is that it undermines the ROI overall.
Yeah, which actually is a good segue to think about like the step two here, which is, again, the KPI and incentive alignment. And it's really important that although this was the number one thing to get right when transitioning to the highest level of maturity for most companies, they wish they had done this earlier, right? And every single mature firm that evolved to a federated model had done that. So these are two key things to kind of highlight. And while it traditionally appears later in the process, we've moved it up due to its overwhelming significance, right? So many mature firms we saw wish they had addressed having the right KPIs tied to specific actions, specific programs and projects that the COE is going to be undertaking and tying it again back to the different business units, the different teams that they are internally tied to and are kind of working with to drive specific business goals, right? So without that, we see that very often COEs work in isolation and aren't able to ultimately justify the investment that's gone into them.
Stephen, would you want to add a couple of thoughts here?
Again, I think the big thing is when it comes to the federated model around the incentives is that, and again, going back to the example that I gave, the KPIs that that brand team had globally in the example I gave were adoption and compliance of the standards of sort of the use cases that we highlighted in of the templates that we created. The KPIs that we had in the regions were driving leads, hand raisers, and conversions to sale and contribution to profitability. And so by definition, we had a conflict and we didn't have enough of that brand compliance mandate within the sort of the regional objectives. And we certainly didn't have enough of the sales objective within the global governance. So it's this balance of KPI or finding KPIs like customer lifetime value as an example that people can rally around that really span those boundaries within your organization that I think are key to sort of making this real and actionable.
Yes, agreed. And this is kind of segueing into thinking through really where the expertise can lie in terms of not only defining those KPIs, but setting the entire infrastructure up, right? And so the third kind of key theme that we uncovered is really figuring out what your DNA make up with, like what is it that is core to you as an organization? What are things that you need partners for where there's better domain expertise and where you can kind of have the best of both worlds, right? And so the survey results indicated that most enterprises do obviously outsource a significant portion of the functions that a COE does, but the degree to which that happens changes. And it changes over time and it changes over the maturity, right? So for example, obviously the technology is number one, right? The technology implementation is typically outsourced. But while that is at 81% during peak implementation phase, right? So when you're just setting up, when you're just trying to figure out things, when you're bringing on more channels, more journeys, more teams, and starting to influence and scale the capabilities, that is when we see kind of the most requirement. But then as that kind of reaches normal or steady state, we start seeing a lot of that moving to a balance between internal and external where we start seeing, okay, so there are certain things that live outside, there are certain things that I live within. The second thing I think is really important on the business case piece because ties back to the KPI discussion. We very often see that is also a portion that's outsourced essentially because a lot of enterprises either just lack the benchmark necessary to define what is to be really measured and what is to really be tied back to the initiatives and prove the ROI or sometimes they just require third party validation, right? To make the case. And so, and again, that extent to which it is outsourced varies. It's really in the initial phases when you're trying to sell the program and make sure that internal teams are bought in is when we see the most use of external resources and strategic partners.
One other element on this that's really interesting is the fact that when it comes to the expertise that you need to pull this off is that most automotive enterprises have depth in one or two of these areas. And in many cases, they have great digital partners, creative partners, either traditional or digital agencies or combination that may have depth in one or two of these areas. And sometimes those are complementary and sometimes they overlap, they just increase. So if you think about it in the case of Adobe, many of our agency colleagues have really great Adobe practices and can really deliver on that. But when you look at the combination of things that's required is it does typically require sort of these other disciplines that are typically known for sort of the digital transformation space. So, and to give a very brief commercial for a publicist group, we have this concept that we call power of one, which is really this concept of where you're combining your amazing creative, amazing tech skills, amazing content skills, and then all of the people process technology and the sort of the change management elements that can work with clients that have some of that capability themselves. So I think the best way to think about this is how you create your own version of power of one to deliver on this requirement. And this will give you the best chance to get more of that value out of the personalization efforts that you started to undertake probably just before and during the pandemic. And now that you're accelerating its importance, we think that's really a fundamental key to getting this right.
All right. And then,A common client, a case study from an Adobe and Google Sysapen client that has gone through this maturity and has reached a place that I think has some really interesting insights that we all can learn from. So, Stephen?
Yeah. So, what's interesting, I'm going to go back to the slide. We shared it earlier and we've alluded to it a few times. And it's a really, I love it. And a lot of times in these kinds of presentations, these kinds of slides can be very academic, they're theoretical. And you go, oh, that definitely does describe it, sort of. It doesn't really map. Well, what's interesting about the story I'm going to share with you about a common client of Adobe's and Google Sysapen is that amazingly, and again, this slide was not created in reaction to this particular client, but their journey maps very, very closely to this slide, unintentionally so. And it's amazing that when we got together to kind of look at this, how these sort of these, the parallels that we saw. So, again, let me just tell you about the client. I can't tell you who it is, but it is a global automaker that is one of the largest in the world that is headquartered, that has, let's call it a sort of a bi-national or a multi-location headquarters, and that has both global leadership for digital. It has sales company leadership for digital. It has brand level owners of digital, and then it has in-market owners within countries and then specifically amongst its largest markets here in the US. And normally you would say in many cases that the whole focus on digital and personalization of scale, usually you think of it as somebody that's looking to drive improved outcomes from better targeting, engaging, converting, and then impacting their efforts around personalization. Ironically, this was a function, and this grew out of the proliferation of sort of one-off random acts of personalization capabilities that existed worldwide. So we were asked to help them think about this in a way that actually ironically was designed to take cost out, but ultimately would also simultaneously drive improved performance. And so interestingly, in many of the markets, both at the global level and at the regional level, they were departmental driven. There was those individual personalization efforts by brand. There were some luxury brands. There were some outdoor brands. There were some volume brands, of course. And ultimately what we looked at was in terms of their maturity was it was all over the board. And so what we tried to do was to create a model and give a set of recommendations that wasn't about a big bang or wasn't about just this Herculean effort on their part, but started to create, again, that center of excellence where personalization and the tactics would support it could be centralized at first so that there was an initial sharing of best practices. Because for the most part, the luxury brand was not talking to the volume brand, even though in many cases, people that are the candidates for volume brand acquisition are also candidates for luxury brand acquisition, is the new vehicle sales personalization efforts were not in any way involved and depending on market, and heaven forbid the tier three or tier two or three, and then the individual dealer personalization efforts were not managed. And then IT and marketing and digital were not really well aligned. So what we focused on creating was the center of excellence initially to start to centralize those capabilities and create the governance around how you do it with the biggest focus being how do we see what the patterns are that are the same in all markets? What are the patterns that the smallest markets can inherit and adopt and embrace very quickly so that you can raise their game? And then how do you enable the big markets? The big markets tend to be the markets in North America, the markets in the largest countries in Europe, in some cases, the Asia pack markets that are super large. How can we take the lessons from those and share them and the assets and where they had a common platform? And this was the nice thing in that they were fundamentally an Adobe shop plus other platforms that they could start to tackle this. So they started to adopt this. And then they also then said, where can we start to create sort of federation? Now, this was really, really important is that the federation was key because what we couldn't have was this regional control or brand control of personalization and then all of a sudden take that completely away from the local markets, like in the story that I told, and put that at the headquarters level where folks could not fundamentally, they had to go and ask permission. So we started with those largest markets to give them an ability to start to have variations that supported theirs. But the key was that they had to sort of make that variation and how they got there available for other markets to adopt as well. Then we call this model the enterprise excellence with a digital core. So the digital core is essentially that center of excellence that we highlighted, but the enterprise excellence is that federation. The thing that drove this and the thing that made it possible was that rather than organize around just around brand or geo or model line or individual digital team within the life cycle, is that we focused on customers and the attributes and the journeys that they faced. And when you start from the bottom up at customer types and segments and the distinct behaviors and needs, and then apply some common sense attributes like geography and common sense attributes like the journeys that are the full life cycle, is that all of those dimensions of the business start to find their way. So you're not engaging in volume versus luxury collisions in the way you normally would. It's not a problem when you have new vehicle marketing and sales and after sales, because you fundamentally have built these around journeys. And now many of the OEMs have all created these journey teams, but what they have done is to build their personalization approaches and their core or enterprise excellence around how you can deliver personalizations around that universe. And then what's the governance for which messages should be supersede and which interactions should supersede in which circumstances. And that arbitration becomes really, really important. And that's probably the area that needs the most maturing in the automotive industry, which is which journeys, which customers and which personalization schemes need to persist and which need to defer and how do you use tech to support that so it's not too big to scale worldwide. The last bit that was important about it, and if you can see sort of at the top there, and I'll walk you through what you're going to look here. These are the pieces and parts of the organizational design. And you'll notice there were the journey teams that focused essentially around personalization around the different phases of the lifecycle. And then there were at the third level around different kinds of use cases and value props for those, and then the various platforms and channels and the like. Now, ultimately, the organizational design, if you didn't have the top layer, would fall apart. And let me tell you why. Is that ultimately, if this is just about having owners of those different personalization schemes by those different dimensions, is that you will have better organization for sure, better ownership, but you're still going to have those collisions. Portfolio management is like within the securities industry, or think about your retirement account, or any other investments you make, is that each investment essentially has a return on investment. And in certain cases, a new vehicle message or a new vehicle marketing message may have a higher ROI at a moment in time for a particular customer segment in a particular environment that is higher than an after sales message or a connected services message. But let's imagine that somebody has a vehicle roadside emergency, and there's a range of other messages that could be personalized or delivered. Clearly, that vehicle roadside message or interaction is going to be the most important at that moment. So if you think of these in terms of their value and their impact to the customer and to the organization, and then manage them as if they were securities at any moment, you can start to make those decisions and not only manage sort of the tech and the program management, as Nirav highlighted, you can manage them in terms of their returns. And this is what drives the business performance. And so this model becomes really powerful, really important. And it's a kind of a true north that we really encouraged our client to adopt. And they're in the process of really adopting both at a global level and within the other dimensions of their business. So I think that sort of wraps it up, at least from that case study example, Nirav.
Yeah, no, that's awesome. Thank you, Stephen. And, you know, just like having been involved with this, like, to some extent, like the one other element just to underline is, you know, ultimately that you don't want people to be the glue between things, right? That's where things break down. That's where you have inefficiency. The goal is to have greater reusability and greater consistency. And, you know, the domains and platforms and trying to be able to have common set of capabilities there is extremely crucial if you want to be able to get things done faster, if you want to have the right decorations, et cetera. So, you know, but again, Stephen, like really appreciate this example and hopefully it shed a light on a lot of, you know, people in the attending thinking through like, how does this all come to life? And what does it really mean from an automotive context? And so this is a great illustration of that journey that this client took. That kind of concludes, I think, at least our content portion. I know we have about six minutes to the top of the hour. We wanted to make sure that we open it up to questions, you know, that have come in either in the chat or separately that have been submitted to us. So if you have questions, please submit it now. I see one from Mohammed. Are there blueprints or architecture pattern for this mobility model? So, you