[Music] la [Music] [Music] walking on the edge of life [Music] [Applause] a on me [Music] please welcome Eric [Music] [Applause] Hall good morning you're here congratulations welcome to Adobe Summit day two I hope you were blown away by yesterday's keynote strategy sessions and breakouts this morning is our inspiration keynote and we have an amazing lineup for you today but how can we top the insights of day one sha new shared his reflection on the impact of AI on customer experience management
and outlined adobe's Innovation agenda and nil Dove deep into our product strategy showcasing the future of data content and Journeys in an AI powered world and David showed us the next generation of firefly and the future of ideation and creative production it was standing room only for the strategy Keynotes on generative Ai and marketing performance and I hope you are inspired by where the technology is taking us Summit 2024 is demonstrating how we as a community were shaping digital marketing
and customer experience in the age of AI the lines have been blurred between your marketing your sales your product and support in today's world your digital experience is your brand and increasing it's also becoming your product and with the higher pressure on growth and downward pressure on budgets we're all called upon to be on top of the financial the financial outcomes as digital and streaming continue to displace tra traditional media and social channels continue to evolve acquiring engag
ing and retaining customers is more difficult than ever and this means that lifetime customer value and loyalty they matter more than ever to stay ahead brands in every industry must constantly raise the bar on their in toin customer experience consumers expect to be remembered valued and rewarded when they interact with your brand and perhaps no industry represents the intersection of digital and in-person like the airline business now this is an industry with tremendous competition complicated
Logistics and critical safety standards as Airline customers we have high expectations and that includes seamless digital journey connected to our physical Journey selecting flights booking tickets frequent flyer programs seat and meal selection lounge access and our baggage location that's a lot of experiences to get right or wrong before you even take a step onto the plane so is your travel experience going to be an adventure or an ordeal as customers we expect it to go perfectly so the bar f
or success is really high and this morning we have an opportunity to hear from one of the leaders who takes on that challenge every day Ed Bastion CEO of Delta Airlines will sit down with shot new right after this short video when I get on an airplane it is me time maybe learn another language binge watch by Nature travel has just so much optimism in it and I love that our ambition as a brand is is not just to be the leading airline in the world but to be the leading customer experience brand we
want the interactions that customers have with us to be one click one Platform One Source of Truth the digital experience is as important as the physical and Human Experience how do we recognize it's someone's birthday and we wish them a happy birthday when they walk on to our aircraft it's not just an email platform about an offer it is about making that interaction and that travel experience at the gate and then on board the aircraft better we have the app we have the website we have the kios
k we have the onboard inflight entertainment screen all of those channels need to be synchronous at every touch point they feel like Delta knows who they are Delta sync is creating a digital environment that is compelling for the customer and then capturing the data on the back end the more we have the intelligence that we rely on Adobe to bring us the more we can build a connected Journey we know our customers are evolving so we're looking at their behaviors and what they're doing with other br
ands and how they're engaging and interacting with our brand so we're creating and developing content and iterating in real time 1 2 3 we know through the analytics they're booking some sort of a Leisure vacation but they're falling out of the process and we can see that when we send them a notification how effective were we in getting the action done what's really exciting is we have this ability to test and learn that much faster and do so at a scale that's unprecedented Delta as a brand is sh
owing up in a similar consistent way time and time again it builds trust it builds loyalty and Adobe is the foundation that allows us to enable that experience is the difference how can we bring in better tools and technology and skill up our talent what can we do next gen AI just takes it to the next level and allows us to think beyond what we could have even imagined we want to connect the world and we want our customers to trust that there is no better option than Delta to do [Music] that ple
ase welcome shantar ryion and CEO Delta Airlines Ed Bastion [Music] good morning well I'm thrilled to have Ed Bastion CEO of Delta Airlines joining us uh today at adobi Summit under Ed's leadership Delta is transforming air travel with generational investments in technology aircraft airport facilities as well as employees worldwide Ed's a 25e Delta veteran and heast Champion Delta's shared values of honesty Integrity respect and we'll talk a lot more about that as well as servant leadership at t
he core of every decision and since becoming CEO in 2016 Ed has expanded Delta's position as the world's most reliable Airline and grown its Global footprint so welcome Ed and thank you for joining us at Summit well thank you shantu and it's great to be here with you very impressive uh community that you've built and created we're glad we're a part of that community and I know we have many people that we carry to Vegas today too so welcome to Delta too and uh and we'll get you back home safely t
oo well you know let me start off with um as a 25 year veteran when I think about uh the kinds of things you've had to navigate as a leader you know you talk about 9911 you talk about covid you talk about bankruptcy I mean you've really done an amazing job building Delta for the long run and steering through crisis so maybe you can touch a little bit about that yeah it's certainly not a industry that's for the faint of heart this is this has its challenges but yeah it's a really important indust
ry and I think that's one of the keys is that if you know having been through so many challenges including Co which was the biggest of the all if you know why you exist if you know what your purpose is you know the importance that your customers then not just your customers your community your world places on what you do that gives you the confidence you're going to get through those challenges and that's what kept us going right through Co because we knew how isolated and how dark and how much
angst had in the world when people couldn't travel people couldn't be with each other people couldn't get to where they needed to go and travel is one of the things that unites and brings understanding and brings fellowship and brings joy and so I knew we were going to get back and when you have that confidence that enables you to be bold and courageous in the steps you're taking that allows you to be humble when you realize the depths of the challenges that you have to work through the transpar
ency that's required and we knew we were on stage through all through Co people were watching how Delta was one step at a time starting to bring the world back together and especially in the United States and it was it was a it was an incredible feat that our team team displayed but it was one of the things look back on and understand that that resilience that you build that muscle that you create over time how powerful that is and it's it's really what our brand stands for it's a resilient bran
d and I think again this is something uh I know Ed youve championed which is the people first culture and uh there's an amazing statistic I mean as you had to go through this entire pandemic you did it without any layoffs across your 990,000 employees and you've grown that to 100,000 and and now that that was amazing so first EXA truly thank you well it's you know it's it's easy to say your people first what company doesn't say that right but it's actions like that in in fact we were the only ai
rline in the world that didn't fur a single person and so you again you talk about knowing you're going to get through the hard time and working together to get there that's what enabled it no but it truly is I mean when when we take a step back and think about how you had to navigate it and did it with the people first it's amazing well in Vegas and I know last year uh when we were in Vegas at CES uh you announced two I think industry first uh initiatives and maybe we can get an update on that
Ed announced free Wi-Fi on all planes and everything you were doing and you announced I think at that point what was really pioneering which is how you were going to create a set of relationships with other companies to create this loyalty culture that you wanted to do maybe touch on that yeah so last last year at CS we announced that we were rolling out and we're still in the process continuing to roll out fast free Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi that works okay there's a lot of people say they have a Wi-Fi t
here's not a lot of people have Wi-Fi that works and is and is free at the same time we've got it through most of our domestic system at this point we're in the process of putting it on all of our International equipment as well by the end of this year it'll be on all of our International planes where it's really going to be a game changer and to me it's remarkable that again it's another point of connection when you know Wi-Fi sounds like a fairly simple doesn't sound like a very uh revolutiona
ry technique to bring in but when you consider the fact that you've got we've got a thousand planes that are flying at 500 miles an hour around the world bouncing around you know trying to create that that that sterile uh high-speed connection is really difficult but we've been able to master that and what it's enabled us to do is to bring people into our community at an even deeper level because the only thing we ask is that you would be a member of our program you'd be a sky member and over th
e last year we've had over 2 million new members of our program customers we already had we just didn't know who they were come and and and sign on to in order to get the free Wi-Fi and to become part of the membership and you think about what that 2 million customers that you have that you can't even Market to you can't personalize you can't serve well that's huge and then on top of that we have of community of Partners we've got T-Mobile we've got Paramount plus we got Walmart plus now we've g
ot AMX resi we got the New York Times and all the puzzles and the the the the games that they they display all free for our members when they're on board the planes and now what we're also in the midst of rolling out is all those seatack screens that we have on board because we have more three times as many seatack screens as any airline in the world has we're turning them into smart screens and we' we've got about a hundred of those flying today and by the end of this year at least through dome
stically we should have most of the domestic Fleet enabled and so that it'll take your your extension of what you're you're developing you know from your your handheld to your screen and then you'll be able to actually use your handall for what you want to have and be able to watch whatever you want on your own terms it's it's it's really fascinating and I know you've really been trying to push the whole experience and we'll come to you know experience and maybe the role that technology plays bu
t I've always thought we all get influenced by our early experience es in travel and I read about some of your really really early experiences in travel with the family um I don't know if you want to maybe touch on you know your Early Travel experiences my my Early Travel experiences were not in an airline uh I was 25 years old before I Ste foot on an airplane so how I got this job I have no idea I this is the last thing that so when I i' I've done a number of college commencements I always tell
the kids you just keep your eyes open to Opportunities because I when I when I graduated college I never even Ste foot on an airplane uh but I also grew up in a very large family I was one of nine children and so our travel experience was once a year we'd all be in a a car a station wagon my father driving through the night to Florida for the spring break travel and back again and it was my parents nine kids and my grandmother and we were able to carry only what we fit in our our pillowcase and
that's a pretty good lesson for for parents out there you know tell your kids you can they can only carry it's School you what what you have in your pillowcase and it kind of gets your prioritization in place so so I I in my mind I knew there must be a better way to do this than uh than what what how I learned well you've talked a lot about creating the single Delta experience maybe you can touch a little bit on you know irrespective of what platform or what brand how you're creating the single
experience for all the folks out here digital Technologies are providing us the opportunity to have what we'd like to think of as a seamless experience for our customers and a unified experience our company next year is turning 100 years old we'll be the first airline in the Country turning 100 we're going to we're going to celebrate loudly absolutely it's great great to see and when you think about a 100-year old company you've envisioned the technology infrastructure and it kind of is what yo
u think it is there's there's like thousands of applications and programs that have been developed over the over time and the ability to knit them together and to be able to develop a modern experience from a technical standpoint is quite a challenge so we're we're working actively on that we've moved most of our our um our infrastructure to the cloud through AWS we'll be complete with that by the end of this year so that's that's enabling us but then we want customers as they travel through the
Delta system whether you're booking a trip online or needing to talk to one of our reservation agents or going through security or picking up your bag at the end of The Journey or being on board with us and interacting through our Wi-Fi channels you know what you can you can you can engage we want that relationship to be robust to be connected to be the information to be consistent as they as people travel through through the system and uh we we know that our Delta app now is one of the leading
apps period out there in terms of the experiential world and we also know it's one of the reasons why people continue to prefer Delta because of the app and we've got a new a new uh release coming out it's going to be uh our best release yet in May the teams team's working on uh excited about that because we also want people to be able to have control of their experience one of one of the challenges with travel it can be stressful right I'm sure none of you can relate to that right through an a
irport it's it's really easy right and and one of one of our our our ideas is it shouldn't be as stressful as it is it should be something you look forward to and that you're looking forward to where you're going and and your journey is part of that and so we've made the travel app or the Delta app an opportunity for people to control their experience while they're on board if they want to make change if they want to find out information about where they're going because and by the way a lot of
our our customers connect onto another plane as to where that is and and how that's all working and the more information and the easier it is to use uh customers feel feel a sense of comfort and peace and control around the experience and that's where the technology really makes a huge difference so let's just keep on the technology theme I mean I think it's fair to say 2023 everybody talked about AI so maybe a little bit on how AI changes travel and maybe Delta specifically yeah well we've been
working uh with AI for many years uh it's now a new a new form I I understand generative AI but I I prefer to uh mention call it augmented intelligence cuz we never want our people to think that we're taking the power away from the human touch so there's always going to be a human at the controls by the way the airplanes that you fly on are largely flown by technology right where Pilots are there the human touch they're monitoring it they're managing it they're interacting as as necessary but t
echnology goes as far as it flies the aircraft even that that are that our customers are on which is which is by the way a heck of a lot safer than uh than any any other way to travel and it's great and it's it's it's a it's a good way to to to think about technology in our world uh we see AI as unlocking the opportunities for our employees to continue to spend even more time personalized experience and service with customers rather than having to to sit there and punch out the screens and be ab
le to bring information forward we use Predictive Technologies to make sure that we're the most reliable airline in the sky through our engineering programs and maintenance Delta's got a standard as this the the the industry gold gold standard on reliability but we don't do that that just through hard work we do that through smart work and technology and augmenting the decision- making that we have but we know we can do better because we have 5,000 flights a day we serve on average over 500,000
customers a day that are flying all over the world and when you think about the complexity of all that and you think about the behaviors of all that and you think about what you can learn to be able to make better decisions and forecast and analyze and make better better you know choices about in terms of where you how you're going to rout route plane how you're going to avoid turbulence how you're going to ensure that customers are getting to their journey in an even quicker more seamless fashi
on how you can use that to to give your your agents the ability to kind of not punching around looking for information but to call call up a question in two seconds have the answer presented consistently across the airline it's it's significant but the the the watch out for it all and I tell all my fellow CEOs this is to make sure your data that you're putting in there is is cleansed it's clean it's giving the information out the answers out that you want to see happen and that's where we're spe
nding a lot of our time is making certain that our our databases and our infrastructure is actually generating the type of answers that we'd expected to to produce so somebody who thinks about the future of travel all the time and is sort of saying how do we uh plant the as to where travel goes and you know paint paint us a picture over the next 3 to 5 years you know what happens with travel what's and and how are you positioning Delta to be there as a leader well travel uh we've all seen as eve
ryone's come back from the pandemic how important travel was and people are traveling at a level we've never seen our demand set is really really strong and everyone thinks that it's some form of Revenge travel occurring it's not this is the new normal okay this is the new normal I mean everyone that's here made a decision to come here because we wanted to experience something together okay yes you could stay home and you could maybe watch this online you could stream it but the power of connect
ion is is is you it brings thousands of people together to to listen to to us you know talk about this you have so many things with travel that I think technology is going to enhance you know you think about the experiential aspect of it you think about the ability to share the ability to to find new places to go the ability to make it feel closer to home to give the encouragement to go and explore you know I I you know the dinosaur I grew up and you know we we in our house house we we had encyc
lopedias I'd look up encyclopedias and see all these places around the world and really I never thought I'd go anywhere you know to them but it was kind of kind of interesting you know our kids now are at the places we're reading about and sending us pictures that we still haven't gotten to you know and um and and that's cool so I think travel and experience and is going to be even more powerful um a service than it was pre- pandemic because when something was taken away from you as travel was p
eople now are relishing it and they're they're they're going for it and I don't see it slowing down maybe a little bit about brand it's a set of marketers in this group I mean how do you think about the Delta brand and what do you want it to stand for and how it evolves well the Delta brand has three underlying attributes it's what we want it to be welcoming we want it to be caring and we want the experience to be elevated and that's what we trust our people to deliver every single day now you c
an't deliver a brand unless you have an airline that has a high quality a standard of reliability and I think that's where sometimes you know the marketing and the particularly in our industry can get out of the way I mean you can't Market that unless you actually are delivering that because your customers know who you are every single day and how you perform and so we've invested for the last 15 years in making certain that we have the most reliable airline in the sky and while covid certainly
hurt us and our recovery was was challenged over the last 9 months by far we've been number one across the board of every every standard in fact in in Dubai and may I'm going to be be uh receiving on behalf of the 100,000 people of Delta the global airline of the Year award that the industry gives out it's a top Airline not just in the US but in the world um so that's that's a statement that's a statement of the brand another statement of the brand I think think about and this blows my mind uh w
e are the fifth largest etailer in the country Delta is if I ask you the top five I I'd be willing to bet you even and I know we're a good client of yours I don't think you would have said Delta uh but we B after Apple number one in Amazon well we're we're we're we're number one in Spirit uh you got Amazon you got Apple you got Walmart and you got eBay and number five is Delta wow and you think about how far that's changed so it used to be travel was go you go through through on the online agenc
ies and the and the booking.com and all the try to find the lowest price 60% of our customers now booked directly on Delta because they trust us and they want to have that experience that number continues to grow as the experience because it's the experience of the brand that creates that Delta was named this year by Fortune Magazine the 11th most admired company within the whole their whole survey within the The Fortune 500 11 as we're still recovering from a pandemic and so that tells you the
has power and there's a premium that we get we our customers and our people generate and deserve that our customers pay us a premium last year uh Delta generated 40% of the industry profits yet only having 20% of the market share and so our seats are twice as valuable as any other seat in the industry so that's that's what a brand stands for and now now where we take that brand is that we start to extend the brand we extend the brand to our partners at American Express with the world's biggest l
oyalty Arrangement that the Delta uh American Express loyalty card uh we we have a great great partnership with Starbucks uh we we expand it through ride sharing with lift we expand it through through our our our Partnerships you know throughout throughout the broader ecosystem we're even looking outside the travel ecosystem to be seen as a brand that that transcends Transportation because people don't Cho choose Delta just to get someplace because because you there's cheaper ways to get somewhe
re people choose Delta for the experience that we offer and the confidence they know that when they're traveling on Delta we're going to have their back well Ed from my perspective uh both in terms of inspiring folks of how you've navigated the crisis uh you know how you put people first and how you help connect the world I think what Delta does is really inspiring i' like to end with some word associations okay so I'll just ask uh say a few words and uh you can answer with whatever word comes t
o mind first okay um accountant yeah that was that was boring [Laughter] Bulldogs Georgia go dogs miles it's my grandson my my my first uh first grandchild little 15-month old boy he's the most people in this room are way too young you're still having your own kids or starting to have your own kids but you know for for for folks like us shantanu it's uh I have found you know people talk about wellness and and and how do you relieve pressure take care of yourself for me spending time with my gran
dson take takes all that worry off my shoulders Marathon yeah I I've run two I Ran New York recently and I've got to get a new replacement in a few months because of that but rais raised a lot of money for Childhood Cancer and U and that was worth it you're doing a great job of answering it you're not using one word but that's okay we'll let know uh three more golf love it Delta uh it's um it's my home ed basan uh he enjoys people please so thank me thank you so much thanks really thank you all
thank [Music] you thank you to shant new and Ed what amazing insights 500,000 people a day traveling on Delta while maintaining a human touch consumers expect to be remembered valued and rewarded when they interact with your brand and I think Delta is doing exactly that this morning we are celebrating the Art and Science of making that happen and The Innovation leaders who take on that challenge every day and we wanted to celebrate those leaders a few years back Adobe introduced the experienc ma
ker Awards to recognize breakthrough performance from our customers the digital leaders and their teams who deliver amazing customer experiences create business growth and set bold new standards for their organization and Industries on Monday evening we held the 2024 experien maker Awards on the eve of summit right here in Las Vegas and you can sort of think of this like the Oscars for marketers and experienc makers and by the way just a slight detour in the last few years Adobe is very proud to
have won scientific and Technical Oscars for three of our Flagship applications Adobe Photoshop Adobe After Effects and Adobe substance 3D yeah right that's no small achievement these are products that have defined creative categories and in the same way this year's experienc maker win ERS are defining new levels of success for their business at our Awards C ceremony we saw our experienc makers looking their best and more importantly we heard what's top of Mind from the nominees and the winners
so let's take a [Music] look being honored as an experience maker is a great independent recognition of a lot of the hard work work that we've been doing what it means for me to be honored as an experience maker and it isn't me it's you know it's T-Mobile it's my team they all do an amazing job in partnership with Adobe being honored uh as an adobe experience maker is a testament to our [Music] work fcom is transforming how we engage with our customers and that's a whole new set of customers fo
r us and through this work that we're doing around transforming marketing it's actually bringing that customer Viewpoint right into to the front so one of our key success factors is the culture that we've been able to build we've built something transparently open within our organization that really allows our business stakeholders to understand how we can help them achieve their goals with the help of the users through user experience research and experimentation AI is really exciting for us we
want to embed AI into our devices into our Network the best customer experience is one you don't notice J is actually a compliment to all our marketers so it makes our marketers life much much easier so I think AI is fantastic and what it's going to help us do now is actually bring it into the Forefront of how we develop our customer experiences and take advantage of all this amazing technology we've been putting in place for quite some time and bring personalized experiences forward to our cus
tomers that's what they're expecting of all of us Brands and now we're going to be able to do that for them a big shout out to all of our winners stand up if you're here there's 10,000 people in here so I don't know that we'll be able to pick all of you out but congratulations again wow now if you want to make the big screen next year look out for our 2025 call for entries this August it's adobe's honor to celebrate the amazing work you and your teams do every day because we know that none of th
is is easy a worldclass digital experience is not created in one step and Technology does not turn itself on but more importantly it's not just about any digital experience impersonal automation it's not compelling the real Innovation is what we and what we do it's not just the technology but using the technology to deepen our customer relationships and build the bond between brand and customer building relevance building engagement building true one-to-one relationships that takes creativity em
pathy expertise Nuance our Human Experience informed by data the organizations who get it right are standing out from their competition and evolving new business models in the process this level of business evolution is only possible because of you the teams and leaders who are driving this work every day it's people like all of you in this audience who do the heavy lifting to make change happen to take the necessary risks to Galvanize those around you to change the game and invent the future no
w our next two guests are leaders who are doing exactly that they are changing the game and inventing the future they come from different Industries and separate continents but there are some connections they're both leaders in stored institutions that have been around for a long time and as Leaders they are empowering their teams to do amazing work where risk-taking is an imperative where customer relevance is at the center of everything they do where digital is driving business model Evolution
and something counterintuitive their digital first efforts are forging a more human connection with their customers so our next speaker is Emma springham she's CMO of TSB a UK bank and TSB was one of the big winners on Monday night at our Awards Gala they won this year's Maverick award and Maverick is a great description of Emma herself she is Reinventing the TSB brand across every medium right in front of 65 million citizens of the United Kingdom in a 25-year marketing career Emma has also hel
d leadership positions at Barclays Nat West and even his majesty the king's Bank Cs and Emma is doing it all in her own style today TSB is shaking up the industry against some pretty big and entrenched comp competition with a human Centric brand promise so before we meet Emma let's play a short video and learn all about TSB Bank hello from TSB if you've not heard of us we're a bank from the UK with around 5 million customers and a team of around 5,000 people we were the world's first Mutual Savi
ngs Bank founded in 1810 in Scotland by the Reverend Henry Duncan today our purpose is still helping our customers feel confident about their money every day it's brought to life through our brand idea which recognizes that money is still the elephant in the room and tsp is here to help it seem less scary as a business we're on a journey of transformation from a traditional High Street Bank to a digital bank with a human touch and our partnership with Adobe is at its heart so say hello to our CM
O Emma springham Viva Las Vegas [Music] hello Adobe suit thank you for such a warm welcome I have the pleasure of being here today in Las Vegas to talk to you about some of my career stories and give you the opportunity to spend some time thinking about your personal brand what I love about my career is you never know what's around the corner I didn't know three months ago that my career Journey would lead me to this stage talking to you in the entertainment capital of the world and just as the
American Howard Hughes set out to Rebrand Las Vegas in the 1960s transforming it from its Wild West roots to what we're all experiencing today my journey is also a journey about branding and transformation most importantly enjoy the ride life is too short to be miserable in your career if you don't take action it can chip away at your mental health so most importantly make sure that you get to enjoy the ride surround yourself with people that you trust that challenge you and make you question yo
urself we spend more time at work than we do with our loved ones so it's so important that we have fun along the way one of the biggest enablers in my career has been my focus on my personal branding and just like Howard Hughes it all started with a clear purpose vision and some very core values it's always been lost on me why people don't spend more time thinking about their personal brand and rather leave it to luck especially coming from an industry where the power of branding is so well unde
rstood I schedule time to think about my personal brand I spend time thinking about my target audience the list is endless my boss the board my team Sals Finance they all need different things for me so when we're building external marketing plans we also spend time making sure that we have highly effective internal marketing plans to engage our stakeholders when I work on my personal brand I focus on my three personal brand words the words that best describe my personal brand and help me stand
out my three words are brave trust and growth brave because as the American performer evil canil once said where there is little risk there is little reward brave because it pushes you in your career I always ask myself is the marketing strategy brave enough will we be proud of the deliverables I encourage my team to look outside for Innovation I also encourage them to speak out if they see discrimination or bullying in the workplace being brave is in my family DNA and the bar is set very high t
his is my super Brave soulmate beex beex saves lives for a living so no pressure then but beex does really make me think about what am I giving back through my work when we meet people and are asked what we do for a living the reaction to Becks is always total admiration the Rea when when when the question then comes to me and I say marketing it's actually a bit of a cool response actually no marketing it's pretty cool it's pretty funky uh even teenagers think that marketing is pretty cool but t
hen when we're asked about the industry that I come from and banking it's not as it doesn't usually go down as as as as well as it usually does because banking one of sorry one of my core values has been to never incite hate in any of my marketing campaigns and I I just stick to creating pink elephants I'm grateful to the banking industry over my career I've worked with some of the most incredible people and Minds everyone I meet wants to exceed customers banking expectations or as I like to say
create magical moments across the customer Journey banks have a history at being at the Forefront of transformation there is a lot of representation from Banks today at the summit because they recognize the importance of attending events like the Adobe Summit the most important thing is that I can look Becks in the eyes and be proud of the work we're delivering one example is in the customer vulnerability space TSB were the first organization to train their Branch staff in a de domestic abuse s
upport providing a flea fund to support victims Escape domestic abuse will affect one in four women and one in six men in their lifetime raising awareness of safe spaces campaigns makes me feel really proud I also feel really proud of our CGI pink elephant and what they represent talking about the elephant in the room asking our customers to be brave and talk about their money only one in five people talk about their money worries which can have a detrimental impact on their mental health the ea
rlier a bank knows a customer is facing financial difficulty the quicker they can step in and provide support talking helps and hence tiny the elephant was born I don't have the same level of marketing budgets as the big Banks so CGI was a very costeff effective and flexible Pro production method but trust me I felt very brave going into board to repitch a brand around a pink elephant I made sure that I led with the voice of the customer and their positive feedback on the campaign ideas the laun
ch of the elephant in the room campaign was a big success not only externally where the brand perceptions around Innovation trust and money confidence increased but also internally our staff fell in love with the elephant we've had staff making Elephant cakes for competitions knitting little elephants the response has been amazing and then at the end of 2023 a magical moment happened marketing week put tiny forward as a nominee for the campaign of the Year award and Tiny only went and won [Appla
use] the external recognition though really helped build trust with the board that we've made the right decision on the Rebrand so a big thank you to marketing week and all the people that voted for us we're brave enough to be the first Ser financial services company in Europe to deploy Adobe experience platform we're moving to realtime Solutions which help our customers to build their money comp confidence enabling us to launch personalized customer content delivering the right content to the r
ight customer by the customer's channel of choice when we turned on onetoone personalization for loans sales in the mobile Channel immediately Rose by 300% which achieved a lot of attention from across the business our journey to moving to realtime Solutions we are using marketing Tech to identify five vulnerable customers and proide proide provactive prompts one example which will not go down well in Vegas in fact we might need to lock the doors and I apologize in advance to Howard Hughes but w
e're starting to use data to identify gamblers in debt and offering support through gambling blocks and video banking my second word is trust trust is about being trust by my colleagues my boss and my customers trusting empowering my teams to deliver work they're proud of it's about building long-term valuable relationships I've had the pleasure of working with Adobe for 25 years that silver wedding territory that is incredible better than marriage it's about creating trust at the highest level
through the organization when you're pitching Innovation to the business with no no Pro business cases it's not easy you need that trust at the highest level my marketing teams proactively use customer and Data Insights to inform the business strategy which has led to personalization and data sitting at the heart of the business when marketing texit at the heart of the business strategy you have Buy in at all levels it's the same for customer trust personalized digital experiences are helping us
to build deeper more more meaningful connections with those who trust us to manage their money this is more this is about more than sales this is about making our customers feel valued and appreciated and enabling them to realize the Milestone moments of their lives and my last word is growth my growth my team's growth and the growth of TSB having a growth mindset coaching others so they become their best selves it's just as important to make team members feel individual and special as it is ou
r customers when our people feel psychologically safe the teams can unlock Innovation and Excellence growing the commerciality of TSB this quote from John Wanamaker who was an American Pioneer in marketing back in the 1900s was very true back then but fast forward to 2024 and John would have had his answers there is no excuse for marketeers not to measure their work the 2000s saw the start of the evolution the age of digital and and with it marketing became a combination of precise measurable sc
ience and leading technology successful marketing today is the delicate blend between Art and Science art being the brave cre creative execution and science being the data and transformation to get buy into new ideas you have have to speak the chief Finance officer's language and focus on sustainable growth these are my gogeous twins Emily and Jessica as you can see from the picture very different mindsets on their first day back at school just as I expect their teachers to grow their minds teac
h them new skills and build their confidence it's no difference for leaders we have a duty of care for our teams and their well-being and as Leaders we must talk about well-being and encourage team me members to bring their whole selves to work in my team meetings I have a regular slot for bring your whole self to work recent topics spoken about by my team have been John who talked about his stammer and Becky who educated us about ADHD and what we can do to support her it's our role to build hig
hly effective and collaborative teams which can only be achieved for ensuring there is a growth mindset culture at the heart of the team they say feedback is a gift it is if it's given by someone trained in coaching and someone who understands the importance of emotional intelligence all of the leaders in TSB are trained in coaching in summary my personal branding focuses on three words Brave trust and growth I will leave you with the following question what are your three brand words it has bee
n an absolute pleasure today to be spend some time with you I hope you enjoy the rest of the Adobe Summit thank you [Applause] everyone Emma springham Emma that was amazing thank you so much for being here we love we love your talk today thank you for being with us oh my pleasure my pleasure now Emma did not fly Delta Airlines from the UK to here and so she had some flight trouble and that was a huge bummer because she won the Maverick award this year and we need to give it to her right now A th
ank you so much Emma your true Joy thank you for being here be my pleasure thank you so much and going home with this will mean a lot to my team because they did so much hard work it's about the team and also all the senior execs will keep investing in me so it's brilliant thank you very much thank [Applause] you wow now moving from banking to sports next up major League Baseball okay come on let's hear from baseball now look in terms of fan attendance baseball is way ahead of other major sports
in the USA as you're about to see and baseball of course is a stored institution part of America's cultural fabric no summer is complete without a trip to the ballpark Chris marck is chief operations and strategy off officer for MLB reporting Direct ly to the commissioner of baseball he leads growth and Innovation efforts and he's responsible for driving the reach of the game working with the League's competition committee on strategic baseball initiatives and creating the major league playing
schedule in over 15 years with MLB Chris has grown his career working in labor relations and strategy before taking on his current role Chris is driving really exciting changes in baseball and Major League Baseball so let's take a look [Music] this game is for you the fan this is the game we all want to see get the ball pitch the ball keep the defense on their toes field like Aussie run like Ricky it's the best game in the world now it's even better we noticed the game was changing on the field
we decided it was time to intervene to make sure we put the best former baseball on the field look if we get to the point that somebody's getting towards Ricky Henderson's number that'd be a good thing for the game is the way I look at it throw not in stolen base and the entire effort uh was an attempt to just give fans more of what they like in a lot of ways we think we're restoring baseball to when it was the most popular they want to see more action they want to see an improved Pace they want
to see the ball in play a little bit more autistic smash I'm here to tell you seeing them showcase their skills even more often and more frequently it's great for the game these changes I think they're fantastic uh I think they make the game quick and athletic way I remember being in the 80s and 90s watching it on TV jumping around on my couch at home baseball has changed significantly this season and everybody's talking about it viewership is up attendance is up and social media engagement and
the buzz in the building we throw out the first pitch you look up you're in the third you look up you're in the sixth everything's moving it's Snappy it's clean it's a great night to be at the ball just a beautifully played baseball game today these fans are in it to the end the energy and the emotion that's in those stadiums was just fantastic best fans in the world we have right [Applause] here please welcome chief operations and strategy officer MLB Chris [Music] [Applause] [Music] marinac h
i everyone thanks Eric for the intro and thanks for Adobe for for having me here today I'm here to talk to you a little bit about what we do at Major League Baseball to innovate and to grow our business both on the field and off the field and how we use tools from Adobe to bring that to life Major League Baseball has been around for 150 years as Eric mentioned in his introduction we're probably one of the most traditional businesses around um change is not easy um for those of you that are Baseb
all fans you know how much our fans value tradition and Heritage um but that doesn't mean that we can't innovate and we can't grow our product over time and I want to talk to you a little bit today about how we do that for us Innovation starts on the field um we uh over time have historically not changed the game on the field very frequently um as you saw in the introductory video last season we made probably the biggest round of changes to the game in over 50 years baseball is the sport without
a clock it was the sport without a clock um and we added a clock to Major League Baseball and um that change not only went well it went amazingly well as you can see on the screen above the game times for a major league baseball game went down 30 minutes when we added the pitch clock to the game um along with rules around pickoff limitations limitations on the shift and expanding the size of the bases the rules that we implemented last season were an amazing success these were not just incremen
tal changes but as you can see these were Monumental changes not only did we change the time of game but we also addressed another big area of feedback from our fans which is the action on the field our fans talk a lot about how they want to see more action in the game in particular something like you see here stolen base attempts which are our fans most uh interesting play we designed rules that fostered more base stealing and you can see stolen base attempts last season went up by about 40% um
as well as other things like balls in play hits and run scoring it was a big big success for us on the field by adding more action in less amount of time and giving fans more of what they want on the field as a result this had Major Impact to our business you can see our attendance on the screen uh we were up almost 10% in attendance last season this is the largest attendance growth that we've had in Major League Baseball in almost three decades um thank you we got more people into the ballpark
because we were giving them a better product and not only did we get more people into the ballpark we we had better TV ratings we had better engagement on digital and social platforms fans were more interested in being a baseball fan last year because we made the product better I think there's a few things that I want to communicate to you about how we deliver change of baseball as I mentioned we're a historic institution change is not easy um so how can you deliver not just incremental change
but meaningful change change that changes the game and I think there's a couple of key themes that I want to um communicate to you today about things that we did that we found were successful first is listening to your fan or your customer asking them what they want and designing change to meet their needs don't just Implement change because you think it will be successful ask your consumer what they want and give them something that will deliver the results um that they're asking for secondly i
s test big changes to make sure you get them right if you're going to go big make sure you don't make a mistake we have the luxury of having Minor League Baseball which has over four levels of of uh uh amateur of baseball that leads up to Major League Baseball and it created an atmosphere for us to test the changes that we had around the pitch clock and pickoff limitations to make sure that they worked to make sure that they actually gave fans what they want and that they were successful and so
when we implemented them at the major league level we knew what they were going to do and we knew they were going to be a big success and then the last thing is to spend time educating your stakeholders to understand to make sure they understand the purpose of the change and to make sure they understand um the reasoning behind making change and why they should put effort in to adopting those changes we spent countless hours with our players with our coaches with our fans educating them about wha
t those rule changes were you saw a spot from Brian Cranston that we had out extensively to educate our fans about the rule changes when the changes came on the field people knew they were coming and they were ready for them and as a result they were willing to embrace them and adopt them and that's how we got over some of the historical limitations and hesitancy towards change and really made lasting and impactful change but change for us is not just on the field Innovation is part of the fabri
c of Major League Baseball and why we've been able to sustain ourselves over 150 years as a business our Innovation off the field started decades ago um when we looked out uh and felt like we had a unique asset which is that we play a game every single day and we could deliver those games to our fans on streaming platforms and so in 2002 we became the first major sports League to stream a live game online we grew that platform over time and when the iPhone came out we were the first major proper
ty to update our iPhone app to contain live streaming that product grew and developed over time and ultimately became the foundation for Disney plus the streaming technology that baseball built is now bringing you all of the amazing content and property that you have on Disney's platforms and mo most recently this last season we became the first major sports League to produce and distribute our games locally to our fans this is an example of us understanding our strengths and innovating and grow
ing our business based on what we do well but the Innovation that we did digitally doesn't just extend to to video it extends to our entire Suite of digital products and we made a concerted effort to migrate to become a direct to Consumer franchise a lot in the and similar to the way that you heard from eded earlier on Delta Airlines we want to be a directa consumer business and we want to know who our consumer is and and and as such we've built an extensive portfolio of digital products the MLB
app the ballpark app we own a ticketing company tickets.com MLB.TV we have an opportunity to create a first-party relationship with our fans and we think that's the foundation of innovation for baseball the fundamental strength of baseball as a sport is the imperson experience I'm sure many of you have been to a baseball game you understand the connection that it brings to a family to friends that experience of going to the ballpark is an experience you remember from your childhood and you neve
r forget we have more people 10 professional baseball games than all the other major US sports leagues combined this is a strength for us when we looked at this strength 3 four five years ago the majority of that asset was a was an analog experience it was a printed ticket you'd print a ticket out and you'd walk into the ballpark we didn't know who our fan was and thus we couldn't personalize the relationship we couldn't create a great experience for our fans because we didn't know who you were
you were literally coming in with a printed ticket and we didn't know if you were the same person that came yesterday or if this was your first time to the ballpark we made a strategic decision to migrate our in park experience to a digital experience and you can see what we did over a couple of year period we went from 14% digital in 2017 to nearly 100% last season we know every single person that comes into the ballpark and we're able to create a onetoone personal relationship with that fan wh
at what that has done for us is it allows us to give more context about who our fans are there's a there's a funny anecdote that you read a lot in the media about how the average age of a World Series viewer is over 55 years old baseball's fans are an older demographic but the reality is that's not a full picture of our fan that's a very very limited picture of who our fans are and there's a lot of other ways that our fans engage with the sport and so by creating a first-party database we unders
tand who our fans are we know that the average viewer on MLB.TV our Digital streaming platform is 45 years old we know the median age of a ticket buyer is 44 and we know the average age of a fan in our entire database is 41 years old this tells a much more complete picture about who our fans are and as a further example of this when we migrated to digital ticketing it opened the door to a relation ship with a whole new consumer before we went to digital ticketing we were only collecting data pri
marily on the buyer of the ticket the buyer of the ticket tends to be a person who's older and has more access to disposable income but when you go fully digital you open the door to your entire fan community and what we've seen is that we're introd the average new fan to our database now is 36 years old whereas before we went to digital ticketing it was 45 years old we're talking to the younger fan now and we're creating a relationship that we think will be a lifelong relationship with that fan
so what are we doing with that data we're using our relationship with Adobe to transform the consumer experience we're taking that data that we have about over a 100 million fans in our database and we're using tools that adobe brings to us including the Adobe experience platform the journey Optimizer the customer data platform to segment our customer base and deliver to them Target offers and real-time information personalize the experiences that transform your um experience as a baseball fan
I'll show you a couple of things that we're doing to bring that to life hopefully you're doing similar things in your relationship with Adobe first example we have automated abandoned cart campaign so you try to go buy a ticket you don't convert our system in conjunction with Adobe will automatically send you an email that asks you to buy a ticket and convert and come to the ballpark we build Aid driven segmentation in the customer data platform we use a whole host of variables to figure out whi
ch of our fans have the highest propensity to buy we take those segments and then we serve them ads on on social media platforms those targeted campaigns show over a 50% lift as compared to a generic campaign we're reaching our fans in a more targeted personalized way and that's showing Real Results for our business and then one other example is on our digital products we allow you to pick your favorite player we know who's a sh Otani fan for example and we also know where you live and so histor
ically if I was a Phillies fan living in in Philly the Phillies are serving ads for Phillies fans but what we can do now is serve ads for a sh Otani fan who lives in Philadelphia when his team comes to town and we're seeing tremendous return on those campaigns as well because we're reaching an entirely new segment that was left out that wasn't a segment that was targeted previously and we're creating new opportunities for fans to engage with our sport we're also creating ways for our partners to
activate and to bring our relationship with the fan to other opportunities in Commerce and so this is one example Le where uh a fan scans in at the Ballpark with our ballpark app and one of our partners in this case Mattress Firm you get an offer um to to buy an item with Mattress Firm and we've done that with a number of other partners as well it creates an opportunity for a consumer to get an offer and it creates a way for our partners to unlock opportunity um with our fan base but the experi
ence is just beginning when you scan your ticket we've as I mentioned we've converted our fans to a digital ticketing experience within our ballpark app that app has real-time notification opportunities much in the way that you know Ed talked about with Delta we're doing a very similar thing in our ballpark app that's the flagship um platform for us to communicate with our 100 million fans every year that go to a game last year we started to create customized information notifications to our fan
s when they get to the ballpark you scan in and you immediately get a push notification that gives you options for food near your seating location it it gives you information about online food ordering and it gives you more information about how to how to have a great experience at the ballpark in addition we started to create offers for our fans so the the one on the right you see is an offer for an upgrade you scan your ticket in there's a open inventory available in better seating we create u
pgrade offers for our fans to improve their experience once they get to the ballpark as the journey continues this season we're going to be integrating our notifications with our stat cast system we have an extensive system many of you probably seen it on our broadcast that track where the ball is when the ball goes off the bat the exit velocity where it's going to land um and how long how far it traveled we've we'll be integrating our ballpark app with our stack cast system so that when a playe
r hits a home run we can send you a push notification that says go buy a jersey for that player go buy a piece of memorabilia and get a discount while you're at it um it's a way to integrate the digital experience with the physical experience of being in person and creating a really great way to um engage with our fans and then lastly to tie the entire journey together we're put we're going to be sending push notifications to fans after the game you go to the game you have an amazing experience
you're with your friends you're with your family your team wins we can send you a push notification that says hey why don't you come back and here's a discount to do it as soon as possible we're we're creating this journey from start to finish where our fans are getting personalized notifications and information they're getting personalized marketing they're converting they're coming to the ballpark they're having a great experience while they're there and then we're bringing them back as soon a
s possible that's what what the tools from Adobe allow us to do they allow us to have a personalized experience for all of our fans to create a virtuous cycle with engagement and bring to life this really really amazing experience of being a fan of baseball hopefully that gives you some inspiration some things to think about um traditional business like ours change isn't easy it takes time it takes effort but when you have a real Clear Vision of what you want to do to be successful um you can br
ing that to life and in Digital World Adobe is a great partner to help you do that thank you for having me [Applause] today here we [Music] go Chris thank you for being here really awesome so great to see all the cool things you guys are doing with digital and fan engagement and turning into a real relationship I want to just share a little bit I grew up in Topeka Kansas Topeka Kansas 60 mil from Kansas City and the Kansas City Royals and Chris in 1985 the Royals beat the St Louis Cardinals in w
hat was known as the I70 Series in seven games now that year Brett saberhagen was the Royals biggest Ace he won two games who was the MVP of the World Series and I went to the parade and I was like this high and he gave me a high five so could you get his autograph for me hey I'm happy to do it and you know you know what those are the kind of experiences that stay with you your entire life and that's why we why we think these tools are so important okay so what would also be awesome is this is t
he Bo Jackson Jersey so could we get B to sign this jersey for me all right I think you're getting a little carried away here okay but but wa wait just one more so George Brett almost hit 400 one season right he was he for a moment he was at 400 and then it came back to like 395 could we get George Brett's autograph how about we do some tickets for opening day we're opening tomorrow Kansas we're all invited to opening day on behalf of Chris no so Chris like you're doing a lot of cool things and
you shared a lot of them one you didn't talk about was the fact that you were globalizing the game and um opening day is tomorrow but actually the first game of the season the first two games of the Season were played last week tell us about that correct yeah we had two games in Korea last week I was actually in Korea and just came back a couple days ago we had the Dodgers and Padres open up in Korea um and it was a great way to show showe the global nature of the game we have a lot of interest
right now in Asia particularly with SH Otani and some of the Japanese players that are having a tremendous amount of success in the United States and so we were able to bring two teams over to Korea um connect with that fan base and bring the Major League Baseball product around the globe um and it just creates a great connection point for us to start the season that's very cool so talk to us about opening day like this is obviously a big deal um how do you prepare for a big marketing moment lik
e opening day across the country yeah it's it's really Omni channel for us you know we we have a new ad campaign coming out we're going to have another iteration on uh some work we did with Brian Cranston so you'll see a new version of that talking about how anything can happen in baseball it's unpredictable and that's a brand narrative that we want to reiterate with our fan base but it's not just on a traditional you know media channels it's about using digital platforms as well to connect with
fans so we have active marketing campaigns on social media platforms around selling tickets um and a whole host of other things on our owned and operated Platforms in terms of advertising the start of the season um and getting our baseball content in front of the fans reminding them that this is the greatest day of the year the greatest day of the year I love that so Chris you've had um last question you've had a really great career um that just continues at Major League Baseball you're doing a
lot of cool things maybe just share with us an Insight or two about what's allowed you to continue to be successful and and grow the types of things that you're conquering at Major League Baseball yeah the one thing that's really interesting for me is I've been involved in baseball as a as a player as a coach as an executive every year since I was 5 years old and so for me it's it's a lifestyle it's something that I'm just I I love the game and it's a passion for me and I think the takeaway tha
t I have after being a baseball in an executive capacity for about 15 years now is that that passion and energy that you have for the product is a is a key driver for Innovation it it Sparks creativity it Sparks energy it Sparks fresh thinking you have this huge knowledge base with with which to build on and so for me the Love of the Game and the love of the sport is something that really helps drive a lot of the things that we talked about here today and so for for you out you know those of you
out there that are in a similar position you know with your businesses your organizations what are you passionate about what makes you really get out of bed every morning and and and drive creativity and thought and that's what's really going to lead to the most amount of innovation and creativity um for your businesses as well follow your passion I love that Chris marinick everyone thanks a lot Eric it really good yeah thank you [Music] so we've heard from two experience makers who are ensurin
g that established Brands Thrive and grow in a digital first world now today's last guest is going to share a different side of that equation what it takes to be entrepreneurial he's a pioneering podcaster and much more with groundbreaking hits including how I built this the kids science podcast wow in the world and a third podcast the great creators he has interviewed thousands and thousands of people Nobel Prize winners iconic actors athletes musicians and a lot of Business Leaders in fact For
bes Magazine has called him the greatest interviewer of his generation so without further Ado please welcome guy Ros I think the best piece of advice I've learned from from leaders is that kind leaders have kind companies I mean kindness is an incredibly powerful tool it sounds a little hokey but we've had leaders on the show and entrepreneurs on the show who are kind people like you know Gary and kit Ericson of Cliff bar they they give their employees a a chunk of ownership um Kim Jordan of New
Belgium that makes Fat Tire she allows her she you know gives him ownership to her employees and the thing about kindness that I've learned from entrepreneurs is that kindness is free cost nothing it's it's 0 and0 but the return on that investment is bigger than any Financial investment it's actually a hugely important quality of successful entrepreneurs I love that be kind guy I love you buddy please welcome guy [Music] RZ ain't nothing going to hold you got [Music] it I want to tell you a sto
ry about the dumbest business idea I ever came across not a particularly inspiring way to start a talk well the founder of this product decided to enter one of the most saturated categories in all of cpg he had no connections to it he had no experience in it he had no money to start started the Founder's name is Mike Cesario and Mike spent his entire career working in advertising agencies he was a guy who would pitch add ideas hundreds of ideas and hope that the agency would pitch those on to th
e client most of the time his ideas failed and by 2019 Mike was out of a job but in his mind he still had this one idea for a business now if you've read the book Blue Ocean strategy you will know that this was not a blue ocean idea the blue ocean is where there is opportunity and no competition Mike decided to get into water bottled water as I told you literally and figuratively a saturated Market bottled water is a $300 billion Global industry it's dominated by Coke gon and Nestle it is a Fool
's errand to try and take them on but Mike felt like the stories about water were predictable and dull bottled water spoke of Mountain Springs Health nature Arian Wells about life about water's lifegiving Powers but not a single water brand was talking about death of course they weren't that would be stupid right wrong it turns out there was something of a Blue Ocean strategy after all lots of kids drink energy drinks not water but what if you could put a blazing horrifying skull and an a creepy
old English font on a tall boy beer can you fill that up with fresh natural mountain spring water well the answer of course was Liquid death now now even before Mike Cesario had raised a single penny to launch the brand or to make a single product he spent $1,500 to produce a teaser video the video was filled with maob scenes of death all at the hands of water it should come as no surprise to anyone that that video was a hit on YouTube alone that $1,500 video was viewed over 5 million times fro
m the very beginning Mike thought very deeply about who he wanted to reach and he thought really methodically about how to reach them he believed by the way I mean this is a water ad he he truly believed that if he could make water look cool he could actually get teenagers to drink it today liquid death a brand that did not exist 5 years ago started by one person with no money has amassed more than 8 million followers on Tik Tok and Instagram and its YouTube videos have been viewed tens of milli
ons of times this year that brand is expected to reach $200 million in sales and they just raised a around that gave it a whopping $1.4 billion valuation so what account for its growth what accounts for its virality for for its stickiness well for starters they use humor and stories to connect with consumers their slogan as you saw is literally murder your thirst if you want to join the liquid death loyalty club which is Free by the way you have to sign a contract selling your soul to the devil
and for that they'll send you a t-shirt which means means you will be a walking advertisement for the brand teenagers see their friends buying this mountain spring water and a scary dangerous looking can so they buy it too because the can tells a story it's a story that's different for every single consumer but that connects with them on an emotional level emotions like Amusement excitement Joy interest Surprise by the way these are among the 27 states of emotion identified by researchers at UC
Berkeley in 2017 and 19 out of these 27 are net positive emotions the kinds of emotions that we humans respond to and make decisions accordingly we know this because this has been studied for decades in his book de cart's the fame neuroscientist Antonio damasio writes about how our emotions determine our preferences and and even guide our decision-making and what Mike Cesario understood what all great Brands understand is that if you can find the touch point between your brand or product and the
consumer it builds a powerful Bond take a look at this picture it's an advertisement of course R's ketchup now almost all of you understand what this conveys right away it takes you to a place in your mind maybe a place of nostalgia it tells a story many of us have experienced we've been at a diner or a restaurant a piping hot plate of french fries arrives to the table you dunk it into a cool glug of ketchup and instantly you know it's not Hines it's not the taste of your childhood of backyard
barbecues of ball games of summer because that bottle the taste that feeling is so unmistakable that we know when it's not the real thing this is the power of a story conveyed in a single photo now what I do on my podcast how I built this is tell stories since 2016 I've interviewed over 500 Founders and Visionaries people who built some of the most iconic brands in the world everyone from Howard Schultz of Starbucks to Sarah Blakeley of Spanx and though each episode is a deep dive into how the b
usiness was created and scaled it's not primarily a show about business in fact it's a show about stories because if there's one unifying Factor around every business it's that every business is a story now you may have heard this before but it may not always make immediate sense after all a business is about selling a product or a service in exchange for money or Goods which is true but a business is also about the question why why did you decide to pursue this idea why do you think the world n
eeds to hear about it why does it add value to someone's life in each of these answers is a story it's what connects you and me and everyone out there to the thing you're building or trying to present to the world these are the questions s by the way that an entrepreneur named Larry Lou had to answer before he was confident that his business idea was going to work when Larry arrived to the United States from China in 2002 to work as an engineer at Intel he had a hard time finding the foods that
he loved and over many years of talking to other people who'd immigrated from Asia he discovered that a lot of other people also had the same problem unless they lived near an Asian grocery store it was hard to get the things that they loved for many years Larry thought deeply about how to solve this problem and of course they were powerful emotions at stake Nostalgia excitement appreciation Joy so in 2017 he founded a company called we we we is an online grocery store that mainly specializes in
delivering hard-to finded Asian products things like Chinese vinegars or Japanese fruit or Korean snacks at launch the company had very limited cash to work to work with and they had no marketing budget and initially we had a difficult time growing the business but Larry understood that there might be a way to replicate an approach that bigger Brands like Dropbox and chimp and slack it taken if you've used any of those Services you know that each time one user sends another user a link or an em
ail to someone else well that new person in order to access the file or use the service becomes a user as well so Larry was looking for a way to build that kind of virality but to do it through stories so he came up with a plan each time a customer ordered something from the site they'd get an email was a unique link attached to a ready-made social media asset of the product like a a perfect Japanese cantaloupe or a Chinese sausage or a Taiwanese snack the email encouraged the customer to post t
he asset on any social platform right if someone else clicked the link and ordered from Wii that new customer would get a 15% discount the person who posted it would get a few dollars back in credit now this promotion cost cost Larry's fledgling business a lot of money in fact it put them in the red for the next 3 months but in short order it actually increased their users by an order of magnitude so much so that by the end of the year we did something very unusual for a startup it hit profitabi
lity and today we is one of the largest and fastest growing players in the us Asian grocery space a market in this country that could easily exceed $70 billion by the end of the decade now over the course of more than 550 in-depth interviews on my show with you know Brands founds of Brands like like slack the aformentioned slack or Airbnb even raising can's chicken what we've learned from all of them is that the best brands have figured out how to find the touch points that connect you and me to
the things they make and when we have a positive feeling about something we tend to talk about it and that is the most powerful form of marketing in fact in 2021 neelen confirmed this when it found that 88% of consumers around the world trusted recommendations from a friend above any other type of advertising by the way this is a strategy we use even on our show and how I built this for our back catalog we have hundreds of older episodes that are still relevant and instructive and I really beli
eve anyone can benefit from them they're free but we couldn't figure out how to get people to explore those past episodes so what did we do we invited our listeners to call in and tell us in 30 seconds about their favorite past episode and why and each week we air that 30second spot in our ad break and guess what it's given our back catalog an enormous boost those listens translate into higher downloads that enable us to monetize the back catalog and grow the show further it's also a way for us
to not only be more responsive to our listeners but more relevant and by the way relevancy is why we tailor recommendations to its customers and why it solic solicits ideas on its on its platform for which new products to bring to the platform it's what drives liquid death to introduce new all the time they don't in fact if you were to build a a word bubble out of the 550 Founders we've had on the show one of the most prominent words that would emerge is this one failure because every successful
product or initiative or campaign is the product of a culture willing to accept failure let me say that again every successful product or initiative or campaign is the product of a culture willing to accept failure in fact I think in some ways how I built this should probably have been called build fail build because that's also the story of most successful Brands audible story we've told on the show now the world's most successful audiobook company is the product of so many failures Don Katz t
he founder he started out thinking they were going to sell MP3 players by the early 2000s that company was trading as a penny stock it was on life support but eventually after years of iterating and designing and developing and trying they came up with the model we know today even a story we told just a few weeks ago about MGA entertainment the company the toy company behind Bratz dolls and LOL surprise they come up with and try and and then reject far more ideas for dolls and toys than they eve
r release and even then some of the products that are released are flops the point here again is that cultures where failure is okay are places that have a higher likelihood of long-term success because cultures that allow for failure also tend to encourage collaboration so one of the most Innovative collaboration stories I've come across in more than two Decades of studying companies might surprise you because it's not from a scrappy startup OR tech company I'm talking about Proctor and Gamble
in December of 2019 I had the chance to spend some time at Proctor and Gamble's headquarters in Cincinnati PNG is a 180 year old company they it's a multinational conglomerate they've got 60 Brands and about 20 of them are worth over a billion dollars so judging by the Numbers alone they're doing something right they've got you know hundreds of thousands of employ 100 over 100,000 employees uh so you know it's a pretty bureaucratic place or certainly more bureaucratic than a startup anyway durin
g my visit I was amazed to learn about the origin stories of so many products that have become household names for example in the late 1990s PNG was working on a new plastic rep called imp press this was technology designed to take on Saran Wrap and glad clean film products that were that are owned by competitors SC Johnson and Clorox this was a multi-year project it was highly complex it involved bringing together industrial designers and chemical engineers and project managers you name it righ
t meanwhile in another part of the company another engineer named Paul SEL was trying to figure out how Proctor and Gamble could compete with Colgate a toothpaste brand that was really threatening crests market share one thought Paul had was teeth whitening at the time if you wanted to get your teeth whitened you had to go to the dentist and Paul wondered whether you could bring that technology to the home bathroom so for over a year Paul SEL and a small group in his department tinkered on an id
ea to make an over the counter tooth whitener after many fits and starts and failures they finally came up with a formula but they had a problem they didn't have a good solution for how to apply it to the teeth they needed something that would fit comfortably on the tooth that was relatively inexpensive and could adhere and stay in place for a long time for months seel and his team tried different things many different things but they couldn't figure out what to do one day he was having lunch wi
th a colleague named Bob Durk sing who was working on impress the plastic wrap project Proctor and Gamble encourages cross-pollination they want employees from one division to meet and work with colleagues from another anyway the two colleagues are having lunch and Paul SEL tells Bob from Plastics about his problem and at that lunch Bob from plastic says and I'm paraphrasing cuz I wasn't there but he says Paul why don't I cut you a strip of this cing fil material we've been working on over in Pl
astics come on down with me they tried it out and in a couple of days these two collaborators had a working prototype of a product so they pitched it to the CMO and within a year it became known as Crest White Strips in its first year that product alone generated $300 million in sales for PNG that after many fits and starts and failures and by the way the plastic wrap project the one called impress That was supposed to compete with Saran Wrap and cing film was scrapped PNG decided to allow that
project to fail and to this day the company does not compete in the plastic wrap space but the plastic wrap technology developed in an attempt to do so ended up being a key part of what built Crest White Strips think about this for a moment PNG has been around since before the Civil War and it remains one of the most Innovative companies in the country in part because of its culture of collaboration because of its strong commitment to research and development and how the company Works to deeply
understand consumers and search for gaps in the market and of course through its willingness to allow for trial and error and failure and failure as I've said is both critical and vital to achieving a successful outcome now I know you've heard a version of this truism before but there is real data to back this up in 2019 researchers from Northwestern University analyzed 46 years of venture capital portfolio companies and more than 750,000 applications for research grants to the National Institut
es of Health and what they found was conclusive virtually every winner begins at a loser but what differentiates those who persistently fail and those who eventually succeed is both plainly obvious and surprisingly common the ones who make it study their failures and understand that failures are paving stones along the journey it's like the athlete who watches her tape after losing a match or how the US military conducts after action reports after every single engagement or exercise or simulatio
n and in one of my favorite examples that happened just last year it's how NBA superstar Giannis responded back in 2023 after a season ending loss in the playoffs if you recall the Milwaukee Bucks were poised to win it all when a reporter asked him if the season felt like a failure an exasperated Giannis answered there are good days and bad days some days you were successful some days you're not but that doesn't mean it's a failure these are all steps to success and that quote that single quote
is the story of a business or an idea or a vision or a campaign some days it's not your turn and you have to shift or persist or iterate or reimagine but each day each failure is a small step to success and sometimes actually surprisingly more than you think it's the dumb ideas the most outlandish suggestions the liquid death ideas the ones that come from inside a culture that values and even celebrates failure those are the ideas that Inspire the stories that build great businesses thank you so
much thank you [Music] wow guy Ros everyone yeah now you just heard from guy Ros and um in guy's presentation there were about 20 illustration style slides our producer Joe buckwald built all of those visuals of guys presentation this past weekend using Firefly that's gamechanging that is gamechanging the stories that guy shared and the leaders that we heard from this morning they've embraced technology to give themselves a Competitive Edge in crowded markets and these brands have built an adva
ntage because bold leaders delivered on a vision and weren't afraid of failure and in the age of AI that's more important than ever because this guy just talked about there could be somewhere out someone out there with a new idea in competitors large and small who has that entrepreneurial spark to change the game and invent the future do you have what it takes I believe you do we've got a great Community together let's change the game and invent the future thank you for being with us today now s
peaking of new ideas that can disrupt things please remember to come to our strategy keynote presentations this afternoon we have two great sessions one on content and creativity and the other on data and personalization so get there early for a seat and also sneaker tonight where we will showcase the standout Adobe Innovation that is hatching in our Labs it's always a highlight of summit and we promise adult refreshments and that will help you to encourage the brave presenters who demo these em
erging Technologies and most exciting our co-host tonight will be Shaquille O'Neal I'm really looking forward to that and Shaq also known worldwide as DJ diesel will be spinning at The Bash event following sneaks so have a great rest of the day we'll see you back here the kickoff at 5:30 thank [Applause] you [Music] [Music] oh he
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