[music] [Sakura Martin] Hi, everyone.

I'm so, so sorry to keep you waiting. We've had a few tech issues that you could probably have been able to tell. But thank you so much for coming to this session this morning. I really appreciate you all being here, especially as it's quite an early one. So thank you very much. So I'm Sakura and I'm the Global Brand & Design Lead at Denstu, which is one of the world's largest marketing consulting and technology agencies.

So in my role, I oversee Denstu visual identity, driving brand consistency, and establishing a globally recognizable brand, which is often easier, said than done. My role ranges from developing the brand identity at self, including all the assets in the toolkits to managing a small but mighty team and also providing art direction across the network as well. It's a role that I love in an era that I'm really passionate about.

And we all know the power of a super strong consistent brand, but it can be really hard to achieve. So this morning, I want to share with you how we go about developing this identity. The wins that we've had, the lessons that we've learned and also how we use Adobe Express and how it's been a complete game changer for us.

Okay, so I'm going to start by explaining a bit of the background about Denstu and the journey that the brand has been through. We've been through quite a lot of change in the five years that I've been with Denstu. And then I'm going to talk to you about how we manage, how the design team manages our visual identity across 145 markets.

How we support collaboration between designers and marketers using Adobe Express? And the new ways that we're empowering marketers to be able to create their own content using graphic design and video editing tools within Adobe Express.

I'm going to show you a few demos and a couple of examples of the workflows that we have between our marketers and our designers and how we've been using Adobe Express and then we'll have some time for questions at the end.

Okay, so Denstu is a Japanese marketing consulting and technology company and it was founded in Japan 120 years ago. So in Japan, it's a huge company. It's a household name, they have over 22,000 employees and it's made up of over 150 agencies. In the last 15 years, we've become a multinational global business. And I think what makes Denstu really unique is that we combine the Japanese innovation with a diverse global perspective to really drive growth for our clients and to help shape society.

Today, I'm going to be talking to you mostly about Denstu in our international markets.

Okay, so we work with over 11,000 clients, including most of the world's top 100 advertisers. For example, American Express, Microsoft, P&G, Vodafone, the list goes on. We're made up of 72,000 people, including those in Japan across 145 countries.

In the last 15 years, Denstu has driven growth by expanding through acquiring lots of brands.

We're now down to these six, which are main agency brands, and they specialize across media, creative, and CXM.

Okay, let's get into how we manage our visual identity.

So this is a setup of the Brand & Design team. So I'm part of the Global Comms Team based in London. And our role is to support all markets and all brands across the network by helping them identify best practice when it comes to things like toolkits, content, platforms, strategy, and so on.

We're organizing into these four broad centers of excellence. They've got internal, external, corporate, and client comms with Brand & Design sitting across all at a centralized service.

Each of these sense of excellence have their own teams, their own challenges, and their own ways of working, and they use the brand identity or branding differently depending on their audience.

We also have a layer of our regional comms within these as well. So we have our four regions, Americas, EMEA, APAC, and Japan. But with this structure, we can really centralize the management of the brand and this helps us drive governance, which is a difficult task due to the size of Denstu.

So the Brand & Design team executes design requirements for the global teams. And then we also provide art direction and consultancy for the regional and the market teams. And as with all successful brands, our goal is to really drive brand consistency across the business and establish a globally recognizable identity.

So why is consistency so important? It's because it's key to building brand equity, building trust with our clients and also raising brand awareness.

Historically, we've gone to market as our six agency brands, but now we also go to market as Denstu with our integrated offering. So building brand equity in the dentsu brand is more important than it's ever been before.

Okay, so when it comes to brand governance, what have the biggest challenges been? So the first one was brand disparity across the network. So before we underwent our transformation from 160 brands to the 6 that we have now, we looked at our digital estate. So this is about five years ago, and we found that on our website, our social channels, internal channels, there was just a huge lack of consistency. There was content from all the different agency brands, loads of different messaging, and the dentsu brand itself wasn't that strong. There was different fonts, colors, tones of voice, imagery styles, as you can see in this image here.

So showing up consistently was a big challenge for us. And then the second one, which I think is a common challenge for businesses of our size is the alignment of teams across the world, particularly because we found we had two very different audience groups. So we had our marketers, who mostly work in PowerPoint apps such as Microsoft and Word, and then we had all of our designers working in Adobe Creative Cloud and they're both working on these two very different ecosystems that made it difficult to collaborate.

So what do we do to address this? We built a unified solution to try and bring these two audiences together. So we began by building our Brand Hub. This is on our intranet and this was our one-stop shop for everything brands related so we had all of our assets, such as our logos, imagery, icons, all of our templates, and our guidelines. And then we separated to answer these two areas. So we had a Marketer toolkit and a Designer toolkit.

So our designers who mostly use Adobe Creative Cloud simply had to follow our Creative Cloud Library, which was linked on the Brand Hub.

Sorry, I haven't got my click on that. There we go. So they then had its automatic access to all of our assets from within the Adobe apps. We absolutely love using Creative Cloud Libraries at Denstu.

The Denstu library alone gets about 25,000 impressions a month on average, so it is really well used across the business. And it's just a really good way to make sure that everybody has all of the latest assets, you can just update them whenever you want, and then everybody automatically sees them.

Up until recently, we have been using libraries that were linked to our personal Adobe ID, but going forward with the new enterprise storage, we're now able to create a brand library that's owned by Denstu that everybody in the company can have access to.

So for our marketers, we built our Marketer toolkit. So this is for those who mostly use PowerPoint and Word. They could download everything that they needed from our intranet, which is linked to SharePoint.

Later on down the line, we actually rolled out the use of the PowerPoint Plugin with Adobe Creative Cloud Libraries, which means that you can access the libraries from directly within your PowerPoint app and just easily drag and drop assets onto your slides, which was great for our marketers, as well. And that was the beginning of the journey of really bringing the two different audiences using the same type of libraries.

We also house all of our templates on here. So for both audiences, we had our social assets, external emails, internal emails, primary presentations are much everything. And once we launch this Brand Hub, we saw a huge rise in brand consistency across all Denstu branded content.

So in September 2020, we rebranded from Denstu Aegis Network to denstu.

So this was a great opportunity for us to be able to refresh and re-energize the brand. We really wanted to move away from the corporate holding company identity that we had to brands that felt bit more fresh, clean, modern, and that nodded to our Japanese heritage. So from the logo, which has been streamlined and simplified to our color palette, which has a lot more muted tones with some soft colorful spaces and our imagery, which now feels a lot more realistic and editorial.

So here has been part of a rebrand.

Okay, a lot of you. So you probably know they're quite stressful and they come with their challenges.

So these were some of the challenges that we had from a design perspective. So I think the top one is communicating the changes to all of our people are 72,000 across, lots of different markets.

And then we had to also keep bearing in mind that we had these two different audience groups. And then the second challenge was distributing the assets and making sure that everybody had everything that they needed. And then we need to ensure that all of the new content being created was on brand and had to make sure that all of the old assets were out of the picture.

So fortunately, we had our infrastructure in place. So because we already had the Brand Hub, we could just update what we already had. So we just added all of our new assets to the Creative Cloud Library and also the SharePoint Library as well. And then this was our one source of truth. It was the only place that we stored all of our assets and that really helped drive more people into using it, which again resulted in further consistency in a time that could have been quite tumultuous. Rebrands are always quite difficult to manage.

Although we had the Brand Hub and it was really useful.

We had everything there for our marketers and our designers. We were still facing the issue that our marketers and designers were working with completely different toolkits and it was still really difficult for them to collaborate. And then our second issue was with the demand for content, really growing and growing, we sometimes struggled with design resource as well.

Okay, so what do we do to address this? We looked at ways that we could support collaboration and this is where Adobe Express comes in. So Express has really enabled us to combine the two workflows so that designers and marketers can collaborate on the same platform.

I'm going to show you, how we use Express day-to-day. So firstly, I'm going to start with showing a common workflow between a marketer in the Global Comms team and a designer. So the great thing about this workflow is that all of the steps are kept within Adobe Express. Apart from the first step which is the brief. So the marketer and the designer are working in the same platform throughout.

So we start by the marketer briefing the designer on a template. So this workflow is showing, how a marketer if they couldn't find a template that they needed in the Template Library that we have set up, they can request a bespoke one.

So they brief the designer. The designer then creates the template so they can either do that in Illustrator as they usually would. And import it into Express or they can create it directly in Express. And then the designer shares the template back with the marketer by inviting them to edit or they can create a separate library.

And then the marketer can add in their own content using the template, and then the marketer would then need to share the content back with the designer for approval. The designer has a look. If it's on brand, great, they can sign that off by the comments tool within Express and the marketer can export the content.

But if it's not on brand, the designer will suggest the edit to make sure we're really achieving the brand consistency that we're after and they can do that via the comments tool also within Express. And then the designer makes the change, we go back rounds, they share it again for approval and then once it's all signed off, they can export the content. So as you can see this process, it feels super streamlined definitely, compared to processes it's before where you would be using multiple platforms, multiple channels to communicate and this results in saving time. So now I'm going to show you how this actually works.

Okay, so I'm going to show you a demo from the perspective of the marketer. So let's say I'm the marketer and I want to create a social post for Instagram to announce a new hire and welcome on new German CEO Karin Zimmermann.

So I'm going to play this now.

Okay, great. So I go into the Your stuff folder and into my Libraries...

And then I'm looking for the library called dentsu templates - Adobe Express.

So I can open that one. So I've just got a couple of demo ones here. And I'm after the welcome template.

And then we can just start a new file.

And then we wait for it to load. Once it's loaded, we have all of the graphics in there, which are all editable. So I'm going to start by replacing the headshot. So Karin has some really nice headshots, so I'm going to use one of those. And I can just drag and drop it from my file onto the canvas and it automatically stays within that image box. And then I'm going to remove the background following the style of the template.

Perfect. It's so quick.

And then I'm going to add in Karin's details. So I'm going to add in her name and her job title.

Okay, great. Because Karin's in a German market, I'm going to adapt welcome to her local language...

And just paste those in. And then we can resize those as they fit within the canvas.

Let's see if it's easy to do.

Okay, great. And then I think I wanted to flip Karin around just to make the space fill out a bit better and make the canvas filled a bit more balanced. There we go.

Okay, I also want to post this on my Instagram stories. So I can go to the Resize tool...

And then there's all of these dimensions stored within Express so I don't even need to go and Google the dimensions myself. They're already there. And I can just duplicate and resize. And then we have the same asset, but perfect for Instagram stories.

So I'm just going to check that. It looks like it could do with a bit of a reshuffle. So the great thing is that it transfers everything over and it's on the perfect canvas size, but sometimes you do need to do a slight reshuffle just to make sure that the space is filled out exactly how you want it.

Okay. So I'm pretty happy with that. Next, I need to share it with my designer. So I click on the Invite button and I'm going to share it with Jody, who's a designer in my team who actually created this asset. So I'm going to share it back with her and then she'll get notified on her Creative Cloud desktop app and by email as well. And then she has replied straight away. It's very hardworking, Jody. So she said, "Looks great! Happy to approve." And then I've just replied, "All within Express thing. Thank you." And now I can download it.

So just click on the Download button I'm going to change it to JPG for social, make sure we've got all the canvases ready to go. And then it goes straight into my Downloads folder.

Okay, so this is what they look like once I posted to social and that was super quick. It literally took three or four minutes. It's on brand. And even just the cutout tool alone has been such a game changer for us 'cause we use these a lot at Denstu, especially for headshots.

Just to try and get a bit of consistency 'cause you know what it's like with everybody having different backgrounds on their headshots and for a marketer or a non-designer to be able to do a cutout like this that quickly has really been game changing. This is perfect for us.

Okay, so that was an example of how we combine the two workflows. Now I also want to show you how we're empowering marketers to create their own content as well.

Okay, I'm going to jump straight into the demo. So again, this is from the marketer's perspective.

So I want to create a social post announcing that one of our teams have won an awards at Cannes Lions for a piece of work that they did for 7-Eleven. So if I go into my Template Library here, I can see that I've got an award wins post, but it's a still. And I, kind of, wanted to do a video because we all know that videos perform better on social and they're a lot more attention grabbing, and this is quite a fun campaign. It's got a cool video and I want to be able to include it, but our video editors booked out, so I'm going to see what I can do. I'm going to start by choosing this still for now because it's the closest one that we've got.

So I can choose that from my Library.

Start a new file, so the same as before.

And then this just saves me from creating it completely from scratch.

Okay, cool. So as I said, I want this to be a video, so I'm going to remove the image for now.

And then I'm just going to add in the details of the campaign so it was called Take it to Eleven and it's for 7-Eleven by our Denstu Creative team in the US.

And I'm just going to update the name of the award that was won so it was the Grand Prix. So I'm going to add that in on both sides. This vertical text is a nod to the Japanese heritage that I was talking about earlier. Just going to make sure that's centered and you can use the guides. It's really easy to get it all in place.

Okay, cool. So because I want it to be a video, I'm going to click on Create a video and then I'm going to show the timeline at the bottom.

And then I can just drag and drop the video from my file directly on to that timeline. So it's super easy.

And then as with all our videos, I'm going to add the dentsu animated logo to the end as well just to finish it off.

Okay, so this is what it looks like so far. Definitely, it needs some animation within the text, so I'm going to animate the first line here. I'm just going to put on a simple fade 'cause that feels most in line with our branding and I'm going to do it to the second line as well.

Again, with the fade for consistency, but I'm going to move this along the timeline slightly so that the second line comes in after the first line so it's more readable.

Nice. And I'm just going to shorten that first bit to about three seconds 'cause every second counts on social, you need to get straight in there.

And then we can go into the campaign video.

[music] Okay, so I feel like I love this video, but we need to keep it short and sharp for social. So I'm just going to go straight into where the music drop to keep it exciting so I can just move along the timeline and cut the video to exactly where I want it to start.

So I think around about here works for me and then I'm going to add an animation of fade in and out of the video clip to make it feel super polished and super professional.

And then we can take it from the top again.

Okay, so that was where I wanted it to start.

Perfect.

And now I can download it, or really, I should be sharing with my designer, but I feel quite confident in myself 'cause I'm doing this for a while now.

So I'm going to go straight to downloading it. Don't tell anyone.

And then the video just downloads.

Okay, let's see the video.

[music] So that's a pretty cool social post for a non-designer to be able to create so easily and so quickly. We've got the animated text at the beginning with a nice background and all of the details that we need and then we fade into the campaign video, and then end on our animated logo. So I think it's really cool for non-designers to be able to do that, but even designers as well. I think, well, with myself, I specialized more in Illustrator and InDesign. I'm not a video editor, but I can easily create this without having to learn how to learn a new platform and it really helps broaden my skillset.

Okay, so since using Express, we've had a number of benefits and it's been received really well. And I think if we take a step back and think about the wider picture, there's been such a huge rise in content creation tools recently. We're not only posting on social, we're creating content for it and with the rise of TikTok and Reels, we can see that anybody can be a content creator. And with that in mind, there are two things which I think have contributed to this landing so well within our business. So firstly, I think we expect the tools that we use in our work life to be just as good as the ones that we use in our personal life. They need to be user-friendly, intuitive, and seamless. And lots of people are now already familiar with using content creation tools, such as Instagram Reels, which I feel, like, this is quite a similar too in the way that you can create videos, so it's easier for them to be able to pick up these things when they're at work 'cause they're already using them at home.

So the benefits, we've seen instant improvements of our workflows. Express is really, really easy to use. It's super intuitive. You don't need to watch those long videos to learn how to use it. You can just teach yourself straight away. It also encourages collaboration.

So you can have lots of people easily co-editing, working on the same thing. We've got the reviewing and the commenting tools, and then we've got all of the templates that you can create so that really encourages people to stay on brand. And they're super easy to distribute through the Libraries.

And then you can also access the Denstu Creative Cloud Library as well, any Creative Cloud Library from within Express, which again helps people stay on brands 'cause they have easy access to all the assets that they need. And then we've also got the multiple-- The fact that you can have multiple media types within Express which is pretty revolutionary. I don't think I've ever used a platform where you can add in images, vectors, GIFs, video, audio, everything all-in-one platform.

And then the fifth benefit, I haven't actually included it on here because it's not something that we're really using at Denstu, yeah, but just one that I see that we can use more of in the future would be the integrations with Firefly. So for us 'cause our focus is brand consistency, it's quite difficult to achieve that with generative tools at the moment, but as we saw yesterday in the Keynote, the developments in Firefly are happening so quickly, so I'm sure they're going to be learning all our brand identities by no time.

And then we also heard yesterday the exciting news about Generative Fill now being in Express, which I'm looking forward to using.

Okay, so what's the impact that this has had on our business? So all the benefits I mentioned mean that we're really saving a lot of time for designers and for marketers. And designers now have more time to work on the higher impact, more creative work.

The amount of time saved, kind of, varies depending on the type of content, but for the social post, the welcome one that I showed you so that's quite a basic one, I would say. We're seeing about an hour of time saved for designers, so this includes all the time they would have spent talking over the brief, maybe collecting the content, finding the headshot, designing the asset, creating it in multiple dimensions, exporting it, and then sending it to the marketer for approval. And then we're seeing about half an hour being saved for marketers as well. So that is saving time because they don't need to be checking the content and sending over any feedback that they need asking for changes. We all know there's always last minute changes, but now they have to do it themselves. So as you saw it's really quick for them to do. It can take them 5, 10 minutes even if they're quite new to Express. So we're seeing at least an hour being saved for each asset like this. And we're a global business. We have multiple agencies, multiple social platforms, so you can tell that the time is going to be adding up really quickly, so we're saving a lot.

We're still in the early days of using this as well. It's only been a few months and I really think that the amount of time saved is going to keep on increasing and increasing exponentially once we see the adoption increase even more. And once we see some more the development of some more brand controls on the platform as well.

So secondly, the marketers feel empowered, which is really important, I think, it's helping non-creatives feel really good that they can amplify their own creative skills it's so satisfying being able to create something like this.

Thirdly, the content is on brand, and we're achieving much higher levels of brand consistency because everyone's using the templates that we have, the assets in the Library that is usually no excuse for going off brand.

And yeah, that's ultimately the main objective of me and my team is to really drive that brand consistency to help us achieve higher brand equity.

Okay, so these are a few developments that we would quite like to see in the future at Denstu. So we're really lucky we have a super collaborative relationship with Adobe. About a month ago, I spent the day at that office in London at an Express roundtable event and we had the opportunity to talk to the product developers and the strategists, have discussions with them about Express and then we also have the opportunity to give them feedback for things that we would really like to see within the platform.

All of the points that I'm going to talk to you about, we actually discussed that and I was really glad to hear that basically all of them are on the roadmap, which is really exciting.

So the first one is brand controls. So we just need a few more template locking options 'cause as I said, our goal is to drive brand consistency and we really want to strengthen the brand by being able to empower marketers to be able to create their own content but the more we empower the marketers, the less control we're having over the brand, which is a difficult balance to get. We're still working on that. We want the marketers to feel empowered, but we just need to find the right, kind of, balance to make sure that they're using it in the way that we need it to be used, so that they can really use themselves to drive growth.

So we'd like to see template locking options. So for an example, we could have a social post, we would like to see the Denstu logo fully locked. So it's always in the same place, same size, same color and that cannot ever be moved, whereas the imagery and the text we want the marketer to be able to easily replace the image to an image that they prefer and also edit the text as well, so the balance between having those constraints along with editability.

And then we'd also like to see a built-in approvals process because as you can see, it's easy to just download it without going to the designer first, as you saw me do. So any way, that we can try and stop that from happening. I mean, it doesn't need to be for all content. It can just be for like the bigger global ones with the bigger audiences.

Okay, and secondly, we're all talking about AI and it is genuinely a really exciting time. I'm particularly excited to use the new model that we heard about yesterday in the Keynote.

So when it comes to Express, we'd like to see, AI automates some of the more, kind of, simple tasks.

So for example, it'd be a cool idea if you could put all of the content that you want on a canvas, so your image and your text, and then click a button and then the AI can automatically turn it into something that's using your brand colors, your brand font, and in the layout that your brand identity would have taught the AI how to do. So that is something that we've been speaking to Adobe about and they are exploring that, which is really cool.

And then secondly, because we are a global business, we really wanted to see automatic translations, so that teams can localize content to their own language. And yesterday, our wishes were granted and it was launched. So I'm excited to start using that too.

And then finally, some AI generated copy and some call to actions for the captions on the social post. So again, we would love to see the AI learning our tone of voice and being able to generate some captions for us.

And then finally, personalization. So another megatrend we're all talking about across the marketing world. We'd really like to see some, kind of, personalized profiles. So when you first open Express, it would be cool if you could see all of your brand assets and your brand templates straightaway, rather than seeing the content suggested by Adobe so you can go straight into creating your own content.

And then we'd also like to see the option to be able to collaborate on shared projects rather than singular files. So at the moment, you can share a file directly with someone, but usually you have, like, multiple files for one project.

So yeah, we'd really like to see that as well.

Okay, so who's currently using Express in Denstu? We started rolling out Express to a group of 180 monthly users and they're all using it, which is literally unheard of when you roll out new technologies in businesses. So this group is mostly made up of some key designers and marketers across our largest markets, some marketing teams and also some of our agency brand teams as well.

So next, we're going to be rolling out to our Global Communications Network, which is made up of about 300 people across all of our markets, and then we have plans to scale it further across our business function groups as well. So like our HR, finance, and social impact teams.

And then eventually in the longer term, we see the potential to roll out to our client teams, as well so they can be using it for client work.

When I say that we're rolling out, we basically just had to set up an initial one hour session to basically, we not show them how to use it, but show a demo of what it can actually do. And then we haven't really needed to do any further training after that because it is so intuitive, so the session was literally, like, this is what you can do, and then they run with it.

Okay, so I'm just going to end by showing you a quick slide of what our branding used to look like. So this was about five years ago. As you can see, it's a bit of a mess, and then this is how we're looking now. So these are just a few that I've pulled recently. And you can see we have a lot more brand consistency, it's feels a lot cleaner, the graphics feel a bit tighter, a bit more well designed, and this is a mix of designers and non-designers creating this content.

Okay, so I've taken you through how we manage our visual identity, how we support collaboration between designers and marketers, how we are empowering our marketers to create their own content using basic video editing, and graphics, and image editing within Express, and showing you the impact that this has had on our business, and showed you how we really plan to scale this across the network. So yeah, that is everything that I wanted to show you today. If you have any questions, I'd be delighted to take them. Or if anybody has any experience that they want to share using Adobe Express, I'd love to hear about that as well. Thank you.

[music]

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Empower Your Design Team for Strategic Impact - S6150

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ABOUT THE SESSION

Technical Level: Beginner

Your creative team is at the strategic center of your brand - so why are they spending time resizing assets and tweaking copy? Designers at dentsu, one of the largest global marketing and advertising agency networks in the world, stay strategic by leveraging Adobe Express to keep low-level tasks off their to-do lists. Join Sakura Martin, dentsu’s Global Brand & Design Lead, to learn how you can enable non-designers to self-serve on-brand, engaging content using assets and templates created by your design team - and keep your designers focused on work that delivers real business impact.

 

In this session, you’ll discover:

  • How to support better collaboration between designers and marketers with Adobe Express
  • How the dentsu design team scales to manage a cohesive visual identity across 145 markets
  • New ways to empower non-designers for on-brand content creation with access to basic imagery and video effects

Technical Level: Beginner

Type: Session

Category: Collaborating with Your Team

Track: Creativity and Design in Business

Audience Types: Art/Creative Director, Business Strategist/Owner, Graphic Designer, Print Designer, Illustrator, Social Media Content Creator, Executive, Marketer

This content is copyrighted by Adobe Inc. Any recording and posting of this content is strictly prohibited.


By accessing resources linked on this page ("Session Resources"), you agree that 1. Resources are Sample Files per our Terms of Use and 2. you will use Session Resources solely as directed by the applicable speaker.

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