[Music] [Ravi Pal] Okay. I'm going to be starting now. What if I told you that in the time that we took to set this up in last four, five minutes, that your customers, your target prospects have been exposed to thousands of hours of content? And most of them probably have engaged with it, most of them have liked it.
But here is the question. If you're not going to supply the content at the speed that they need it, they're going to probably going to look at it elsewhere with another brand or another content provider.
The question that we need to ask ourselves, though is, is it the speed, is it the personalized content, or is it the orchestrated, well-crafted experience that matters? My name is Ravi. I'm Global CTO at Ogilvy One. I'm joined by three visionary leaders with me on the panel. I'm going to be your standing host, and they're going to be sitting panelists.
I'm going to introduce Dom first. Dom is Global Head of AI Design at The Coca-Cola Company. His vision mission is that, technology should be used to amplify human creativity, so he's going to share his views from that perspective. I've got Jess, Jessica. She's CTO and Adobe Product Leader at IBM. She's been at the forefront of developing sophisticated technology ecosystems that drive next-gen marketing at IBM. Welcome, Jess. And Roberto, my colleague. Roberto is Chief Creative Officer Spain, Global Creative Lead at Ogilvy One. And he's always got that extra insight about the changing behavior in digital landscape and will always surprise you with something new, even better than what you know about yourself. So welcome, Roberto.
So I'm going to start with you, Dom.
So offline, when we were having a chat, Dom and I were talking about how Coca-Cola Company has always been creating these innovative, outstanding digital experiences for decades. But we also know, like we are here at Adobe MAX, there's new technology, there's new data ecosystem that keeps developing. So, Dom, in your experience, as well as at Coca-Cola, how are you seeing this whole technology and data change impact or transform the creative design process that you've been using? Do you want to share your thoughts? [Dom Heinrich] Yeah. Maybe we do something first. I think it's super odd that we have this silent group. Can you all, if I say something funny which will not happen, can you all just clap or make some noise? Yay! Good. Thank you. Cool. Okay. You are there. That's good. It's good to know. I mean, maybe I start sharing my personal opinion. Being in this space since, I think, 15 years around AI and design, I think what's interesting to see is that for the first time, technology and data is not a behind the scenes element anymore, right? It became suddenly so easy to access and basically democratized. It allows us to communicate with us in the user interface we use as humans to communicate with each other, which is natural language. And I think we see this for the first time, this democratization of human and machine relationship, which is quite interesting when we look at that. And I think what we see from which is more important probably to that is the question is how do brands use that, and how do we stand out and make these experiences really meaningful in a world that is all driven by that technology in the back end? And I think that's the opportunity that lies at the hand. For us as a brand as iconic as we are, it always has been about culture, and experiences, and creating connections and meaningful connections. So the question really comes down to how can we leverage that and how can we make that more-- How can we actually take this human element to it back into it? And I have this slightly, maybe romantic perspective that AI actually makes us more human at the end because it allows us to focus on things that really value to us. That for example, you guys scream and clap because that's what makes us humans humans, right? And I think the technology of you have the headphones on and listen to us, as an example is something-- That's experience design, right? It's like the question is really coming down to how do you stand out as a brand in that matter in the future. And so I believe that there's an opportunity for brands to actually leverage that, and I think we are probably in a good position to do that.
Thank you.
Yes. Thank you.
So I think I'll ask a question to Jess, and feel free to add to as the questions go by, all of you. Jess, you've been driving technology direction for, obviously, decades, and then we've seen new technology, AKA generated AI, get added to that complexity of the ecosystem, right? But how's that in your view? Again, feel free to share a general perspective, as well as IBM at how you're driving it at IBM. But the question really is that is it adding to the technology ecosystem? Is it disrupting it? What's the view there? [Jessica Criscione] I would say a little bit of both.
One of the key parts of all of this AI and frankly automation in general, is that it forces us as companies to both clean up all of our data so that we can base it on the right things, as well as get-- I would almost say, more crisp about what our brands are and how we represent them. I will say at IBM, we have six or seven different creative teams internally, all with slightly different interpretations of how our brand should look and feel. Sometimes by sub-brands, sometimes just a disagreement on terms, like one of the favorite terms. Some of our teams use to describe our brand is that they want authentic photos. Authentic is a very subjective term, and if you're going to train models on it, you need to define that a little bit more and say, "Well, it means very specifically this with the perspective and this in relation to the body language in the photo. - Yeah. - Things along those lines. And I think that clarity helps all of the teams make the brand a little bit more distinct and recognizable.
And frankly, to tie back to the data, but you have to have that data so that you can find the right things, make it portable, put it on the glass, right? We're all trying to do content supply chains and get things out at scale faster. You need the underlying data there, it needs to be consistent across all the systems, and then you need that crispness of brand to help carry it through.
I'll come to Roberto first, and then we'll probably take a slightly, double-click at both of your point of views.
So, Roberto, you've been like as I introduced you, you've been looking at this changing behavior for decades. Last few years, I'm sure you would have noticed, so what are those changes in the customer behavior that has taken place, might be useful for this conversation. And also, how is that challenging the brands to then create or look at creating compelling creative outputs? [Roberto Fara] Yeah. I like to go further back. Usually, when we think about, 30, 40 years ago, it was easy for creatives, but also easy for brands to control the experience. There was four or five people sitting on a couch, one remote control, one owner of the remote control, usually that. And he was picking the content. And you sit there and you just like, "That's it. That's all I have." So then we move further and suddenly, we have this digital space that was like a second option. But it's still for marketers or creatives, it was still a very controlled environment because we could do whatever.
But right now, just watching this audience right now, it's like, "I'm competing against your phones, against the content you are looking, at the same time that I'm becoming content for some of you." And they're all looking at you. - Yeah. - Do you notice? They pay attention? Not all of them. Some of them are still like, "I'm trying to catch their attention with some headlines." But it's like this is the first time that I'm being competing with another content at the same time that I'm becoming a content.
But real and a digital content. So for me, one of the challenge for brands is, speed.
Speed is very difficult for brands because a person can make a decision in seconds because it's in our DNA, it's in our culture, it's in our context. We can make decisions very fast. But companies, it's a group of people. So it's not easy to come up with a decision. As an example, without going into details, in actual political campaigns, when you are running community management, the decisions to approve a content, it's 15 minutes.
So if you don't decide something in 15 minutes, you're out of context. So for brands that is not even possible right now, it needs months for make decisions. So speed and agility is one of the big challenge to catch attention. Okay. I'll take those arguments forward. So couple of days ago, I was reading some stats, and then I think yesterday at the Partners Day, Adobe shared that stat.
If you had 1,000, let's say, products and 1,000 customers on the other side, and then you start to add variations like asset types, channel mix, region, countries, languages, and then apply the customer context and segments, etcetera, etcetera. You tend to get to the asset variations like, thousands, hundreds of thousands, and some stats say that'll be close to millions.
Now I understand that we're playing this efficiency game a little bit. And from your argument AI is helping us cut down on the steps of the process. And from your argument as well, it's allowing us to move forward at pace. So how do you balance this? And maybe, Dom, you start, and then you can pitch in. But how do you balance this efficiency gains we're seeing with this technology advancement and then the human touch, that unique human touch that you talk about, right? So how do we balance that so that we don't lose out on what Roberto just mentioned? We still need to push content out at speed. Yeah. I have probably a very radical view on that because and that's my personal view. But we talk about this at work as well. It's the competition. I look at all of you and you all pay attention. Not many are on the phone which is I think incredible at the end. But we're all in this almost like a rat race of attention grabbing, right? And I had last night a conversation, we had a conversation about, clickbait and how the press is twisting your words if you give in to users. It's because they do it because they want to have attention. So we are in this world of attention grabbing. I think what's interesting about AI and I think what we need to think about is, if we all move in an authentic AI world, we're all shielded by an AI, then we are basically have our consumer becomes the AI, right? And then the question is how do I get around that? And then we are back to what we're seeing here at the moment. We are at life events at back and we are in experiences. And how do I make them meaningful and valuable? It's interesting because that was always a conversation for all of us in the last 20 years. Roberto and I spoke about it in his time, in other agencies and that has always been the driver. Apple was at the forefront of it. And I think that's the interesting part. I think it actually it comes back, right? And so we are so over indexing at the moment on the technology that I think we lose a little bit the perspectives on it. And to answer your question I think, I will answer that slightly different because we don't look down the funnel from a perspective as like how do we reach everybody at the moment. We do that in the organization. But as the design team, we're looking more at how do we drive consistency, right? How do we show up in a world where it's everything is auto generated. Everything is customized. How do we make sure we create brand consistency? And one of the things we're doing there is working with Adobe on a product they're building, but we invented as Coca-Cola, that will be available for all of you at one point, hopefully-- Coming next season. Coming next season. I mean, let's put some pressure on the Adobe team now. But now we're piloting it and because we want to figure out how we can own the design part.
And I teach that at Pratt as well. We talk a lot about design systems and how they need to be made in a way that they can be scalable and customizable, but at the same time, make sure that the brand shows up the way that we want the brand to show up no matter who's touching it. And I think that's the way forward at the moment is like you need to really-- I think designers and creatives in particular will become way more important in this. Talking about experiences, talking about design systems, talking about how do we show up, and make that meaningful connection, right, will probably the most important thing in the next couple of years. I believe actually, we will talk more about humans in the next few years, then we will talk about AI. That's a hatching. That's great. - Putting my bets on it. - Yeah. I just want to add something to the 1 and the 1,000 thing.
Because there's one factor that we don't take a look often is like veracity. When we think about this generation, it's consuming like more movies in one week than probably our grandfathers, like, 40 years ago. That veracity is not controllable right now. So it's some ways, you spend five, six hours on TikTok even though you think it's 10 minutes, which is great. I mean, anybody can do whatever, prefer. But the thing is, how you attack that program is even for platforms like Netflix, Amazon, whatever. They're trying to speed up to create content and people are like, "I need another one because I just finished the season of Lord of the Rings in just three days." And then people are saying like, "But I don't have time, but I'm consuming." So for brands that's not even possible. So you need to find more organic ways to maybe to share that content creation with other people. So there was something that we talked many years ago about the differences between brand communication when you are pushing a message, you reach the audience for 10 minutes, 2 months, depends on how big is your budget in media, and then that message goes down, delay, and you forgot. Versus experiences where you invite people inside the brand, people start creating with the brand, having fun with the brand, and they are their own content creators. So there's no one way that one point can create so much content for so many people at this voracity versus, all being part of something and sharing and creating. That's when it becomes more organic, more natural, and even more fun. Yeah. - I'd actually love to-- - Yeah. Hop in here in as well. Part of what we're really trying to do is how the humans involved in the upfront strategy and the design and the original creation of the thing.
And then start to have automation and AI do derivatives. If you have a human write a long form version of a case study or some other asset, they approve all of that. Humans are part of that process. They might use something to help provoke some ideas, but they're the ones that create it. And then we hand it off and we start to do automated workflows, like, what does that look like in an email? What does it look like as web tile, right? The machine is taking some of the-- I would almost say, low level mundane work off, like, it automates different image crops, right? Humans can still validate, they might not like how it's centered, they might not like how it's positioned. - Yeah. - Right. But there's always a human that is involved in that to approve it. The idea is that it'll allow creatives to do greater volume of work and that we can then start to hopefully train the models to say, "Okay, if we're now going to do different audiences or something for a different industry." What things might we look for to start to swap out? But for us, the humans will always be at the center of it. It's really just how we can have that AI and automation start to scale things so that we can hit a broader audience and make more content. Yeah. It's interesting because I think in the early days of innovation when that became a buzzword in our industry, I remember that a lot of people used the Einstein quote of, "If I have 60 minutes to solve a problem, I spend 55 minutes on asking the question." It actually becomes more important now. And to your point, it's like 55 minutes to really think through what the design system is, what the creation is, the creativity is because the 5 minutes is actually not what I'm doing actually anymore. It's the AI doing for me ideally. And so I think that's-- I love where you're going with this because I think that's where we don't have that conversation enough. We have all of these leaders who speak a lot about efficiency and there is efficiencies, right, but I think that's a false statement.
To Roberta's point about content, imagine content is being created in real-time in that moment, you're watching it. So Game of Thrones is just going on and on as long as you watch it. That's crazy, right? But how do I make it that the story stays engaging? I don't think the AI will do that. It's like, will be still the human, hopefully. Judith is still out there.
I think I want to switch the efficiency conversation to something else. And this is something that I've been personally grappling with since 2012, and there is a reason for that date. It's not the movie 2012.
So if today I go online, and I look for, let's say, and this is the example I was taking for Roberto. If I go for a hair color, I've got gray. You can see it.
And if I wanted to search for a hair color, right? The expectation as a consumer would be that somebody is gathering that data, and I'm one of those consumers who shares data because I want personalized experience. So it's available. Maybe first intent is not caught, but then subsequently it is. And then I want that singular focused experience, crafted experience delivered to me that this is exactly the product that I wanted instead of me exploring tens of fifteens or 20 of those products. And this is like a simple example because this commodity, right, the hair color. Maybe I'm looking for organic nature of it, or a specific color, or what have you, right? So question is this, that while on one side we're talking about the speed and I think the variations, etcetera, but then when we talk about curating that experience, orchestrating that customer experience from a personal delivery to an individual. What needs to happen, and maybe just I should start with you, consider this that again, in my role when I talk to clients, there are data vault gardens. So for us, we would need to find out, who this person is, what their universe looks like, and what have you. But truth is that there is a data wall guardian. Truth is that we were in some organizations, sociopolitically, organized by specialization that I do email well, or I do mobile well, or I do web experience really well, or what have you, right? So how do we get to that, I don't know if this is a word, but singular experience, which is focused on an individual. Maybe a dream, but how do we get there? Well, I think there's a lot of different paths there. To use your example, for hair color, in theory, if you give the system the right to do so, you could model hair colors. Yeah. And you might discover, I didn't know I liked hot pink.
There's a lot of possibility where the system starts to see patterns in your behavior and other things where it could start to recommend something that you might never have thought of.
But I think the key for all of us is that if we're going to ask for people to share data with us, we have to treat it properly. Yeah. With respect, and give them something to make it worthwhile, right? I think too many companies get a little casual with data. Yeah. To me, if you say, I like the color purple.
That's the thing that is personal to you. I should protect that just as much as I would your birth date or your home address, right? And I'm never going to use that in a way where it is not without your awareness and permission. But if I'm going to all of a sudden make the site purple, I should tell you how and why I'm doing that, right? So I think from a respect to our client's standpoint, you have to be very aware of where the line gets creepy. - Yeah. - Right. And try to be as transparent about all of that as possible, and give them rights to control all of it. I agree. I agree. And obviously, you touched upon privacy, governance, what have you. But it's also about, even for us to train a model, we go back to what we've been hearing from Adobe, the trust factor of it, and whether we're going to get into the regulatory challenges of it.
Anything to add, Roberto? Yeah.
I like this example. When we think about CRM, very big point of contact between brands and consumers. No? - And the middle word is a relation-- - Yeah. Or relationship. And when I think about the emails in the last 15 years, every one week I receive an email that says, "Hello, Roberto. Hello, Roberto. Hello, Roberto." And I was like, "Got it. You know my name. Amazing. I've been together for 20 years and you know my name. Amazing." When I think that outside the digital space and I think in a relationship with whatever, my wife a friend, family, it's the first time it's like, "Hello, Roberto." And then after that, it's like, "What's up?" And then it's like, "Hey, I'm going to talk about you." And if I know that it's purple is your favorite color, I don't need to remember you every day. Oh, purple is your favorite color. Today is the purple day.
So I think we became, sometimes, in some way, we're part of an easy solution. It's like, if I contact the person and I send something saying, "Hello, Roberto." And then I put a content, that person will feel like, "Oh, he knows me." Yeah. But we became so, like, I don't know, predictable that I would say 95% of the people here just delete the email. You're subscribing to a bunch of brands and companies and you just delete the email. The only email that you open is the ones that are surprising you. They're only ones that have like a different subject or maybe has like a great coupon. But if not, you just delete it. Imagine how many emails you delete a day. So brands are spending so much money on that just to be deleted.
So maybe I'll ask this then, build on this argument.
So if that's the case wherein I want a personal experience delivered to me, and I've got these challenges with data and technology as Jess described, is there a way in which I can create consistently than the compelling content, which just goes back to your previous argument because my customer still needs that content to be supplied at a particular speed in different channels, and whenever they want. So like you said, they're probably watching 12 hours at a trot, whatever content they're watching. So is there a way that you apply or any advice on how we could actually create that content consistently for consumers? I mean, knowing your brand, and as again, using the human relationship, you have to work hard to keep up that relationship alive, you have to renew things. You have to understand that the person is changing through to life. You have to be contextual, you have to understand the moment of the year, the moment of the week that you're talking. You need to know also when you just shut up and don't talk, maybe listen. You have to involve the other person. So the insights are all there. Then I think maybe AI can help us to automate some of those things. Maybe we can find some ways to make it much easier for brands to display or deliver this contacts or touch-points of communication in a better way. But for creatives, the challenge is the dead of mediocrity. Yeah. If I will come up with an idea, or a copy, or a tagline and it takes me five days to come up with something that GPT can do in five seconds, I'm dispensable. So we need to became indispensable.
I think there's a great opportunity to become more brilliant, more excellent, and more creative than ever. The tools are there, we just need to step up. Yeah. Brilliant. I think that is super interesting what Roberto just said because the emails we're getting, "Hello, Roberto, I hope this email finds you well." We're all getting that on LinkedIn, right? Everybody? I unsubscribe but it never goes away. Now I have these Sunday mornings where I become really German and then they reply in return. And then I have a debate with people. It's like, "So try to sell me the product you are selling me without saying the word AI, ML, or data." And they struggle with that. There's no value proposition. But it goes back to what Roberto just said. Yeah. "Never try to reach out on LinkedIn and with that phrase, and not on a Sunday, I might reply." And so but the interesting part about this is, what you said about mediocrity. I talk a lot about mediocrity as on subscription because we are living in this world not just written word. It's like images. It was like look at them. - They all look the same. - Yeah. I was amazed today. I took a picture where the keynote was and all that there was no differentiation. Maybe this was today on purpose because it fitted into the brand ecosystem. But it is a danger that we live in a world where we're not talking about Gen Z anymore. We will talk about the generation. Yes. Because we will be all-- Because AI is a yes man. It's like, sorry, a yes, to be correct here.
Because it just tries to please us. And so that leads to-- If we are not thinking critically and if we are not pushing the boundaries, then we will just create a lot of mess. And that's bad. That's bad content that will drive you guys looking on your phones instead of listening to us. That's what it is all about. This is about elevating quality. It's thinking differently, spending time to critically think about things, and pushing the boundaries because one of the things we also shouldn't forget is, even if I train it on my own brand and my tone of voice and my imagery, we're all running on the same large language model so a lot of people choosing to run on the same large language models. And so the underlying idea will stay the same, right? It's like, it will look like you, it will look like your brand, it will sound like your brand, but your competitor might show up in the same way because of people going into your point, typing in I need an idea, content strategy for a CPG brand for beverages on a hot summer day. It's like, I bet with you ChatGPT gives you 20 ideas, but I bet with you, everybody else uses the same ideas because it's way more a human transformation than a technology transformation at the moment, which I think is the core of what we really need to be aware of.
Well, I think at the sound of shamelessly plugging this in, but-- - Yeah, please. - Or the risk of plugging it in. So that will be fun.
- You want to plug it in? - Oh, okay. - You make the sales pitch? - Yes. - Oh, okay. Good. - No. - I mean, to-- - Please all pay attention. Phones away. Sales pitch coming in. To this point, now there is something to be said about what Roberto was saying. And therefore, I think Roberto and some of our creatives came up with this methodology called relationship design, which we tend to apply. And that applies to this conversation as well because it's not a conversation in silo. It's a conversation about brand, your business objectives, what data you have, like Jess was talking about the underlying data ecosystem, and also the customer's context and landscape. So it makes sense, and I fully agree that we need to find that bridge. We need to find that right insight of which we can go and solve this problem.
So I think we have about five minutes before we open for audience's questions. So maybe we take one more.
One of you used the word authentic experience, and I think Jesse did, right? And I think that's truly, I mean, from all this conversation, that's one thing that I picked up that you don't want sea of sameness, as you were describing it. You use the same tool, same technology, no differentiation. You create, and the speed with it which you want to move, you probably end up creating similar content for everyone. So how do you describe that challenge that we have with this? How do we create the authentic content, authentic experience for each brand? Anybody? - I mean, I'll hop in since-- - Yeah. I was the one that see the word out originally.
I think to touch on Dom's point earlier, we are all using the same models. We're all learning how to do prompts and things in parallel with each other. It is all shared public things that we're basing all of our stuff off of. I think the key, honestly, as a brand, you have to be unique enough not to use yet another adjective to describe an adjective, but in this case, I think you really need to have a unique stance that is visually different, totally different, actually have some clear and consistent messaging that represent your brand in a way that it can carry past that sameness.
I think we have a unique potential right now that if we can be very clear about some of those things and what the core of what our brands are, these tools can help us extend it to new visual paths and new written paths and still maintain the core-- I'm trying to find the right word and I can't find it right now. But the thing that truly represents the brand, and I think that kernel is what is critical. And I think any brands that have not clearly defined that for themselves are going to get lost in the sameness. Yeah. That's got to be brutal, I guess. Any other thoughts on that? Well, for brands, if you fall in sadness, what's going to happen is basically, right now, we're, like, any phone, any device, any wearable, or even clothing, it has the same functionality for you than any other brand. It's all about being in the top of mind. It's all about being a love brand because when you sit in front of, whatever the choice that you're going to pick, it's going to be about motion, it's going to be about love, it's going to be about something that reminds you to something because this phone and the other phone works the same. So important. But being authentic, it's not easy. As lesbians, my wife and me, we always like, look at those couples that after years, they wear khaki pants, khaki, shoes, and khaki wearables, and they go together wearing the same. And we were like, "We're never going to be like that." And one day, we look each other and we were like wearing the same colors. And we were like, "Oh, God. This is the moment." We're like, "[CURSING]." We're like, "This is over." - It's called brand dilution. - Yeah. And then we're trying to be authentic. And basically, we discuss our outfit before. It's like, "If you go with that, I don't go with that." And there's some discussion sometimes. But being authentic, it's not about how you look only. There's like multi-dimensions to that. It's how you act, it's like what you say, what you do, when you say it, how you say it. So there's so many things that build this DNA of a brand or a person that helps you to be authentic. I think what's interesting about this and we I think we struggle as human beings with that too. We play roles, right? We have the role on stage. We have the role at work. We have the role at home.
There's a German version of me when I speak German. That's still the 35-year-old kid that came to New York 10 years ago and so now you can make the mark. And so but it's a different person and that person still exists. So if I speak with my friends in German I catch myself doing that. And what I think is so interesting about this is for brands, we have people sometimes in charge that they are there and they're trying to make their own mark instead of the brand's mark. And looking in the audience and looking at one particular person who's on our team who's there since 30 years, I think, and he stands for the brand, right? And he understands it and I think that's why a brand like Coca-Cola works so well because there is people who really gardening it and really building a governance around it and making sure that you stay authentic and stay true to yourself and keep your identity no matter who comes in and goes out. And I think that's so fundamentally important but maybe sometimes it's also important to just put your ego aside and understand who you are and who is the brand you're working for, what's the brand standing for, and then really, putting this out. And I think, in our case, Rapha Abreu is the VP Design at Coca-Cola and he lifts that, right? He's like, he's always looking from that perspective on how do we keep the brand iconic, right? And how do we do this in an AI world is a big question. And I think it needs these leaders who are humble, who are really actually putting their selves aside and actually putting everything down to, it's not about my brand, it's about the brand that I'm working for and how do we actually make that stand out. And I think that's for the agency is also the tricky part.
I'm like you, it's like, "I'm a creative person." It's like we always wanted to do something cool and special, but how do we-- - Am I attached to it? - Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And so how do you make that still have that touch but stay authentic is probably the biggest question of lifetime. Now I agree. And I think, like Jess said, we need to find that kernel essence, maybe. That's the word, right? We need to find that because when creatives come to technology saying, "Okay, this is what we now want delivered," and we look for that same answer because we need to now codify that into something which is tangible and can be delivered, and then can be felt by the end customer and end consumer depending on who you are reaching out to. Well, that's fascinating. Thank you very much for everybody who made time for this, and big round of applause for our panelists here.
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