What do Mattel, Abby Wambach, Cirque Du Soleil, and George Clooney have in common?

I’ll wait for you to Google it… Did you come up with the answer?

According to John Mellor, Adobe’s VP of Strategy and Business Development, they all are boldly creative in a world driven by data. This is what’s required to make the transformation to an experience-led business.

“Our jobs demand more data to create those experiences, but data is just a piece of the puzzle. Data alone is insufficient until we can wrap meaning around it. Our job is to transform that data into content that gives meaning to the experience,” he said.

Mellor also revealed results of a Twitter poll of Summit attendees, revealing that more than 40% believe their organization is “slow and steady” to adapt to this change of pace. Herein lies the challenge for many brands: combine data and science with content to tell great stories at scale.

“It’s through the power of storytelling that you can create the experiences and personal connections we all crave,” Mellor stated.

While Mattel, Cirque du Soleil, Wambach, and Clooney all shared captivating stories, below are highlights from two of the talks.

“Sometimes the most valuable invention is reinvention”

For most of us, our connection to Mattel stems from our childhood. Whether you loved Barbie, Hot Wheels, Fisher Price, or American Girl, Mattel is etched in our memories.

Richard Dickson, President and COO of Mattel, shared the story of how the brand started as a creations company by transforming the traditional paper fashion dolls into Barbie dolls, and “reinventing the toy car as a cultural phenomenon.” (Hot Wheels)

However as the brand succeeded and the company grew, Mattel lost its way and devolved into a packaged goods company that made toys.

The company realized it had to challenge the status quo to rise as a leading brand in “playtime.” Mattel applied the reinvention roadmap to reboot Barbie and disrupt the category the founders established 60+ years ago.

“Rapid relevance was the only way out,” Dickson said. Mattel did four major things for Barbie:

1. Reflected the diversity girls see today, and launched more than 20 new dolls that represented a wide variety of skin tones, hair color and texture
2. Liberated Barbie from high heels with a flexible foot
3. Created “Hello Barbie,” one of the most advanced AI toys that engages girls with conversation (Note: this was created based on feedback from girls who said “I wish Barbie could talk to me.”)
4. Responded to decades of cultural criticism of Barbie’s “perfect body” by developing dolls that reflect a wide variety of body types

Mattel needed to make girls fall in love with Barbie again and have their moms “like Barbie a little bit more.” This prompted the brand to create and tell a story through a short film called, “Imagine the possibilities”.

Mattel knew they had won over their audience before placing any paid advertising. They “created blockbuster relevance in the marketplace that couldn’t be bought,” with trending topics on Yahoo! and a cover story for Time as well as:

• 50 million views of the short film
• 500 million engagements on Facebook and Twitter
• 81% positive reactions from moms
• Celebrity influencers talking about it on social media

This reinvention roadmap, which is now being applied to Hot Wheels, Fisher Price, and other lines, is the push for Mattel to re-establish itself as a creations company and inspire the wonder of childhood.

Shaking Up the Movie Industry

Day 2 closed with an interview of George Clooney by Ann Lewnes, senior vice president and CMO of Adobe. Among the many topics covered, they discussed the shift in the film industry due in part to emerging technologies and social media.

“Technology and new media are opening up new ways to tell stories that didn’t exist before,” Clooney said.

“What’s happening in our industry is interesting. Television, for a long time, had its limitations. But now, TV, Netflix and others have ramped up the quality. It’s better than some of the films you see, and that’s great for our industry in general,” he continued.

With the proliferation of smartphones and similar video capturing devices, anyone can create content and share their experience with a large audience on social media. While Clooney is not a fan of social media, he indicated one benefit (from his perspective): “It [social media] can force you to make better products.”

This shift is something not only with which Hollywood has to contend, but also across dozens of other industries. You can’t ignore your fans – or your haters for that matter.

Final Thoughts

The keynote speakers of the day echoed John Mellor’s earlier remarks: “Storytelling is the biggest tool we have at our disposal. It’s that human touch that helps us connect with customers. Now, more than ever, we have to be storytellers.”

What did you learn from Day 2 at Summit?

Photo by @skimsey, https://twitter.com/skimsey

After a few minutes of listening to her curse, I steeled myself against her wrath (which was causing our dogs to cower) and asked if I could offer assistance. She dialed down her fluster long enough to reload the website and show me the problem. On the screen, the site began to resolve, then it turned gray to highlight an ad window spreading over the center of the page.

The ad opened just long enough to announce a car dealership’s brand before both the ad and the browser behind it vanished, leaving me looking at neat rows of apps on the iPad’s desktop.

“This is just a bunch of …,” my wife said, followed by yet another string of epithets that made me want to join the dogs in hiding. “I need to review the morning story placement, and I can’t even get to the site!”

In separate situations, I witnessed similar exasperation recently from people at a Starbucks, at a mall food court, and in the waiting room of a doctor’s office. Little else sends Americans into paroxysms of agitation quite like the intrusion of advertising into our online reverie. And yet digital publishers express surprise and concern at the latest surge in ad blocking software revealed by PageFair and Adobe Systems, Inc. in “The 2015 Ad Blocking Report,” published this week.

PageFair, headquartered in Ireland, provides solutions to detect and measure ad blockers. Adobe is one of Perficient’s Strategic Partners. The report they produced examines per-country and per-state information on ad-block usage, as well as monthly active user statistics, and it found that – surprise! – web users are ratcheting up their use of ad-blocking software.

In the past year, ad blocker usage rose 41 percent in the United States and 35 percent in Europe to encompass a total of 200 million web users worldwide. In some nations in Europe, the report said, a third of users employed ad-blocking tools. Here, in states such as California, New York, and Oregon, around 15 percent of users regularly blocked web ads.

Those numbers translate into heavy damage on corporate profit margins, the report said. PageFair and Adobe estimate that U.S. firms alone lost almost $6 billion in revenue last year because their digital ad efforts were not reaching intended targets. The loss is likely to climb north of $10 million by the end of 2015.

PageFair and Adobe define ad blocking as any solution that acts like a firewall between web browsers and ad servers. Most ads are blocked or deflected by end users using solutions that target extensions such as “adblock” or “adblock plus.”

Naturally, online marketers are alarmed by all this blocking. It means their carefully crafted sales pitches – intended to supplant the evaporating influence of print publishing – are disappearing into the digital ether.

“(The) existential threat of ad blocking has become a pressing issue in the board rooms of publishers across the world,” the report said. “A concentrated response is required, founded upon a renewed focus on user experience and enabled by secure ad-serving technology.”

The key words here are “user experience,” or UX – the defining element of success in 2015. Connected technology has matured well past the convenience stage to become essential in the livelihoods of consumers as well as companies, but consumers, not companies, are driving this evolution. Proliferate smart technology and social networking have empowered consumers; now, they can choose to engage companies at multiple levels.

If companies hamper this empowerment, or compromise the UX with excessive ads, slower page loading speeds, intrusive auto-play videos, and the surreptitious downloads of uninvited promotions carrying potential privacy threats, the companies risk losing engagement.

And that affects the entire web.

“As technology develops and ad-blocking plug-ins become more commonplace, the growth in ad-blocking usage will receive yet another catalyst,” the PageFair/Adobe report said. “This has the potential to challenge the viability of the web as a platform for the distribution of free, ad-supported content.”

Presently, the web browsers Firefox and Google Chrome are responsible for most end-user ad blocking; however, the mobile market is making strides in this direction. Developers are busy making plug-ins for smartphone web browsers, and Apple’s pending iOS 9 will include support for ad-blocking apps.

The iOS 9 platform is due to release in September. Afterward, we can expect ad-block numbers to soar and more publishers to panic – and I can expect my spouse’s cursing to subside.

Creating a dynamic platform to support global digital marketing programs? PwC and USG developed a strategic plan and roadmap to deliver an integrated solution that enables local markets to take advantage of the global investment, from digital asset management, assets and product data, to developing country-specific workflows, while also ensuring brand compliance and consistent analytics and measurement. This scalable, Adobe Marketing Cloud based solution provides USG with the framework to target its marketing and optimize experience based on real-time data. Learn how USG and PwC collaborated to develop a cloud-based platform based on Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Analytics and Adobe Tag Manager, and DAM. In this session: – Learn how starting with a Mobile First mentality drove the experience design – Discuss global analytics dashboards – Explore marketing automation platform integration, and hear how USG is leveraging the platform for their employee intranet This session is for digital marketers.

Data

• 50 billion connected devices by 202
• 2X the E7 GDP will double
• Gartner by 2017 the CMO will spend more on IT than the CIO
• eMarketer – just under 40% of marketing big data spending will go to software investment

USG is a building manufacturer. They had a large impact in the recent downturn and needed to deal with that plus making changes in how the company dealt with the market.  They had a lot of challenges including an outdated site, outdated technology, no clear user experience, no analytics or decent benchmarks. On top of that they were in the midst of going global

The old site was a bunch of links focused on their products and not much. It had little valuable information.

What did they do?

It started with user research

• Interviews
• Personas
• customer journey
• Industry research
• full technical and architecture analsysis
• Better metrics and a plan for metrics

The deliverables was a scorecard and a roadmap on moving forward.  They used the term “insights” that would drive a more valuable experience

1. Organization of content was needed
   1. Search vs browse. Needed to support both
2. Must focus on the user experience
   1. Mobile first philosophy
   2. Data rules with key analytics
   3. Structure that scales

The customer journey

One key focus was on supporting the customer journey with the focus on the four sub-principles.  USG chose Adobe Experience Platform and other tools.

Search vs browse:

had to support both.  Purposeful navigators and inspired explorers both needed to be supported.  Insights came as they looked at the web analytics with a lot of site failures.

The home page is now much simplified. Search is now predictive and allows for search by item and form numbers.  The search results are very clean with an easy to use “add to submittal” feature

Mobile First

It’s a Philosophy of designing for mobile interfaces first and then for more rich interface, add to it.

Data

They built a set of customized dashboards to get actionable insights using Site Catalyst.  It allowed for more detailed dashboards to see what was working and what was not.   They could view by market (Mexico vs USA) and by a lot of other filters.

Structure that Scales

They started with the simple stuff like templates and web analytics and move on to features like countries, languages, intranet.

• Consistent branding across the world. May change colors but other features in the theme remain the same
• Developer a product wizard to create a uniform product page that fits that structure that scales mantra
• Pulled in 10,000 digital assets localized through the tag manager
• Wanted to use Adobe Cloud for intranet and campaign
• Intranet
  • Unified security
  • Reuse of the tool
  • Social connections and commenting on articles
  • Team publishing and collaboration
• Support for microsites like Team USA that went live during the Sochi Olympics

Getting It Done

• Multi-phase plans
• Agile appraoch
• Parallel development teams
• 7 total iterations over 12 months
• Rebranding with the Olympics
• Included changes to design based on market changes

Results

• 153% increase in useage
• exit rate down by 5%
• 15% increase in return to site
• 16% increase in product page views
• 76% more page views
• 13% decrease in home page bounce rate

USG now has a a rocket ship prepped for future changes with a great view on the digital experience of their users.