John Mellor, VP Strategy at Adobe, kicked off Adobe Summit day 2. The theme of day 2 is about personal reinvention because products are only one part of the reinvention journey. A big part of reinvention is about the people and the culture. Marketers have an overwhelming optimism about the reinvention of marketing and how it affects them personally. The top three emotions cited were excited, optimistic and encouraged.
Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson, both expert climbers spoke about how they overcame impossible challenges. They did a free-climb of the 3,000 foot Dawn wall at El Capitan where they climbed with only their hands and feet.
Kevin Jorgeson doing the impossible
On a scale of 1-10, they described the climb as an 11. Others have described this as the toughest climb in the world.
It took the pair several years of repelling down the wall to figure out how to climb back up. In total, it took 18 days to make the actual climb.
Kevin and Tommy talked about having to let go off his disbelief in being able to make the moves and just doing it. At one point, Kevin was stuck for 8 days trying to get past one point in the climb. He had to have laser focus on the task, resolve that he could do it, and the patience to wait for the right conditions.
Both Kevin and Tommy are taking their inspirational message out to others to help them overcome challenges.
The next topic for the morning is about organizational change. Todd Copeland, National Australian Bank and Rob Roy, Time Warner spoke about how they tackled organizational change. Time Warner focused on always connected consumers and mobile access. The organization had to change their thinking to keep up with this challenge. They had to focus on getting the teams to work together and eliminate silos.
Time Warner looks at customer satisfaction as the true ROI for their efforts. They measure a lot of KPIs, but customer sat is the most important KPI to them. TW also uses a lot of data to tell the story of how they are doing rather than just anecdotally. Rob valued people with multiple skills who could take on several different tasks.
Todd talked about bringing customer service, marketing, IT and product teams together in a very agile way. They create smaller sprint teams to execute fast and focus on the outcome and not the process. Along the way they had to change the culture and mindset of the overall bank. They have gone down the path of “less powerpoint and more prototypes.”
Neither looked at themselves as product managers, but instead used the term customer experience manager. It’s about the total experience and not about specific products.
Our third topic was about maintaining your values in a new digital world. Sarah Gormley CMO at the Girl Scouts
Girl Scouts
gave her perspective on this topic. The Girl Scouts have been recognized lately for their digital efforts. They launched Digital Cookie in December as a layer on top of the traditional cookie marketing efforts. Girl Scouts Cookies are just one experience for girl scouts, so the organization has to support all of the experiences.
Girl Scouts is really a federation of organizations, so change is more difficult across the entire organization. Their digital transformation efforts were targeted towards letting volunteers spend more time with the girls. So they spent a lot of time to reduce paperwork, consolidate web sites and more.
Sarah is trying to get more entrepreneurial to elevate how the non-profit can promote their vision and mission. From a talent view point, she is keen on getting the right marketing staff and align themselves with the right technology partners.
As a treat, Adobe bought a box of cookies for every attendee at the conference. What a treat for us and for the Girl Scouts.
