Reimagine the creative work journey with Adobe Workfront + dentsu
As the demand for personalization escalates, the demand for content does too. Companies need to inspire people to engage with their goods and services. But not with just any content — creative work must be enlightened by context, consistent across an exploding number of channels, and delivered at the precise moment the customer needs it.
That’s a lot to ask of teams working from multiple locations and in fragmented systems, managing work with disconnected tools like spreadsheets and emails. It gets difficult for marketing teams, agencies, project managers, and creative professionals to stay aligned and on strategy.
Who’s working on the project? What’s the brief look like? What’s the status? Is this the final approved asset? Don’t we already have artwork for this campaign somewhere?
Let’s take a break from the chaos and go down a different road.
Your company has invested in Adobe Experience Platform as its data foundation, so you know when an active segment meets the threshold KPIs for activation. Insights show that 2,500 customers searched for “blue hoodies” in July. The product manager checks inventory in your Magento commerce platform and finds 20,000 blue hoodies in various sizes available for purchase in New York City.
To capitalize on these insights and extra inventory, your marketing manager kickstarts a search and banner ad campaign project using Adobe Workfront. She gets immediate visibility into availability and can assign the right people to the job.
Adobe Experience Manager then serves up 20 lifestyle images set in NYC to the creatives tasked with content creation. With support from Adobe Analytics, creatives can even see how well past assets have performed. And they can stay in the creative tools of their choice to comment on, update, and approve assets.
Meanwhile, everyone involved can see how many tasks have been completed, what’s in progress, and what’s up next, all from a single platform.
It’s the brainchild of an Adobe and dentsu partnership. And it’s called Content Symphony.
Made for creatives, by creatives
A global group of creative, media, and customer experience agencies, dentsu connects brands with the solutions they need to keep growing and creating. But they noticed one solution that was missing — a singular platform that could help companies navigate the content creation and delivery process from start to finish.
So, they joined forces with Adobe Workfront to develop Content Symphony, a global creative production management platform that integrates Adobe solutions into one easy-to-use interface. In this capacity, Content Symphony, acts as a cross-cloud solution that plugs into Creative Cloud, Document Cloud, and Experience Cloud so that communication and creativity happen all in one place.
“In this platform, we’re allowing people to understand their task, know why they’re working on it, what are the insights, get access to the creative brief, get inspiration, talk to their peers, and really create assets that will be usable for personalization.”
— Deepak Narisety, VP of Experience Technology, dentsu/Merkle
One click to action
Built on Adobe I/O’s Project Firefly and leveraging Adobe Workfront API’s Content Symphony ties the creative work journey together by connecting solutions in the Adobe ecosystem, making it faster and easier to create content to scale with one-click actions. One-click actions are presented at the right time during the production process in an intuitive way so the user doesn’t have to be confused, but they are provided the right motivation to move a project or task forward.
Adobe Experience Platform captures and consolidates customer data in real time, so creatives know exactly who they’re creating for. Adobe Experience Manager makes it easy to manage marketing content and assets, so creatives don’t waste time searching for or recreating existing content. And Adobe Analytics keeps creatives connected to data insights, so they can see the impact of their work.
“If you take out the noise in the production, the amount of time it takes to create something, there’s a lot of churn. If you reduce the churn, you can create more content,” said Narisety, VP of experience technology at Merkle, a dentsu agency that helps brands achieve customer experience transformation.
The platform integrates with Adobe ID. From one convenient dashboard, team members get access to all relevant information and resources. This includes all the necessary files, a description of tasks, inspiration boards, brand assets, stock images, project examples, copy, wireframes, fonts, and creative briefs. It even includes a personal calendar to help prioritize projects according to timelines.
Content Symphony is also fully integrated with Adobe Creative Cloud, Experience Cloud, and Document Cloud, so creatives and stakeholders can comment on, get feedback, make updates, and approve assets in the most efficient and speediest way possible. Teamscan make sure assets are tagged properly, have the right filters, and meet the needs of the creative brief and segmentation analytics before publishing in various formats across multiple platforms — mobile, web, app, or social. And Adobe’s open APIs make it possible for Content Symphony to also integrate third-party solutions into the ecosystem.
The dentsu Workfront timesheet solution
The creative minds at dentsu took the best of Workfront — flexible configuration, integration with other core platforms, and automation and data provisioning features — to take the chaos out of the creative process. They even found a way to make sure projects could be measured against a time-recording tool to help improve business management.
In 2020, dentsu reviewed its approach to tracking time and activity globally and saw room for improvement. As many as 25 percent of their specialists weren’t tracking billable time. They needed to restructure how they captured billable hours to have better eyes on productivity and profitability.
Between March and July, they designed and deployed a timesheet solution to record billable time using Workfront. And by December 2020, over 7,500 dentsu employees were onboarded to the Workfront timesheet solution, which has since tracked over 56,000 projects and 7 million hours and counting.
Content Symphony and the Workfront timesheet solution are just the beginning. As the digital landscape continues to transform, they’ll be even more call for content to support personalized and relevant customer experiences. And we have no doubt more innovation from a dentsu/Adobe collaboration will follow. In the meantime, keep a lookout for Content Symphony, set to launch in the first quarter of 2022.
Check out Deepak Narisety’s Adobe Max session, where he demonstrates how Content Symphony can help organizations deliver personalized content at scale.