[Music] [Will Rochfort] Hello, everybody. Welcome. Today, we're going to talk about Content Revolution. God bless you, the people in the front row. I need you to sit there. We are going to have some audience participation today, so please, when we ask for it, it's not like we're going to bring you up here and JK is going to hypnotize you or anything. It's some very basic bits. You can see Port Julie in the front row. It's like, why did I sit in the front row? It's very good to see you. Thank you for coming out. Do you remember meeting me? No? This is very awkward. Julie from Chile. Right? Yeah. We were on a Zoom call six months ago. Didn't you work at REI, like, you're from Seattle? Yeah? Why are you looking at me like you're so puzzled? Where are you from? All right. I'm sorry, Julie. We've never met before. I just looked you up on LinkedIn because I was looking for somebody to engage with in the front row. It's very nice to meet you. We're going to talk about Content Personalization later today. This is a really good example of where you don't want to maybe show that you know someone a little bit too well. Port Julie's heart's palpitating. Just like, I've never met this man before. Was it cruel? I'm sorry, Julie. I owe you a lot. I'm not even sure what it is. So we will ask for some participation. Julie is going to be the only person I will have called on all day, so don't worry, I won't do it to anybody else.
All right. What is wrong with these images? GenAI made this, you could say we put in the prompt of a modern tent pitched in the Grand Canyon. Now I feel bad about knowing that Julie works at REI because she might have, or used to work, so she might have known the answer. What's wrong with this? Somebody give me a guess.
There are no humans. Yes, that's right. You want to have humans sleeping in a tent. What else in the back? Yeah. The horizon line's looking a little like someone tried really hard. Anything else? Yes, sir.
Pretty much, yeah, that's-- The Grand Canyon is a pretty big hole in the ground. You think you could choose maybe a couple of different backdrops. So that's all true. And what else you might not know is it's actually illegal to camp anywhere with that view.
Oh, really? If you want to have something close to this, you can go to the Tanner Trail. It's a very beautiful hike. It's on the eastern side of the Grand Canyon. But if you want to camp on the edge with that view, that is illegal, which is a pretty a thing to be frowned upon to run that. The other thing that you can't probably quite tell is does anybody here do alpine mountaineering? I'm asking this in Miami. I recognize it's a dumb question. That's fine. These are all single wall tents. So me as a product expert, I look at this and I say, "Well, I can tell by that clip design that you would never put a single wall tent 7,200 feet up on the south rim of the Grand Canyon." That was a really poor choice for product selection. But GenAI doesn't know that yet. And the point of this is you need to have humans involved to understand the context with which you're using it. Let's do a second one. Let's say you get the product bit right. [Jenny Kelly] All right. So we're going to start this one. You're a product company. You're launching a new hiking boot. What is wrong with this image? No socks.
Would be very painful. Good one.
Anything else stand out? Yes. Maybe back.
Well, it could be. - They look like you could hike in them. - That's a good question. People hike in some questionable boots.
They're very clean. Yeah, a few good points. You probably want them to actually look used and like they're actually hiking boots. But it was a little bit of a trick question because there's not necessarily anything really wrong about it. The interesting insight is that most companies are not using GenAI to generate product images. Right? Doesn't matter. All the training that you put into the model, the indemnification that's out there, you're going to be a little concerned about a model that's trained that then is generating some product image that you put out into the public. So the better case, the better use case is they are going to start shooting differently. They're going to think to how they shoot their products or use 3D to now visualize their products, and then use GenAI to create the environment around them.
So this one, I'm not going to ask you what's wrong with this image. I think it's pretty clear.
And to be fair, I pulled this from when GenAI first came out. So I thought, let me try this in Firefly. And gosh, I did this look so much better. Such an improved quality.
But I did cheat a little. I actually said fillet salmon in the river because Firefly got it right. GenAI has come far enough that when I said salmon swimming in the river, it gets more accurate. And I did have to check with fishing experts to make sure that these actually were salmon and this was accurate. So we specifically pulled some examples, by the way, that don't include humans. I know someone said that earlier. And then we weren't specifically pulling here's what you would have in your marketing campaign because it's more that we wanted to make some points on how people are using it. And things on this one, for example, like the power of how you prompt and how you type it in and the importance of having a human in the loop. And what does that look like when you know the right use cases within your company for how you use GenAI, and then you have the knowledge of the tools that you know how to execute them.
All right. Last one. We don't have any alpine mountaineers. Anybody downhill mountain bike? Seriously, not a single human in here? Holy cow. All right. Well, downhill mountain bike is like biking. Olivier, thank you. There's one. God bless you. Traveled all the way from Europe to be the sole mountain biker in the Miami conference. - Just explain the gray square. - Yes. Indeed. So we obstructed whose campaign this was because that's not the point of this picture. The point is to focus on the talent here. Can anybody tell what is wrong with this photo? But the fact there are no bikers, actually, this may be really difficult. All right. Let's zoom in a little bit, maybe this will help. Anything standing out? Yeah, the footwear. You're getting close.
So I have my $70,000 car in the background. I've got-- Yeah. What do you got? I love it. You can barely make it around the cul-de-sac in this thing. But don't worry. You've got the kickstand on your $200 Huffy, next to your $70,000 vehicle in the previous photo. So yeah, this is something that stands out. Now when I showed JK this photo, what was your reaction when I first showed it to you? - What's wrong? - I had no idea. And when I told you what was wrong, what was your reaction? - Well, it made sense, the kickstand. - That was nice of you. Your first reaction was, "Who cares?" - Might have been right. - Okay. Fair. The mountain bike community cared. But the reason we shared this story, welcome, everybody. You have to sit at the very front if you come more than five minutes late. That is a rule that we just imposed. Everyone's like, "Don't look at them." The point is not what the market's reaction was. The point of this is this was not GenAI. This was a fully funded shoot. A bunch of people approved this. There are people on set who approved it. God bless that poor guy who has talent and who's probably like, "I would never ride this, but you need someone who can balance on two wheels long enough for this shot." We, as humans have accepted a degree of, "It's okay if there's a mistake when it comes to humans being in the system." We still like to crow when GenAI gets it wrong. But that's going to change very soon whether the market demands it, we just become inured to it. That is going to shift. We're probably not quite there just yet. So we had some research that talked about interesting stats on how consumers react when they know that GenAI is being used in marketing materials. And it led to about 60% of consumers. It led to a decrease in trust when they knew that it was being used. Now we have additional stats that show, and this can be hard to exactly quantify, but if that you are already a brand that's trusted in the market or even a sector that's trusted, people will trust more when you use GenAI because they assume that you're only going to use it responsibly. So those ones go hand in hand. So the two points that we want you to think about is that there's not a blind recommendation to engage in GenAI and to use it in your business. It's that there is a right way to do it. You need to know your brand. You need to know the right use cases, and you need to know your consumer base when you do it. And then the last part is when you're tying this, it's the human plus the tech that brings the power in how you do these together.
All right. Intros. Yes, that is me. There's somebody pointing over there. You're like, "Who is that guy on screen?" That is me. That's the same human.
I love using this photo for two reasons. One, I am not all waistcoats and neckties, but also if I could be doing anything with my professional life day in and day out, this would be it. God, I have the prompt of asking people if anybody here backcountry skis, but it feels like you've got to ask that question. - Probably, a no. - One backcountry skier. How do you explain backcountry skiing? Yes. That is indeed the punch line. - Fearless No chairless. - Oh. - I thought-- - You say fearless? I thought he said fearless. I mean, there's also some truth in there. No chairless. So backcountry skiing, if you don't know what it is, you put mohair underneath your skis, and you can ski uphill. I know some of you are thinking modern technology has solved this. If you give someone money, there is a chair that will carry you up the hill. That is true. But this is out of the shoot at a 10th Mountain Division hut in Colorado. 10th Mountain Division hut is our big backcountry hut system. And we're doing a new product shoot for some gear that's coming out the next year and they were photographing and filming and writing about what had won. And the day before, I had carried a poke slide for 80 pounds of production gear. So we had, like this was a while ago. We had our M10 and our FS7 and all this gear carted up to the hut, and then we didn't get there till about two in the morning. We had to set up at sunrise the next morning. The other photographer is on the shoot with me. I'll never forget. He's like, "Hey, Will, just look at me really quickly." And I looked up at Andrew. I was so mad at him because we were out here prepping when we should have been doing it the night before. And he captured this photo and now it's my favorite headshot to use.
I tell this story because I want people to understand as we're working through content supply chain today and talking about big transformations in GenAI and big technology, which are things that I care about. The perspective that I bring and JK brings as well, also coming from a back, her background is we care just as much about the people who are being transformed as the transformation itself. We want to bring that perspective of when we're advocating for things like figure out how to work GenAI into your workflow, it's not just because we believe in the tools, it's because we're the people who use them and care immensely about figuring out how to do that in a way that makes space for people who do the making, not just make space to make more.
So when GenAI came out, I did probably what most of you did, I'm assuming, is I took the pictures of myself five sample images, uploaded it, and decided what GenAI was going to say, what I should look like, or maybe the better version of me. And this is what I got.
I will note, I did not ask what do I look like as a male. That was not a prompt. So I tried it again. Another fun fact you'll learn about me, my left eye actually does not go left. And somehow so I apologize for those of you on this side. Somehow it picked up this nuance and I-- This is what I actually look like just with a few more tattoos. So I run our content practice at Deloitte Digital, and we talk about content supply chain. And then, of course, what the tie in is to GenAI, innovation, automation, and how that's impacting all of our clients. So the topic of this is does the rise of GenAI mean the decline of creativity? Jumping to the lead, of course, it doesn't. But there are some important things that we want to answer a part of this session. So first, we're going to share our perspective on what creatives have that everyone else doesn't that makes them next gen leaders. Second, how do you take that superpower, apply it to current market conditions so that you can become a next gen leader? And then finally, we'll look at opportunities across the content supply chain for brands to infuse innovation and keep up with the next gen creatives.
All right. Act 1. What do creatives have that everybody else does not? Does anybody know this quote? And I'll read it. The whole key lies very specifically in seeing into the mind's eye, which we call visualization. And the image has to be there clearly and decisively. And if you have enough craft between your own work and practice, you can create the image you desire. Does anybody have a clue who said this? I heard Steve Jobs in some made up name. - What was the other-- - No, ChatGPT. Y'all, what a-- Real sad. No, it's a real human. He's no longer alive. Your aunt and uncle will probably have one of those black and white photos hanging over their fireplace somewhere. - Ansel Adams. - Yes. - Nice. - Nice. Thank you. Ansel Adams. So Ansel Adams, this was the first book that he published back in 1935, nearly 100 years ago, where he first introduced this idea of visualization. And the reason it was important at the time, photography as a tool was thought of as a recording device. You could have seen that very famous photo of the horse running, you know, that was one of the early things to establish what photography could be good for. The idea of photography as fine art was almost unheard of. So Ansel Adams was in the vanguard of photographers who are trying to get people to think this way and the story he told around visualization, which opened up his entire-- If you've read his books on the camera and the negative, the very beginning of it before he even talks about camera operations, about the importance of visualization. Because the point that he wanted to make is for the photographers who can visualize the image before it exists, those are the ones who are the creators. We have people who are using this recording device, that's excellent, but to have the technical mastery to visualize something before it exists and then create that image and then share it as fine art, that's the distinction he wanted to make. And this is what creatives have that others do not, the ability to visualize. This is your gift and what makes a substantial difference when you think about what is the role that I can play in this world of GenAI.
And you've seen this play out before because when most people use GenAI, they ask themselves, "Do I like what it made?" And they'll enter some more prompts.
- Great. - That's okay. JK is in control of the clicker. I'm not allowed to touch it, which is probably a good rule.
They play with the prompts. They try and test it a little bit more. They get a little bit of the two of my favorite pieces of creative feedback, either make it more organic or make it more cinematic. Has anybody ever received either one of those? Oh, there's some very sad smiles in the room. That's enough. You don't need to raise your hand. That's okay. And you just keep on messing with that prompt hoping that it's going to give you what you hope is going to be something that you like. The difference with creatives is when creatives use GenAI, they ask themselves, "Did it make what I wanted?" This is the distinction. This gift of being able to create something in your mind's eye before it exists, that's why you can use GenAI to do things that other people cannot. It's what makes you special in this particularly current market and you're thinking about why am I someone who can lean into this, what is special about me, is your gift for visualization.
And that gift for visualization and then connect it to something of larger business value, that's what gives purpose creativity. I'm sorry, gives purpose to creativity.
When you're thinking about where does then this gift translate to something that a business is going to care about, the importance of purpose in your creativity, that's what connects with an audience. And I'll give a real practical story about this. I was on a shoot, it was 10 years ago now. I don't know. We're in Tasmania. By the way, if you guys have not been to Tasmania, incredible place. The tourism board flew us down there to do some photography, do some filmmaking, write some stories about why you should go visit it. And if you know anything about history, you know that Australia is a penal colony for England. Well, Tasmania was the penal colony for Australia, so it's this really cool rugged outlaw vibe that still exists today. Or maybe I just wrote the narrative while I was there, but it felt like it.
And we're on this shoot, and it's the first leg, it was this four day hike, and one of the seconds I was with had just procured his first Kessler Pocket Dolly, which is like getting the slider was a huge thing for him in his life. So he adds his, I don't know, whatever. It's like a 40 pound weight dolly to the side of his pack. We're hiking literally through bogs, where you hike through a bog, you come out to dry land, you take off whatever you're wearing on the bottom half of your body and you pull leeches off one by one, which was really comfortable. Eventually, you had to do it for your friends, which is even more comfortable. And Ben, while hiking through water, carried this extra 30 to 40 pound weight just so he could set up a couple of shots. He's like, "I'm going to get the slider shot." And we stopped the entire trip so the media team could get down. He kneels down. He's like, "Look at the way this thing slides behind this." It might have been a eucalyptus tree. I'm not sure. And he loved it so much and it was beautiful 'cause that parallax of the roots of the tree really close to the frame and the people hiking in the background was incredible, but it had no story.
The slide didn't reveal anything. He was just excited to use his new toy. And when I see people working with Jenny are right now, they're like, "Ben with the new toy." This thing's incredible. Look at this thing that I never would have thought of. I wouldn't have thought of putting a rocket ship in a circle, but I did. It's amazing. And what I think creatives can do to progress how we think of this is you can visualize the way that you want it to be used. That is your power, that gives it purpose, and when you have purpose, that connects with an audience, and when you connect with an audience, that creates conversion, creates attraction, creates loyalty, and that's what businesses need to survive.
That is what's actually at stake. Your ability to-- I'm sorry? Can I say it again? I have a really important rule that if I say something smart, I can't say it twice. It's so-- You know what? I will try later. What is your name? [Ivan] Ivan. Ivan, I will find you after this and do my best to deliver it twice. You can record wherever you like. Just make sure I look moderately intelligent.
This is what's at stake, that ability to take your gift for visualization, connect it to purpose, connect it to audience, and connect it to what businesses need to survive.
So the question is, how can I use GenAI to help me to make what I want? So I'm going to share a real life client example with a use case. So we did what we advised when we started this session. We sat down and said, "What is a business problem that you have that can be solved by GenAI? And we picked a pain point that was around product innovation visualization. So the CPG Company that is right now, they would ideate on all of these hundreds of different products, narrow down the list, and then send it out to be visualized on what the product looked like. And, the use case that we're testing with them is how can they take those ideas and use GenAI to be their visualization partner as they go through that journey. So I decided to build a-- We would have done this live, but they recommended that we do it. But you'll get the live feel because you're literally going to watch me type. I just did a screen recording. And I know that this exists already. Just bear with me. This is in the Alaska lounge. My kids love the pancake maker that you can click, but we'll walk through what it looks like a device that mixes and pours pancake batter. My first go was a little rough. There was no pouring. It was a very messy mixer. It didn't really get what I wanted so I changed it. I wanted it to be enclosed. Change the device, mix it, and then has a feature to pour the batter into a cooking pan. And this was my next live result. And I thought, "Well, I'm getting a little bit closer to what I want." Imagine that I'm the product innovation team, by the way, getting to experience how this looks. You see a long pause here because I did sit and stare at my screen, and I thought, "How can I write this better to get what I want?" And so I thought about it for a little while, and I decided, this was my next take. So I thought it should be stainless steel. That's what we all want in our kitchen. It has one part where it mixes the pancake batter, and then another part where it moves to cook it. And I wrote, "Cookies, pancakes." I meant cooks. But you know what? It still got it right. And I was pretty impressed with the way that this one turned out. It looks like that machine on the bottom left or the bottom right, was a pretty good tool that if I made a lot of pancakes, I wouldn't mind clicking a button and having this show up. But the whole point is when we talked with the whole-- They had their whole product invitation team in the room. I did this live with them. Not this example, but we took one of their examples. And while I was on the phone with them, typed it into Firefly. We laughed because some of the first things were just as awkward as this one, probably more awkward. But the whole point is that not only was the business exploring what was possible, they were bringing their whole team along the journey with them where they could see the future of them using it. Not that it was impacting their job, it was empowering them and making it something that they were excited to use.
So let's shift to the next section, which is how to be a leader then in the creative, in the GenAI space. So as Will's talked about, if your superpower is visualization how can you use your superpower for good? In 2023, we surveyed around 650 or more marketing organizations and talked to them about how are they thinking about GenAI, what do they think about the future of content, what are they using in their business. And, this was one of the-- I haven't told you what it is yet, but this is one of the interesting insights, which won't be surprising to anyone, which is that from the previous year, the demand for content was up 54%, that they had just seen that from 2022 to 2023. We just got the results two weeks ago. We haven't even officially published this report on how people said, "Okay, in 2024, what are you seeing?" And now they are saying it is 93% up from the previous year. This is a huge. I'm sure everyone is experiencing this in your business. We are the huge demand for content. And then the other interesting follow-up is that they felt like they could only meet the demand about 63% of the time. And I want to add a caveat to this which is, were they just meeting the demand or did they actually have effective content? Were they actually engaging with their consumers the way that they want to be engaged with? Or was it we got the volume out, we had a mandate to get out on the channels, and even some were still struggling to meet that demand? Excuse me. So we'll touch on that later. We're going to talk a little bit about effective content. So this is a screenshot of our 2023 report. The 2024 report's coming out soon. But one of the things that ties to the increase in demand is also a question on how brands are meeting the demand. And the instinct is to add more people. And we actually did see that in this year's result was a little bit more responsive. Well, we're outsourcing more. We can't meet the demand so we're having to bring in extra. They're trying GenAI. They're trying some things. But overall, when we advise brands, we know that there's a better way to actually get to this sustainable growth.
And that is moving the point of leverage to get more done, much like you see these workers here. I just like that they're actually using the physics of how they get stuff done. So for us in our jobs, it's the same thing. What does innovation look like in our field? Whether you're using automation, which we're actually seeing a huge increase in, even over GenAI, the more brands are going. I don't know if we're ready for it yet, but we know that we can be doing automation already. Regular AI, it's brought attention back to that. And then, of course, GenAI, where there are select use cases to be able to doing it.
I like that you can tell a lot about our formative years by the examples that we pulled. Those of you who don't know JK, she used to own a restaurant. So the fact that I chose skiing and she chose pancake batter mixing, that's a lot. Do you have any inspiring advice, by the way, if anybody wants to open a restaurant? I don't.
See me after. I'll tell you more. All right. So where do we start with moving the point of leverage? Has anybody in here ever received a crap brief? - It's a yes. - Yeah. The question of laughter kind of said everything. Or no brief at all. If I had to choose any one thing to predict the effectiveness of content, campaign, anything around it, it's how good is your brief? So a year ago when we were sitting around trying to figure out what can we develop in terms of our own proprietary gender ad tools, JK and I were talking, I was like, "This is the thing that gives me the most pain is our junk breach." She's like, "Well, why don't we figure out how to automate pieces of that?" So this really quick video clip, and when I say really quick, it's like four seconds. This gives you an idea of what this is, but I wonder what I want you to take away is it was not a complicated thing to build.
It's very simple, but it gives consistency and efficiency. And consistency and efficiency, especially when it comes to the briefing process, especially if you're going to make content at scale, it's one of the biggest changes we can implement. And why I get so excited about this because if I could just get decent briefs inbound, I'm way more excited about what I'm going to make and moderately optimistic I'm going to get less requests like make it more organic. And were you telling me that Workfront just rolled? Yeah. Great. So those of you who are working in Workfront, this just came out, jump in there and start using it. Develop the muscle memory, be the person in your organization, like, "Hey, I know this is a new thing that we can do." Just figure it out and give it a go because I guarantee you there are a majority of humans where you work or with your clients who just want somebody to figure it out. And if you're the person who can be that role, if you're the creative that understands how to visualize and understands how to use technology like this, that's incredibly, incredibly important for your careers and the perspective it will give you and the reputation it will give you will be incredibly positive.
All right. So if you want to be the next gen creative leader, embrace the maker manager mentality, what does this mean? So this term came about when I talked with one of my buddies who used to work at Google and then he went to a startup like it feels like it's a very consistent path. And he was talking about from the coding side what GenAI means for him. He's like, "Well, look at this. It used to take me forever to code this app together and now I can do it in a matter of hours." It's unreal. So we talked about that, we talked about the perspective for our world and I don't know takeaways is the right word. The conclusion that we came to is this idea of a maker manager mentality and the thought is that, with AI treat it like you can instantly increase your own head count of your team. AI basically allows you to manufacture intelligence anywhere just like 130 years ago when we created mechanical torque and all of a sudden you could put mechanical torque anywhere, that created substantial change in the way we operate as a society. GenAI can do, is doing the same thing. So this perspective of when you're thinking about working with your tools, this perspective of I can be a manager of these tools and I can use it to increase headcount, take that mentality to all these new tools that are here. Don't just treat them like this thing that's on the side. How would you actually use that to make it feel like you're increasing your own immediate workforce? This, of course, is not just about making more. It feels like we're talking about how do you keep up with the more demands for content. Even in the world of AI, what is still true, undoubtedly, it's not your ability to make more, it's your ability to understand what customers want and bring that to them. If you can make more of it, that's great. But making more alone is not nearly relevant enough. So that's the business perspective but I think personally there's a reason that I care immensely about this. I, of course, care about business success. But for also the creatives that I work with in my creative career, why do I care about this? This next slide has a quote that I really enjoy from Atomic Habits, great book if you haven't read it. I am not paid by James to say that.
And there's a quote in there that says, "The secret of creative work is to make a lot and publish a little. Make 100 things, discard 90, share the 10 best. Create, create, create. Edit, edit, edit." And I've been trying to put my finger on what is getting taken away over the past 10 years when it comes to how much we're making.
And this made it so crystal clear for me. We've lost our ability to enjoy the nonlinear part of the creative process. When we're working with teams, like half the time, I swear our first guest has to be our best one. We don't get a chance to ideate, we don't get a chance to rough draft, and that does work enough of the time but honestly, it's fairly unsatisfying. I know that it's not our best work. So when you think about this maker manager mentality and what GenAI tools do, what it's done for me immediately is create more time for doing creating. And the easy example, this is object selection by the way. I was trying to explain to my seven-year-old, how we used to select objects back in the day, and I'm like, "You'd zoom all the way in till you could see the pixels and dot by dot, you would click." And then zoom back out and be like, "Oh, my God, it's someone with frizzy hair. I'm never going to edit this photo." Object selection now like the speed at which you can edit and spend time on editing that's grading or something a lot more grading with a D, not with a T. Grading is something more interesting and substantially different, that is what AI has given us, this ability to create more and publish less.
So to summarize act two here...
Part one, work with your business to move the point of leverage. I mean highlight work with your business because figuring out how to go to your business and identify the problem, like the brief example that I gave. And say I know that there's a tool out here. Can we figure out how to get it through whatever amount of red tape may exist at your business? Some may have more red tape than others. But figuring out how to help hustle it through and be seen as the person who can help move that point of leverage so you can create innovation and make more without adding more people, be that person to be the next gen creative. And then part two, embrace the role of the maker manager and the tools that come with it. Become the expert in those tools.
I would be remiss to not talk about an obvious point here, one that sticks out with me personally and deeply.
When you think about using AI, it may feel like you're trying to sail between the Scylla and Charybdis, where on one side, you-- Go ahead.
One of JK's favorite pastimes is to judge by use of language.
So anybody other than Olivier? 'Cause I think you know this because you use. Does anybody know what Scylla and Charybdis is? This guy's got an answer to every question. One.
Wow. That was way more description. I just read Percy Jackson to my daughter, so I got a bit of a refresher recently. So yes, it is from mythology, and it's basically two horrible things on either side. You try and sail between them. So when you're trying to resolve this feeling of on one hand, it's like make more, make it cheaper, make it faster, make more again and the other side, like I would like to retain a small percentage of my creative soul and the reason that I enjoy coming to work every day.
I get that that's a challenge. But what I think is true and I think JK thinks this as well because we talked about it a lot, you are not going to lose your job to AI.
You're going to lose your job to people who know how to use it.
Figure out how to be those people because there's going to get to a point real, real soon where and we're in a window by the way, this time hasn't passed us, but I do think that coming up soon. You're either going to have to write your own narrative or it's going to be written for you.
Figure out how to embrace that role of the maker and manager. Figure out how to work with the business and be that hero that's figured out how to bring GenAI.
That's going to work out really well for you.
All right. Chapter three of three, in case you're tracking how much we have left. So after you've done this, we focus on the world of creatives and visualization. But after that, as a business, you need to know how to take those next gen creatives and have a next gen content supply chain that can support it, keep up with it, really.
So we believe that we are in a content revolution. And we call it a revolution because the speed of change happening right now means that evolution is just not enough.
We're seeing change in demand of content. We're seeing a change in innovation that is skyrocketing how we deal with that. And as brands, you really have to embrace what this looks like for you. So when we think about what this revolution looks like, this also shouldn't be new, is here is the life cycle. It starts with strategy and planning. You need to figure out what your creative acceleration looks like. How do you then produce and make all the content? The review approval and publication of the content, and then sometimes the last step, which is often missed, is the optimization and measurement. And if I drew this the right way, I would have that arrow instead of going off the page, just pretend it loops all the way back and starts the cycle over again because it really is a life cycle. So if you are looking at a real revolution, you have to actually ask yourselves, where do you start? What's the right place? How do you look across this, what feels like a very overwhelming space in content, and decide how can I create sustained growth? How can I make change within my business? What does good look like? So there is a ton of opportunities. When we work with brands, there's so many places where you can start. I'm just going to call out a few because it just it depends on where you're at with your people, with your tech. Some people come and say, "I'm ready to start with GenAI." And we realize, "Well, you're not managing your data correctly yet. Can we start their first?" So often there's a lot of readiness that needs to happen before they can really get the benefit of GenAI. So knowing your business, knowing the maturity of where it is, and getting that foundation right is key before you even get started. So for those that are employing it, we do have some stats to share. But on average, those using it at scale are saving 11 hours, more than 11 hours per person when they're utilizing GenAI.
And by the way, that goes across use cases. A lot of the responses were in the strategy and planning and then the execution of content, which we're seeing as the quickest, most common use cases right now. A 67% decrease in time spent on manual tasks. This one's really common, very easy use case, touch up, background removal. We've heard a lot of exciting innovation coming from Adobe. A lot of these are tasks that should be able to be incorporated into your production with minimal risk to your business. And then lastly, I think, yeah, I'm going to show you a video on this in a little bit. My very favorite use case right now for GenAI is content review and approval, and we'll talk about that when I have a video coming up. But the point is there is opportunities and it's not just for time saved or cost efficiencies. Some people want it because it's higher quality. Its data informed driven. It's enhancing what they're doing in their jobs. There's a lot of different reasons and benefits that they feel like they're going to get from that. Overall, when companies feel like they're using it, this is what they're reporting, an average of 13%. There was maybe a third of companies that reported closer to 20% of return on investment when they were employing GenAI as part of their work.
So hitting on what we talked a lot a bit earlier, there's been a shift in how brands are thinking about how they measure the effectiveness. When we did this report last year, previously they focused on brand awareness, ROI, and cost reduction. Those were the top three by far beating out any of them. It was interesting this year to see a shift more towards these four, a focus on engagement rate, cost reduction were the highest, number of qualified leads, and conversion rate. So we saw a decrease for things like brand awareness. It was a really interesting shift of what we're seeing from the data.
So with all of those and all the content supply chain, let's talk through what some of those quick wins are that we're seeing people get started. So I talked about my favorite use case. Content review, I think, is a really exciting one because it doesn't matter if, from our examples, if a human made it or if GenAI made it. You can now use GenAI to review whatever content you're putting out in the market, email, text, your website, and have that be a data informs tool that makes your content better. It can check brand guidelines and tone. It can check trend resilience. It can check legal guidelines, like we have a financial services company we're working with that any email with a credit card offer that goes out, it writes, it scans it, and it writes the legalese at the bottom. Right? Those kind of accelerators to our business that then is also making the approval go faster through their business. So just like our other clips, this is also a relatively fast video. But the essence is we uploaded a PDF. It gave a score one to five on how it did against brand guidelines and tone. And then GenAI even wrote the categories on where it thought it could improve. So it talked about the hero image, visuals, and copy for the full length demo of this goes into detail. Is there a clear call to action? Is this accessible content? Does someone know how to engage in the content? Do they know what your brand is without your logo? The ability that it can give you to gut check your creative and what's been interesting about this one is creative's response to it. That instead of it being like, I'm a little worried about how this impacts my job, it's been more, this is kind of cool. I have a data informed tool that comes back to me as the creative, and I can decide how I change that output and what that looks like.
Another use case is Asset Booster. This is built on top of AEM assets and allows you to use GenAI to generate metadata. You can do taxonomy. If you have questions on this, Monica and Helen, they're in our front row, can answer more on what this is. But the point is this is a serious pain point for a lot of businesses is how they deal with metadata, content reuse, how to find it. There are quick wins to help solve this problem. And then there is the digital twin. So everyone's heard about digital twins in traditional supply chains, what that looks like. For us, the ability to map out someone's content supply chain and understand the impact to your business before you make any change is kind of amazing. To be able to say, I have a backlog of content. What's the fastest way for me to catch up on that backlog and simulate it before you actually make a change? This is what becomes especially for those of you in companies that have a very high volume, very complex content supply chain, something that starts to become strategic business decision making before you ever make a change.
So these are just a few of the use cases that we're seeing both excitement around GenAI as a use case or brands that are starting to use that really it addresses this increase in content demand that we talked about or the drive to increase quality or how you can get more personalized. But there is a really, really important point here that will start the whole session on when you talk about what level of personalization is the right level of personalization. A quick question that I get asked a lot is can't I just use GenAI now to make all the volume that I want? I have all of this personalization I've been wanting. I've got my data done the right way. Now I'm going to use GenAI to make all the content. And the fastest answer to that is you need to make sure what the right level of personalization is. More does not mean better. If you are not as mature in personalization, you may want to start with just three groups and start there. Because if you get really deep sometimes you don't get the right return on what that investment is and you want to be strategic about how you use it. And the last most important part is don't just think about how you meet demand or that volume of content, focus on how to make your content more effective. Something that brands feel like represents you and that you're showing up in an authentic way. And then make sure that you tie it back to your business goals.
So the storyline reminds me of one of my favorite pieces of advice, which actually I should pause for a second. My guess is we're going to wrap with 10 minutes to spare for Q&A. So if you're the type of person who likes to ask questions, please be ready for that. And you can just holler them or holler the questions out and we'll repeat them while there are mics in the middle. But to give you some context that, yes, if you have questions, we will have some space for them.
This storyline, this is back when I was getting Lean Six Sigma. If you don't know what Lean Six Sigma is, just think of it like an operational efficiency construct. And this guy named Mark who led, one of the offices that dealt with black ops programs. So he was like this 6'2", wiry, retired naval officer, now a naval civilian and he stepped up in the front of the office. And you can picture this guy who was just like he's one of those people who just looked like a special forces operator and had such command and presence. I was like whatever this guy is about to say, this is in 2005, so obviously it stuck with me. Whatever this guy is about to say, it's going to be amazing. And the first thing he says is, there are three kinds of businesses in the world.
The ones who know they're winning, the ones who know they're losing, and the ones who don't know the score.
So when we look at what JK just talked about, if I could give any one singular piece of advice to businesses who are trying to understand how to manage content, make a better scoreboard. We spend ungodly sums on making so much content and forget that back end piece of how do I measure and optimize? If you remember that supply chain wave that JK described and how it's meant to be circular, you could really measure and optimize at every single step. Understanding what your scoreboard is and then using the content to match against those KPIs, against those things that you care about, and then matching the purposeful creative to those objectives that you want, that's the single piece of advice I could give any anyone to an organization who's trying to understand how do we do what's next with content supply chain, it's build a better scoreboard.
Let's go to the next one. All right.
This is a campaign that ran by The North Face, just came out a couple of weeks ago. I'm not going to guess if anybody recognized it. A friend of mine named Sandra Clark, who is our director of global marketing, led the strategy for us. So I was talking with her about it. This campaign is really cool. It's such a different visual identity than North Face normally has, like where did this idea come from? She's like, "Actually, we had some really rich strategy behind it, which I won't get into here, but all of the footage is existing footage." And what really stuck out to me were two things, one that I'd like to believe that if you fed all of TNF or the North Face's brand guidelines into some model and you gave a bunch of the old content, they likely would have never come up with this 'cause this direction and request never existed anywhere. It was something that was new for the campaign. They had not done a manifesto in a while, so they wanted to come up with something that felt different to show it back in the marketplace. By the way, if you guys want a great reference, you should watch Max Your Days. It's like 10 years old, and it's still amazing work. So we're going to roll 30 seconds of this, so you can get a feel for it, and then I'll deconstruct where we could have done things a little bit differently by using some modern technology. [Music] [Woman] Out here. Out here. Out here.
We play different. Out here, we don't play games.
We don't play with whistles, our referees.
[Woman] So sweet. We play with adrenaline. Get up on your feet. And euphoria. # Why with the state that I'm in # Come around and make a move! # Maybe teach ya something... # All right. That's half of it. I couldn't find a good place to cut it, so we cut it there.
The sound design alone is just so sexy. I could listen to it. If in another life, I would be a Foley artist, but unfortunately, that's not my current form of gainful employment.
When talking with Stander, there are a couple of things that really stuck out to me. And the one that you guys probably could guess, anybody who's ever tried to find footage in an archive full of footage, the first one is, how do I find what I want? She was describing the number of hours the team has spent trying to find, there's a clip right before this. It's Alex Honnold from 2015. They're like, we know that clip exists somewhere, but no one can remember where it is, and they finally, of course, found it.
Having I think you shared the asset booster. That was one of the references. Right? Doing better tagging of things in your DAM and your MAM, aside from efficiency, you want to talk about reducing things that cause pain? I don't know if anybody finds immense joy in trying to sift through stock footage or existing content. If I could choose one thing in the post production process to never do again, that would be it, and I would be thrilled.
The second piece is licensing. The track alone, I love this track, had six licensing agreements. I think they had 47 across the entire cut, and they spent so many cycles making sure they got the licensing agreements right. There's a way to automate that as well, in terms of managing and generating the contracts. It's an incredible use case. And the third one is translation. TNF's obviously a global brand. Translation has been a sticking point for a lot of brands in the past.
She said, "It's okay for me to tell this story." The way that they translate is they send it to a local regional manager who's bilingual and say, please take this script and it's a 30, 60 second edit. Can you just give me the local version? Doing that kind of works. It's really hard to do that at scale. So translation and the way you can do that effectively and accurately with AI is pennies on the dollar compared to what it used to be. So your ability to globalize and create that personalized experience is significantly simpler and significantly more cost effective. Those are just three examples that came from one conversation from a campaign there. We play different campaigns that I loved.
And the reason I tell that story is it's very easy to think about, "Okay, well, content of scale stuff, I understand how this applies." This ability to use GenAI and then use it for something that's that, like, tentpole piece of creative that's not going out to a 1000 different people is just as important. And so this final note for chapter three here that creative is the beating heart of an effective content supply chain.
This is to me where if you're going to create something that's effective, you have to have the right creative. And we think about content supply chain as this big long operational thing for me said with significant acknowledged bias, I know.
Creative is the beating heart of that supply chain and why it's so important to get that right because when you take that gift of pre visualization that creators have, you take that gift and you become a next gen creative leader and you create a content supply chain that's a next gen content supply chain to keep up with those next gen creative leaders, that's how all of this connects and then ultimately it creates something that creates connection with your audience. And again, Ivan, that's what's at stake, Connection with your audience. I knew I said it earlier, just couldn't place it again.
All right. So you've come here for the gems. What I mean by the gems, whenever I go to these conferences, I'm just looking for the four or five slides that would sound really, really intelligent and I can take to my creative cocktail party this evening, but look at this new idea I had. So anyone's welcome to take credit for any of these. Please come and talk to us at some point. We'll at least hear about it. But there are four that I want to highlight. The first one is this thought that when most people use GenAI, they ask, "Do I like what it made?" When the creatives use it, they ask, "Did it make what I like?" And this is the difference. The second one, embrace the maker manager mentality. Lean into this, this idea that AI can be a way to put 10, 20, or 30 people in your creative space with you and then use that to buy time back so that you can create more. It's not just about making more to make more. It's about giving you the space to create, create, create. Edit, edit, edit. Make a lot, publish a little.
We're in a content revolution. Use the momentum that's happening with GenAI to make a big change in your business. Focus on how you're doing this internally and bringing your team along, and what this looks like in the market, and how you can really look at how you revolutionize your content supply chain.
And then the most key part, make your content effective. Don't just make more. Being able to make content at high volume is not a challenge. Being able to make good effective content that represents your brand the way you want is.
So as Will said, "We do this because we're passionate about this area. We like these because we want you to come up and talk to us about what this looks like in your business." That's how we all learn from each other, how we all get better. Send us a note. Find us on LinkedIn. Connect. Happy to chat more.
And people ask me what I want to take away from these conferences. And, of course, I love the gems like I said, but really the thing that I'm looking for the most is someone to invest in.
Whether that's a client, someone who's struggling at, in their creative shop trying to figure out how to manage with this transition, that's what I want. I want to find someone to invest in. That's what gives me personal, professional fulfillment. So seriously, send us a note. We will respond. We are real humans. You didn't make one singular Jenny AI joke.
Other fun fact, I get a dad joke at least twice, three times a week on Jenny AI. Jenny AI is my brand. So you did kind of nail the 10 minutes left. If anyone has questions, we will happily answer them.
No? Amazing. Thank you for coming. Appreciate the engagement. We'll be around if anyone wants to talk. Come say hi.
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