[Music] [Monty Hood] Can you believe I used to have to convince companies to have a website? Imagine that. But not this guy. That's my grandfather on the right. He's the one smiling and getting a check. In 1951, he moved from Iowa to Orlando to start a tractor dealership. It was a good place to sell tractors to farmers, mostly in the agriculture community. And then as things changed in 1971, and Disney came in, our business changed, and it became more of a developer system with construction equipment. I learned some of my best life lessons in that job. I worked there during the summers. I remember one day seeing one of our mechanics, big guy Carl, fixing a tire tractor-- Tractor tire.
He plugged the tire, rolled it over to the tractor. This was probably a 300-pound tire. He lifted it up and put it on there, and I thought that was impressive. This guy just lifted this huge tire. But then later, I saw Abraham, one of our senior mechanics out there. And I saw Abraham fix a tire, roll it over the tractor, and I thought to myself, "There is no way that Abraham is going to be able to lift this up. He's going to have to ask Carl for help." But he took a lever, a little crowbar, and put it under the tire and lifted it up, and then gently pushed on the hub. And I was even more impressed, and I thought that's the smart way to do things, and that's the way I want to do things.
Now in the early '90s, when the film industry came to Orlando, my father shifted from construction equipment over to tents, and I got to build on this website. Those flags were animated. It's so cool. I still like this site.
I've always found that the best ideas come from our customers. So in this site, one of the managers at Hood Tents had an idea to put a little cost calculator on there. It was the ability to put in, oh, how many people were attending your event? What type of event it was? Was it a wedding or, oh, I don't know, a movie premiere? And I put it on the site. People could go in there and get a price quote beforehand. This is fundamental to how we do things now, but it was ability to connect with our customer before they even met them. So by the time they had the conversation, they already started that connection.
I'm looking at Generative AI now, 28 years later. I cannot believe it's been 28 years since building these sites. And I'm looking at it as the next revolution in terms of what the web did for us. I remember seeing the web for the first time, the visual web. My friend took me to a computer lab at Florida State University, and there was a black and white screen, Netscape Browser. And seeing that visual web was just, it blew me away. I've always loved the idea of connecting what's behind the graphics to the graphics themselves. I love that with the web, and I love it now with GenAI. I want to keep that passion. I don't want to be jaded to it. I'll go ahead and challenge you all to have the same thing. Look at this tool you have, look at this new information, and see what you can do with it. I'm Monty Hood, and I'm responsible for brand automation at Red Hat. Now Red Hat's an enterprise software company. We are based on open source. What does that mean? It means that anyone can come in and have an attitude inside that mirrors the outside of open source. Let's say someone might come in with an idea. You can try and control an idea, but it's very difficult to mandate things. And that means that the best ideas win. So I had to sell brand automation at Red Hat. I had to convince people it was the best way to go.
And we've grown from about 2,000 people when I started 17 years ago now to 20,000. And the brand automation has helped us scale up.
So what is brand automation? Fundamentally, it's giving the marketers at the edge the ability to create their assets. It removes the process of going to a designer and getting those small updates, the ones that are like date changes or just quick changes to meet a new campaign need. So I look at it like a replacement for a circle of how things move. Imagine that we have a manager out there, a brand and marketer outside, and we have their asset. They want to move it and update it. In what I'd call traditional design, they'd take that, move it along the process, go to the designer, we get this shiny, new, great design. And then we continue to move along, and as it goes back to the marketer, it becomes a little bit stale. It might become a little bit old. I've counted seven steps in that process. And designers don't want to do those updates anyway. They want to design, give them that fundamental design. So we push this out to the edge. We push out the people that know it, the people that need to use it. That makes it fast, that makes it relevant, and it lifts load from both.
But what problems are we solving for with brand automation? We're scaling up. We need to do more with less. This is always in every company we need to do this. So we're going to be able to go broader. I've talked to marketers who have needed to put out banners every day instead of once a week. We want to grow and we want to make sure we can do it in a smart way.
We want to maintain our brand integrity. At Red Hat, the brand is the most important part of what we have. People trust us. So maintaining that brand is extremely important. If you have open source, you can actually go and use our software. You can use someone else's. But you need to trust that name. We need to have that brand in every single thing we do. Once that trust is established between the marketers and the designers, people want to do the right thing. They want to be able to create the right information, and they want it to look right. So that brand integrity is extremely important. And the last part that I want to solve for is creation time.
The creation time I described before is that kind of circle around and how you can move an asset through. At the same time, I've looked at how fast are we going, how much can it move us forward. I've calculated it out and it is about 10 times faster than it would be without having brand automation. And this is including the time spent. This is including emails. This is including everything come through. We need to be on time. We need to be agile. We need to be able to create things quickly.
I want to break today down by three different sections of brand automation. I want to look at efficiency, empowerment, and creativity.
The most common question I get from marketers when looking at the brand automation is, how can I take more control over things? How can I get this in my hands? They want that control of the endpoint. They want control of what they give their customers. And the most common question I get from designers is how can we offload more? How can we design more? How can we stop making these small updates? I am a true Florida man. I mentioned Orlando, and while my one grandfather was selling tractors in Orlando, my other grandfather was fishing and picking up seashells on the beach. I'd get to go to the beach with him and together we created quite a collection. And I looked at the shells, now stay with me here because I'm pushing this a little bit and don't factcheck me on all of this. It's the way I think. But the shells have a common template.
If you look at this shell, the univalve on the right, oh, that book, I looked this up.
It says on there. Can you read it? 65 cents for that book to go through all the shelves. I thought that was so awesome. My grandfather signed it. I guess he didn't want anybody to take his little book to monitor the shelves. But I looked at these shelves as a template, and I thought, these are basically like the templates we use...
Because they have that single design, and they also can morph into different things. The color, the style, the dots on it. The way they change is based on where they are in the world, what the water currents are, what their diet is, natural predators. And that's what developed all of these shells. And 100,000 different shells have been identified that are based on this one fundamental template. This is how I think of it.
Adobe Express, if we look at it down and we look at brand automation, has a similar kind of templating system. If we get that strong foundation in place, we can create any number of things. And there's also two things we can do. We can go through and create things within minutes. We can go and create something like this campaign. We usually have about 7 to 11 banners in a campaign. That might be things from paid placement to social media, organic social. And we'll put those in place for, oh, we're using it here for a product. You can use them for anything, for an event banner. And they're based on our grid. We can reuse these across the board.
I want to talk about a couple of things I've seen happen that really relate to this.
I had a call the other day with a program at Red Hat, the Red Hat TV program that happens to be called a program as well, TV program. But they came into it thinking, "I want to evaluate Adobe Express. I want to evaluate brand automation and see what we can do with it." This is a typical 30-minute call. And I knew coming into this that we could do more than evaluate it. We could get a little farther down the road. So these are people that didn't have-- There's two marketers on this team. They had some fundamental banners, some really well designed banners that had come from the design team that they could reuse. Remember, resources, being able to reuse the materials. And that's all they had to use.
So as I talked to them, they shared their use case. We chatted about where in the world they are, what's going on. They took me through it, showed me what they have. I gave them access to Adobe Express. They had not used it before. I was able to give an example of someone else's banner that we had created before and we used in Adobe Express. And I was also able to create a banner for them. And at the end of that 30 minutes, oh, and empower them with the ability to create their own teams. I will talk about that in a minute. But at the end of the call, they had their template. They had the ability to create themselves, and I would say they just walked away with what they need. I probably won't talk to them again about this. They were nice. I'd like to talk to them at some point. But that was where we got them. It was great to be able to get them that far.
Look at the way that we do traditional design now or the way that we push things forward. We have used our Intranet to take a PSD or Illustrator file, and we'll deliver it along the way.
If we push it out to the Internet, we get it down that singular path. And we end up in a marketer's hands, or it ends up in an agency, or even on someone's desktop. We don't have the ability to track or to see what's going on when they use it. With brand automation and with the ability that's built into Express for brand automation, we can see what people are creating. They can share it with us. We've set up a couple of things. We've set up a broad user group or a team in the project section. I don't know how many have got hands on it. If you have not, get your hands on Adobe Express because I always tell our team, kick it around. Kick those tires. And we have a way to set up these teams that we can go through. And we are able to avoid the endpoint that we don't know where it hits in AI or PSD.
We also find that we build that solid template I described here before that we can reuse them. So we are able to push things out and lift more from designers that way. We have a built in feedback loop that we get with brand automation that literally does not exist at other places. This is something that I identified quite a while back that there is a gap. Let's say we're running a campaign, and we have-- Oh, let's think of it as a tracking the banners on it. And if I'm tracking them, I usually want to know how well they've done from a performance standpoint. I don't usually track things like the color of the banners. This is something that we don't get feedback on. It's been anecdotal in the past.
I've had a lot of conversations. You heard me say I was talking to this marketer, I was talking to a marketer. But this has happened a lot recently. Lots of conversation. But I was talking to a marketer last week, lots of conversations. And they told me that they not only track what the performance of the campaign is and what they put the banners in but also the colors of them. And I thought that was just that little bit of information was really helpful because it's something I can take back to the brand team. The red banner was performing better for them. We usually come in with red, black, and a gray, or a light banner.
And she showed me a spreadsheet she was keeping. So not only was she tracking the performance of the colors, the performance of the campaign itself but really putting it in there. She didn't know where to go with it. She just knew it worked for her. One thing we've been thinking about or that we put in front of people usually are not the red banners. I wouldn't say we're phasing them out exactly, but they're not the main thing we put in front. We usually start if I set up a template, I'll usually have the gray or the lighter banners in place in first. And those are what people just gravitate to and go for. But getting that information means that we now can decide, well, should we go with the red banners first or definitely don't get rid of them because it's working for someone.
In addition, if someone has a banner format they're not using, one of the socials or one of the sizes, being able to see that's important because we know that maybe we should take that out of our design world. Maybe we don't need to create that. The effort to create that additional size, additional format is a lot. And we will create, let's say, three designs, two types of themes, and then several different colors. If we're doing that for every single banner, it's a waste of time, honestly, on the design side. We need to take that information and use it to say, okay, let's stop it on the design. And then on the other side of it, we have the marketer. And if the marketer is not using what we put out there that we expect them to, maybe we should have a conversation on that also. Maybe we should get back to them and say, "Hey, why aren't you using this one?" So now I've got my 10 times slide. I already explained this, but basically through that efficiency around it, through the time we go through, that is where we're saving it.
I want to talk about empowerment.
Now empowerment, when I think of empowerment, what do I think of? I think of cake, of course.
Why do I think of cake? Because in the '50s, when Betty Crocker came out with an instant cake mix, they made a conscious and possibly controversial decision to leave out certain ingredients. It could have just been water added to the mix, and you'd be finished with the cake. But they knew their customer. They understood that they wanted to feel like they had more of a stake in the cake. And they didn't want to just make Betty Crocker's, they wanted to make their own.
When people have that option, I'm going to share a couple of things I've heard, but I don't make them myself, but they're kind of interesting. We can replace the oil with apple sauce. We can replace the water with 7 Up. So make sure you all try this and let me know how it goes. Don't make me eat it though because I don't know what it actually is.
But the customers that had the cake and liked it, they were empowered, they felt empowered, and they made it to their taste. There.
So when we have the trust built with the brand and with the design team, we can let the designers do more of what they're meant to do. We let them design. And the empowerment like that cake allows the marketer to make decisions about what they want. It allows them to choose that template. It not only lets them meet their own campaign but will actually go as far as letting them go in and create their own templates. Try something different. Like I said, go into Express and just try it. Oh, take a template and remix it. There's an interesting concept in Express that I had to take a little bit to get my head around. There's, I call it, a decentralized administration. So we don't have a admin role. I'm not used to that. Giving that up is a little bit tough for someone who's running a product. All I can do, the only power I have over anyone else is to add users. So that means that we have our official brand information that comes in. People are going to take those templates and use them. But they can customize their needs. They can create these teams. They can create different ways of working together. They can set up their own workflows. They can create templates. I want to take that and then push that back into the broader Express user group. I want it to go back to Design. I want to use that as something that is what drives this. And I want it to be something that gets us to that creative point we need to be.
We're giving them ownership effectively.
So we've talked about how brand automation...
Can make updates to small banners or to kind of that production level kind of thing. But can it make us more creative? It can. That idea of going in the templates and changing them, the idea of creating on workflows, the idea of sharing this back. It's creativity in a design sense we can actually put that in place. But beyond that, we also have creativity in how we do things. So the creative message or the creative way that we set up our workflows or even something that's global and we want to push across, the way they're translating things when they're putting things in that way. We can use all of these, and they can all be pulled back together when we're on a common system.
This is the Green Gator Pub. Did I mention already that I do not like gators? But I'm going to tell you why anyway. I don't like things I can't tell how they move, and I can't tell how the gator moves. And I grew up here, and they're on the side of the lake, and I hear about things about gator taking people, and I don't like them. But I put this in there, so I'm not going to go to this pub. Anyway, these signs started around the 1200s in Great Britain, and now they've become a cultural icon. We're going to see them in different places today, and people like them. They do define things out there. But at the time, when they first started using them, the tavern owners, the pub owners weren't looking for a way to put a marketing plan together. They weren't going in and thinking, evaluating what would address this best. I'm in Miami, so I'm going to have a green gator. They just wanted something people could recognize. And the reason they did that is because largely the population was illiterate. So people would come in and recognize something, they'd find a meeting place, they'd know what it was, and they could go in there and I guess stay, meet someone, or just get a drink. And that was a creative idea. They knew their customers. It was something done out of necessity.
So we look for creative ideas from anywhere within Red Hat. If I think about, let's say, both the technical and the more business oriented types of people we have at Red Hat, we can get those ideas, we can move them into Adobe Express. I was having a conversation with an account manager, and he got it really quick. I think he had some experience with Illustrator even. But in Express, down the side, there are layers. So he had the idea that I was talking about in terms of how we usually do. Okay. Here's how you update things. You can take an asset from the side and move it into layers. I think the Adobe folks in the room are going to be like, "Why are you doing this shortcut?" But it might be built in. I don't know. This is very fast though. And he actually said, well, I can just move this layer over and it replaces an image where I can cover it up. And so by moving those layers up and down, he could change things out. And I like that idea personally, and I'll tell people how to do that. I'm looking at folks that I know are from Adobe and they're like, "Don't do that." But I'm going to share it out. I want people to do that. Another feature we have in there are locking. So I talked before about how people can get in there and mix their own templates up. As I create these templates, I'm able to lock them down, or I say I. As anyone creates a template, they're able to lock in different places. Now we know that someone could take a graphic and completely mix it up. It could be from anything. It could be a PNG they pulled from somewhere else. It could be already bit mapped. They could put it into a program and just change it out themselves. But remember, people want to do the right thing. They want to stay on brand. They want the ability to stay on brand.
With this locking mechanism, I can do it in two ways. I can set up what I call a hard lock or what we call a hard lock in Adobe Express. And that means that when I push that template out there, it's a brand template, I say you cannot change this section of a page. In fact, I think that was shared in the keynote that the hard locks was something that's in place now for Express.
So that lock, if I create a template, use a template, you create your materials from there, you can't change them. But you can duplicate that template, there's always around it. But on the other side of it, there's a soft lock. Now the soft lock lets people change the text in a certain area. It lets people switch out images and different things. And that that is something that keeps them on-brand. There's no question. That is that five minutes in and out, make something, pull out and use it for your purposes.
The soft lock also means that if I unlock it, I can change things around. Trish would give control over more of the design to our marketers. A huge issue that we always had, it seems so simple, but it's something I ran into all the time with design, and went back to designers, is the size of the field that lets you hold the text because if we go in there with lorem ipsum, we don't have the ability to put just any amount of text in there. We don't know what size it's going to be. The languages change. The market materials change. So just the ability to unlock that field and open it up a little bit makes a huge difference. It empowers the marketer, and it also lifts things from the designers. And for something like that, it doesn't feel good to take that process and go back around. This is-- Let's see. We do it in there. We do it in some of the graphics and in our call to action buttons. So little changes like that and opening it up and letting people have some control over design does make a big difference.
I want to stress that it's not just about...
The system, it comes down to people.
It's that common platform that people use. It's a way to communicate more. It's a way to collaborate. I've talked a lot about these updates. I've talked a lot about how people work with an existing template or they go in and this feedback loop may be built into it. But it lets them communicate more. It lets them share their ideas out. They create their own template, their own teams. They can push that feedback in. They can have the two-way communication. And that's really important.
Okay. I'm just going to say it. When I look at this picture, and I think of these folks collaborating, I think they're trying to figure out how they can all do their work only using two computers. Sorry to the brand name. Sorry to that. But I think they're all trying to get on there and use it. But they're also coming out with their ideas. They're probably deciding how things can work, how to collaborate also.
When things are working well and spinning in unison, it's great. We look at this-- I like this one because it shows the tops all turning at the same pace. It shows kind of a nice lined up things. But not only is one of the tops going to fall over but there's room for new ideas out there. At some point, it's going to fall over. Look for those new ideas. Always be ready for the ones that might not be evident. The person that doesn't speak up. If they're in Adobe Express, if they're in brand automation, they're going to speak up just by doing what they do.
Ta-da. Look for that bright top.
How many people saw the top in the background that was there in the last one? Anyone else? Couple of people. Can I show you again? It's there. Yeah. I know it does look like a shadow, doesn't it? But it's there. It's that bright idea behind other people.
What's next? I want to go back to generative AI and how we want to move forward with it. Now being a big company and having to protect the brand, step into things, we need to look at it carefully. I'm going to describe it in terms of a graphic on our website or one of the assets we create, a really simple one.
Let's say we have a square asset. Oftentimes, we'll have image on it. We'll have a background that might be unique and text and a button. I'm going to look at this in three stages also, how we can move image and AI.
We can pick a part of it that's not so destructive. Maybe it doesn't really-- It's not so risky to update. Let's think about that image on there. We can use a photo in there. I'm having an event for telco in Paris. So let's let the marketer design a image for it.
Let's use the Eiffel Tower, easy one to do for that example. I've also found that Firefly is really good at these, by the way. I've tested against different things. And because it's built on all of the Stock photography, millions of Stock photos that Adobe has already, it does a great job of creating what you need for business. So we've decided, okay, we're going to give them that section, we're going to update that image. It's on-brand. We could use a custom model. We can do different things in there. We're comfortable with it. So that's the first step of how we could enter into using generative AI within something like Express, within these banners, within these more routine updates, I guess, and avoid that loop. Put it to the marketer. The next step I see is changing out the backgrounds on an image. A lot of things that we get back, a lot of things we develop have a background theme, more so than a design that really has a message in it. It kind of reinforces what it's about. So if I'm talking about a telco event in Paris, I have now created my image. Step one, let's see how that goes. Step two, let's look at the background in generative AI. I'm going to dig in a little bit here into the weeds because there's things we just-- This one is one we can't do without it. The backgrounds that come through sometimes don't fit within our buttons. Within the buttons, the call action, and the text, and it seems like a minor thing. But to be able to update that is very difficult. I can't go into every single image and change the background. All I can do is move around some text. And if we're able to generate these backgrounds, we're going to train something on it, we can generate more and pull one that doesn't overlap the text. We can also generate different ones for use in different places. So let's have a digital ad campaign, and we'll have three pictures on the page, three banners on the page. They can all actually look different. So if we generate more, we're not just looking at the same one three times. So that's the way I see the second one is that we take a standard style in the telco area. I mean, I'm going to dig in a little more here and just say maybe it cut off. We use a cell tower and communication devices. So those might be cut off halfway through the phone. So it looks like, I don't know, a rotary phone instead of a cell phone. I have no idea. But whatever it looks like, it doesn't look right.
That's what we can do with GenAI in the background. Now let's look further and think of a third step here. This is looking pretty far ahead. I'm not saying I know everything's going to happen, but I would love to see this at some point. GenAI is really good about fitting things into sizes. So if we have a certain size of banner, we can teach it our brand, we can teach it how things fit together. And we've already established that image, we've already established something like the background, like that ancillary piece that goes together with the whole banner itself. But think about the layout of the banner. Let's lay it out in GenAI so it knows where we want to have our call to action, where we want to have our text, where we want to have that image. I think of, unfortunately, I know the size of all the images we use and could probably name all 11 ones. That's okay. But we have a 300 x 600 banner, the tall one. And I know the logo's at the top, text in the middle, and at the bottom we have our image or something to support what we said there. Then we have our square banners. But if we use AI to lay them out, we can choose from the different banners. Okay. So what does that mean for creativity? Does it take it away from us? It doesn't. I'm going to tell you why. Because the marketers can still choose, of course, what they want on the banner but also choose from a series of banners they get. They can still get the exact results they need. This follows the grid. It lets them choose that banner. It lets them choose that layout of different things that were spit out from-- That's a terrible way to say it, of different things that were generated from Firefly through there. So they can pick what works. They can make sure it doesn't overlap the button. They can make sure they complement each other on that page. They can make sure it's different when they post them through social. So the marketers still have that power. On the design side, how does it help us with creativity? On the design side, the team, I will say that if anyone in the room read it, I'm always super impressed with the design guidelines that they put together. There are very well detailed guidelines that come out. This is before the Illustrator file, before the PSD file. And these guidelines tell how the specific program should work. If I think back to Red Hat TV, there are specific guidelines in place to how we represent that program.
So we lift in this area how to make them more creative when we decide to use GenAI. Well we can lift the last step. We can remove that file creation. And we can move back to the actual designing, the actual creation of those design standards, and just send our brand through, and send the brand through for that information.
I hope that I've done a good job of explaining the efficiency of brand automation...
Efficiency through Express, the empowerment that it gives you, and the empowerment both on the design side and also on the communication side, and the creativity. My favorite part, and the one that's hardest to describe, because I know those ideas are going to come in, I've loved looking forward to seeing them.
So I appreciate the time to talk to you about this.
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