Delivering Differentiated Content in a World of Content Overwhelm, with Warren Daniels, CMO at Bynder

Transcript

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Peter Crosby:
Welcome to Unpacking the Digital Shelf where we explore brand manufacturing in the digital age.
 
Peter Crosby:
Hey everyone. Peter Crosby here from the Digital Shelf Institute. The growth in content required by the Hungry Beast of the Digital Shelf has been exponential and is showing no signs of slowing. It is more vital than ever for content and commerce teams to collaborate at scale to make sure they're delivering relevant, differentiated content that performs. Warren Daniels CMO at Bynder joined Rob Gonzalez and me to deliver insights on the ways in which leading brands are upping the game of their content machine to compete and win in this next decade of the digital shelf. So Warren, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. We're really grateful to have you on. Thank you.
 
Warren Daniels:
Thanks so much for having me. Really excited about the conversation today, Peter and Rob
 
Peter Crosby:
Standing out. Thank you. He is there in the background, but we'd like to hold him off for later. So standing out on the digital shelf, it's become an ever-rising bar, right? As the cacophony of retail media sellers and content types expand. So that means the collaboration between creatives and e-commerce teams is more critical than ever before. So from your perch at Bynder, what is the current state of the battle to digitally differentiate?
 
Warren Daniels:
Yeah. Well, I think first and foremost, we need to reflect the fact that digital transformation, the digital economy, it changes everything. So I think we've seen so much change in the last 20 years in terms of the growth of digital commerce and what that's meant for content and how organizations show up via digital channels. So I think the latest estimates that I have around online commerce is around 20% of all sales with the expectation that that will continue to grow over the next three to five years, to somewhere between 23 to 25%. And I think we need to recognize that's trillions of dollars in an additional revenue and what that means that there's going to be a really, really fierce battle for online wallet share. So I think if you think about the point of engagement with consumers in a digital first economy, that long tent pole is content. And I think this is giving rise to increased demand for content, both creative content, product information, content, editorial content as well to support these content driven omnichannel experiences. I think it's driving much, much closer collaboration between creative teams and content teams, which are now increasingly being merged into content operation functions and sometimes centralized on a global scale and an e-commerce teams. So I think this digital economy, it's created, isn't it? A world of content overwhelmed. Yeah,
 
Peter Crosby:
That's for sure.
 
Warren Daniels:
Yeah. In
 
Peter Crosby:
Some ways on both sides, right? In some ways on the consumer side, it's all becoming almost too much, but then certainly on the side of the teams that you support to make that supply chain of content happen, right?
 
Warren Daniels:
Absolutely. Peter, and we talk about this trimmer that we hear about in organizations again and again and again. Yeah, the volume of content that is required to be delivered at scale to a growing variety of channels. So more channels, more end user touch points, and with data, the need to deliver it faster and long gone are the days where you'd brief in a creative agency on a piece of content for a digital ad, and they tell you, you can have that in two weeks time, wait patiently for it. The data in digital channels and end user touch points mean you need to act on it that much faster to take advantage of the opportunity to grow wallet share, so greater demand for content, deliver it more consistently across an ever increasing number of channels. I think organizations are really struggling to tame the content content beat and it is pushing them to the limit.
 
Warren Daniels:
And we as Bynder, we see this in our platform. So usage data in the last 12 months, 40% growth in the number of assets stored on the Bynder platform, and then we're delivering more and more assets. So we're now delivering 17 billion assets on a monthly basis to these different channels and touch points. Again, just some data points I think to demonstrate the exponential growth that we're seeing. And so yeah, I think against that backdrop, we're seeing organizations looking at content through a completely different lens. They recognize that strategically it's more critical than ever before. They're waking up to the fact that despite huge strides in MarTech and e-commerce tech investments, that content and content operations functions by the way haven't evolved to adopt technology that I think addresses the modern day challenges of the digital economy. So now I think there's recognition that and differentiation through content in a world where barriers to entry in the digital world are not as high as perhaps in the physical world are absolutely fundamental to growth. And so organizations are turning their attention to this principle of delivering exceptional content experiences.
 
Rob Gonzalez:
You mentioned a couple of things in there I want to dig into together. One is just the number of channels that companies have to market across and the content needs for those channels. And the second is how organizationally companies maybe need to change and evolve a little bit for that. I'm really interested in this because in the past you'd have for example, the corporate marketing department running TV ads and whatever, and you'd then have shopper marketing and they'd have a totally separate set of content requirements, but relatively narrow. And all of these different groups that are managing content within a company can kind of run in their own silos. And I don't think that that's as true in a multi-channel world where you're kind of doing branding and sales content and conversion optimization like top of funnel, middle funnel, bottom of funnel content within a single channel all the time. So there puts kind of a workflow and people process pressure. What are you seeing from the brands that you work with and how they can navigate this and are there good patterns that are out there for brands actually organizing to succeed here?
 
Warren Daniels:
Yeah, no, absolutely Rob. I think there's great truth in what you say there because if you think about the buyer journey B2C especially, but it also applies to B2B, people are going through a myriad of different channels and touch points and responding to different stimuli from different types of content before they get to the point in which they're ready to act, buy and purchase. So you have to be absolutely consistent across all of those channels. That's an incredibly difficult thing to do. So we see six core things that organizations look at very, very closely in delivering exceptional content experiences in this omnichannel world in which we live in. And I think just first of all, we should define content experience. I think it's its simplest form. It's just delivering the right content to the right people at the right time in the right format. And first and foremost, I think relevancy is front and center for marketing, e-commerce teams going forward.
 
Warren Daniels:
So the ability to deliver contextualized content to specific customer segments, and I'm not necessarily talking about the utopia of a customer segment of one here, but how can you drive content to different segments of the market with greater relevancy than you might've been able to do in the past and take steps towards doing that? I think speed and agility is the second thing that we see come up very, very frequently as a challenge for organizations that we work with and not just speed and agility in terms of getting content to market, but actually the process for reviewing and approving content to get it to market in a timely manner, but in a way that is consistent across all those different channels and touch points that you talk about. And then the need for brand consistency, safeguarding brand identity and promoting that consistently in order to support this consistent omnichannel content experience.
 
Warren Daniels:
And then because content doesn't exist in a vacuum, it's of course at the heart of an ecosystem of MarTech and commerce technology. How do you quickly and efficiently deliver that content to end user touch points that ultimately drive engagement and conversion? And how do you do that at a level of scale based on that volume and variety of content that is required? But at the same time, you've got to counter that with the challenges of maintaining cost and creative capability within your organization. We've seen a lot of organizations that have invested heavily to scale content creation, but as they've scaled content creation, what they've found is their creative capability and the output has diminished. It's not as differentiated and unique as perhaps it once was and therefore doesn't get the cut through that is required to drive action amongst consumers. And then I think,
 
Rob Gonzalez:
Can you double down? Sorry to cut you off, but that last point you made is a really interesting one. As the volume increases the quality, what's that?
 
Warren Daniels:
Absolutely there is the volume. If you scale volume of content and you are not increasing the resources that are in place to support that, what ends up happening is that unique creativity that often drives the content that drives engagement and cut through in a digital world that diminishes you end up with vanilla content that looks and feels like a lot of other stuff that is out there and doesn't perform in the way that you would expect it to or want it to. So how do you free up resources to maintain creative capability or integrity if you like, that drives differentiation that drives cut through whilst you've got this conflict or friction with, Hey, I need to deliver a hell of a lot more content in order to support those channels and touch points that we're now selling through. And that then leads us to performance, Rob.
 
Warren Daniels:
So content's got to drive and meet business goals as well as user needs. And so we've got to answer questions around how's content being consumed, who's using it, who's engaging with it, and actually what's engagement like for different types of content as well? So I think there's five or different things in there that we consistently see relevancy, speed and agility, brand consistency, distribution scale, and then ultimately performance as if you like the building box of content experience and delivering exceptional content experiences. So perhaps actually I could bring it to life for you and I maybe start Rob seeing as you asked the question about scaling content creation, maintaining integrity and relevancy of that content. I'll start with an example of Perot Ricard, I don't think they need any introduction. I certainly drink a lot of their stuff as I'm sure you do. Tempo global brand with a portfolio of prestigious brands, 11,000 users on their digital asset management platform, accessing assets that are used to compete of course in a fiercely competitive market.
 
Warren Daniels:
And they use Bynder as the single source of authoritative true for their brand assets. And as a result they're able to control access to those, to both internal and external stakeholders. But I think actually the interesting thing in the context of the question you asked me is they also use DAM as a critical stage in their content creation process. So they use it to enhance their ability to create greater volumes of content without needing to assign extra creative resources to it. So they're able to create on-brand assets that can then be adapted to templates that can be used in different geographies by non creatives. So in effect, the designers and create and agencies that work for Pono, Ricard are producing adaptable content that then goes into local markets to keep the content engine fueled and customer touch points engaged. And I want to provide some stats in terms of relevancy here. So their absolute vodka video ad campaigns that went out into the European markets, I think it was last year actually, they were able to quickly swap out city names in order to have relevant adverts for the cities in which they were advertising. And the impact of that was an ad recall of 35%. So I think a great example of relevancy and personalization at scale without adding significant cost and resources to the content operations team.
 
Peter Crosby:
So you kind of have a global center of content excellence because we see a lot of these centers of excellence popping. It feels in some ways like you have that and then because of the way they've approached it, it makes it super easy for the regions and even down to local to quickly customize that to then get higher recall and performance stats back out. That's really cool.
 
Warren Daniels:
Absolutely adding cultural differences that perhaps you would only really know from being in a specific market and a geography swapping out of language. And again, you've got control around those templates so that they remain on brand and consistent wherever you are in the world, but what you're doing is in effect democratizing that content to those that are allowed to use it in order to drive relevancy that gets greater cut through in this case in the local cities.
 
Peter Crosby:
That's really cool. Let's double click on the, you talked earlier, you and Rob were talking about the importance of differentiation to drive that better performance and that better brand impression. If you can dig in to see what are the elements of a differentiated content experience, if that can even be described that has been successful in the real world. Do you have an example that you could share?
 
Warren Daniels:
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So I'll use an airline firm actually, yeah, an international major airline firm. In fact, I flew out to Amsterdam this morning on them. So they're leveraging content for business cast flyers on their long haul flights, I think in an incredibly innovative way. So these flyers are now able to pre-book their meals complete with visual imagery based on what is going to be available on their individual flight on that specific day. And as a result of that, the airline is able to ensure their customers get the food that they want. So the customer experiences better, but they've also as an outcome of that, but also been able to reduce the amount of food waste, which again supports their sustainability goal. So great customer experience and innovative use case in terms of use of content and great output in terms of other benefits as well, Peter,
 
Peter Crosby:
I love that. I mean, I think it seems to me that the more you start with what do you want as always, start with what the consumer experience is that you want them to have. And then use content as a way to bring that to life in a really dynamic and engaging way that actually makes both the consumer experience be better, but also the impact on the company's bottom line and on some of their major issues like sustainability. That approach is terrific.
 
Warren Daniels:
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and I think if you apply, perhaps I share just one more example for, I use the term distribution or delivery as part of the fundamentals of content experiences. Again, claws San Diego based manufacturer and distributor of eco minded flooring and decking and other building materials. They recognized the omnichannel retail landscape and the need to diversify their go-to market strategies by leveraging not just retailers, which was their traditional model, but also a direct to consumer sales channel as well, to increase their reach and revenue. And they wanted a presence across multiple channels, but they needed to be consistent, not just in terms of the creative content that they were delivering to market, but because of the nature of what they were selling, the product details that also sit alongside that creative content. So they integrated their digital asset management platform with a PXM platform, Salsify in order to manage both product data and visual assets in a consistent and engaging way to customers. And so now all those product assets are updated in the dam are automatically stink with sync with the product detail pages and then the latest versions of those distributed to their network of online retailers. Really, really quick, fast and efficient. And one of the benefits for Cali is when an asset is updated in the dam, it's updated across all the touch points that it's serving as well. So in terms of that consistency of go to market and speed of distribution, I think another really, really great example of a component of a content experience.
 
Rob Gonzalez:
Yeah, I mean it's powerful and obviously to me when I hear that, I think, yeah, that's going to sell some more floors, but there's devil in the details, especially for the larger organizations. And I just love org design questions. Who's responsible, who's actually can make the call on what happens, who's got the budgets? And so the strategy I totally get that you're proposing here, but if you're a large global multi-brand, multi-product company, this has got to be really difficult. There's a lot of different departments. There might be a centralized content development group, there might be decentralized content development groups, there might be a centralized digital marketing or digital merchandising group. Sometimes it lives in marketing, sometimes it lives in sales. There's just a thousand ways to do this that we've seen out there. What are the foundational blocks to executing a strategy here and what are the best practices for large organizations to actually make this real? If you're more than just a one brand, one geo company, if you're a multi-brand, global, multi multi geo company, what do you have to do in order to make some of these things real?
 
Warren Daniels:
Yeah, that's a great question, Rob. And you're right, there's incredible complexity in what we're talking about here. It all seems so simple. But yeah, so there's a few things we see organizations doing consistently. Well, first of all, they've got to have understood and committed to taking steps to recognize the mission criticality of content in driving growth in the digital economy. And normally we've seen a change or a transformation that's taking place in and around content operations, which is normally bleeding into other functions like commerce or digital transformation or customer experience. And then the other thing that we consistently see is they think about the content life cycle holistically. And by that I mean through the lens of how they create, manage, and deliver content. So best in class organizations really think about things in this way on the create side of the house. How do you scale content operations by automating content production?
 
Warren Daniels:
And if you think about the standard process for content creation, it often requires designers or external agencies, they're asked to create, make changes in specialist creative suites. Often for very simple changes like swapping out language or changing of a placement of a logo. I think enabling people to access brand compliant templates that they can then amend in a consistent way is one way to eliminate the need to hire more designers or more agency resources whilst maintaining brand consistency and accelerating speed of execution. So we see best in class organizations thinking about the challenge of scaling content creation on a global scale and improving relevancy at the same time. The second thing that we see folks doing is recognizing that they need a single source of authoritative truth for their content. And that means organizing being able to access and then retrieve on brandand content and collaborate on bringing that content to market much more quickly in order to decrease time to market.
 
Warren Daniels:
So they look at how they manage content through that lens. And then increasingly over the last 18 months or so, actually what we've seen is best in class organizations looking at how they can be much more efficient with the content that they've already got. So asset reuse and repurposing before I'm going to go and build more content, have I got a single view of everything that I've got that can be reused, repurposed, perhaps amended before I go and have to buy more stock imagery or photography for example, or create more content from scratch. So again, organizations certainly in the last two years or so have looked at this through the lens of actually there are some economic headwinds that mean we have to be perhaps more diligent around cost than we have been in the past. How can we apply that to content and content operations?
 
Warren Daniels:
And then the third part, as I said, is the deliver part. How do we automate the transformation to content and deliver it across omni-channel buyer journeys? Typically what that means is rather than having designers create one core asset and that then be transformed manually into the 500 or different ad sizes that you need to support all the different channels you're going to execute through nowadays, how does that one asset get cropped effectively for use on all of the channels that it's going to be executed through in an automated and brand compliance way? And then how do you connect that content to the end user touchpoint through integration to things like CMS for websites, marketing resource management for work in progress, assets and workflows and collaboration around content and assets, marketing automation platforms like Salesforce, marketing Cloud and of course PIMS and PXM platforms, the likes, the likes of sify. So create, manage, deliver, and a holistic approach to managing the life cycle of content.
 
Rob Gonzalez:
I have just a question, right? In the midst of that, one of the things you said is in a way, know what you already have, reuse what you already have to the extent that you can. I think the implication there is, and I'm not a creative that does anything with imagery myself, so I am maybe speaking a little out of school, but I think the implication there is that maybe it's hard to even find stuff that you've already built. So maybe companies or agencies spend a lot of time reinventing the wheel. And if so, if I'm just sort of reading between the lines, if that's correct. Does something like AI help with search and image reuse? I mean usually with gen ai we think about more usage rather than identification, but is that a way to get more leverage out of your existing asset?
 
Warren Daniels:
Absolutely. Robin, if I think about Siemens Health ERs, Siemens Health ERs by the way, global workforce, 60,000 employees, they're a world leading provider of medical technology. Those folks are leveraging aging, not gen ai, but AI for automation in order to identify assets much faster. And actually they are identifying assets and sharing content 70% faster than they were before as a result of leveraging AI search capabilities. Our Bynder AI search capabilities. And actually an outcome of that is that they've driven an estimated three and a half million of savings in the first year as a result of asset reuse, simply based on the fact that they're now being able to surface more of the content that they've got in their single version of the truth, the dam across the whole of their global enterprise. And as an outcome of that, they don't need to go and purchase more or build more. So actually it's enabled them to scale content much, much faster than they would've done in the past and get to market quicker just as a result of having access and be able to see more of what they've got quicker rather than having to go and go and buy new stuff.
 
Peter Crosby:
And we're just in the early days too, and I think it's probably there's lots of runway left to go. At our recent digital shelf summit, we started to hear real world, not just laboratory, but real world examples of brand experiences personalized at scale on retailer websites with a combination of data and AI so that a product page is changing in response to who's arriving at it. People are starting to put those pieces together. And we've talked about that potential for a while now and sort of imagining what it would take to be ready for it. And now we are at this point where AI is really starting to add value and have the capability. So got to before we let you go, just sort of have you pull out your crystal ball and what do you see on your side of the world happening over the next, I imagine couple of years. Let's give ourselves a good time span for that actually coming true and how brands would need to provide massive amounts of, I dunno whether you'd call it cohort specific content to be able to allow retailers they don't control to be able to produce that as sort of a snap of the finger. What do you think of that future and do you see it being possible affordable and executable over the next couple
 
Warren Daniels:
Of weeks? It's a great question, Peter. So first of all, I think we did quite well. I think we got through 35 minutes or so without touching on.
 
Peter Crosby:
I know. I'm so proud that,
 
Warren Daniels:
Yeah, so we should applaud ourselves for that. We're here now. Listen, a lot of hyperbole around gen ai, especially in the role that that can play and is playing in content creation. From my experience, most organizations are still trying to figure out how and where to deploy gen AI from both an efficiency and a responsibility perspective. But there's no question that both that and AI driven automation presenting credible opportunities for organizations in terms of delivering exceptional content experiences. So I'm yet to see personalization to that utopia that is always called out as customer segment of one anywhere, but absolutely happy to be challenged on that by any of the listeners to this podcast. But there's no question, it's closer today than it was a year ago. I still think we're a few years away from what I would call, but what I would say is that whilst we're still waiting, I think there are a lot of organizations that have taken simple steps to improve relevancy and personalization in meaningful ways.
 
Warren Daniels:
Some through gen AI and then some through AI driven automation. And I talked about what Pero Ricard did earlier in order to drive cut through without that need for hyper-personalization, what I would encourage creative content teams to look at is how they can start to increase relevancy and personalization by automating content creation and getting it in the hands of the right people at the right place at the right time. I think that will drive more impact than this customer segment of one super highly personalized, which I don't think is doable at scale today, and certainly not doable at scale in any way that makes sense economically whilst beginning to leverage the opportunities, the two forms of AI that I discussed offers in a responsible way. And I think to do that, it comes back to what I said before, a strategy around how you create, manage and deliver content powered by AI and automation, but based on the fundamental principles of the growing demands of content to win on the digital shelf.
 
Peter Crosby:
Well, beautifully put, and a great way to close actually, and I know you folks do so much strong thought leadership in this area. Is there a particular asset that you would point people to on your site that might sort of reinforce some of the messages that you're bringing out today?
 
Warren Daniels:
Absolutely, Peter. Thanks very much. So two things I'll point out. Certainly some of the use cases that I've called out today are available on the customer page of our website. So feel free to go there and if you come to the Bynder.com website, search up the winning on the digital shelf guide on our resources, on our resources page. I think that that will probably delve deeper into the topic of this podcast today and give you some much deeper insights than we've been able to give in the last 40 minutes or so.
 
Peter Crosby:
Warren, thank you so much for joining us and sharing some of these insights with our community. We're super grateful. Appreciate it.
 
Warren Daniels:
Absolute pleasure. Thanks so much for having me.
 
Peter Crosby:
Thanks again to Warren for all the great insights and examples. Swing by digitalshelfinstitute.org for the latest and to become a member. Thanks for being part of our community.