Hi, everyone. Welcome to this Adobe session with our partners at Deloitte and Dollar General. Will and I will be your hosts for this, fireside chat. I'll start. I'm Marta Frattini. I lead Industry Strategy and Marketing for Retail at Adobe for our Digital Strategy Group, which is the group that works with major retailers on digital transformation and experience like growth. I have been in retail for about 20 years, and prior to Adobe, I was actually in your seats trying to make it work. I know how hard it is, but also how fun it can be. Thanks, everyone, for being here. Paul? Hey, thanks, everybody, for coming. My name is Paul Bucalo. I run Marketing and Digital Engineering for Dollar General. My team's focused on business-led and technology-enabled innovation. We focus on strategy for owned and paid channels, digital properties, personalization, and first-party data. So I've been at Dollar General for about 14 months. Before that, I was at Walmart, and before that, I was a consultant, and I think the piece I'm most excited about this year is the launch of our new CDP coming up. Thanks, Paul. Hi, I'm Charlene Charles. I lead operations for Dollar General's Media Network, and what that means is I oversee the day-to-day business operations, inclusive of our P&L management, our ad product strategy, the sales planning, media execution, along with measurement and procurement. I've been at Dollar General for about two years. It has been a lot of fun i get to work with folks like Paul. D ollar General is very near and dear to my heart. I grew up in rural Arkansas, and fun fact, where my parents now live, where I grew up, on both sides of their home, on the highway, there's a DG, is the first store on either side, so happy to be here. Thanks, Charlene. I'm Will Pickard. I'm a senior manager at Deloitte. I lead our personalization and data science proposition. I specialize in transforming marketing functions for Fortune 500 and FTSE 100 retailers. I help them harness data, AI, and technology to drive customer acquisition, marketing efficiencies, and increasing customer loyalty. I've been working with Paul and Charlene for just over 18 months, and I've helped them set up their vision, but also now, critically, we're in the middle of delivering it. Now we've got intros out of the way, we probably should introduce Dollar General for the audience. So, Paul, do you want to kick us off? Yeah. Dollar General is America's general store. I think a lot of folks think about it as a place where everything's a dollar t here's a lot of off-brand items, but that's not the case i t's like a small box retailer where you have a variety of brands and price points. Dollar General's mission is serving others, and they do that through helping employees with secondary education access, through their literacy foundation to drive education access in our communities. Dollar General is growing. This year, 2024, we're planning on launching another 800 stores. To build off, Paul, thinking more about the consumer at Dollar General, we go where people don't go or can't go in rural America, and across the board, our stores, over 80%, serve markets of 20,000 people or less. W e're often the go-to choice, location, bodega, as you think of it, for a lot of consumers. W e do two things for them w e are focused on saving time for them, the convenience of our 19,000+ locations, and money. So we have national brands, and we have a lot of consumers who have buying power w hen you put that together, we're very much trying to help them save time and money. Overall, with our 19,000 stores, most of our sales actually are offline, which makes sense with the convenience of our locations, but against conventional thinking is how digitally engaged they are. O ur digitally engaged shoppers spend twice as much. They are searching for cashback offers, coupons, the weekly ad, what's in stock, and their nearest store. T hat's a big component of our consumer that kind of challenges conventional thinking that they're buying in store, but they're maybe not digitally active t hey very much are. C harlene, you have quite a unique demographics and quite a digitally hard-to-reach one. Talk to us a little bit more about some of the strategies that you employ to engage this type of consumer? I like to simplify it just to two different parts. First, are transactions. When you have over $2 billion transactions, you essentially have a plethora of customers raising their hands, saying, "This is who I am. This is what I like to buy. This is what helps me. This is what's needed in my life." That all comes together to ensure that we have audience and scale. That's a big component of our audiences, is unduplicated, unique reach and extension. The second part of that is around our market that we addressed. So I hit on Rural America.... I don't know how many people in here are from a rural place, but we all understand that media is driving to efficiencies, right? You've got markets that are urban, the lowest cost per click. You're trying to do everything the cheapest way possible. What you're essentially doing is optimizing out of small-town America, and so that's the other part of our strategy, is addressing an overlooked market, and people come to us as they're starting to see results of that unique, unduplicated reach. Awesome. W e touched upon the size of your footprint, and I noted that you mentioned that we're planning to grow by 800 stores in 2024. I mean, that's three stores a day, pretty much. T alk to us about how that's impacting your lives and your team's lives, and give us some insights on how you're dealing with that challenge. Yeah. With m any stores, there's always the challenge of how do you prioritize? There's always fires taking you away from your core strategy. So we try to prioritize by looking at the feasibility of what we're doing and how much value it's gonna bring to our customers and our employees. I'd say the other challenge is keeping a consistent experience. Like Charlene was saying, we engage our customers digitally with offers, and that drives them into the store, but the challenge is to keep a consistent experience between that online and bricks-and-mortar sale. T hen finally, I think the last is scale. With so many stores, you got to make sure that whatever tactic you're trying to create, you can reproduce it all over America seamlessly. I'm gonna chime in one second here, 'cause, like, I think whether it's the proliferation of stores, like in your case, Paul, or the proliferation of digital channels, the reality is, harmonizing the experience across channel is really the challenge for retailers, and continues to be i t's been kind of the buzzword, but it's here to stay. We know customer expectations are becoming … are continuing to increase, and I think retailers have one of the hardest jobs in this sense. Like, frequency of interaction is super hard, super high in retail. Every new digital channel that pops up, retailers are expected to show up there, be the first, know what to do there. Customers interact on average seven to eight times with retailers before actually making a purchase, and it's not a linear journey. It's looking at your desktop, pulling up your mobile phone, going to the store, expecting to be able to, like, pick it up wherever you left it off. E xpectations are really high. I do think the real differentiator today for retailers is the ability to recognize, activate, measure in real time. Like, I think we all used to say, next best action, next best opportunity. Gone are the days where that meant identify someone and segment them in an email program 10 days later l ike, your next interaction now happens minutes later in a different channel. So being able to know that that's the same person, this is what matters to them. I think what you said, Paul, about... Or Charlene, about, people looking at coupons prior to going to stores, that's, like, foundational to your business, but it's true to every retailer. It's about, like, 90% of consumers check out the website before going to the store, so they have some sort of, like, digital experience and influence before showing up in the physical world. R eally being able to connect and measure is not, is not a luxury that anyone can afford not to do today. I think that brings us to personalization at scale, and as you embarked on this journey, tell us a little bit more about your priorities and vision for that. Yeah. O verall, it's really important to have an integrated view of the customer, and thankfully, at Dollar General, we aren't siloed. And I say that in regards to enterprise marketing efforts are actually connected to what we're doing with paid or vendor amplified. E verything, whether it's suppressing audiences or understanding your efficiencies within, you've got that integrated view across your customer. That is critical and so important. I've worked at other retailers where you essentially don't even know what the enterprise side is doing, or you're duplicating efforts. DG does have that under the same umbrella, which really actually makes all technology conversations, everything we're trying to do in regards for the consumer, much more appropriate in understanding those connected touch points. Yeah. What I love about Charlene's vision is really, the customer doesn't see Dollar General as retail media or enterprise marketing, it sees it as one storefront, and so you have a real customer-centric vision that's also unified across those two things. I think we've seen with our research that seven in 10 consumers will spend more if the brand personalizes the customer experience, often up to 38% more. Getting it right with your customers will unlock incrementality with brands, for your brands in the media network, but also for Dollar General itself. I think historically, it's fair to say that Dollar General struggled with just doing proof of concepts, and it would rarely ever scale think that was because when we looked at it and we assessed it... There were some core fundamental capabilities that were missing within your tech stack, but also both within the business as well. Fundamentally, to achieve this vision, enterprise marketing and retail media needed one core set of capabilities and one unified platform. So we had to use the enterprise marketing as a bit of a petri dish to sort of test and learn and then scale those capabilities to when we want to monetize them within retail media. Of course, this required quite a lot of pragmatism, a lot of prioritization around what the long-term sort of foundational building blocks are, but also short-term quick wins, that scores on the boards, as I like to call it, so that the exec get off your back a little bit, and also that the customers also see the value that we're delivering to them. It also, critically, we should have some innovation within that, too. I think finally, just one thing that we really looked at within the vision was not just what technology capabilities were needed. Personalization at scale requires your whole operating model to really transform, change, and it's a cultural change as well. So within the roadmap, we built in both process changes and people changes, so we had one unified view of the roadmap and on how it all aligns, so we could harness the technologies correctly. So we talked about that one core platform and the capabilities needed. Paul, do you want to talk a bit about what technology choices you made and why were they important? Yeah, thank you. I'd love to. So, it all starts with clean data. So to get all the data in one place, we stood up a Snowflake data lake, and it sounds good, but once you put all your data in it, it's more like a cesspool than a lake. And so you have to kind of put the data into a clean zone where you can start to cascade it to your other systems. The next step was to kind of invest in a tech stack, and we decided to invest in the Adobe tech stack because we had - we already had many Adobe components. We had AEM, Adobe Analytics, Adobe Target. Just like those other tools, we wanted the CDP to be a self-serve platform for the business to create their own segments and eventually to create their own customer journeys. Then finally, you know, we talked a lot about scale, but really experimentation. So when I got there, Dollar General had such a strong experimentation program, but it was kind of predicated on an A/B or kind of win-lose strategy. And so introducing a multivariate approach where the tools could pick up on the signals in real time and start delivering different messages based on the results, even before you need to evaluate those results. That was kind of the last step. Paul, speaking my love language, because clean data, technology, and the ability to scale is exactly what is needed for the media network to flourish. Beyond that, collaborating with outside partners is key. I use the analogy that it's kind of a relay race. By the time you bring in a tech partner, because you know that is where your customer is off-site and you want to engage with them, you expect that technology partner to know their solution best. Beyond that, you need to activate the audience, execute the media, be able to measure afterwards. All of those handoffs and everything from the data, the tech, the scalability, need to come together to essentially go back to brands and advertisers and tell the story of what really happened, and they want a return. They actually need measurable outcomes to be able to come back and say, "My consumer needed to buy X, and I was able to demonstrate that," and bring that back to their brand teams and so forth. So the collaboration front with multiple partners is so critical because we can't do the work without other people helping. To the point of doing the work, 'cause, like, the how can get really daunting. I think about, like, you walk the NRF floor, and there are, like, hundreds of providers and technologies and options. As you started to think about how to do it, like, what were the things that you were looking for in a partner, prioritizing in tech and integration, and what ended up bringing you to Adobe and Deloitte? Yes. So we were looking for partners who were thought leaders, and Deloitte helped us to future-proof our architecture by bringing the dual-zone approach. And that's kind of what I was talking about earlier, where you start with clean data on the IT side, and you cascade that data over to a self-serve platform for the business side. And like I was saying, we've already invested in the Adobe stack, so extending that stack even more made a lot of sense. Both of our partners had a track record of delivery for their clients. And then, I think we had a better way of kind of evaluating the tech. So instead of an antiseptic RFP that's done on paper, we had all our partners come in, and not only were they there to demo themselves, we had our engineers and our business practitioners, hands on keys, doing the demo themselves. So we really got to kick the tires and drive the car around the parking lot before we purchased it. Love that. Beyond everything that Paul just mentioned, there's kind of three big things for me. First and foremost, leaning in with ambiguity. So you bake off, you do all these things, you've got everything locked and loaded, but in reality, you don't know what you don't know. You have selected a partner who's looking from the outside in. They only know what information you've provided them. So when you get inside their house, so to speak, you really see there's mold on the wall, there's rooms that need to be repainted. You see all of this other work that you did not anticipate. And that leads me to the second point, having a partner that has the appropriate thought, leadership, and creativity to solve problems with considerate to constraints. So they have to figure it out with you, with what money you have. It can't turn into, "Well, this is how you do it," and then you get inside the house, and then you need to add all these things, and the bill goes up. There's very much a collaboration that has to occur across the board. I like the sound of a bake-off being a British person. You forgot. Wait, there was one more. Oh, yeah, there is one more. Accountability, accountability, accountability. D eloitte, Dollar General, we expect greatness. We hired you to help us. There is a component of their services, thought leadership, and knowledge that we maybe have an opportunity to learn, and we need accountability. So when things go right, I celebrate that with a simple congratulations, 'cause we paid you all for that. But when things don't go right, it's about fixing it. It's not about dependencies and blame. It is really about, okay, what is the resolution? How do we still get to where we're trying to go? Okay, now you can go. I feel that accountability every day. I suppose when we, Charlene just mentioned successes, Paul. Can we talk about a bit about the successes? I wanted to share some of the early success. Yes. S ome of the early pieces we launched, we completely revamped our Adobe Analytics platform so that we're collecting a whole bunch more engagement data, w e're now collecting all that data from mobile and web properties into, like, a single report suite, so you can compare it with each other. And that was good to kind of set up for that clean data that we're putting into the other systems t hat was a good success. T hen, this year, we were able to launch in-store push notifications. W hen a customer goes in the store, they can get an alert right away about any offers that are in that store that day. And I think it's an exciting feature for personalization and to drive those purchase and redemptions, but it could also be a future kind of DGMN product. T hat's the good, and the bad and the ugly, like, what learnings or what shouts do you have in the process? Well, it probably sounds oversimplified, but start with getting your data right, 'cause if you put bad data in the end system, then none of it will really work. So invest time, not just in getting the data right in the source system, but also kind of minimizing the number of hops that that data has to make and, you know, how it manifests in the end system t hat's kinda my other watch-out is: focus on the outcome. There can be this tendency when folks talk about data to, you know, which piece is in which repository, and can we get this one special piece of data? That really doesn't matter. It's more important to focus on which customers do you wanna reach, and what are you trying to drive them to do, and the data will kind of flow from that. Yes. Building off that, I cannot build. I am not in engineering. I have no technical skills, but there are things I want every day from Paul and his team. T o do that right, it's so important to invite your non-IT stakeholders into the process at the beginning. I think that often gets overlooked. The business team asks for something, the IT team delivers it. When it's time to showcase the first debut of something, it's not what we thought it was. A lot of time is spent going back, explaining exactly why this is what you chose and what you want. And so the earlier you can bring people along for the ride, the more likely they are to actually understand that this was the destination you all were both wanting to get to. Awesome. I think we're concluding the conversation, to be honest. It has been a great conversation, but also a great journey so far. I'd love to finish with some parting thoughts. Paul, do you wanna kick us off? Yeah. I f you leave today with one thing, Dollar General is working with innovative technology to solve interesting business problems. Dollar General might be 80 years old, but the stuff we're doing is pretty cutting edge, and we're growing. So check out the site, see if there's any positions that fit, or give me a call. Give him a call. Charlene. Paul's giving out his phone number right now after this session. My parting thoughts is, this is not rocket science. I firmly believe we overcomplicate this. At the end of the day, you have a brand, you have a consumer, and we're just trying to get it to them in the easiest way, and maybe they don't know that's something they need now, or they do. Regardless, it shouldn't be that difficult of a journey, and I think we overcomplicate it i f you break things down to each component of the problem, we are not saving lives, we are not doing brain surgery. This is selling more stuff or finding people who are looking for something in store a nd so you just have to stay grounded in that to make sure that the problems can be solved across other teams instead of overcomplicating it. ... Yeah, I agree. I think my parting thought is actually a couple. I think the first one is it all needs to work together. T he tech stack is one piece of the equation, but really, the partnership, the organizational roles and responsibilities, the clarity of goals, and making sure that everything adjusts towards your end goal is really important. The other thing in my mind is plan for the future, make sure that whatever you're implementing is future-proof, but also plan for the present i think, gone are the days when we could we could do, Paul, I'm sure you're happy about that, like, two-year-long IT projects, where, like, everything is on hold, and TAT is done with the project, right? Like, that's not the case anymore. Today, you need to really deliver value fast, so make sure you have a roadmap that, yes, sets you up for, like, 10, 20 years from now, but also quickly delivers value, and make sure you can measure, measure, measure the value. I do see someone in the audience who's an ex-coworker, but, like, I consider a friend at this point, who really helped me do that when I was at Gap, and that was the key of success at the time. It's like making sure that from your first 30 days, you can really start saying, "This is what this is bringing for us and for the business." 'Cause that's the way you, you're continuing to get budgets and credibility inside the organization. I have Paul's number if anybody needs it as well, so happy to pass that out. M y thoughts are, start with the customer, I think that's pretty critical. Especially then also look at your data, especially when it comes to identity. I think when we were talking about, like, the digital offline, online world, I think identity is critical within that. Prioritize in a pragmatic way, and then it really is a holistic thing. T hink people, process, tech, and that should help you get to the goal of personalization at scale. Alongside that, it's been a pleasure working with both Paul and Charlene for the last 18 months, and I'm really looking forward to the next set of capabilities we deliver and also the next few successes to put on the board. Thank you. Thanks, everyone, for joining. Thanks. Stop by the booths. Bye. I 'm so excited to be here with you today. So my name is Olivia Kwon-Best. I am Adobe's GM of Digital Strategy Group for Retail and Consumer Goods. So a little bit about myself i' ve spent over 20 years, driving omnichannel transformation in retail, both as a strategy consultant, as a retail executive, so I'm also ex Macy's, and now as a software provider. I'm really excited to have Bennett Fox-Glassman, SVP of Macy's Customer Journey, here with us to share this really iconic brand's story of how they're using personalization to drive really amazing customer experiences. B ennett, tell us a little bit more about yourself and your role. Thank you, Olivia, and thank you for having us here today to tell that story. As Olivia said, I'm Bennett Fox-Glassman. I'm Senior Vice President of Customer Journey at Macy's. I am. I would tell you I'm a retail enthusiast, as I'm sure many of us in this room are. Hard to be in this business if you don't love it. A s many of us also know, retail is such a team sport, and so my time at Macy's has really been a path through all the different parts of the company i 've gotten to work with so many different teams and so many different parts of the organization, and that's been really formative in my career at Macy's. A lso, I think has really set me up for customer journey and the role and the team that I lead today. Customer journey is a new concept that we introduced a couple of years ago. Our reason for being is really to bring together all of the different parts of the company around the customer, and to make the company, to make Macy's more customer-obsessed, more customer-driven every day and in everything we do, whether that's in how we plan product, whether that's in how we deliver store experience, digital experience, and so on. C ustomer journey at Macy's, we have consumer insights and analytics h ow do we understand our shopper and what they do and what they're interested in? We have some of the technologies we'll talk about today that powers better and richer experiences for our customer. And then the programs that we rely on in order to create customer-led, customer-driven growth, like loyalty, like our own media, and notably, like personalization. T hat's a really unique role, and I love that because I feel like when we speak to different customers, one of the challenges that's often cited is being able to cut through the departmental or functional or channel silos. I think you guys are really headed in the right direction. I think personalization continues to be one of the most relevant topics in retail. And I think the reason why is that many retailers, I mean, it's not a new concept, as we all know, but the reason why is that retailers still struggle to deliver it at scale in a connected way to all customers in real time, across all channels. T ell us a little bit about more about your strategy. P ersonalization to us means context and relevance. So often we are attempting to have a conversation with our customers, but we pick up as if we don't know you. You may have been a Macy's customer, some of you in this room, for 20 years. But when you come to us, you know, if I know you and I bump into you, I don't say: Hi, I'm Bennett, nice to meet you. I say, "Hey, great to see you. How have you been? How are your kids?" Right? Like, I bring context to that conversation, and that's really what we're aiming to do with personalization, is how do we make sure we pick up where we left off? How do we make sure we bring context to each conversation and interaction we have with you? You can see here sort of a funnel view to thinking about that. We expect personalization to drive relevance all throughout the customer's journey with Macy's. Whether that's when you're top of funnel, and we're thinking about inspiring and attracting a specific customer to the brand. Whether that's as you move down the funnel, and we're thinking about: How do we engage you? How do we provide you relevant product? How do we provide you relevant experience? Whether it's as you move even lower in the funnel, and we're thinking about: How do we convert, right? What is that offer? What is that communication at the moment of purchase that's really going to get you over the line? T hen finally, how do we use personalization in order to drive rich, engaged relationships over time, and that feedback loop over time as we think about growing customer lifetime value, which is a term I know a lot of us use, but it's, it can often be hard to put into practice h ow do we enrich that relationship over time in a way that delivers loyalty, and then ultimately, as a result of that, sales and profitable growth? Yep. Yep, and that is the Holy Grail, right? M ost retailers have been at this for a while s o tell us a little bit about what's new and different now. I think you hit in your question a minute ago on some of the things that are most important to me. Yep. We have, many of us, been doing personalization for a long time, and I would expect many of you in the room feel that way, too. I'm doing some personalization i t's not like I'm at zero. Whether that's through email or whether that's through paid media or product recommendations, maybe. W hat I think is different and what we're finally really getting to, in my view, is, A, we are getting to a point where we really can get more one-to-one. Historically, it's been, you know, larger segments or smaller segments w e're really getting to a point with all the technology coming into the market, where one-to-one is more practical. We are getting to a point where we can really do it in real time, right? Where an action you took just now, not only can inform how I speak to you in that same channel, but in another channel. F inally, to that point, we're doing it in a connected way, right? You want the conversation to feel like I know you, regardless of where you show up in my, in my experience, whether that's digital or stores or the contact center or somewhere else. And b eing able to connect it across channels, I think we're having a breakthrough in that as well. Okay. L et's drill deeper. T ell us about the specific capabilities that you guys are using to really execute on that strategy and vision. There are five. I've got a visual aid for you all here. I think they flow quite logically, though. The first to me is, can we bring that data in? Oh, all the phones went up i love that. Thank you. Oh, that's good. All right, this is a good slide. Noted. The first is really data foundations, right? Can you bring your data and have it centralized in one place where you can actually get at it, right? Again, those of you who work in this area know that just having, like, data unification, this is nontrivial. So getting it all in one place where you can use it, then being able to access it i can actually understand what it's telling me m y marketers, my analysts, can actually get access to that data. Deciding, what should I do with it? What comes next, right? What is the action that I want to take with my customer? Then being able to create a message around that, put that into something you could actually deliver to a customer, and finally do that, and do that across channels i think of those as kind of the breakdown of what you have to do to actually deliver personalization and to do it at scale. T hese desired capabilities are very much in line with what we see many retailers trying to seek. So tell me about kind of what use cases are you going to execute with those? Because often we do find, you know, some organizations have a very strong library of use cases that roadmapped out. So tell us a little bit more about yours. We started with a list of many, and one of the best things I think we did actually was to choose at the early onset to focus on a few. And so a handful of ones that we have focused on early, they include first to second purchase for that new customer I bring in. How do I get them to that second interaction with the brand? Include helping to, particularly for Macy's as a department store, one of our great strengths is the ability to sell many categories and to put it all together, and so to complete the look and build the outfit, for our customer. Another great strength we have as a brand is the strong omnichannel nature of our business w e have many stores across the country. We have an incredibly strong digital business, and not only do our customers love that about the Macy's brand, but those are our most engaged customers. And h elping customers who may be shopping more in one channel or another to see the benefits and to engage with us on an omnichannel basis. For members of our loyalty program, helping them to understand the benefits of that program and engage a nd if we see them doing, you know, they're transacting outside the program, how do we make sure they're seeing and realizing the benefits of Macy's Star Rewards? F inally, for those customers, tear to my eye, who we start to see engage less with the brand, how do we get them to reengage? How do we re-up their interest and re-trigger whatever brought them to our amazing brand to begin with? We've started with those five- Yeah. I think it's, there's plenty of room to grow there. Yeah. W hat I love about these use cases is that I feel like it really covers a full customer life cycle, from getting that very important first to second purchase, right? Building more engagement, increasing the basket, and then also just winning back potentially lapsing customers. So let's segue into kind of the role of the technology, right? w e all know you need technology to enable these capabilities. H ow did you go about choosing the right technology, platform, and partner? A few things were important to me, continue to be important to me as we evaluate who are our ecosystem of partners around personalization. First off, it is, it is critical to me that our partners be vision-aligned. They have to share what we want to accomplish t hey have to share the level of ambition, right? It's not just like we're sort of doing this faith l ike, we're, we're in it to win and to really transform the customer experience, through the technology that we're delivering. We look for partners who deliver and can deliver at scale. Macy's is a, a large brand and a complex brand, and, we wanna make sure that, that the customer doesn't feel that, right? That they feel the personal interaction. C ompanies who are able to do that, and who are able to scale with us, and who are able to work at the speed that we wanna work. My partners, any of them in the room, will joke or will know that I'm very serious when I say we wanna move fast. And I say this to people sometimes, and they're like: "Okay, yeah, most brands what?" And then they feel it after, you know, a few months of working with us. W e did. W e're intense about it, but but because we are fueled by what the customer is looking for us, and the customer is changing and evolving so quickly, and that's our North Star, and so we're chasing that, and we expect our partners to race towards it with us. And then finally, personalization, as those of you who work on it know, is complex in terms of how you have to drive change and how you have to drive that change across the organization and with your partners. A partner who is able to help think about that operational change, the change management, and so Adobe has been great on all those dimensions. I think you all actually put personalization into your company's mission last year, and that was exciting to me. ACS or the consulting arm have been great partners to us as we think about the change. T hank you for, you know, all you have done to live up to that goal, but we really do i t's a high bar that we set and hold on the team for our partners. Yeah, and it is true. A dobe's entire go-to-market is personalization at scale. And I think that, you know, we really did find a common shared vision upfront, and I feel like that's really helped pave the way for the partnership, and we have really been privileged to help you along this journey. T ell us a little bit more about the specific technologies that you're using to enable these capabilities. I 'll walk through it again, sort of, you know, from beginning to end, and I find it's helpful to use a specific example s o let's take first a second purchase as an example. Data foundation, being able to bring all that in one place, as I said s o capturing, knowing where that customer came in, what we learned about the customer as they had that first purchase interaction with us. Understanding which channel that was in, what category they may have purchased, what price point perhaps they purchased at, and maybe geographically, where they're based a lot of information you can learn about a customer in an initial interaction. And so making sure we have all of that, we have all of that consolidated, is an important first step. Then, as I mentioned, being able to give this to our marketers and to our analysts, so that we say, "Okay, how does this align with our strategy?" Right? None of this is without the context of what you're trying to do with a brand and how you're trying to grow or what your merchandising strategies are. And so being able to marry those things, because you can create access to the insights, is important. O n that, on that first dimension, we've stood up Adobe Experience Platform, AEP, and we've used it in conjunction with a product called Customer Journey Analytics, in order to provide more and more real-time insight around the customer. Then, as we move through, what do I want to do next? W e've done a lot of proprietary work here, actually, building our own model s o if you've made a first purchase with us, I still have to decide what would I like to talk to you about next? What should that be? What's going to be engaging to you as a Macy's customer, based on what I learned as you came in? A gain, whether that's category, whether that's channel, whether that's level of offer, whether that's price point, whether that's brand, we wanna make sure we get that next interaction right i 's really important to retaining the customer. Putting it together with content and message. W e've been implementing Adobe Experience Manager, AEM, as a product to help us marry the marketing message, assets, content together in a more dynamic way, in more like real-time a s I mentioned earlier, it's an important part of how I think we're all transforming our experiences. T hen finally, you gotta practically get it out the door. And all these things sound easy, and I know all of you in the room who do this day in and day out, know it's, it's always harder than it sounds, but you gotta get it out the door. A dobe Journey Optimizer has become an important part of our ecosystem there, and, and to be able to deliver it, as we talked about, in a synchronous way across multiple channels. So whether you choose to come onto the website, whether you receive an email, whether you show up somewhere else, and I'm serving it through paid media, and I want that message to be consistent, so it feels like Macy's is talking to me, and they get me, and they know where we left the conversation off, and they know where we're picking the conversation up. Yeah, and those are some really, like, truly aspirational capabilities, because, you know, being able to connect that across those journeys is really important, and you guys are going after really tailoring one-to-one offers i f you're showing a potentially lapsing customer a particular product category offer, 25% off on email, well, when they show up on site, you better show them that consistent message. And it's really difficult to do that without an integrated technology platform s o we've been so excited to be on this journey with you. Y ou know, moving beyond technology, and I think this is a really, really key learning from Macy's, is that I think, org and op model is just as much, if not the most important thing, beyond the technology, to make sure the teams adopt the technologies, you're getting the results and the benefits that you're seeking. Y ou also have a very unique role as that SVP of Customer Journey, bringing along a lot of different disparate teams. T ell us about how you guys are driving adoption and success. I 'll give a shout-out to some of my team here in the room, who, like, came to visit. They work hard every day in order to drive personalization across the enterprise in this way, right? Retail, I mentioned, I said at the beginning, my deep-held belief that retail is a team sport, and personalization is no exception to that. W hether that is partnering with our merchants to understand their priorities, whether that is partnering with other marketing teams around the organization in order to ensure that this is part of the overall message that we're telling to the customer right now, right? We may be in the context of Mother's Day or Valentine's Day or Black Friday. We still wanna make sure the way in which we're communicating to you feels relevant to you, but in the context of the overall brand story we're telling in that moment. H aving this team that's really focused on personalization as a capability. I think, has been incredibly powerful for us to then navigate the organization and break down what traditionally may have been silos around whether particular marketing tactics or particular categories or however your business is structured, right? That could be regions, that could be brands for you. But having a team that really allows you to break through that and to put the customer at the center of the conversation in order to deliver that experience, we've found has been incredibly important. I love that it's not just, like, a talking point y ou guys are actually executing it, so kudos to you. I know that Macy's is already seeing value, although we can't share the numbers, but tell us about how you're measuring value and proving it to the entire organization. One of the most important things to me on value has been that what we do with personalization is incremental. If we simply do something different, you know, kind of moving value from the right pocket to the left pocket, we haven't accomplished anything for ourselves, we haven't accomplished anything for our customer. A gain, we hold a very high bar for ourselves, for our partners, about what does it look like to have succeeded, and, and we look at that in terms of incrementality and specifically incrementality at the customer level. Because, again, that's my measure of success i wanna see that the customer is coming back to us more frequently. I wanna see that they're having a longer length of relationship with Macy's. I wanna see that they're engaging with more of our brands or more of our categories r ight, all of these are indicators to me that they are deepening their relationship with us. W e've been very excited about what we have seen early on with these journeys that we've talked about. We are seeing that incrementality at the customer level in a way that's meaningful, and we are very excited to continue scaling that as we move into 2024 in a way that drives meaningful growth for our business. Yeah, I love that, and we know that retail is tough, especially now, so we know that we need to drive incrementality, incremental results, and we're really excited to partner with you on the dashboards to make sure you have all that, all those insights in real time. All right, w e do know that, you know, true transformation, I find, is a multi-year journey, so tell us a bit about where you are now. I would still characterize us as being at the beginning, even though, as I said, we, we've done personalization for a long time, and actually for many years s o it's, it's not that it's brand new, but I'm so excited about where the speed of customer change is aligning with the technology to deliver better experience, and how we are keeping up as an organization with the pace of that change. T hough we've been at this for a little while, I think of us as being still just at the beginning of delivering the type of really deep, engaging customer experience that we're reaching for our customers. Yeah, we're all excited to work on the next set of use cases with you, so seeing more and more value. Okay. T o wrap up, what are some of the biggest learnings, those critical success factors, that you can share with this audience? I would absolutely prioritize. I spoke to our five use cases that we've started with, but I think an early learning for us was, make sure you pick a little bit at the beginning to start with t here's often a temptation to wanna do it all or to wanna buy into the big, big vision, but you gotta start somewhere, and it's really helpful, I find, to ground that starting point. Additionally, the point about not trying to do it alone. You have to do it with your partners around the organization. I have found you can't really leave anyone behind e verybody has to understand how this is gonna change, not only the way that the customer experiences the brand, but the way that every single one of our functions has to work and think in order to successfully deliver on this experience. Once you really start comprehending the magnitude of that change, it can be quite intimidating, but it is, we find, so critical to making this stick and last and ultimately delivering for the customer. Yeah, I think you're so spot on with that, because when we've looked at different retailers tackling transformation, we found that really there's been two major paradigms i think the old way has been letting all the different teams tackle personalization on their own. The email team try to do better targeting with better data, the site team improve the product recommendation algorithms. I think those who have proven to be successful have created an enterprise-wide strategy, because we do know that customers traverse multiple channels. Y ou need to make sure not only are your marketing and digital teams involved, but your merchants, right? They may have to give up kind of more control around how the homepage looks like to really be customer-centric.... T hank you so much for sharing the story i think we've been so excited about this partnership, and if you guys have any questions, please come and chat with us w e also have the Adobe booth, and go shop at Macy's, which is only about three blocks away. Come and shop. Open till 9:00 P.M. this evening. Yes. Yeah. Does anybody have any questions we could take? What is the biggest challenge when you're doing, like, personalization, like, digitally, technically, and then how you overcome it with the other people organization or sitting in platform? T he question was: What do we find is the biggest challenge technically, and how do we overcome it? I think being as clear in your technical strategy as you are in your business strategy is very important. We come from an environment where there are many systems, many of them older than I'd like to admit, where there are lots of different vendors we're playing with and who play an important role for us. B eing focused about what role do you expect each piece of technology to play, and what do you want that to do for the end experience? I have some fantastic technology partners, one of whom happens to be sitting next to you here, who are actually very rigorous with us about what is it that you want this piece of technology to do for the customer, and then we'll build it s o I think being customer first in everything we do has actually really helped to inform and help us to work through some of the technical obstacles. Any other questions? All right. Well, thank you so much, Bennett. I'm so excited about this, and please come to learn more about Adobe and Macy's. Thank you, everyone. Thank you, Alicia.