AI Supercharges Innovation and Content at Newell Brands

Bruno Soeiro:

Hi, I'm Bruno Soeiro from Infosys Aster.

Melanie Huet:

Hi, I'm Melanie Huet, and I am the president of Home, which is the home and commercial division at Newell Brands.

Bruno Soeiro:

Today, we're going to be talking about AI in marketing, its usage, adoption, and how it's evolving the role of the CMO.

Lovely to meet you, and thanks so much for taking time out.

Melanie Huet:

Of course.

Bruno Soeiro:

As we hear at the ANA Marketing of Masters, over the last two days, we've had closed round tables on six working groups of the council talking about brand media creative services, data analytics, and the implications of AI adoption. Now, could you tell us from your perspective, how have you been adopting AI in terms of efficiency within your business?

Melanie Huet:

I think Newell's at the front of adoption in terms of our peer set when you take a look at us. And so, one of the things we did is immediately we formed a dedicated AI team, and we allowed that team a lot of freedom to explore, experiment, fail. And what that resulted in is us finding lots of opportunistic ways to integrate AI immediately.

And so, some of the fun things the team came up with is we were one of the first groups out using synthetic personas for insights. We identified some partnerships and tools that we wanted to incorporate, like Stravito, which helped us really unlock our insights database globally. And then, we decided we really wanted to focus on front-end innovation, because for us, winning products in the marketplace results in winning market share. And so, by using AI, we were able to take that ideation process at the beginning of innovation, and move it from really about a four-month process, down to one to two weeks. It's been outstanding.

Bruno Soeiro:

Wow, I can imagine. So from an efficiency play, you've been there, done that.

Melanie Huet:

Right.

Bruno Soeiro:

And if we were to look at effectiveness and measurements of the investments you've made in AI, how are you offsetting the savings? Are you investing them to drive further opportunity in brand growth? Are you investing them in new AI tools? Could you describe how you're offsetting efficiency with effectiveness?

Melanie Huet:

Sure. That's a great question. So let me try to piece it out. So on insights, our insights budget did not go down. Rather, what we did is all the insights dollars we weren't spending, because we were using AI to go gather insights, we were able to then reallocate those dollars into some much larger foundational studies that we really desperately needed, so for example, things like global consumer segmentation or some deeper ethnography work around the world, et cetera. So I would say that really looks a little bit more like us repurposing the dollars for some other value-added pieces.

Then when you look at content creation, there, we actually needed to scale up just to stay in business, if you will. So we knew we needed 5x more content and we had to use the same level of staffing, and our staff was already completely underwater. So the productivity gains has helped this finite group of people actually be able to keep up with the demands of today.

Bruno Soeiro:

Fantastic. And if I could dig a little bit on the effectiveness component, when we think of a big topic that was being discussed as CMOs this week has been measurement. Now, we've got measurement within marketing, you've got your media measurement metrics, your efficiency productivity metrics. But a measurement that came up that I found really interesting as part of the influencing role of the CMO in the org is how does measurements from marketing translate across your workflow to start bringing in the CFO into the conversation, start bringing in the CEO and even the CIO, to have joint accountability on the outcomes that you're trying to drive? Could you describe, are you tackling that, how are you tackling that, to drive an inclusivity of marketing in the broader spectrum of the company?

Melanie Huet:

Yes. In fact, we really needed the CEO's support and continued investment in our team. So when we look at the metrics we were using, one of those looked like us measuring number of assets created. We had to go find some quantifiable metrics that we thought then related back to us increasing productivity and ultimately helping to lift sales. And so, one of those looked like number of assets being created. So via that and some other metrics, we were able to assess that we increased our productivity four and a half times, and then we started to not be late for deadlines to retailers. So another really simple metric was just being on time and in full for all of the launch pieces that are required to put a new product in the marketplace. Best we can tell, I think the number changes constantly, and it goes up, not down, we need 500 pieces of content to launch one new product out into the world.

Bruno Soeiro:

That's fascinating.

Melanie Huet:

Yeah. So it's a huge demand on our people and our time. So essentially, the formula was if the outcome is we need to drive sales or share or something like that, what we did is we tried to back into what is the work that we're doing, and how might we measure the work that we're doing to hit some type of metric that then we might link to one of those? Because it's kind of hard to say, "The number of assets I created is directly related to the current sales number." But you can certainly find that middle point that says, "If I'm on time, ready and in full for everything that's launching, I know I've delivered that part to the organization."

Bruno Soeiro:

Fantastic. Fathoming 500 assets. Leading into, it's a great segue to talk about with adoption of AI in terms of talent, governance, usage, adoption, how did you manage that?

Melanie Huet:

That's a tricky one. So everybody likes to draw the charts about the early adopters and the rejectors and all the people sitting in there, and we found the innovators, the early adopters in our organization, we identified them and created this little think tank. There's naturally the next ring of people that are excited. But the group that you need to influence is this broader piece of the organization that may not embrace it easily for many reasons. They might be afraid, they might think it's going to take their job, they might just prefer the way they do things now, it may not be any other reason besides that.

And so, with that group, we had to demonstrate the value in several different ways. So we would do things like showcase studies, we would help them get licenses and start to play with the tools. We started to help them understand the benefit it was adding, and we also had a strong talk track internally in the company around, "We haven't been reducing jobs in this particular group." So we started with the insights team, we actually had to add a staff member, because our productivity went up so high that it attracted a lot of attention, and so the demands coming into the organization skyrocketed.

Bruno Soeiro:

I was going to ask that question, so if you were able to take an X number of weeks for human-led content production asset resizing to potentially a number of hours, what was your increase of productivity? It must've skyrocketed.

Melanie Huet:

Well, we think it's about four and a half times what we did the prior year.

Bruno Soeiro:

Wow.

Melanie Huet:

Yeah.

Bruno Soeiro:

That's pretty good.

Melanie Huet:

It was very good.

Bruno Soeiro:

And as you've adopted this new technology, how have you ensured alignment with your IT departments, your AI teams? Because now, all these new roles start popping up, a head of responsible AI or enterprise AI, how have you integrated what you're taking on with IT, or has that not been a problem at all?

Melanie Huet:

It's an important question, I'm glad you brought it up, because it's important for the leaders at the top to come together on this topic and make sure that we all have aligned goals and outcomes and that we know what our roles are, because that's where it can get a little murky, which is what does the IT team actually do, versus now you might have some marketers or designers or other people actually running and installing IT. It's kind of a unique situation, the way MarTech has come online. So I partnered really closely with our CIO, and his group and my group were both very excited about AI, and we let the working team below us come up with how they were going to do this together, and by fostering collaboration at the top and then allowing the working team to define how they wanted to do it, that was actually the best path through that.

Bruno Soeiro:

It's so enlightening to hear that, because marketing has got a significant opportunity to be the experimentation bed of AI, especially as you're drawing forward. We've spoken about asset resizing, are you doing anything in other asset classes? Are you venturing into video? Are you playing with any generative tools that may not be primetime-ready?

Melanie Huet:

Oh, yes. So we have a fantastic relationship with Adobe. We signaled to Adobe several times, we're very complicated, and I think sometimes people don't recognize it or believe it because our revenue is seven and a half billion, and Coca-Cola is down the street and they're actually quite a bit larger than us. But we do have complexity, because we play in over 130 product categories, and that often gets missed in the conversation.

Where I'm headed with this is as we were on our journey with Adobe, all of a sudden, their eyes were open like, "Oh yeah, this is new and different," because we sell candles. Well, candles has a flame, and it kicks off a very different halo and glow around the flame, and that's a different type of image to work with than a hard cooler, than a baby car seat, et cetera, et cetera. So together, we really pushed the boundaries of what the tooling can do on Firefly AI and how the custom models work, because you train on a certain product, but you don't necessarily take the model you trained on a candle and pick it up and apply it to a cooler, for example. So together, we've really worked hard to push that technology.

Bruno Soeiro:

That's fabulous. We work a lot with Adobe as well, and we've done a really interesting partnership with them where we're trying to get industry-specific AI models and SLMs into the platform, so great use case. Just looking ahead, where do you see the most exciting area of innovation that you can't wait to get your hands stuck into?

Melanie Huet:

There's so much. Honestly, every morning, there's something exciting released. So I'll give you today's answer, but I suppose my answer would change in a week or two. It's amazing to me how we are now creating the opportunity to bring so many things to life at one time. I'm pretty fascinated by the fidelity of video that's being generated through text prompting, and we've been using some of that. We've taken still images and used products like Runway, some of the Adobe tools, and we can immediately move a still image into a moving one. And all of our testing tells us that responds so much better in social media, higher effectiveness rate. Now, we've been able to create videos up to one-minute long, generally through just texting and other things, prompt texting, I think it's fascinating. We're eliminating photo shoots. Sometimes, it's hard to catch the nuances that signal that it's not real, and pretty soon, I think those nuances are going to be gone. The funny little movement a human does in a video, it's going to be smoothed out soon.

Bruno Soeiro:

Absolutely, the pixelations will disappear and move on. I was sat yesterday next to a CMO from a pharmaceutical company, he's gotten off static assets completely and he just does video formats-

Melanie Huet:

Interesting.

Bruno Soeiro:

... for the entire distribution channel. And yes, he's working with Google, with YouTube, and they're really focusing on very specific models to drive that.

Melanie Huet:

That's great.

Bruno Soeiro:

Yeah, so it's really good. With that, I just wanted to say thank you so much for taking time out of your schedule and for spending time with us.

Melanie Huet:

Thank you.

Bruno Soeiro:

Thank you.