Woolworths Group consolidates 30,000 marketing assets into Adobe platform

Woolworths Group has consolidated 30,000 marketing assets into Adobe’s digital asset management (DAM) platform in an effort to create a “single source of truth” across the organisation.

Eve Ireland, of Woolworths Group, speaking at Adobe Summit in Sydney.

The retail powerhouse has built a repository for its multiple brands’ marketing material as part of an 18-month program focused on improving discoverability, reuse, and operational efficiency.

The initiative has seen Woolworths begin to decommission its legacy digital repositories and streamline workflows across its many internal teams.

“[In] a legacy business and a big business like ours... we have assets that sit within teams all over the business,” Woolworths Group's general manager of Next Gen Marketing Eve Ireland said.

"Our focus has been making sure that we can consolidate all of those into one location.”

Housed within Adobe Experience Manager, the digital asset management system acts as a centralised platform for storing, organising, and distributing marketing assets, including images, videos, and campaign content.

Speaking at Adobe Summit in Sydney, Ireland said Woolworths' repository is still “growing every day” with current efforts directed at “making it as useful to the [marketing] team as possible”.

“[It’s about] making it really easy to find things, but then driving that reuse agenda so that we can get more life out of our assets and start to think about reuse on a longer-term basis," she said.

"We need to also make sure that we can really trust that source of data.”

The adoption also sets the marketing team up for future artificial intelligence initiatives, with Ireland adding: “When you're thinking about automation and at-scale AI, you just have to have that source of truth.”

One of the key steps toward improving data discoverability has been refining asset metadata through initiatives such as improved tagging and the use of clear, consistent descriptions.

Building on this foundation, Woolworths Group is also working with Adobe on using AI to improve its metadata tagging, which Ireland said has delivered “some really impressive results”.

“We'll increasingly take that workload off the marketer, and the image recognition will obviously be super beneficial to us,” she said.

As a result, marketers at Woolworths will no longer need to manually tag images during campaign development, as metadata will be automatically carried through earlier stages of the content workflow, Ireland added.

Workflow standardisation

As an organisation spanning multiple brands in Australia and New Zealand, orchestrating workflows across Woolworths Group has been a complex task for Ireland.

“From the start of [a marketing] brief through to delivery, [a campaign] touches so many teams [and] it can go off in so many different directions,” Ireland said.

To help address this, Woolworths Group has introduced a standardised taxonomy, a structured classification system to label and categorise digital content across an organisation.

The group has also implemented Adobe Workfront to enhance project management and workflow collaboration, enabling a more connected, end-to-end process across teams and business siloes.

“We have learned a lot from either past experiences or observations of it being done in other places,” she said.

“I think we're in a good place with respect to keeping it quite simple but making sure that everyone can be connected through this form.”