Weaving Lumen’s golden thread with Workfront and Adobe Experience Cloud

Lumen strives to be the trusted connection to the networked world and is focused on delivering technology that enhances the customer experience. They do this by enabling digital businesses and the digital home through adaptive networking, IT agility & hybrid cloud solutions, in addition to connected security offerings.

The Project

Lumen began adoption and implementation of Workfront internally in Spring of 2019. The task was to create an improved asset management process and infrastructure. At that time, their asset management approach was scattered, siloed, and impractical for a leading communications provider. No one knew where assets were stored.


They were spread through several different systems that, in some cases, required finalized assets to be shared via email in order to be used in campaigns. Thousands and thousands of individual storage units, with thousands and thousands of assets, many without metadata. This crucial piece of asset management was missing from Lumen's system.


Hoodoo was approached to set up Adobe Experience Manager Assets (AEM) and integrate it with Workfront to create a state of the art asset distribution center. Lumen purchased AEM Assets because it provides organizations proper asset management with content reusability, as well as metadata and tagging to make it easy to create, store, find, and deliver assets from a single authoritative system.

Lumen had some guiding principles for this project:

Don't Reinvent the Wheel

Understand existing processes and data. A question frequently asked was “How can we get the most power out of the combination of these tools with the least amount of changes?”

Understand the Lifecycle of an Asset

Lumen wanted to gain visibility to the ROI on an individual asset basis and manage everything from creation, review, approval, usage, and retirement.

Findability Is Critical and We All Search Differently

Organizations create and add metadata to assets throughout the asset lifecycle, so make sure to capture all of it and send it along with the assets. More information improves data governance around assets, ensuring that teams know the most up-to-date source for their assets, rather than having finalized assets emailed around.

Begin With the End in Mind

Think about how reporting is going to fit in. How assets are delivered, consumed, and tracked is just as important. How did an asset perform across business units, channels, or even messages within the same channel? What does that take and how do we roadmap those things?

The Tools

Knowing what Lumen wanted to do and having guiding principles helped to shape the approach that was used for the project. And as Lumen asked how to go to a state of the art asset distribution system, it became clear what set of tools that would enable them to do so. Let’s talk a bit more about the tools that they chose that were necessary to accomplish the task:

What Every Modern Enterprise Needs

Workfront

Workfront allows you to manage projects, tasks, issues, requests, scheduling, and much more. By using project templates, approval workflows, and custom forms, organizations can standardize processes and establish governance. They can also leverage the power of Workfront’s custom report builder to calculate costs, hours, alignment, risks, or just about anything else. Their creative teams were already familiar with the Workfront system and would not have to follow any new processes, keeping creative people focused on being creative and not forcing them to become distribution specialists while allowing Lumen to organize and understand the effort required to generate new assets.

Allowing Creatives to Do Their Thing

Adobe Creative Cloud

Best in class creative services and applications from Adobe that give users access to a collection of software used for graphic design, video editing, web development, photography, along with a set of mobile applications, and also some optional cloud services. Lumen utilizes many of the Creative Cloud products and wanted to ensure that creatives would not have to learn new systems to be able to fulfill their creative assignments.

"Real time data analytics grants us the opportunity to assess what’s working and what’s not. This allows us to make changes quickly and pivot when necessary to drive positive business impact."

Amey Smothers, Senior Marketing Manager


A Centralized Distribution Center

Adobe Experience Manager assets

The industry leading digital asset management system with a robust feature set including custom metadata schemas, dynamic delivery through Dynamic Media, AI-enabled smart tagging & cropping, search tools, Brand Portal, Asset Share Commons, Adobe Stock integration, and a native connection with Adobe’s Creative Cloud tools through Adobe Asset Link. AEM is the centralized distribution center for all assets: work in process, renditions, finalized, internal, and external.

Data That Changes Things

Adobe Analytics

Adobe's best in class web analytics tool allows you to collect, filter, and organize data about how users interact with your digital experiences so that you can identify statistical trends. It assists businesses in delivering better customer experiences by providing real-time insight into the performance of marketing goals and campaigns. Allowing for tracking of different KPIs for digital assets starting at asset generation, including cost of production, conversion rates, usage reports, and various engagement metrics. Easily share relevant reports across the organization including creative teams, marketing operation teams, and leadership. Ultimately, the business needs to capture true lifetime ROI on creative spend for the assets produced.

The Bottom Line

The technical implementation of setting up Adobe Experience Manager Assets, connecting it to Workfront using the Workfront Tools for AEM connector, and then setting up the workflows between these systems and Dynamic Media took about a month to accomplish. The bigger, and frankly always harder, aspect was to then align the Lumen team and their existing process to this new approach to handling asset management. They continue to iterate on their internal processes to refine and improve them, re-evaluating the plan against current organization practices and requirements. Today Lumen is using it to great success and effect. Through a combination of technology solutions and business process engineering, Hoodoo helped Lumen deliver to their users the tools that they needed to create and track their assets and ultimately transform their creative operations.

View the full presentation video on what we did with Lumen right here.

"Hoodoo was a great partner that not only helped us create the solution by looking at people, processes, and tech but is also a valued partner to help us extend the solution as we discover new use cases."

Shane LaBounty
Creative Operations Leader

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