Hello everyone and welcome to our webinar and thanks for joining our session today with Lucy. Marketing often fails to tell us what happened when you just look at impressions, clicks, leads and revenue all by themselves. It doesn't always show how those signals actually connect across the full customer journey. So today we're going to explore how a connected campaign intelligence layer can help teams move beyond fragmented reporting and build a cleaner, more actionable view of performance. So that's why we're very happy to have Lucy joining us today to walk through her perspective on this topic as she helps set the standards that make paid media marketing so efficient and effective at 3M. And for those who don't know, 3M is a global science and technology company behind thousands of products and solutions across industries including healthcare, manufacturing, transportation and consumer goods. So for the team since fragmentation was more than a reporting challenge and created a sales risk and difficulty scaling paid media consistency, I'm really looking forward to hearing Lucy's story today. So I'll just give Lucy a chance to introduce herself before we do a little bit of housekeeping. Yeah, thank you, Julianna. So as you mentioned, I'm Lucy Egan. I am the paid media enablement manager at 3M. And as Julianna said, 3M is a very kind of fragmented, huge corporate company, but I sit in the center. So I sit within what we call our global marketing and sales services team. So a central pillar that covers all three of our different business groups. So really excited to talk to you today about how we've implemented naming conventions, Acutix as a tool, you know, with that shared aim to try and increase our visibility of how our marketing is working across 3M as a whole. Yes. And thank you so much. And also just kind of, you know, introducing the Acutix part as well, just introduce who we are for those who haven't met us yet. But Acutix is a platform that works across your marketing ecosystem, helping to standardize marketing data at the source across teams, channels and markets a bit, as you'll hear as well with the 3M story. Also with preventing errors and validating your campaign or marketing data at the source so that you can use that for powering reporting, optimization, and making sure that you're really ready for a new agentic workflows where the structure really matters more in how you're managing your data. One last bit of housekeeping is that you can ask us questions. There should be a question tab on the right side of your screen and you can drop questions throughout the session and then Lucy will be able to answer those as we go. So I'll just keep an eye on those and if you have any questions as well, be ready for them. So first I will turn to Lucy just with our opening question of before we get into your full journey, what did marketing reporting look like at 3M and where did the biggest challenges show up? Was it in reporting time, data, trust, compliance, or attribution? Where did you feel the biggest pain points? Yeah, so I think just to set the scene, and I'm sure this won't be a surprise to many big corporates if you're on the call. Although we are a single company, essentially due to its global scale and multiple business units, it was being run, or it still is in certain sections, and being run like three separate businesses. We have different versions of the marketing team, some have centralized to a global marketing center where I have kind of one or two people to speak to, and then our consumer business, that's the one that has all of our kind of key brands that you've probably heard of, outside of 3M, so your Post-it, your Scotch, your Command brands, they're still very area focused. So obviously, we are then trying to find some standardization across multiple different areas. So we have LATAM, we have APAC, we have EMEA, and then USAC as well. So really trying to meet the needs of all of those varying different areas and the central view as well. So what we were finding was that although we are very fragmented in the way that we go to market, the way that we run our marketing campaigns, some of these questions are universal, right? So how do I know how well my campaign is performing? ROI is becoming more and more important. You know, we're looking beyond just our impressions and clicks, our leadership, and therefore the people who own the budgets, they're not falling for that anymore. Almost to our detriment, I have to say, and I think I'm going to cover that a little bit later. But what we started to do was to look at, okay, well, what are these things that we are trying to track across the company as a whole? We have certain systems of record, of course, Acutix being one, so every UTM and campaign name built across 3M as a whole is built within Acutix. We also have another platform, Sprinklr, that is used to build all of our paid media activity, and we started to look at where we have those kind of synergies and single point of contact. So how can we start to implement some of that governance? So for us, it was, we want to empower the marketers to be able to do the marketing that works for their business group, for their area. That's not my job to tell them how to spend their money, where to spend their money. But when they are doing it, how can we start to put those conventions and governance in place to make sure that when they are coming to us, which they do as a central team around data and analytics, how is my campaign performing, we can start to pull multiple sources of data together. So I think my role here was around setting up that process, making sure that we have the right tools in place, and then making sure that we have those conventions and that governance moving forward, where we are working with multiple different agencies, in-house teams, marketing automation teams, paid media teams, how we can then pull all of that together into a fairly simplified standard naming convention. Yeah, and we also talked a bit about, I could share this slide as well, that we kind of went through when we were talking about this, you know, this session today on why it's so important. And you mentioned kind of also, like, the trigger point that really meant that this is where we have to move. Could you talk a little bit more about that? Yeah, definitely. So for us, we are all big on self-serve reporting, getting that reporting. And what we started to see that we had some version of a story. So in my central role from, you know, as a paid media leader, I couldn't have told anyone at any one time, exactly how much money we have been spending across paid media platforms, how much traffic we have driven to site, all of these various things. But what we could start to see was, well, in Salesforce, we've actually got some opportunities. And by the way that we've, you know, set up our tracking, we can directly attribute them to some of the paid media activity that we have done. So that led to these kind of trigger point conversations where we almost needed to take a few steps back and start to build that foundation, we want, we know that we want to continue to gain investment in paid media solely, you know, selfishly, that keeps me in a job. We know that that's where the market's going. We know our customers, whether they're B2B or B2C, they are spending more and more time in that customer journey that's no longer linear looking online. And what we weren't able to do was to track, you know, how they are performing. So we had to take a few steps back, as I say, make sure that we have built those kind of strong foundations so that we are future proofing ourselves for future. That said, you know, we live in a corporate world, we are constantly looking at how to return the best share price and value back to our shareholders, that's not going to go away. You know, fundamentally, 3M is a B2B company. And therefore, we are always very heavily focused towards the bottom of the funnel, that lead generation, some of those things we've mentioned as well. So we have been running requested demos, we've been running, you know, contact us, and we've really had to try and make sure that some of these marketing qualified leads that we've been driving, we're really able to start to see what happens to those next. So we're driving leads to our sales team, whether that's internal or the guys out on the road. But then we don't always or we didn't always have the visibility beyond that. So when we start to have those discussions around this time of year, around budgets for next year, we were really struggling to really show our value. So this is a kind of longer term solution. Obviously, what we're here to talk about now solve some of that solution, we get that visibility across Eloqua form completions, through to Salesforce opportunities. But we're now kind of starting to look at, okay, well, we know that we can track some of that great stuff because of these foundations that we've put into place with Acutix. But now there's also that kind of white space, that more traditional brand marketing tracking, that we've almost lost sight of, because we've got so good at what we're doing here and what we're talking about now, kind of the next step for me is, okay, well, let's as well as that, how can we start to bring on a new measurement framework, some more attribution modelling around as well as those leads for those people who are in market, which from a B2B perspective is likely only 5% of our target market at any one time, how do we start to layer in some of that data of those other 95% of potential future buyers and moving that forward. So I think that was the trigger point. I think, to be honest, we're at the next trigger point. Now we've almost solved that problem. We're on to the next thing and just trying to keep that momentum moving forward. I mean, that is the case, right? You will never stop finding those new trigger points to act on, especially in such a huge global organisation that you have all of these different points that you that you just covered, especially with trying to meet the different needs, primarily being B2B as well. Could you walk me through before we go into your journey a little bit about why campaign naming and UTM consistency specifically became the focal point rather than starting with dashboarding or attribution modelling? Or was that kind of the first test before you actually circled down on campaign structure? Yeah, I think, to be honest, it's an education piece. A lot of the times with 3M, our marketers were used to creating UTMs. They might not necessarily know what they're for or what they're used for. But that was kind of the one standard thing that we knew that we were building where every time we're building an email, the marketers know that they need to build their UTMs in Acutics, put them in there. The same for paid media. So by me sitting centrally in my role, we were then able to start to look at some of these things and that central tool. And I think, to be honest, that's why we started with UTMs. We also know that the way that we build our forms, so whether it's an in-platform form that a consumer is filling in on Facebook, it's connected to our instance in Eloqua, and it's pulling in UTM parameters into that. The way that we've built our naming conventions in marketing automation is connected. So we already had a little bit of structure around that. But what we didn't have was kind of those guardrails around limiting who can create those things. Can we take it a step further? So not just UTM creation, but also campaign naming. So things like your paid initiative terms that we're building out in Sprinklr or in Google, making sure that we've got that consistent. Because what we were missing was that unique identifier across all of the elements of our marketing, which meant that in our reporting, if we wanted to see how our email had performed, you'd go to the email dashboard. If you wanted to look at your paid media, you'd look at your Google activity, but actually you probably haven't used the correct naming convention or the same naming conventions. And we're talking about tiny little changes. So you might have, I don't know, like car care with an underscore in your Google campaign, and car care without any spaces or with a space in Facebook. And therefore, when we're trying to pull all of that data together, we never had that single kind of connection to bring all of those items together. So I think that's where we started. We identified, we already had awareness of UTMs, we had some level of compliance, and it was really just how can we mandate that from the center and make sure that we can pull all of those different data sources into one. But that's also what we discussed about when we were talking about this session was the connectivity layer, because it is not just about making sure that, of course, you have different silos. You mentioned email, you go to this one dashboard, paid search, paid social, you go to the next dashboard. But it is about that connectivity layer beyond, you know, that element and what can you do with this once it's set up. So I will pull up also some of the slides that you shared with me as you kind of just tell, talk us through your journey and the steps that you took, the tools you're working with, and kind of the transformational change that 3M has undergone. Sure. I think for us at 3M, and I've been at 3M for 16 years for my sins, I've worked across all of the business groups that we have, and I've been in our central function for about eight years now. It's never been that 3M don't invest in the correct technology. And I'm sure this is going to resonate with a lot of people. It's that we, it's owned by IT, we sign these wonderful contracts, but then the onboarding piece or the way that we set them up is not setting us up for long term success. So often, it's not that I need to go to the IT team and say, right, we need a whole new solution to this, we need to get rid of Adobe, we need to get rid of Salesforce, what we really needed to do is build those foundational kind of stepping stones. So what we were showing here was a project that we started working on in 2000, well, 2024. And it went on until kind of the end of last year, where we started to look at how can we standardize and simplify what we've already got. So we know that Power BI is our incumbent tool for dashboarding. But as I just mentioned, we have loads of different dashboards, how do we know that the marketers are going to the same, the single same source of truth, because anyone who works in data knows that data is not likely to be the same. Even though, you know, for multiple of the right reasons, you know, when we're looking at paid media data, if we're pulling it from Sprinklr, where the time set is central time, because that's where we're headquartered in Minnesota, in the US, versus if we pulled it directly from Facebook business manager, there's a few hours difference. And it's all correct data. But there's that needs an explanation. And we were finding that a lot of my job was troubleshooting these issues that were coming from the marketers, because we weren't all looking at the same data layer as well. So making sure that we've got standardized reporting, everybody's singing from the same hymn sheet, we are QAing and making sure that that data is correct. And then we are accepting that that is good enough, and we're moving on. And that's not to say that we don't bring in new data, if we start working with a new platform, for example, but we needed to get to a point where good is good enough. Because I genuinely believe if we constantly try and strive for perfection, we're never going to move forward, especially in somewhere like 3M, where we do need to get the support of our IT team or our data engineers. So we needed to, yeah, as I say, get to that point. We also needed to rationalize ad accounts. So pulling in data, making sure that all of that is in there, but also not having that too confusing as well. So that we have these kind of simultaneous projects going on to set that foundation we had, then we had layered that over the top of that we had our platforms, which we've talked about, we had to Power BI, we had Sprinklr. And then once we've got all of our ducks in a row here, and Acutix, of course, from a UTM and campaign naming perspective, we can really start to sort, tag, make sure that that data that we can get that visibility of spend for 3M as a whole. But also, we like to be able to slice that data by business group, then within our business groups, we have divisions, we have areas, all of that kind of legwork that we've done that now we can really start to enable, we can start to look at some of these AI solutions that we've talked about with Acutix, because ultimately, rubbish data in, rubbish data out. And I have to put our hands up and say, we don't have this perfect, we have it a lot better than we did before. But we are kind of better set for future success. So I think that's been the major project for us within 3M getting our ducks in a row. We've also worked a lot to try and reduce the volume of agencies that we work with, so be it creative agencies, media agencies, where we have areas, so your EMEA consumer business group working with one agency, then our other business group working with another, it's really hard to build that governance layer, and manage, you know, users of tools such as Acutix, if we don't limit that agency consolidation down as well. So that's been a real important part of leading this change has been reduce the number of people, the amount of risk. 3M, again, is a very risk adverse company for the correct reasons. And Acutix has been a key role in helping us to be able to set those foundations. Could you tell me a little bit more about kind of how the process went on getting buy-in from the teams and, and like any challenges that you face? Because it is such a heavy people process. Of course, it's, it's humans that are going in and making the changes. Yeah, and I think absolutely. For me, I try to partner with the business groups whilst so I'm almost good cop whilst being the compliance owner here as well. I think historically, as I mentioned, we will, 3M as a company would implement a new tool, a great tool, a CDP, for example. But we would, that would be owned by IT, it would be bought in, and it was never based on the business need. So everything I try to do in my role is based on what are we trying to get from doing this? And what is the outcome? And for me, this one was a really easy sell-in, because the question is, you want to get visibility of your campaign return on investment. At the moment, we can't do that because of X, Y, and Z. And in most of the cases, it was, our data is fragmented, we haven't named it correctly, we've been using multiple different campaign names. And therefore, our data and analytics team can't find one identifier across all of this stuff to bring it together. So to solve that problem, this is what we need to do. And actually, then people understand the output, we obviously piloted a couple of business groups, where we know that the marketers we have that great relationship with. And once you've got some examples of, hey, look, we can see a $20 million opportunity, because someone saw a search ad, brings us on to a whole nother conversation around last click attribution and things, you know, as I said, we are absolutely not where we need to get to. But suddenly, then you get the ears of the right people, and we start to really build on those foundations that we've set. Oh, definitely. And I think it's, it's such a great story, not just from the fact that you've rallied the organization around this being a problem, because it is still either something that hasn't yet been identified from any organizations, or the solution hasn't been tested yet. And so I think it's, it's great, first off, that you and 3M have rallied around this, but also that you've started to see the impact of this downstream, because it is not just about naming, but it's about what can you do with this and kind of showing the business impact, and tying that through both from the start of the process through to the end, or the end of the first trigger point. But now also that you have this data flowing more cleanly, could you give us kind of a concrete example of one of the connections that you can make today, or an example of something that you've worked the most closely with, that you can also connect between the opportunity to revenue that you couldn't make before? Yeah, absolutely. So I think from our paid media dashboard is pulling data from multiple sources. So we have all of our paid traditional data, your spend, your impressions, your clicks coming from either sprinkler or Google, depending where that's flowing into our snowflake. We then get all of our site data, cookie policy dependent, of course, in via Adobe, we then had Oracle Eloqua for our marketing automation. And then we have obviously all of our Salesforce data as well. And we also have another layer in regards to where to buy intent on our website coming from somewhere else. And that's what having standardized naming has been able to pull together. So when I was talking about finding that single identifier, we are now able to track, you know, what marketers can do in our paid media dashboard is filter by obviously their business group, their division, their campaign name. And then when they select their campaign name, they will then see all of the investment across the multiple channels in a single view. So we might have spent 20,000 on Google 10,000 on meta, and then you can see all the way through that funnel. So you can see your opportunities open that are connected directly to that investment, which obviously is super powerful, when we're reporting back on a quarterly basis to our leadership. But as mentioned before, the danger with some of this, and I know when I went to the Digital Marketing World Forum earlier in the year, met you guys, was that we're almost penalizing ourselves because of this great visibility. So we know that we have this visibility. If you were or if you are a budget owner in 3Ms, one of our division leaders, and your budget's tight, you're going to continue to put the budget where you can see that immediate response. That danger being that in the B2B world, our sales cycles are long, they take a long time. We know that, as I said, only 5% of those people who are converting are ready to purchase. But we also know that today's consumer is making a lot of their purchase decisions before they've even met like a 3M sales rep. So gone are the days where we just turn up at a paint shop and we can sell them the new 3M paint gun. You know, by the time that they are ready to purchase, they probably already know that there's only one or two other competitors that they might want to look at. So the danger that we have by having that full funnel visibility in the hands of the wrong people, and again, that's an education, that's a change management piece. And I think we are starting to make some progress at 3M is that we will continue to focus solely on those people at the bottom of the funnel. So it's now our job to say, okay, we've got all of that great data, but actually, can we start to pull in our POS data or our sales data? Can we start to bring in some other marketing signals? You know, LLMs are coming and, you know, search has changed. How can we start to bring in like 3M share of search or our share of conversation on LLMs into this dashboard all together? So we start to get more of an integrated framework. Yes. Yeah. We talked about that a lot in the beginning and not focusing just on those lead generation metrics. That was kind of like the jumping off points that we had as well on. And you're just at the beginning of this process of kind of trying to identify, kind of how to identify leads with different metrics than you typically would. Do you have a little bit more of a plan that you could share on that on how, like the early signals that you can gain for audiences that aren't sales ready? Yeah, and I think I can and I can't. From a business group perspective, it differs. So as I mentioned, our consumer business is our B2C business. We have very good POS coverage from our customers. We get sales in data, we get sales out data. So we know that at Christmas, we sell the most of our Scotch products. And we can see a direct correlation when we are working with influencers or we are, you know, on paid media that the sales out in our key partners, like a B&Q, if we're in the UK, depending where we are, a Kingfisher, for example, we have that connection. The marketers, because they are used to that kind of B2C world, they are more accepting of different metrics for paid media success, such as, you know, view through rate, if it's a video, engagement, making sure that we are getting that brand in front of other people. For the B2B market, 3M sells nothing directly. So we either sell through our industrial channel or our distributors, and we don't always get our point of sale back. So we don't always know there might be a lag, we might do a price promotion, for example, and people purchase, our distributors will purchase, what we don't always have visibility of is that kind of sales out. But that's not to say that there aren't other signals that we are looking into. So as I said, share of search is a big one. In theory, if we are investing on some DSP, so some Amazon ads, for example, with a new product, NPI is a big focus for 3M, we would like to hope that we will see an increase in people searching, asking questions, wanting to know about those products. It's a little more fluffy. But I think it's really important that we're going to layer that over with some of those other things. You know, our job as marketers isn't solely to get to that end user that, as I've mentioned, at 3M, we never really get to work with directly. But if we're doing our job correctly, we should be making the salesperson's job easier selling in that product as well. So I think there is a job to be done around portfolio and sales coverage with our key partners as well, that we've never really kind of connected the two together. No, and that makes complete sense. And I think it is also that in today's day and age, the customer journey doesn't look like it used to. I mean, it doesn't look like it used to 10 years ago, it doesn't look like it used to five years ago, because things are happening and changing so quickly with AI, but also just in the way that we're receiving information. So I think it's also so important, like you mentioned, that you are looking at some of these metrics that might not seem as much of a hard metric, but it's still something that contributes to that overall journey and that connectivity layer that you're looking at and planning so that you can actually action on this down the line. And that leads me to the question about your evolution in 2026. So just kind of to hear about what is your journey and your position and what do you want to achieve as, you know, I know we're moving to the end of 2026, but also as we look forward to 2027, now that you've done this journey of really structuring your naming, your campaigns, and moving that into enhanced reporting, where do you hope to go with this next? Yeah, I think no surprise, AI is on everyone's lips. My hope is that all of this great work that we've done in the background will now position us to have some great conversations with the strategic agency partners with our software solutions, be that Sprinklr, Acutix, Adobe, how can we take that to the next level? And to be honest, I don't quite know what that looks like just yet. So there's a lot of exploration going on. There is also a huge push on 3M to increase the speed at which we can get new products to market. So at our heart and soul, 3M are an innovation company, and we've got some pretty aggressive targets on new products and how we get that to market quicker. So we're starting to look at, okay, is that using content through AI to, you know, amend some of that stuff to translate that quicker? How can we then start to, you know, if we have an increase in volume of assets out there, how can I still in my role, make sure that we're still governing conventions, that we don't lose any of that great information that we have? You know, can we make sure that if we are utilizing some of these tools, we are doing it compliantly through things like the EU AI Act and all these new acts that keep popping up to keep us all busy? It really is, okay, how do we move forward based on those foundations that we've set? Can we simplify billing processes? It isn't glamorous, it's not exciting, but paying purchase orders for paid media at 3M is a huge job because at the moment, you know, we're very siloed. We're raising purchase orders by division by campaign. And we are having to, you know, invoice and confirm those in our tools on a monthly basis. The volume is huge. So how can we start to look at that more centrally? Can we use some of the tools and services that we have in place to make everybody's life easier and increase that visibility from an ROI perspective as well? I think that's also just, it's going to be great to follow your story. I'm very happy that we get to because it is impressive how much you can actually do with this once it's set up. And it is great to hear about, even from the billing perspective, just that this touches every element of the organization. It's not just something, again, we're going against silos here, right? It's something that making sure you have this connected, connectivity layer really goes across marketing teams, analytics, data, IT, and, you know, financial as well. As we close out for today, I just want to ask you for marketers in the audience who recognize this fragmentation in their own stack or in their own day to day, what's the one first step that you would recommend that they take? If you're a large corporation, my answer will probably be very different. If you are a large corp like 3M, don't try and boil the ocean. You're not going to be able to solve all of the problems for everybody all in one time, as much as we would like to. What I needed to do was find a proof of concept and find an ally. So within the business groups, I have teams that are more open to pilot certain things. They're more kind of savvy marketers potentially. So find someone that gets it, build your business case and get it in front of the right people. But know that this is a longer term solution. Tools like use the right tool. So again, this isn't an advert for Acutix. But knowing that we work with a lot of big, huge software companies that are very similar to ourselves, things don't necessarily move as quickly as we would like them to. Choosing a partner like Acutix has been great. I will call Jimmy or Gus on our team and make changes, you know, instantaneously. There's normally a solution. We really thrash out kind of where do we want to get to? That's how I like to start is, OK, blue sky. If none of the red tape existed, but it does in the world that I live in, where do we want to get to? And then start to break that down into manageable chunks whilst not losing sight of that kind of final view of how we want it to go. If you're working in a smaller company that moves quickly, then go for it. I mean, as I say, it's a no brainer. Find that consistency, wherever that kind of consistent point is that you can bring in all of your different levels of data. Do it, start to test it, and then it can be evolved as it goes. But it really is kind of trying to track that compliance alongside trying to be agile. It takes a job, it takes a village, but it's super worthwhile when you do get there. That's such a great perspective, Lucy, truly, because it is about testing and it's trying it out where you can and just seeing what works for your organization, what works for you, and just making this the most efficient process as possible so that you can also free up time to do some of those more interesting downstream projects when you have this foundation set. And it really does start with just everyone speaking the same language, like you would, you know, in humanity. It also just matters that you have a shared language that you use across the organization. And then you actually really start to build on that and see what you can do with that kind of following the story also that Lucy mentioned. So I'm really grateful that you've come and joined me for this webinar, Lucy, and you had such great insights. I hope everyone was inspired. You also answered some of the questions that we had already actually on the fly. So that was perfect. So yeah, thank you so much, Lucy. Is there anything else you would like to share before we close off for the day? I don't think so. Just yeah, thank you for having me. Feel free to find me, connect with me on LinkedIn. If you have any other questions, always happy to learn from our peers, because yes, I'm sure there are projects going on in your companies that could equally be of value as we move forward. So yeah, thank you for your time today. And it was great to virtually meet you all. Yes, thank you so much. And I will leave you with this Acutics QR code, actually. Hopefully, you can see that. If you're interested to see how this looks in action, then you can scan the QR code and talk to Jimmy or Gus or myself about how the platform works. So I'll just leave this up here and say thank you to everyone. Thank you.