Challenge

Mattel felt the strain of needing to create optimized content at scale due to a shift in its strategy to launch a direct-to-consumer channel. Given the increased demand for product and marketing content, this decision required a digital transformation of their current media supply chain.

Their marketing team leveraged two digital asset management (DAM) platforms to store product and marketing assets. By having two DAMs, they didn’t have a unified view of their content, so they struggled with content discoverability and reuse, which slowed campaign creation.

Mattel also had a disparate martech stack that couldn’t work together to streamline the content creation process, an absolute necessity to meet the demands of their new DTC channel and support the promotion of their 2023 blockbuster 2 of 3 movie and related merchandise.

One of the reasons for this disparate martech stack was the monolithic suites of technology they used for their DAM, viewed as the foundational technology within the media supply chain, as it restricted the possibilities around integrations. These restrictions slowed content creation and resulted in unnecessary manual tasks, including aligning campaign and content creation, version control, content editing, approval, and distribution.

One example was the Mattel merchandising team, which spent over $3M annually manually localizing content for different geographies. If they were to meet their new demand for content, automating this process would be necessary, although again, it would be impossible with their current DAMs.

Finally, as Mattel’s martech stack didn’t seamlessly integrate, it made creating personalized experiences increasingly challenging, leveraging data in one system (such as eCommerce or CDP) to power content delivery in another (DAM). Furthermore, understanding content performance was a black hole as assets were being distributed from their DAM to other systems and as soon as that content left, it was impossible to track where it went and if it had the desired impact on engagement.

Strategy

Driven by its CEO, Mattel strategically decided to launch a direct-to-consumer business model. This decision required a digital transformation of their current media supply chain, given the increased demand for product and marketing content.

Mattel wanted to streamline the complexities of creating, managing, and distributing global content at scale. To achieve this, they had to integrate their best-of-breed martech stack into the foundational technology that supported their content creation process - their DAM - but quickly realized that integration possibilities were limited with OpenText and MediaBeacon.

Tenovos was chosen because not only did it act as the one source of truth for all Mattel content, but it also offered several integrations that helped streamline the content creation process, including Workfront (Project Management), Cloudinary (Content Renditions), Salsify (Product Information Management) and ContentStack (website distribution).

Mattel leverages one particular feature within Tenovos: fully automating web content workflows, taking approved content, and dynamically distributing it on their eCommerce site. This process includes using AI to localize the content into 20+ languages and then publishing it to a PDP, with the related product information (via Salsify), directly to their eCommerce provider (Shopify).

Mattel is also leveraging AI to create personalized experiences by integrating data captured throughout their buyer journey to their customer data platform and Tenovos, allowing customized and curated content to be delivered with AI and without manual intervention.

Finally, Mattel leveraged built-in Tenovos AI-driven BI capabilities to capture content performance metrics across different platforms such as social, web, and eCommerce. This gave Mattel unique insights into where their content was published, how it was performing and trending, and if it met their desired KPIs.

Method

Mattel has five principles that helped them deliver a best-in-class martech ecosystem that allows for their DTC business to flourish:

1. Adopt an API-first and microservices approach that delivers modular and self-contained architectural components, allowing for flexibility regarding technologies and integrations.
2. Embrace best-of-breed SaaS technologies, many of which in the MACH Alliance, to provide a configurable and scalable architecture. Many of these new technologies replaced older legacy technologies that lacked modern architecture and the ability to scale.
3. Leverage an API-first approach to connect their entire media supply chain, from creation to consumer consumption. This has allowed Mattel to create one unified view of its content, collecting both productivity and performance data to help optimize future content creation.
4. Adopt AI technologies and technologies with inherent AI capabilities to automate and build experiences that further improve productivity within the media supply chain.
5. Drive constant collaboration through program iteration planning, IT governance, and POC executions to adopt a streamlined approach for delivering business and IT goals.