Content Creation for ECommerce

KARTHIK BALASUBRAMANIAM: Hey, everyone. This is Karthik Balasubramaniam, assistant vise president of operations representing RRD. So our topic of presentation is going to be the content creation for our e-commerce. We belong to a larger group called RRD GO Creative. So what is RRD GO Creative? So our goal mantra is like amplify the content and simplify the process.

So what we do is we help the customers to make their customer experiences better by giving them a differentiator. So what we do is that to do that we maintain. We put ourselves in the shoes of the customers as in what is it that they want to experience. And what we generally do is that we create a custom brand experience by researching how the customer needs to feel that particular product in terms of interaction.

So to do that, what we do is that we are a global brand solution. So we elevate the storytelling by creativity and personalization, and we use other technology and touch points. And we do this with the reliability on a bigger scale. So again, [INAUDIBLE] that what we do is that we implement smart working solutions. We use a lot of data. I mean, we work with a lot of digitization process, and we use a lot of automation tools, and we also use AA for performing different optimizations in the step of the process.

So we also have a little division called Loft for emerging technology services, and what we do is access the newest technologies and ecosystem by leveraging the innovative services platform. So Loft, basically, it works on boosting the productivity and increasing the customer experience by testing different methods and means for achieving satisfaction. So by doing this, what we do is that we do an exceptional backhaul, and we ensure that we are in the customer [INAUDIBLE] space. And by doing all this, that is always a seamless interaction that happens between your design stage to the final delivery stage.

So why do you need to go with RRD GO Creative? As a global service provider in business communications and marketing solution and digital productivity solutions, we make the customer experience the operative differentiator by reimagining the customer interactions, and that how customers get connected with the brand.

And to speak about RRD, we have a team of about 8,000 employees with 500 clients working across 50 locations and 34 years in operation. And we are an OptiShore model, vertical-focused business, and we use a lot of digital workflows and tools actually. So we are built on a very solid pipeline of people practices, governance, and we are built upon a lot of resilience. That is one of the key factors why customers prefer to go with RRD as a company.

So coming on to the topic, the e-commerce, so why is 3D important in e-commerce? Let's take a little step back and see what is actually happening. The expanding scope of e-commerce, what the customers expect is that the new level of personalization, the intuitiveness what the customer expects in their experiences.

And what is really happening is that with the advent of Web 3.0 and 5G networks and the hardwares which is coming in the market-- handheld hardwares are becoming more powerful. Customers expect their experience to happen sitting at one location, and Web 3.0 and high-speed 5G is able to support the faster [INAUDIBLE] trends of the era [INAUDIBLE] content development.

RRD has completely harnessed the power of these emerging technologies to bring an end-to-end solution to you. Now we deeply dive into the customer's offering by individualizing the customer experience so that we can have a higher conversion rate, and there is a lot of brand recall that's happening.

So when we connect to the study, what really happened was there was a 40% higher conversion rate when people started to use these 3D technologies. And 42% of the mobile users preferred to have a 360 interactive video rather than just looking at the snapshot of the product before making their purchase decisions. And 71% of the customers have told that they would be very glad to have this content viewed on an AR or VR platform so that they can make a better and faster decisions.

So GO Creative 3D solutions, what are our building blocks? So from product-centric to our customer centricity, the next level of engagement driven by RRD GO Solutions what we implement will be a game changer in business. The complete range of interactive, personalized, and multimodal solution, which can accelerate the process of go to time to the markets across different sectors.

So how we position ourselves, we help the business redefine the customer experience while simultaneously optimizing the supply chain strategy. And to do that, what we do is that we implement new training methods, and this helps the customer to make better buying decisions.

And organizations who want to develop this 3D content, that is a lot of cost effectiveness direct to customer engagement. Supply chain management is managed very well. And early prototyping and exploration of design and campaign planning can be done very well in advance when we adopt these 3D technologies.

So we also do a lot of enhancement in terms of the product experience by not only designing these products. We also run analytics behind to see how was the stats looking once these items are published on a global platform. Like in product [INAUDIBLE], what is the hit ratio and how much time a customer spends on viewing a particular product.

So we do a lot of analytics behind to see like what is the impact that is really the 3D models or AI we have content that we are delivering is actually creating on the real life. So RRD GO Creative, our 3D Spectrum. So what the focus is basically on, the accelerated development, reducing the go-to time to the market. We also focus on reducing the cost and simplifying the supply chain management.

So RRD, as an organization, we are [INAUDIBLE] everywhere, starting from the package design, to a 3D walkthrough, immersive experience simulations. So we do a lot of 3D modeling work, 3D animations, and also interactive designs as well as 3D renderings. So this is what we offer to the customers, in terms of our capabilities.

So coming onto Autodesk and RRD association. So the very, very interesting fact is that two years back when we wanted to-- I mean, go to a scale we were ambitiously looking at going to an external support, 300 and odd people. And what were the strains at that point of time?

So we got a creative draws on deep domain expertise and knowledge on the digital landscape. So we had a very brief understanding about how the entire 3D chain works. And alongside, we have a lot of skills and capabilities.

So initially, when we wanted to expand-- so there are two challenges. Well, one was that-- the skill and the tool. So when we wanted to look at the skill what really happened was, Autodesk had built a beautiful ecosystem of their education partners. So when we wanted to start our hiring process, but we wanted to ramp to a huge scale, a bigger scale of close to about 300.

So we started approaching a lot of education training institutes and [INAUDIBLE] that we saw a lot of-- I mean creative talents coming from Max and Maya background, who have already actually--

And the next was the tool, actually. What we decided was we didn't want to restrict our pipeline based on a tool. So we completely adopted the Autodesk Entertainment Creative Suite for our purpose, which is comprised of product like Max-- 3DS Max, Maya, Motion Builder, Mudbox. But we saw an effective utilization of all these products across the pipeline.

So well, when we started this hiring process. So it was very easy for us to pick up, for Autodesk is a pure trial out platform. And we started with about 10 people, nearly about two years back. And we are currently a team of about 220 team comprising of creative talents, as well as the managerial team. Where Autodesk is predominantly our pipeline for the content creation.

So you could see that right now we are using Autodesk solutions, in terms of the entire go through process. And that's all the story started with Autodesk.

So a workflow for our ecosystem if you see once we get a creative brief we do the sketches, mood boards, and concepts. Then that gets into a stage of modeling and sculpting. Then that goes to the UV mapping. It's more of a traditional workflow.

So what we have done is that we have kept the pipeline open. The best part about the Autodesk media and entertainment tools are that when we bought the [? suite ?] we didn't have the challenge of cross-transferring the slides between different tools and platforms. Where within the Autodesk ecosystem everything was interoperable, but also not the biggest trend.

So we did not worry much about will there be a file loss, will there be any detail losses once we move from one tool to another. And Max and Maya allow like really a golden handshake, in terms of transferring the files and moving across these tools, basically.

So what really happened [? if ?] [? we ?] [? exactly ?] we chose another type of platform for all these file transfers, and, basically, for the content creation. And then next, when we wanted to get into sculpting, what we did was, we started [? replacing ?] Mudbox.

Mudbox really helped us to speed up the workflow, in terms of doing some complex sculpting work. Then we have tools for UV mapping. Then depending upon where this content is going to go, whether it needs to do a-- we need to do a texture, baking, or probably texturing, or rendering-- we design it using [? authority. ?] Then rigging, animation, lighting, and shading. So predominantly, our pipeline consists of Autodesk tools. And that's all. That's how it works internally for us within RRD.

So on the creative side, these are the tools that have been replaced for content creation, while what we did was we have our own homegrown tool called Metrics. Which will create dashboards real-time tracking, and which has got a very easy interface. So RRD uses-- what really happens is, whenever you get a job the location of this job is picked by a manager. And after that, it takes an automatic route of getting this job allocated to the artist. And once the artist completes the process, he again summons it back.

So the entire process is very much clearly automated, except that the artist picks up the job, and delivers this where the human intervention happens. Then it goes through a quality controller. And once he checks-- after the quality control, it goes in for the client approval. So we have this homegrown tool called Metrics, which does most of the job, in terms of our data management, tracking, and which is really easy and very [INAUDIBLE] tool for-- do this tracking.

So who can use RRD Creative 3D Solutions? Even from industrial engineering, e-commerce, e-learning, marketing, real estate, fashion. So the very interesting part is that the tools are-- they are good as tools, but how effectively you want to put it across for a different purpose it's just a matter of building a pipeline for that specific requirement. The creative pool always remains the same [INAUDIBLE] type of platform as Autodesk. But with one tool we could gather across our different verticals.

So if you look at our client base, North America's-- one of the biggest chain for Big Five is one of our clients, one of the largest pharmaceutical companies is one of our clients who were actually authorized for-- first authorized for the COVID-19 vaccine-- and a leading provider of fintech-- multinational provider of hardware, software, and telecom equipments, and a Big Four accounting and financial audit tax advisory firm is one of our biggest clients currently who we work with.

So let me show-- run through a couple of samples for you. So the left side, what you saw are the references. And the right, what you see are the outputs, which are [INAUDIBLE] and [INAUDIBLE] and labor. I'll just run you through a couple of examples.

So this is, again, something interesting. The biggest why about what you see. So if you asked me how much of the content is created in 3D? The entire stream, whatever you see on the right side, it is all developed and delivered in 3D.

So what really happened was one of our customer wanted us to [INAUDIBLE] render where he wanted to create three variations of this particular stool we did on the left. Like a teak wood, cork board, and a different wood pattern. So they wanted us to visualize how this output would look when we placed on a real lifestyle [? and ?] arrangement. And that is where our creativity team kicked in, and they developed the entire content of this room.

So instead of selling just a particular product, we developed a completely open lifestyle to render what the customer could actually place their 3D content within the room, and see how well it goes long, matches along with the rest of the [INAUDIBLE]. So a couple of-- again 360 animations and visualizations of what we use that.

So this is one of the classic example, you are looking for the Top Five US giant, actually. So every part of the model has been created in 3ds Max and Maya. Then we have done the lighting, and using [INAUDIBLE] and we have delivered [INAUDIBLE] actually.

So coming on the animation and motion graphics. So this is basically a mailer which we have designed. So we have different teams working on delivery. So starting from a PowerPoint presentation, to image manipulation, image correction-- we have teams for doing video edits on both sides. And we collaboratively work together for delivering the entire [? clients ?] in this [INAUDIBLE].

So this particular example, you can see that the 3D model had been done by our 3D team. And we collaborated with our video team for developing the concept of the storyboard. And [? then ?] [? in ?] [? that ?] we do RRD, done by the RRD booklet. So you could see the text animations, everything that is happening on the screen. It's all done by our European [INAUDIBLE].

So one of the very interesting thing, which I would like to showcase here is the interactive content development that we use, extremely [? valuable ?] for developing the interactive contents. So we have our own-- [? the ?] link for ccinteractive.rrd.com. And this is where our file sits in our file server.

And you could see, the file is very much interactive. As I start to move my mouse towards my left and right you could see the 3D model is starting to respond accordingly. The best thing is like we ensure that this contents which are developed are very lightweight in nature, so that the user experience is seamless across different platforms, be it mobile, be it your desktop, or your laptop. So the experience of the user remains the same.

So this is one of the classic example of the interactive content, which we developed for our customers. So I would like to thank all the attendees who had joined for this particular session. And I mean, just to make the long story short, it's been a two year journey for us, with respect to the 3D that we wanted. Initially, we were very ambitious that we would want to go to our team sites from 10 to about 200, 220. And what really happened was, as I told you, the challenges [INAUDIBLE] are like the talent and the tools.

While we saw that these lines were emerging, when we wanted to look at it on a longer run, Autodesk had to be our choice of platform for developing-- doing this still content development. And currently, we are working with about four to five customers, but the volume of work is [? really ?] larger, where our workflows are very unique in nature, in terms of from customer to customer and how we wanted to go about and do.

So certain customers they expect the output experience to be interactive. A couple of them wanted to go beyond render. So we have also clearly made a choice that [INAUDIBLE] is going to be the choice of rendering for us.

Because when we bought the Autodesk Entertainment Creation Suite we also got a couple of licenses for doing the network render. So we also have a render [INAUDIBLE] that's being set. Currently, we just completely [INAUDIBLE].

So I would like to, once again, thank everyone for joining this session. I hope this session was very informative and useful. Thank you.