Placing innovation at the heart of Shell

With a history that can be traced back to the 19th century, Shell was established in 1907 and has since evolved into an international energy and petrochemical company. Known for its presence in the oil and gas industry, Shell also manufactures and markets chemicals as well as invests in innovative sources of power.

Operating at a global scale in over 70 countries with over 80,000 employees, Shell’s growing teams needed collaboration processes to drive seamless daily operations.

Three years ago, Shell came on board with Welcome, now Optimizely Content Marketing Platform (CMP). This partnership has allowed Shell to empower its teams to be more agile, drive marketing transformation, scale and support business demand and execute an integrated approach resulting in more alignment, efficiency, & better brand experiences.

Shell fuel internal marketing process with Optimizely’s CMP

Operating as a large multinational organization, with thousands of employees, stakeholders and requests brings many challenges and complexities. Prior to partnering with Optimizely, Shell’s marketing tasks were communicated the old-school way via ticketing systems, spreadsheets, and emails.

Not only were Shell’s marketing stakeholders finding it difficult to collaborate, but they were also working in silos without full visibility of their content landscape.

With strict brand compliance and processes to abide by, Shell recognized the problem at hand.

As Shell Brands International CEO & Vice-Chairman Dean Aragon explains, “like so many modern organizations, our success hinges on being able to maximize visibility, enable faster turnaround times, and minimize duplication and waste.”

Shell quickly began its search for an integrated collaboration platform that could unify various brand processes in its complex digital ecosystem, and drive content effectiveness and efficiency without compromising on user experience.

Unifying processes with Optimizely Content Marketing Platform

Once Optimizely CMP was identified by Shell for its industry-leading capabilities in supporting marketing teams to plan campaigns, collaborate on work and produce content, Shell’s teams have been maximizing the user-friendly platform.

At Shell, the intuitive Optimizely CMP is utilized for:

• Shared and integrated planning (planning content & campaigns and managing budgets)
• Streamlining work management and creative services (handling and filtering hundreds of creative requests a month from internal employees and external agencies)
• Asset governance and brand compliance (managing tens of thousands of approvals using Welcome and artificial intelligence integrations)

Use case 1: Shared and integrated planning Figure 1: Shell's Calendar view with filter options on Optimizely Content Marketing Platform.

A company of Shell’s size risks losing visibility when numerous campaigns are happening concurrently.

With Calendars, Shell’s stakeholders have holistic transparency across all regions for better insight and are empowered to facilitate longer-term, cross-agency planning. Filters and permission settings enable employees to toggle between a bird’s eye view and tasks to focus on.

The Campaigns capability has moved ideation into a shared, collaborative workspace easily accessed by Shell’s teams instead of their previous practice of using emails.
 
Not only has Optimizely CMP increased company-wide visibility on campaigns, but it has also improved collaboration and communication between employees for improved efficiency.
 
Furthermore, budgets also benefit from this holistic approach as Shell’s teams can ensure campaigns are on track.

Use case 2: Streamlining work management and creative services

Figure 2: Shell's Work Requests view on Optimizely Content Marketing Platform.

Hundreds of requests come in from internal employees and external partners every month.
 
Work Requests automatically route and collectively prioritize inbound requests from a global set of stakeholders.
 
It serves as the single-entry point for brand approvals and project creation. Submissions are routed accordingly, validated and a corresponding project is created with an assigned project manager.
 
The project manager further uses Optimizely CMP to handle budgeting, asset creation, and other tasks pertaining to the campaign with flexible options to customize processes.
 
Within Work Requests, there is also an intuitive UX to request work provided to stakeholders with capacity.