Matt's role
In 2024, Matt (Founder, Imagineers), working through the agency SLIK, set the Next Gen Marketing strategy: the brand experience vision for a customer-centred, omnichannel customer journey of the future, and personalised marketing and customer experiences across all channels. The work ran from stakeholder interviews and a review of around 40 research and internal documents to customer journey mapping, visioning and the F25 plan, and set three focus areas: in-store innovation, personalisation and a connected customer journey. From 2025 to 2026, Woolworths Group employed Matt to lead Next Gen Marketing technology and AI.
The context
Woolworths Group produces a very large volume of creative every week across its brands and channels: weekly specials, catalogues, email, the app, in-store screens, social and television. The Group had committed publicly to taking hundreds of millions of dollars of cost out of the business. AI was on the agenda, under strict rules on what generated content could appear in anything a customer sees.
What Matt did
Matt set up and led the Creative AI Squad, a small team of creative and technical staff that designed and validated an AI-native production workflow alongside the platforms the business already used. It tested a range of generative AI products for video generation, image generation, image-to-video, voice and sound. Virtual sets replaced studio time for product shoots. The goal was to validate whether generative AI could be used to achieve studio-quality assets while realising significant cost benefits. The squad's goal was to validate what was possible.
The results
- 01A material reduction in per-asset production cost, validated in testing with generative AI.
- 02Asset production time cut from days to minutes, on-brand with QA checks.
- 03End-to-end workflow validated against real weekly briefs.