Episode #26
What does it take to build a global brand from scratch at a 90,000-person startup? We discussed this and more with Lisa Gilbert, VP of Global Marketing at Kyndryl.
This post is based on our podcast episode with Lisa Gilbert. Lisa is VP of Global Marketing at Kyndryl, a 90,000-person startup. You can watch the entire conversation here.
1. The importance of brand
Lisa stresses the importance of having a crystal-clear brand identity, staying consistent, and the importance of thoughtfully creating various brand assets. The brand can not confined to a corporate strategy deck, companies must instead consistently walk the talk in all parts of their organization. Consistency creates trust, and trust is ultimately good for business.
2. Activating employees
Employee activation is a great marketing strategy that companies can use to amplify their brand messages, and it’s something that Lisa considers in all content and marketing efforts.
Employee-generated content can be incredibly powerful, and Lisa talked about one of Kyndryl’s campaigns called #KidtoKyndryl. Armed with simple instructions and a few guidelines, the employees shared thousands of personal stories on LinkedIn, strengthening Kyndryl’s brand awareness and image in the process.
Kyndryl also has a formal brand ambassador program with recruits from all over the company.
3. Budget constraints and creativity
In this current moment, everyone’s marketing budgets are becoming more constrained and that’s also true for global companies like Kyndryl. But this just means that companies must find alternative and more affordable ways to reach their goals.
Kyndryl has used large-scale marketing channels and tactics in the past but is currently using more targeted and lower-cost approaches. In addition to employee brand ambassadors, Kyndryl relies heavily on paid social and search advertising in order to reach target audiences around the globe.
Budget constraints should not be seen as an obstacle but as an opportunity for creative problem-solving.
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Watch video: Lisa Gilbert – building a global brand at the world’s biggest startup
Lisa Gilbert: Building a global brand at the world’s biggest startup – Youtube transcript
Today I’m joined by Lisa Gilbert vice president of Global Marketing at Kyndryl uh Kyndryl is the world’s largest provider of it infrastructure Services uh Lisa previously held senior marketing positions at IBM including Chief marketing officer in Japan and in the UK uh welcome to the show Lisa thank you so much thanks for having me so before we kind of get into your work at Working 20+ years at IBM kendrell UH I’d love to talk a little bit about your background you worked at IBM for over 20 years which is becoming kind of that lot length of a 10 years is becoming a bit of a rarity yeah and people feel that they must switch employers every two to three years in order to make progress and build their breadth and depth of experience and and build their resumés so I’d love if you could kind of explain what led you to make that decision or or was it like a conscious decision and what did that tender allow you to do or what kind of opportunities that did that create for you yeah you’re right so thank you for having me and um and I know it is a bit of a kind of a unicorn kind of kind of unique to be at a company for so long in this day and age um but first of all didn’t feel like when you say 20 years I’m like wow that feels like a long time um wasn’t the first company I joined I worked at ulip hackard company before that and worked with compact computer Corporation in back in the day um but um it it I have to say um it was it it served me pretty well um um based on what I like to do anyway I mean I really really um have a lot of passion um to uh work in a market I was born in Japan or as I sometimes like to say made in Japan and I lived there for the first 10 years of my life so I’ve always been kind of different I’ve been an outsider I’ve had to figure out how to fit in um and part of the way you do that is either you learn the language or you learn the culture and you just try and understand the beauty of each of these cultures and that’s something I learned really early that I like to do and I was good at so um I think IBM kind of harnessed that and um gave me the opportunity and I gave them the Sweat Equity to go and uh drop into a couple of aming countries that I was able to work in um and that that once I started to be you know at the end of the day whatever you do you you end up being known for something right like are you known as a great strategist are you known as a growth driver some people are known as really good at kind of breaking things apart and starting over um I became known as someone who had the ability to drop into a market and to and to figure out how to apply what was happening from a global level into a local level in a way that was respectful to the local people the local customers and the local you know norms and Ways and Means and um I don’t think I would have had all the opportunity I had so I Liv in France I’ve lived in London I’ve lived in Japan I lived in China um without being known for that and that took some time right that took it took time for me to build that personal brand and that equity and that trust with the people in my company to or IBM at the time to send me to these places invest in me to do the job in these places as well so I don’t know if I would have been able to do that if I bounce from company to company to company that makes a lot of sense but this concept of personal Equity inight a company or organization I don’t think Choosing career paths and knowing who you are that’s I don’t really I haven’t really heard about that so it feels like it’s something that is it’s not talked about would you therefore give advice or how how would you give advice to someone who’s who’s like you know they’ve been maybe two years at a company and and they’re thinking about you know maybe there’s another opportunity with a slightly higher pay um how do you think about balancing progress or like career advancement versus that personal Equity inside company I mean when you first start out like you just kind of do what you do right and you most of us like unless you’re becoming a doctor or a lawyer you kind of stumble into kind of your first job and then you and then you build from there um I first I think you have to know who you are and you have to know what you love and what gives you passion and what makes you want to wake up every morning and love kind of you know love going to work every day and uh if it’s making money um that that would be a great formula to start to bounce from place to place right I mean that’s how you make as much money quickly as possible uh based on what I’ve seen um if it’s uh getting up if you getting opportunity globally you pick a global company like I did right I I didn’t pick a hungry little startup which is amazing in its own right right if you’re a huge risk taker pick the C like the hungry little growth companies that gives you like that opportunity to go sell and make it big and then because you love building things from scratch and not that I don’t get any opportunity to build stuff from scratch because I did I think we’ve coined that term entrepreneurship I’ve had the opportunity to be an entrepreneur at IBM which which was hard too because you had to get a lot of stakeholder um um agreement on getting something done that’s never been done before but that has its own rewards as well right so you have to know yourself pretty well um and for me I love working at a global company knowing that I could have had the opportunity to do Global work now I started at IBM in Paris so I I already got the bug right then I was a local in Paris and um and I knew the power of what could be because I saw it firsthand until I came back to headquarters or over to headquarters uh for the first time so yeah you kind of have to know what motivates you and then pick your path that’s uh I think that’s really good advice so you spent over 20 years at IBM and now you’re a Kyndryl what was what was that kind of process like Joining Kyndryl and lessons learned what made you want to jump on on this opportunity of creating something new or well creating something new is something I love to do um learning something new is something I love to do um and um what marketer gets this opportunity to build a brand from scratch which is actually 18 billion dollar brand with 90,000 people right like I that was kind of once in A- lifetime opportunity um and after 20 years of the things that I’ve that I’ve I’ve gotten a lot of joy out of um I got this opportunity to take this leap um I tend to and I’ve seen this in my career you’ve heard the phrase look before you leap I’m kind of a leap before you look G and um that has its own issues as well um I I decided to go and take the giant China job and with 24 hours of notice and kind of made that call and it was amazing but um it was hard too right so uh so yeah so um I just leaped and I’m never look back so let’s just kind of unpack that you mentioned like you said this was a completely unique opportunity to create a global brand from scratch so yeah let’s let’s talk a little bit about that the thought process that went into that what have you learned um about branding and and building a Global brand in in in this process so the first thing I learned is like branding is no joke man branding is hard work like like building a brand and really doing it thoughtfully and really do understanding the power of brand really the power of brand not like you know you slap a logo you know kind of onto a water bottle or whatever right I don’t know if you can see that but like yeah it’s it is it is thoughtful meaningful hard work from like building a brand purpose and really figuring out how to build a brand purpose through to understanding how to build a brand architecture and I think I’d say the first thing that I learned is you have to pitch a big tent right so you can’t brand like on the nose so a great example I learned while I was going through this is um Duncan Donuts I don’t know if you you’ve heard of dunin donuts right so so at that time they were making donuts and um and and then as they like um moved out to coffee and to smoothies and to wraps they had they decided to Rebrand to DD right so so you so they kind of open that aperture um if you were for Forward Thinking enough um you’re able to build no bu pitch that big tent um the big tent for us is we decided that our brand promise was the heart of progress and that’s pretty aspirational right like we kind of came in and we had these big ideas and we had these Big Dreams um we we we we’re really good at or we’re the largest managed infrastructure services provider in the world um but we had bigger aspirations so really understanding when we sat with CEO and Maria winens are CMO they sat together and they really thought long and hard about what they want to be not today but in the future and we came up with hard of progress and that really is about our brand progress together each of us advances the systems that um enables human progress and that’s saying a lot too right living up to that brand promise so really pitching a really big tent is kind of the first goal or the first thing I learned and then figuring out how to live up to it um the other thing that I learned um and this was a new one for me too I think they’re all kind of new ones for me um is um walking the talk so there’s the brand right we have this brand which called Kyndryl and I could talk a little bit if if you want about why we’re called krel but um um because that starts with it’s really hard to name something these days like really really hard if you actually look at the trademarks for our specific um spe specific category of IT services there’s like well over a million trademarks out there already so actually finding a name that’s like not like a madeup name like ours is Kyndryl um is really really difficult so um so I can get to that in a sec but it’s really around connecting what we do with um the kindr themselves so Kyndryl is a um is a people-based company our brand is experienced through us me a Kindel um and um and this part part of that we had to get really clear as to what who we are and what we were um so we really rooted it into the culture that we wanted to build and we built this culture um with we which we named the kindr way and it’s really around always moving forward um we have three elements of that it’s Restless empathetic and devoted it maybe maybe on purpose maybe not is that stands for red warm red is our brand color but really restless about not agit up restless but Restless about the P power and the promise of want wanting to continually improve empathetic about our ability to listen and to ask really smart questions and then devoted which is committed to us and our customers shared success and we’ve kind of documented it and every day we try and live the Kindra way and if we for forget sometimes we kind of throw this looks like a red card for soccer but like we throw we have the Kindra way leadership handbook that we can kind of look to if we need to um but yeah so all our our brand is rooted in our culture because our the kindr the brand is represented through us kindr us 90,000 kindr you you mentioned a couple of like The power and importance of branding the the brand assets and how thoughtful you were when it came to Des signing them everything from logo to name to culture hbook can you talk about someone uh or kind of address this skepticism that I sometimes see about like well branding is really this wishy-washy thing we’ll just you know whatever it doesn’t really matter we can change it up how however we like but it seems like your focus is really no we need to be very thoughtful about it and then we need to stay very consistent so do you think that that is actually really key also in a B2B context uh to build a strong brand and what’s what are the kind of the the positive tangibles from from building a strong brand like that thoughtfully so I I think the biggest thing that I learned and I would not say that I’m a brand Guru by any means I just I have dabbled in it um and but I’ve learned so much from it is if you believe that brand is a synonym for the word trust right so think of any brand that you know and love right um my ramoa is my maybe rova and on MAR that the the suitcase company love them um they they are known or any brand is known for something and if you’re known for something you have to live up to that promise and that builds trust between you and your customer set um once you’d establish what you’re known for if you show up differently so I’m wearing right now a jean jacket a white T-shirt let’s say that’s what I’m known for and you know I have brown hair and I don’t wear glasses or whatever and if I showed up differently every single time I showed up with pink hair or I showed up with crazy John glasses or I showed up um you know with you know constantly changing I would you wouldn’t really know what to think of me you wouldn’t know what I’m known for you wouldn’t know how to trust me and I equate that to any brand right so whether it’s cocacola whether it’s Microsoft whether it’s Apple you know any or whether it’s Kyndryl right like we we need to show up consistently every time and I just if you actually sit and explain that to people then it it it makes it much easier to for people to understand okay I understand the color for kindr is warm red you can’t change it to Pink right because if you show up pink then you know I also explain why it’s warm red and why we came up why we were so deliberate with coming up with the imagery and the color and the need for vitality and all that good stuff but um it’s this idea of trust and showing up the same way based on a promise you’ve given every single time you mentioned that consistency and I think you know if you’re small startups are in one market you’re like God it will just be consistent Kindra also like Balancing brand consistency with localization you mentioned you have 90,000 employees I think customers in like 60 countries around the globe how so how do you mention that need for localization which is I guess key to trust like you need it needs to be familiar it needs to be properly contextualized for your culture um with the need for like Global consistency how do you manage that tension so so well we do we have a a brand handbook that and a uh kind of a brand um like Playbook that everybody at Kyndryl should know about or knows about or has access to um so that’s number one then we also have a brand ambassador program so it was really fun to build that program where we um went out to all 990,000 kindr and we asked them to do a video however they wanted um as to why they should be a brand ambassador and they like thousands of people posted posted these videos that my team at the time went went through every single one of them we now have like 109 or 110 brand ambassadors all around the world um many of them are in India because a big big chunk of our Workforce in India and um they um they know the brand rule book or or Playbook like cold and so so there are eyes and ears on the ground to teach and there are eyes and ears on the ground to to correct should something come out um off for example right so so then we with that Playbook we we lay out like what our color palette is um and we lay out what the imagery the importance of imagery is and why and then it shows up like for example in India whenever I go to India the Indian culture they do this amazing I wish I knew what they were called but they do these amazing um petal art you know so they take petal flowers and petals and they make this gorgeous art around any kind of festivity and so making the petal art with the brand color palette is absolutely on brand for example right so it’s not that we’re saying you can’t make the pedal art of course you can because that is a really big big thing as part of Indian culture you know for example we just asked you to do it aligned to the colors for example if you want to make a brand statement right if it’s important for you to make a brand statement so we ask people to um when we when they put the The Branding around all the environments or all the offices we have we give a PL brand Playbook because for a customer to watch into an office in India and have it look like the office in New York or the office in Munich or anywhere around the world or in C follow or whatever um again it’s back to this like you want it you want people to know that you’re showing up the same way every single time this idea of like activating your Activating employees to become brand ambassadors employees is it it it seems like that’s there’s a huge untapped opportunity and a lot of companies struggle to do that um and just like practically speaking if if companies at you know certainly at your scale but even smaller companies if they could get even a fraction of their employees posting on LinkedIn that would do probably huge things for for their uh brand awareness so so what do you think about what’s kind of key to actually getting employees at scale to start to activating them and and help them become ambassadors for the company you know it’s a good question I feel we were really lucky with the 90,000 kid rolls that we have so many of them are passionate about um social Eminence and and posting on social media um I don’t know if it was because they were part of something bigger and didn’t feel their uniqueness while we were a division of IBM um and then once we gave a brand identity and a voice a brand voice to these people they felt very very excited to exert that exert that voice um but but it’s really around how important it is to do that because we we aren’t at a place where we are our our stock pric isn’t at a place where we want it to be at we said we’re a 3 to five year deal so we’re moving in the right direction we’re really excited about the trajectory we have and some of the feedback we’ve been getting from the investor Community um but um it’s giving access to appropriate brand assets for PE people them then post those on social media and one of the things I’m most impr proud of when I was running the brand um at the time was this um user generated content campaign um we did around our first year anniversary around something called kid to Kindel so essentially we gave just a few guidelines of people you know bring a photo of you as a kid and we want and a big part of um of our our brand is about curiosity and um we talk about we’re being we’re pro curiosity and so we say talk about what you were curious about as a kid how had has it turned you into who you are today um so you saw started seeing all these gorgeous posts on the day we let it fly uh people coming up with photos of themselves as children around cultures all around the world um and talking about what they were curious as a kid and why they’ve turned into an engineer or why they turned into selling in the travel and transportation um um sector or why they do marketing or why they do Communications or why they they’re a developer or whatever and they it was this gorgeous tie that we just didn’t give a lot of structure we just gave really light structure and then it just exploded and I think we just won a lovely award in UK for for that campaign so so yeah that would be a really proud moment of where we gave some assets to the Kindel themselves and it just kind of exploded and it went on it went viral and it must be really cool to see when you have such a huge and diverse uh employee base it it really kind of takes on a life of its own I guess yeah did very I I definitely want to talk more Scrappy marketing strategies about content but before just going briefly back to something you mentioned the investor community and it sounds from talking to you like you have at krol been able to bring the importance of branding is really valued and it’s been brought to like the top of the the company and it’s also something that is not really very tangible which I guess the investor Community likes to see they like to see hard numbers so how do you um how have you kind of been able to focus so much on branding and and have it be such a core part of your strategy in the midst of being a public company and and uh having to maybe I guess justify those Investments how how you like generally thought about that at kind I wouldn’t say you know what I just think we um when we spun we had a a appropriate budget to spend around the world but then like you know everyone’s these days everyone’s marketing budget constrained um we are in startup mode so we have to figure out how to be much more Scrappy than being able to buy tons and tons of media for example we don’t have that luxury yet right um we will one day I really really believe we will um so you do have to use I mean we are so lucky to have the 90,000 gels out there right to be able to amplify that brand in many many different ways not just on social but like speaking at you know on panels or speaking at conferences what we do from a a PR perspective right so so you just have to figure out um more Scrappy ways to um understand how to get the brand out there like that that kind of creative campaign around kid to Kindra for example right so so yeah and then you have to get people excited people to come on board with you and I think one of the most excited person is our CEO Martin who who loves this brand probably because he had a whole lot of um his fingerprints on it to be quite honest and um and you know everywhere he goes he makes sure things that are that he sees are on brand in every single country it’s so interesting because you mentioned like what you you have the buddies are constrained and you’re trying to look for Scrappy ways that you can build the brand globally but you’re also doing at a scale that I mean no other company virtually on the world is doing so I’d love to get a little bit into like that Playbook that you’re running like what are some of the tactics channels and ways you mentioned a couple are there anything else that you’re doing that allows you to build a brand by bypassing the sort of the more traditional expensive routes so besid so besides um um so the social activation that we do and that’s where we lean in um then we get just we really prioritize very very significantly so for example when it comes to uh paid social uh like when it comes to our our media mix we really really lean into paid social that’s where we put all of our media eggs in that basket um and we also hyper Geo Target right so um I’m I also run so I I I have the field of the Kindel field marketers reporting to me as does account pce marketing so we have the subset of accounts that are really really important for us for us to grow um to to make our numbers and so even with that we’re able Geo Target to ensure that um those customers know who we are and what we stand for I mean because we’re still and you know how is K Kyndryl differ differ from um the division that we are were with our former employer and how are how are we showing up differently right this ties back to the Kindra way about how we show up in front of our clients in a very different way so geot targeting is one uh tool that we use to be able to get hyper targeted and then also search right right so uh from that perspective wow that’s really interesting that like the digital the Performance Marketing P social search is really a core part and you’re doing it all around the world without having to kind of um choose more expensive let’s say media channels yeah hey don’t get me wrong we’d love to I mean when we when we launched we jacked the Time Square we jacked Shu AC Crossing that was fun right that was really fun but uh you not to need to kind of need to deliver what we promised to the street and then you know once we do those days will come back speaking of which what has been um your proudest moment or biggest win so Proudest moment at Kyndryl far at Kyndryl anything that stands out well a personal amazing moment for me is when we went to the stock exchange and we launched on the launched on the New York Stock Exchange our BR our our our our monik or KD which is our stock symbol um but then like you know that was amazing this seeing that and planning that and creating that experience and the interesting thing on that was um we decided that our primary target for that was our employees so we made this incredible employee experience for them so for people all around the world um The Exchange does an amazing job of of of giving you a bird’s eyye View and a front seat to all of that so that was really really cool but I think I’ve said it the coolest project I worked on is this kind kid to kindral piece on um really taking what we believe in as our brand which is our people and then really not giving a lot of structure but activating it globally in a way that was made sense for each of the different cultures and each different each of the different markets so let’s let’s talk about that a little bit what was I guess a general Strategy and process for creating content question is how do you think about content specifically choosing what type of content campaigns to run like is it a very qualitative sorry quantitative approach or is it just trying to like understand your culture your people what would resonate understand customers and just like creatively coming up with ideas like that like what what does our process look like for you well I think we we’re uh we’re the way our operating model works is um um all the members of our Global team so whether it’s our Global content team our Global brand Team they’re all in service of the folks on the ground right so whatever is built um is built for the people to take over the line right as a I mean that’s a services company that model makes um sense as a if you’re a SAS company I think you have a different model because technology it plays a much bigger uh role in your actual marketing because the tech itself does the marketing right so so we we we go down the services model and essentially we get take feedback by markets as to what they need and then we give enough structure and have it translated into the appropriate languages and then um we give enough flexibility on the ground for the team to take it over the line so so whether we you know a big part of of what we offer to our clients or customers is um helping them modernize their applications and their infrastructure um and so we’ve come up with a a kind of a modernization white paper and then we break it down into its um derivative assets and then we send that out to the markets and the markets use them in whatever Journey that’s appropriate to them based on what role they’re trying to build relationships with so um they take if it’s a ciso role so a chief information security officer role they go down the secure line if um it’s a um if it’s a devops person they go much down the go down the technical line um but if it’s a you know I don’t know a um some a chief sustainability officer we go down like the sustainability at line so we give them kind of piece parts for them to put together um to deliver whatever they need any thoughts on what is kind of required in terms of standing up right now the news feeds are full everyone is posting now there’s AI generated content that’s kind of already I think starting to to to show up at at pretty large large scale so do you have any thoughts on like how can we compete how can we stand out how can we be interesting in this new environment you know what I don’t I don’t yet I’m still a student of it um and I’m kind of watching it it’s it’s scary a little bit from my perspective right everything that’s being created I mean watching what’s happening with the um the uh the the the Screen Actor the the writer strike the actor’s guild strike and how powerful they are to protect themselves about but you know from kind of AI generated content taking their IP and so so I’m just kind of watching it play out right now I’m not ready to make any major major statements around like um what we’re going to do probably knowing us will test and learn right so we’ll constantly test and learn and we’ll go we’ll try something and we’ll see if it works or if it doesn’t um and we’ll kind of test and learn our way through speaking of kind of studying and Learning new skills as a marketer learning what are your kind of go-to places resources tools for making sure that you keep sorry of stay up to dat with everything that’s happening in the world of marketing you know that’s a good question I um honestly I um this might be a Shameless plug but um I am a big believer in this um program that I took in 2018 called the marketing Academy um it’s their fellowship program and it’s for CMOS who aspire to be CEOs or be on boards and um it’s for a select group of CMOS so it I was told it was hard to get in but you know I don’t know any what’s ly anyone who would accept me I don’t I don’t know if I value their judgment but whatever it’s a a unique board level executive development program and um what it gives you is well it gives you a Mackenzie education which is amazing um it gives you mentors from the best-in-class CEOs and board chairs so you can kind of hear directly from them um it gives you your own personal coach a board level exec coach but the most important thing is you you come out of there with this incredible cohort of people my cohort is absolutely amazing it’s what I call my personal cabinet so whenever I need any help there’s someone I can um call up and there’s actually a larger alumni crew that um I can call up at any time just an example of that is um when the queen died um a lot of us in the M anyway we’re like what should we do what makes sense what’s respectful so we H hopped on to you know I hopped on to that that WhatsApp chat group and started to understand what other markets other brands were doing and it gave me more of a steer and it was like a a instant focus group for me um than you know trying to figure out and making a mistake for example right wow that sounds so valuable to have a group of peers who are like-minded and uh just incredibly competent and kind of focused on what you’re trying to achieve as well yeah it’s pretty cool is there anything that stands out from that education in terms of well these are the skill sets or or uh knowledge that CMOS or marketers in general would need or benefit from acquiring if they want transition eventually to BEC CEO or well a lot of things um I think that would be a whole another podcast to be quite honest but um you know first of all speaking language of the board right so really not coming at it from you know your deep marketing um um career approach not career marketing language and really like if you’re engaging with your CFO speaking the language of the CFO if you’re speaking with your CEO you’re speaking the language of C so it helped me understand those languages so I could um adapt what I do to help them understand how it will benefit the company or benefit the bottom line eventually you know that kind of thing so build and taught me building relationships right building how to build relationships with people at that level as well um and then the big thing also taught me a lot about um how to work with different cultures and different people from different cultures because uh not all cultures um are the same and um as as the world’s come smaller with the internet um and I have a job right now where I work with CMOS from you know the 60 different markets that we serve um what I say and what they hear aren’t always the same so really learning how to adapt your style uh but being a study a student of um of kind of cultural differentiation and communication um from that perspective it’s um it’s that’s a big big learning I learn that every single day you’re right we could definitely do another podcast about all of those things Lisa um it’s been really great talking to you thank you so much for taking the time if pleasure if people want to connect with you learn more about what you’re doing and follow you what’s the the best place to do that well the best place to do that is on LinkedIn and uh just I don’t know if this this will be such a crazy thing if it actually works I don’t know if it’s going to work but uh I have a QR code on LinkedIn I’m just going to pop it up just to see maybe it will maybe it won’t you can connect me on that I hope someone will try scanning that I’ll try that’ be cool who knows maybe it will work maybe it won’t but yeah you can connect with me on LinkedIn that’s the best way to do it I’ll also add the the URL in the show notes thank you so much um have a great rest of the day thank you so much thanks for having me thank you for listening you can find all episodes of the growth pod on Spotify YouTube and 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