Adobe is rebranding its AI studio app to focus on performance marketing, a move that could bring more AI-generated ads into social media apps, including Meta, TikTok and Snapchat, as the platform becomes widely available. Adobe is also unveiling its first AI video-creation tool, which is expected to be used by brands to spin up ads on social media.

The product launch on Monday was timed alongside this week’s Adobe MAX, the annual creativity summit from the software company. Adobe announced it took its AI-powered GenStudio out of beta, a phase it’s been in since its launch in March, and is now calling it GenStudio for Performance Marketing. GenStudio is an ad-creation platform, which automates most of the production through AI. The platform also was upgraded so marketers could launch campaigns directly on to Meta (which owns Facebook and Instagram), TikTok and Snap, and display ads through Google Campaign Manager 360, the ad management platform, and Microsoft Advertising. The new video generation tool is an enhancement to Adobe Firefly, which has so far been used by brands to generate still images for campaigns.

Firefly for video is “the first of its kind, commercially safe video generation using just text prompts,” said Varun Parmar, general manager for Adobe’s GenStudio, in an interview with Ad Age. “And you can generate anywhere from five- to 10-second videos. And we believe that a big part of that use case is going to be around ads.”

Adobe has been positioning its generative AI tools as safe for brands since that’s become a crucial variable in advertisers’ decision to embrace the technology. In 2023, when Adobe launched Firefly, it promoted the fact that it had secured licensing assurances around the images it produces. Brands have been worried about using AI that could get them into legal trouble.

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Adobe’s updates could unleash more AI-generated content from advertisers on apps, including Instagram, TikTok and Snap. The rise of AI has had upsides for marketers that need more content as demands for new material online are heightened, but there also are downsides to AI. There have been concerns about AI-generated images, video and fake news flooding social platforms. Also, some voices from the creative community have decried the ascendance of AI in the profession, and one Adobe rival, Procreate, even positioned its platform as AI-free to appeal to detractors of the technology.

For advertisers, automation is hastening the pace of work and helping them keep up with the need to feed fresh campaigns, Parmar said. “Creatives spend roughly two days a week, so 40% of their time, on sort of routine and manual tasks that they have to serve their marketing counterparts,” Parmar said. “So, the marketers come to them and they're like, ‘We need variations for this, this and this.’ And we're trying to alleviate that workflow so that the creators can focus on the big, powerful brand campaigns, brand designs.”

Earlier this year, at Adobe Summit, the company launched GenStudio. Now the company is putting more emphasis on “performance marketing” by including it in the name. All the major platforms, including Meta, Google and TikTok, have launched AI-powered campaign types that are meant to be performance drivers. TikTok, for instance, launched Smart+ last week, which uses AI to create ads, bid on ad inventory and manage campaigns; that’s a product akin to Google’s Performance Max and Meta’s Advantage+.

Adobe’s GenStudio will streamline the ability to develop campaigns and launch them to Facebook and Instagram, TikTok and Snap, and display ads online through Google and Microsoft’s ad platforms.

Lenovo is one example of a brand that has beta tested the AI-powered performance marketing app, Adobe said. The update will make it so marketers can more quickly activate the generative AI ads and return performance data, Parmar said. Brands now need five times more content than before, Parmar said. On TikTok alone, the platform only serves organic videos, once to a user, avoiding serving the same post to a person multiple times, Parmar said.

“All of these reasons are causing a massive increase in all of this content, and the only way brands can actually satisfy that is using a solution like GenStudio, where you can actually reuse the content,” Parmar said, since the AI tweaks existing content in ways that could seem fresh to social media consumers. “You can start to generate variants. And all of this is enabled through an on-brand personalization engine, a workflow that’s enabling this content creation for these platforms.”