Not that long ago, a few select gatekeepers like newspaper editors, movie producers or radio programmers controlled everything that was published for mass consumption. Today, the proliferation of social media platforms, streaming services, mobile apps and digital properties has created an overwhelming abundance of content channels.
But one of the side effects of all these easily accessible ways to reach consumers is that the audience now expects personalized content experiences. According to a recently published Adobe AI and Digital Trends report, 71% of consumers want brands to anticipate their needs with personalized offers or helpful information, but only 34% of brands deliver.
Because of this, the demands on creative teams have increased precipitously. Two significant challenges marketers currently face are the pressure to increase speed of development, reduce costs and scale content, while simultaneously generating more creative asset variations to fuel personalized experiences and optimize campaign performance. With existing production workflows struggling to keep pace, creative teams are finding it increasingly difficult to meet these demands.
The pressure marketers are facing has been great, and many are now asking: Can advances in artificial intelligence help with increasing content demands?
Using AI to power marketing
It’s important to note that AI is not a magic wand that can generate instant brand differentiation and simplify the content supply chain. Rather, AI is a tool that, when guided by strategic human insight and thoughtfully integrated into organizational culture, workflows and tech stacks, can build a bridge between the content needs already being fulfilled and the unmet needs teams are struggling to meet. In short, it can act as jet fuel for creative teams.
In my role as chief brand officer at Adobe, I spend a lot of time talking about the role of AI in creativity and marketing with both customers and my own creative team. In those conversations, I’ve found that one of AI’s greatest promises lies in its ability to supercharge creative teams while empowering marketing teams. For instance, by generating thousands of variations of assets for different channels and markets, generative AI enables designers to concentrate on crafting impactful creative concepts while automation takes care of scaling. This capability allows marketing teams to self-serve in specific campaign scenarios, effectively reducing bottlenecks and permitting creatives to focus on more strategic tasks.
A prime example is our approach to Adobe’s largest annual marketing promotion, Black Friday. Previously, managing the vast scale of production involved intricate workflows and extensive coordination with external agencies. We streamlined this process last year with our own content supply chain solution, Adobe GenStudio, which significantly accelerated content delivery across teams. Adobe Firefly and Firefly Custom Models allowed both commissioned artists and internal creative teams to extend their creative options. Our global marketing teams then used Firefly Services to assemble and export all necessary assets.
With the help of Adobe GenStudio, we dramatically increased the Black Friday content available to our marketing teams, producing more than 16,000 asset variations (averaging around 20 assets per minute) and localizing content in more than 30 languages for 78 regions. This integration ultimately slashed production time from weeks to just days.
Adobe’s Black Friday 2024 creative assets. Credit: Adobe
Another noteworthy instance is Adobe GenStudio for Performance Marketing, our gen AI-powered application that allows marketing teams to create innumerable ads and emails to drive impactful, personalized marketing campaigns. Our performance marketing team leverages this tool to generate assets rapidly, adhering to the guardrails established by our in-house creative team. This collaboration exemplifies how marketers and creative teams can effectively utilize AI within their workflows. Our creative teams trained the large language models (LLMs) powering GenStudio with our brand guidelines and provided best practices for writing prompts. This partnership allowed marketers to produce performance-driven content more swiftly while ensuring brand consistency and enabling creative teams to focus on more prominent brand campaigns.
Creative assets generated with Adobe GenStudio for Performance Marketing. Credit: Adobe
As the two examples above show, our global marketing organization and our agency partners here at Adobe are moving beyond legacy models of content creation and embracing a new, more dynamic approach that balances the speed and efficiency AI offers with the irreplaceable creativity of human storytellers. Creativity has always been central to Adobe’s brand promise. For more than 40 years, we have served both the creative community and the marketers who rely on their work. This legacy informs how we approach AI—not as a replacement for human talent but as a way to empower it.
The challenge for today’s marketing leaders is not whether to use AI, but how to leverage it to enable creative teams to work on larger-scale campaigns with fewer mundane tasks and help marketers meet their content needs. As we all navigate this new era of AI-powered marketing, the brands that will succeed are not those that rely solely on AI-generated content, but those that use AI to push the boundaries of storytelling while keeping human creativity at the center.
About Adobe
Adobe is changing the world through digital experiences. For more information, visit www.adobe.com.
Heather Freeland
Heather Freeland is the chief brand officer at Adobe, leading global brand marketing, strategy and integrated campaigns. She excels at building high-performance teams and scaling impactful marketing across global markets. Heather serves on the MMA North America Board, ANA CMO Growth Council and Spotify’s marketing advisory council. She graduated from the University of Virginia and holds an MBA from Columbia University.
