Brands today are being challenged to deliver experiences across a complex mix of digital channels, audiences and markets, driven by an insatiable consumer demand for personalized content. In fact, according to a recent Adobe study, a staggering 71% of consumers say they expect brand interactions to be tailored to their individual needs. However, bottlenecks in content production hurt the ability of teams to create meaningful interactions with their audience and limits their ability to tap into market trends that drive engagement.
Advancements in generative AI are reshaping how brands think about driving business growth, and content production is one use case that holds clear opportunities. Brands often don’t have the resources to deliver the volume of assets that are needed to engage customers and keep campaigns from going stale. Adobe’s latest Digital Trends Report found that 59% of marketing teams report challenges due to overwhelming demands on creative teams to produce new content.
Generative AI can help by enabling marketers to better self-serve and create asset variations needed to drive their goals around engagement. This allows creatives to focus on what they do best: defining the foundational components of a brand. “Generative AI is presenting creative and marketing teams with a new way to keep pace with customer demands while also breaking through with their brands,” said Heather Freeland, Adobe’s chief brand officer.
When used alongside pre-defined guidelines such as brand voice or channel requirements, generative AI can be a force multiplier. Organizations can deliver on the high volume of on-brand content that oftentimes is not physically possible for one team to accomplish alone. Infusing brand guidelines into generative AI workflows empowers teams to quickly generate asset variations and shorten review cycles.
Reimagining the content production processes
Adobe’s marketing organization has been leveraging generative AI to create on-brand and personalized content quickly to accelerate go-to-market campaigns. This work informed our latest AI-powered solution, Adobe GenStudio for Performance Marketing, a new self-serve application that allows marketers to generate, re-use and optimize content for their campaigns.
During this process, we’ve learned six strategies to scale content production with generative AI:
1. Test content variations at scale. Brands can’t measure what is performing best if they don’t have enough content to test and experiment with. Use generative AI to generate multiple variations of an asset with different headlines, subjects and body copy aligned to each product and audience—and run A/B tests to learn what works best. Our team did this for an email campaign and testing different versions resulted in a 57% increase in click rates.
2. Cut down production timeframes to refresh campaigns. Refreshing content regularly improves campaign performance and decreases ad fatigue; Meta even recommends refreshing ad assets every three to four weeks. With generative AI, brands can quickly create updated versions of existing assets to keep up with market trends, capture customer attention and keep campaigns fresh. Our team was able to use generative AI to reduce the email creation process from two to three weeks to just two to three days.
3. Create unique content to reach underserved audiences. Not having enough content can hinder a marketer’s ability to reach new segments of customers. With generative AI, brands are able to produce new types of content in less time, with variations that are relevant for each target audience. Adobe’s lifecycle marketing team doubled the number of audiences they were able to engage (from 6 to 12) by using generative AI to quickly create and personalize asset variations.
4. Facilitate responsiveness to market trends. Using generative AI to speed up the content production process also enables more real-time marketing around industry moments and current events. At Adobe, our three-week production timeline made it difficult to properly support seasonal events and emerging trends, but generative AI helped cut down the content creation process from weeks to days—and sometimes hours. This provided teams with the agility needed to respond quickly to the market and improve campaign performance as a result. For example, our team was able to deliver a timely regional Summer Olympics campaign and tie content to a cultural moment.
5. Improve agility for regional marketing teams. When leveraged globally, generative AI can help regional marketing teams take existing global content and quickly adapt it to their local regions, independently and in their primary languages. This allows teams to account for cultural nuance while also maintaining brand standards, removing an existing bottleneck for many brands. Decentralizing content creation has improved marketing agility and ROI across Adobe’s international markets, elevating the impact of global campaigns.
6. Bring deeper insights into the creative process. Leveraging deep insights around content performance is key to driving value from generative AI. At Adobe, we bring relevant insights across channel, asset and attributes—such as colors, themes, mood, formats and more—into our creative process. By tapping into insights and performance data for each asset, we can ask generative AI to answer questions around things such as the background colors that drive the highest engagement for a particular product or customer segment in a particular region or country enabling us to fine-tune and optimize content for high performance.
The challenges marketers and creatives face today will likely continue: in fact, nearly two-thirds of marketers believe the demand for content will grow by at least five times within the next two years, driven by consumers who expect brand experiences that are dynamic and personalized to their interests. Generative AI provides a compelling solution, but as we have learned at Adobe, it requires brand guardrails, deep insights and continuous testing. When brought together cohesively, teams have an opportunity to drive greater performance and support business growth.
