How generative AI is unlocking creativity.

At Adobe MAX, we met with creative leaders and marketers from multiple industries and countries about generative AI and what it means for the future of content. Improved efficiency, productivity and innovation are some of the benefits sought by today’s organisations investing in AI. For brands and content teams who are under increasing pressure to do more with less, some may see generative AI as merely a shortcut or time-saver. This has created the incorrect perception that generative AI hinders or discourages creativity. As we’ve discovered in our own work with clients and through the insights we gathered in Miami at Adobe MAX 2024, creativity at marketing organisations is surging thanks to the varied, unique capabilities of generative AI.

Facing the future of content.

Some of today’s marketing teams are still stuck on legacy technology transformation that never delivered, with only 56.5% of purchased martech tools actually being utilised in operations. Some may see these figures and worry that generative AI will only accelerate this trend, locking them in to processes that are solely focused on driving performance efficiency, volume and endless optimisation without a regard for quality. These assumptions appear to be unfounded.

For many future-facing organisations, generative AI is already a creative collaborator for their brand and marketing teams. Nearly half of all surveyed companies currently use generative AI for content marketing, with that proportion expected to rise to 71% by the end of this year. These early adopters are driven by an inherent curiosity about their customers, culture and creativity and they understand that generative AI enables creativity while freeing them from tedious processes that may come with manual production.

There are three key ways that generative AI can unlock a range of benefits for today’s marketers:

1. Supercharge the creative process to drive innovation.
2. Accelerate processes to unlock capacity.
3. Connect more deeply with customers via personalisation to increase impact.

1. Supercharge the creative process to drive innovation.

A predominant benefit of generative AI is its foundation of — and continuous learning from — large datasets. As brand and marketing teams try to synthesise vast amounts of information about their customers and the market at large, generative AI tools can help summarise real-time trends and emerging themes from their datasets so that leaders can focus on what these insights mean for their brand and customers.

By having this information easily accessible in their toolkit and quickly generated rather than calculated manually, marketers can more easily narrow down demographics, channels, topics, aesthetics and other factors that ultimately shape an end-to-end campaign. And, they can react in real time to the ever-changing shifts in the landscape that require their brand to be agile and future-ready.

2. Accelerate processes to unlock capacity.

For a full campaign, the timeline from creative brief to launching into the market can be long. At every stage, more layers of processes tend to pile on. From approving the initial idea to activating it across dozens of touchpoints, brand and marketing teams can often lose weeks in the back and forth between agencies, collaborators and leadership teams. The speed of marketing calls for a far more rapid cycle of creation and execution in order to keep up with the expectations of today’s customers.

This is where generative AI comes in. Whether creating a generative AI programme internally or adopting an established generative AI solution from external vendors, organisations can speed up their time to market while maintaining content quality. They can also keep their content supply chain flexible and nimble as trends and customer preferences shift in real time.

One example of an external generative AI solution that we’ve integrated into our own content production strategy is Adobe Firefly. When our creative team was evolving our brand’s visual identity in 2023, we wanted to develop a tool that created compelling, compliant brand imagery quickly. With the help of Adobe Firefly’s generative AI capabilities, we created the Deloitte Digital Orb Foundry. This platform democratises creative ideation for designers and non-designers alike, allowing our practitioners to input simple words, phrases and themes that are then translated into brand assets within minutes.

Because programmes such as Adobe Firefly can be trained on a brand’s style guide including logos, colour schemes, fonts, tone of voice and more, marketers can utilise generative AI for campaign tasks. Whether optimising the same core content for different platforms (such as social media versus print ads) based on leading practices or language translations that remain brand compliant across formats, these programmes create full suites of content quickly and can help to compress the sign-off process from leadership.

3. Connect more deeply with customers via personalisation to increase impact.

More than 50% of today’s surveyed brands see personalisation as crucial for a successful customer strategy, with plans to increase spending on personalisation by an average of 29% by the end of this year. Brands that prioritise and excel at personalisation are 71% more likely to report improved customer loyalty. Among consumers, the sentiment reflects much of the same. Indeed, 78% of today’s consumers want personalised insights that help them to save money and 84% said that special discount offers or bundles had a medium or high influence on their purchase decisions.

Executing personalisation at scale can bring varying levels of complexity and expenses depending on the data maturity of an organisation. Transforming the content supply chain with generative AI can bring quality, tailored, timely content to the market at scale. As the demand for digital content increases, brands can respond to the moment by harnessing the right generative AI tools and by prioritising customer connection and trust as the foundation of their content creation strategy.

Looking ahead.

Encouraging an open dialogue between an organisation’s leadership, budget stakeholders and creative teams around the role of generative AI is an important step to take before implementing this technology. By assessing objectives and ensuring AI-readiness, marketing leaders can get the most out of generative AI as the technology continues to develop and evolve. Greater brand consistency, amplified creativity and new insights that can enable teams to quickly test and iterate ideas are just some of the potential benefits that today’s marketing organisations can reap by adopting generative AI tools for their content strategies.