SK Telecom transforms its content supply chain with Adobe Express and Experience Manager Assets.

With the proliferation of digital channels and consumer touchpoints, the demand for content is exploding. In fact, recent Adobe research found that 96% of marketers have seen content demand at least double over the past two years, with 62% saying it has grown 5x or more. Most marketers (71%) also anticipate content demand to grow more than 5x between now and 2027.

But marketers are struggling to keep up, with 58% saying that more than 40% of time is spent managing reviews and approvals, rather than creating high-impact content strategies and the content itself. There’s also a growing concern about content that falls outside of brand guidelines. This presents a new challenge for organisations: they need to create content quickly while staying on brand.

Unified digital asset management with Adobe Experience Manager.

SK Telecom, one of Korea’s leading telecommunications companies, faced this very challenge. The company needed to respond to the surge in content demand but was hampered by inefficiencies in its processes. Marketers relied on designers to create content, leading to delays during review and revision cycles. Multiple teams worked with different partner agencies and stored content assets in separate repositories, creating a fragmented system that lacked centralised control.

“From large-scale campaigns, such as the launch of new smartphones, to frequent promotions, we create and distribute countless pieces of content,” said Sangho Jeon, Manager of the MNO AT Development Team at SK Telecom. “We needed to improve our content supply chain to fundamentally solve these problems, and Adobe tools were our choice of solution.”

SK Telecom started by bringing together its scattered digital assets for a new mobile phone marketing campaign into a central repository using Adobe Experience Manager Assets. The solution not only stores assets, but also provides web-based previews of Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator files, eliminating the need for file conversions between teams. Smart tagging further enables teams to quickly locate the right assets within a vast library.

When it comes to marketing assets for a new mobile phone, confidentiality is just as important as time to market. Experience Manager Assets helps manage user permission effectively by ensuring that only authorised users can access confidential marketing assets.

Accelerating content creation while maintaining brand consistency.

SK Telecom works closely with a nationwide network of retailers to distribute and sell mobile phones. The company faced a challenge where promotional assets created independently by each retailer often varied in quality were not always on-brand. Also, to break the bottleneck in its content supply chain, SK Telecom needed a tool that empowered marketers to make simple edits themselves. Adobe Express for Enterprise delivered exactly that.

“With documented brand guidelines alone, they often faced difficulties when putting them into practice. Adobe Express for Enterprise enables them to create on-brand content, which is a significant change,” said Jeon.

The role of designers is also changing. They are freed from repetitive, mundane tasks and can focus on more strategic and creative work.

Crucially, the integration of Experience Manager Assets with Adobe Express allows each department to quickly find marketing assets for a new mobile phone in Experience Manager and increase marketing campaign velocity. This creates a virtuous content cycle through seamless workflow.

“As a trusted technology partner, Adobe solutions have enabled SK Telecom to lay the foundation for systematic and unified content creation,” said Jeon. “We’ve been able to speed up our content production while building a brand system for on-brand content production, and most importantly, our creative team can focus on more important areas such as ideation and strategy.”

In an age of content overload, the power of attention-grabbing, on-brand content at speed is more important than ever. SK Telecom is continuing its journey of innovation, leveraging Adobe Express and Experience Manager Assets to build a future-ready content supply chain that delivers meaningful customer experiences.