Meet content demands and deliver winning campaigns at speed and scale with Adobe GenStudio for Performance Marketing

A graphic collage showing generative-AI elements showing a field of purple flowers behind a white mannequin head with colorful flowers in place of the brain, indicating designs that can be made using Adobe GenStudio for Performance Marketing.

Marketing teams are under major pressure.

Demand for personalised content is skyrocketing while marketing budgets are tightening. Marketers must deliver engaging, effective campaigns with timely and relevant content across audiences, channels and platforms. Simply put, they need to do more — and they need to do it faster.

Generative AI represents a transformative force for enterprise content production, offering vast potential to scale creative output and unprecedented opportunities for brand differentiation and business value. It can help organisations accelerate content velocity, drive competitive advantage and realise previously unachievable marketing goals, such as true 1:1 personalisation — if it’s implemented strategically.

Within Adobe’s Global Marketing Organisation (GMO), I lead our Growth Marketing and Insights team, overseeing essentially all the ads we put into the world via paid channels or email. Like other modern marketing organisations, we face some daunting content challenges, including customer expectations, channel growth and ROI optimisation. Unlike most others, though, we have a unique ability — and responsibility — to build marketing solutions to solve real marketing problems with our product teams.

Adobe’s GMO needs to generate huge amounts of fresh content, launch global campaigns across regions, test assets at scale and track real-time performance, all while maintaining efficiency. Tasked with personalising campaigns across hundreds of customer segments and creating demand for enormous content volume, we realised that traditional production and delivery methods couldn’t take us where we needed to go. So, we looked to our creative and digital experience experts and collaborated to turn a vision into a reality.

Adobe GenStudio for Performance Marketing is a generative AI-first application that helps teams quickly create, activate and measure on-brand campaign content. The technology’s agility and scalability, combined with brand guardrails, allow marketers to self-serve on-brand content to deliver relevant, personalised experiences built on performance data and executed at speed.

The tool supercharges creatives and empowers marketers, enabling creative ownership and unlocking the power of team partnership. Creatives are free to focus on bigger things — less rote production, more strategic ideas — while marketers can think more deeply about the brand and how they work with creative teams.

“Across all industries, there is an insatiable demand for content as customers expect every encounter with a brand to be personalised,” said Heather Freeland, chief brand officer at Adobe. “Marketing teams are struggling to keep up with the volume of visuals and copy needed to deliver campaigns at greater scale and speed across audiences, channels and markets.”

“Just when this challenge seemed insurmountable, the emergence of 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.”

The content challenges we faced

Adobe's GMO is a massive operation. The team orchestrates sophisticated campaigns across multiple channels and markets, sending billions of emails every year and targeting diverse audience segments worldwide in more than 40 languages.

Like many other enterprise marketing organisations in today’s content-hungry world, we faced obstacles. Our traditional production methods bottlenecked our workflows and slowed our entire marketing ecosystem. We could not effectively produce the sheer content volume required to deliver personalised, timely and effective marketing at scale.

Among other limitations, the inability to generate enough content and variations meant:

Challenges in conducting comprehensive testing and using sophisticated optimisation algorithms
Difficulty serving diverse audience segments because of insufficient relevant content and limited resources

According to Adobe research, 59% of marketing teams report content creation challenges similar to the ones we faced due to overwhelming demands and requests on creative teams.

“There is an insatiable demand for content as customers expect every encounter with a brand to be personalised. The emergence of 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.”

— Heather Freeland, Chief Brand Officer, Adobe

Generative AI applications for specific marketing use cases

Once we had the powerful new solution, GenStudio for Performance Marketing, in our hands, we took a measured approach to integrating it into our workflows. We explored our challenges and examined specific use cases to measure the impact of generative AI.

Here’s a closer look at two of those use cases.

Challenge

Conducting large-scale email and paid social testing for large campaigns was difficult, primarily because of the lack of content variations we could generate, given budget and time constraints. Failing to optimise content from performance data led to lower engagement rates and conversion metrics. When testing was possible, we could only test two versions of the subject line and preheader rather than the whole email. For paid media, we could often only create one or two variations, making it hard to utilise social platform targeting capabilities.

Solution

GenStudio for Performance Marketing creates at least four variations of each requested asset, providing different headlines, subjects and body copy aligned to target personas and products. This solution lets us quickly generate and test multiple content variations of entire emails and paid social ads while adhering to our brand guidelines. For email, we run A/B/n tests and multivariate analyses across different content elements, including subject lines, body copy, images and calls to action. For paid social, we use Facebook and Instagram algorithms to serve the right content to the right audience.

Impact

In one of our first generative AI-powered email tests, we used the tool to quickly build and test five versions of an Adobe Photoshop email. It delivered a more than 10% increase in click-through rates and a subsequent test reported a 57% increase in click rates for an Adobe Illustrator email. This content creation speed also allowed us to test new subject lines for a campaign every two weeks, resulting in 8.5% higher open rates. Testing scale and speed transformed our approach to content optimisation, significantly enhancing our marketing performance and efficiency.

8.5% increase in open rates with email testing

A graphic showing how an asset was created by a designer with generative AI and became three new assets created with GenStudio for Performance Marketing, accelerating the email creation process from three weeks to three days and increasing productivity with generative AI.

2. Creating new, unique content for untapped audiences

Challenge

Limited resources made creating personalised content difficult for diverse audience segments, resulting in missed opportunities and poor engagement across our entire customer base. For example, the lifecycle marketing team needed to serve 12 distinct audiences for our North American acquisition programmes, but due to a content shortage, we were often restricted to serving only six. We could advertise 13 products broadly, but we lacked persona-specific assets to create differentiated messaging and content for each persona across social platforms.

Solution

Content creation powered by generative AI gives our marketers the speed and agility to target more audiences with content tailored to their preferences. Our tool enables easy personalisation by using the same prompt and changing the target persona, creating on-brand variations across channels for different audiences.

Impact

We’re engaging more of our customer base with relevant content, driving superior marketing outcomes across diverse audience segments. Our lifecycle marketing team has doubled the distinct email experiences they provide for our North American acquisition campaigns, regularly reaching all 12 audiences and accelerating our revenue targets. For paid media, the product allows us to create enough content for social platform algorithms to deliver the right content to the right audience consistently.

A graphic displaying five social campaigns, each a paid fall-themed social campaign for Adobe Creative Cloud and drove a 9% higher ROI than comparable campaigns.

Accelerate and improve your marketing content with generative AI

Adobe GenStudio for Performance Marketing is a game changer for the modern digital marketer. Our marketing teams now produce more on-brand assets more quickly for paid social ads and marketing emails. This means better customer journeys through greater personalisation and increased ROI by reducing fatigue and increasing the volume and diversity of content in each programme.

With our solution, the GMO team can test email and paid social at scale, dramatically increasing click-through and open rates and they can also create unique content for untapped audiences, improving marketing outcomes across segments.

To learn more about Adobe GenStudio for Performance Marketing and discover how it can help your organisation, watch the overview video or read the report.

Patrick Brown is the vice president of growth marketing and insights at Adobe. He focuses on driving sustainable global growth through acquisition and engagement marketing motions. His responsibilities include leading a global media operation across B2C and B2B segments, a marketing performance analytics practice, a marketing planning and ROI function and a marketing engineering practice.