Fuelling storytelling at enterprise scale.
Ford Motor Company transforms its content supply chain with Adobe to drive engagement through storytelling.
5x
increase in visitor engagement
15%
faster article publishing speed
93%
reduction in review cycle time with Frame.io
“Our Adobe solutions haven’t just made us faster. They’ve given us the time to be more creative, more strategic and better at connecting with diverse audiences through the stories we tell.”
Jordan Mammo
Managing Editor, Ford From the Road
Reinventing the newsroom.
When Henry Ford invented the Model T in 1908, it didn’t just change how people travelled. It changed how they lived, worked and connected with each other. More than a century later, Ford is still rethinking how it connects with people. The revolution this time isn’t on the road, but in the digital newsroom.
The Ford newsroom is no ordinary corporate newsroom. Instead of merely publishing press releases, executive bios and visual assets like logos, Ford’s global communications team publishes everything from high-profile product launches to sustainability stories to behind-the-scenes videos of manufacturing innovation. In many ways, the newsroom serves as the heart of Ford’s brand storytelling.
As Jordan Mammo assumed his role as managing editor of the brand’s publishing arm, now represented by Ford From the Road, he was struck by how limited the newsroom’s storytelling efforts felt.
“Our site was almost entirely press releases,” Mammo says. “But we realised our audience was much bigger than that. It includes reporters, content creators, employees, enthusiasts and what we call ‘Friends of Ford,’ people who simply love the brand.”
With growing pressure to connect with diverse audiences across regions and platforms, Ford needed a way to scale quality content creation without compromising brand integrity, speed or message consistency.
The solution: a more connected and intelligent content supply chain.
With Adobe, Ford built an end-to-end solution that brings creative and content teams together — automating tedious workflows, enabling brand governance and unlocking rapid publishing. The result is Ford From the Road, a new digital newsroom that blends journalism and brand storytelling. Built with the help of Adobe Experience Manager Sites and Adobe GenStudio products, including Adobe Experience Manager Assets, Adobe Creative Cloud and Frame.io, the content supply chain platform allows Ford to share stories more quickly, with fewer bottlenecks and maintain a stronger connection between global strategy and local execution.
And the impact is clear — visitors are now spending five times longer on From the Road compared to its predecessor, a strong signal of content engagement and performance.
Inside Ford’s story engine.
Mammo teamed with Karl Henkel, creative strategy director at Ford Motor Company, to collect the data needed to fine-tune their highly personalised content engine. Then they brought on design and innovation agency Siberia to help develop the strategy and design and build a platform that would allow them to adopt a publisher’s mindset. The shift marked a major cultural change. No longer just pushing out product updates, the team began to tell stories about innovation, community, culture and the people behind the brand.
“People are constantly changing how and where they consume news and information,” says Chris Mele, managing partner at Siberia. “With rapid news cycles, social media echo chambers and a flood of AI-generated content, the larger media ecosystem is in flux. Together with Ford, we designed a modern engagement platform and supporting system that uniquely positions Ford to adapt to that shift.”
Together, they built a web experience with Experience Manager Sites that allows Ford to publish and update stories in minutes, while supporting richer formats beyond simple text and image. Ford From the Road became a modular, scalable newsroom with an improved publishing speed of over 15%.
And if a truck story drives more time on page with enthusiasts or a culture piece sparks engagement with employees, Adobe Analytics provides the team with those insights so they can adjust strategy. “With Analytics, we can finally see, in real time, what’s landing with our audiences,” Henkel says. “That means we can double down on the content that people actually engage with.”
Experimentation built in.
To bring the new Ford storytelling formats to life, the team is managing more than 22,000 creative assets — expected to triple as demand for multimedia content grows. Experience Manager Assets provides a centralised, searchable source of truth, enabling global teams to reuse visuals without wasting time or duplicating work.
But scaling a newsroom isn’t just about storage. It’s about speed, flexibility and creative empowerment.
That’s where GenStudio helps close the execution gap. With a growing library of brand-approved templates and modular asset components, the Ford communications team can now create, localise and publish content on-demand — without waiting in line for design support. Modular templates and AI-powered resizing let regional teams localise content — without adding lift for central design teams. That flexibility is crucial as content volume and formats continue to grow.
“These Adobe solutions not only made us faster,” says Mammo. “They’ve also given us the time to be more creative, more strategic and better at connecting with diverse audiences through the stories we tell.”
The F-150 Lobo Street Truck feature captures what From the Road does best. Instead of a technical release, it explored the design inspiration, performance and enthusiast culture behind the vehicle — told in a human, editorial voice with social-friendly visuals and formats.
Experience Manager Sites gave editors the flexibility to build multimedia layouts. Experience Manager Assets ensured visuals were tagged and ready for global reuse. Frame.io enabled quick video review and approvals. And Adobe Analytics showed what was working — so the team could double down on what resonated.
“With Analytics and Experience Manager Assets, we can actually see what’s landing and reuse creative in smarter ways,” Henkel says. “That means we spend less time re-creating and more time shaping the story.”
The result was a feature tailored for enthusiasts — told in a voice that felt authentic and human — that was rolled out in weeks instead of months. It also drove business results, successfully referring 88% of the story’s readers to the Ford.com ecommerce page.
A creative workflow, accelerated.
As story formats evolved, so did the need for higher quality visuals — and faster production. In the past, feedback was scattered across email threads and shared drives, slowing approvals and momentum.
Now, with Frame.io connected to Adobe Premiere Pro and Creative Cloud, editors, stakeholders and agency partners can leave feedback directly on the frame — cutting review cycles from 30 minutes to just two.
“It’s not just a faster process,” says Tanya Moutzalias, creative content manager at Ford. “With Frame.io, it’s a better one. Feedback is sharper, more precise and that actually improves the creative.” Senior leaders even leave comments from their phones.
Because in-house and agency teams already work in Creative Cloud — from Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator to Adobe Premiere — assets flow naturally from design to review to distribution. That means From the Road can turn around everything from GIFs and animations to full video packages in a fraction of the time.
The road ahead.
With a solid foundation in place, the team is thinking bigger. They’re exploring Adobe AI features like smart crop, auto-tagging and generative content to support faster, more efficient publishing workflows without compromising quality or brand voice.
“We want From the Road to be where people go for engaging stories about Ford and auto culture, whether they’re fans, journalists or just curious,” Mammo says. “Adobe gives us the tools to make that vision possible.”
With innovation driving both the brand and its newsroom, Ford is proving that the future of storytelling is already in motion.
Learn how to power your storytelling engine with Adobe Experience Manager Sites. Then, discover how Adobe GenStudio helps your teams create, personalise and publish content at scale.
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