Unleashing creativity with help from generative AI.

Bridging the gap between creativity and process

Jordan Cuddy is obsessed with the ways customers experience brands. As Executive Vice President and Global Head of Experience at Monks, the award-winning marketing and technology services company, she loves when she and her team can find ways to do something extra to help brands reach more customers, excite audiences and grow revenues.

“Monks is an agency of thinkers and makers,” says Cuddy. “Our clients immediately notice this difference compared to other agencies. We got our start in creative production, but we also have technical, data and business experts to harness creative ideas through services and platforms.”

As a digital-first company, Monks pushes the limits of what technology can do, handling everything from artistic direction and production to strategic and technical support for the world’s biggest brands. But no matter what challenges clients face, they need a steady stream of powerful visuals that appeal to diverse audiences.

Working with Adobe Creative Cloud apps and the Adobe Substance 3D collection, including next-generation features powered by Adobe Firefly generative AI, Monks opens new avenues for customer experience, including augmented reality and interactive games that brings eyes to marketing for some of the biggest brands in the world.

Removing bottlenecks with automated creative journeys

Companies often require artwork to go through multiple rounds of reviews, including creative, brand, legal, risk assessments and others. Even a simple banner ad can take weeks or months of administrative work by creatives before it’s fully reviewed, approved and ready to go live.

Geert Eichhorn, Executive Innovation Director at Monks, may have started his career as a creative, but he’s always been a tech enthusiast. His research and development team envisioned a new approach to creative workflows with Monks.Flow, a proprietary artificial intelligence solution that connects people and machines. Brands can work with Monks.Flow as a managed service that ties together top industry tools, including Adobe solutions such as Creative Cloud and Adobe Workfront, into a seamless automated pipeline that removes bottlenecks and accelerates innovation.

“Adobe APIs, including Firefly Services, allow us to weave creative ideation into the marketing journey. They are critical parts of Monks.Flow,” says Eichhorn. “By removing silos, we add automations using AI to innovate and deliver more assets to drive personalisation with less effort.”

Creativity at speed

Teams across Monks embrace the latest Adobe technologies and features to accelerate creative workflows. Artists often take images found in Adobe Stock and edit, layer or rearrange them in Adobe Photoshop to brainstorm new creative ideas.

The next stage involves generative AI powered by Firefly within all Creative Cloud apps to combine, enhance or generate images to better illustrate designers’ concepts. Using Customised Models designers can train Firefly on a client’s specific style, making it easier to quickly scale content while staying on-brand. Generative Background powered by Firefly in Substance 3D Stager allows designers to iterate faster and produce more work than ever using backgrounds created from text prompts. Using Firefly in Photoshop, designers at Monks speeded up versioning on a media banner project by creating 270 versions of a banner in one day to reuse the banner across all channels and devices — a project that previously could take up to four weeks to do manually.

“Firefly is a great sidekick in Creative Cloud for our artists, helping them work faster and be more creative while saving money for clients,” says Michael Dobell, Executive Vice President of Innovation at Monks. “The real benefit for brands is that AI helps reach larger audiences. Because we can create variations faster, people will get to see content made for them on their preferred channel, strengthening their connection to a brand.” For example, Monks partnered with wellness brand Hatch to drive product sales with a personalised messaging strategy, powered by Monks.Flow, resulting in 31% better cost-per-purchase and a 78% increase in click-through-rate.

Accelerating 3D workflows

While 3D content creation is a mainstay in interactive experiences such as games, virtual and augmented reality, companies are also increasingly using 3D assets to streamline design processes. From virtual prototyping to digital photoshoots, brands are waking up to the benefits of including tools like Substance 3D in their workflows.

Time is the biggest obstacle when working in 3D, particularly when it comes to the effort needed to create and apply textures. But textures are the essential element that bring 3D experiences to life, as well-designed textures can convey realistic and eye-catching details while maintaining high efficiency. The result is 3D assets that look amazing and perform well in any experience.

By improving flexibility and ease of use, the Substance 3D Collection makes it 70% faster for Monks artists to create realistically textured 3D assets. Artists previously needed a day to make requested design changes, such as altering textures or colours and then rendering new versions. Now they can come up with multiple variations in hours and can even provide the flexibility of hopping on a video call to work through options with a client in real time. This enables them to meet tighter deadlines, without sacrificing their ability to experiment with creative ideas.

Designing 3D outfits for gamers

Andrea Arice, Associate Motion Director for Experience at Monks, used his love of fashion to help bring fans closer to the action with Pixel Arena, an immersive 3D multiplayer game from Google and the NBA. Players compete with other fans to win points and earn exclusive digital merch. They can also show off their personalities by customising their own avatars, combining haircuts, accessories and six different tops and bottoms in five colour variations.

Arice worked closely with his Monks team to design all of the eye-catching outfits. Starting with high-resolution 3D models created and prepped using Maya, Zbrush and Cinema 4D, Arice used Substance Painter to add details, textures, fabrics, stitches, translucence effects and colours to create memorable designs. While he initially used Substance Sampler to turn photographs into unique textures and materials, he primarily worked with the extensive built-in Material Library and its diverse selection of customisable materials to speed up the design process.

Time saved working with Substance meant time gained for Arice to experiment. He could switch between colour palettes for his Pixel Arena designs in seconds to make sure that the tops and bottoms looked great in any combination.

Because participants play the game on web browsers or the NBA mobile app, Arice designed efficient 3D models that load quickly without compromising their visual appeal. Rather than trying to sculpt details onto the 3D models, he painted buttons, zips and other details onto garments. Arice originally thought that he would need to create separate high-resolution versions for use in promotional materials, but the game-ready models looked so good that he used them as-is for a promotional video animated in Adobe After Effects.

“Substance 3D has standout features for texturing 3D models and material creation, making it an indispensable tool in our design toolkit,” says Arice. “The robust capabilities, along with the strong integration with the rest of Creative Cloud, dramatically improves our operational efficiencies, allowing us to quickly create lightweight models that look and perform great in any 3D experience.”

Growing brands with creative experimentation

Working with next-gen technologies such as Firefly-powered Creative solutions, as well as the enhanced Substance 3D, encourages Monks’ artists to experiment and explore their curiosity. As a result, they are leading the way for both creativity and technology, delivering innovative campaigns and personalised content at scale.

“Adobe gives us the creative apps to deliver great content quickly. By combining the apps with our expertise, we can solve our clients’ biggest creative challenges, so they win customers and build loyalty to grow their brands,” says Cuddy.