How Adobe's AI-powered innovation is redefining the future of marketing.

There's a philosophy at Adobe that shapes everything we do — we use our own products exactly as our customers do. Being Customer Zero is not just about confidence in our tools. It's about learning what works, what needs to change, and where we need to innovate next.

Building our It starts with Adobe brand campaign became the ultimate expression of this philosophy. As a massive B2B campaign that included strategy, research, assets, measurement, and optimization, we positioned it as a pressure test for what our AI-enabled products could deliver.

They did. And then some.

AI as a creative partner.

Using AI effectively isn’t about skipping traditional campaign development steps but executing each with significantly more power. The experimentation and test-and-learn moments revealed what was truly possible when you pair human expertise with AI acceleration.

We started where every good campaign should — with customer insights. Talking to our customers, hearing about what was and wasn’t working for them, was our ground truth for how we wanted to structure the campaign strategy and messaging. Working with Omnicom, we combined customer feedback with data from Adobe Analytics and insights from Adobe Real-Time CDP to structure campaign message pillars and offers.

What we quickly discovered was that one message wouldn't be enough. Our audience spans CMOs, CIOs, creative practitioners, and business professionals across multiple verticals. So we used our own AI tools — from Adobe Firefly to Adobe GenStudio for Performance Marketing — to craft a unified brand platform that resonated across all of them, with variations authentic to each segment.

As the work moved forward, Adobe Workfront became our marketing system of record for all our workstreams and artifacts. Fully integrated across the Adobe GenStudio content supply chain, we used Workfront to operationalize the work and our team. Our teams and agency partners also worked in the same instance — ensuring no version conflicts or misaligned priorities. Everyone could see the full scope of planning and project management across every campaign element. Transparency reduced misalignment from the jump.

Firefly transformed asset production. When we needed specific imagery for different audiences and channels, Firefly generated hundreds of variations (backplates, backgrounds, hero visuals, etc.) tailored to each touchpoint across mobile, web, social, and more.

Adobe Frame.io handled video collaboration with an efficiency we couldn't have achieved just a few years ago — with asynchronous reviews, high-quality feedback loops, and seamless handoffs between teams. We maintained quality without sacrificing speed.

The entire campaign process — accelerated.

From strategy to asset generation to collaboration to orchestration, the entire development process became faster, better, and more efficient. AI served as an accelerator and multiplier throughout. We weren't bypassing the normal steps — we were amplifying them.

The early results on how the campaign has resonated with customers are positive. Targeted content distribution in paid, earned, and owned has reached millions of specifically targeted marketing professionals interested in solutions to their AI challenges. And we’re seeing 3x higher exploration of advanced web content from paid channels compared to our baseline — proving that clear, authentic positioning drives real business consideration.

This was all made possible with faster time-to-market, higher consistency across a complex and multi-audience campaign, better quality outputs, and, most importantly — genuine data on what works and what doesn't.

For Adobe, this opportunity to put our own offerings to work and document what we learned was invaluable, reinforcing not only our Customer Zero philosophy but also the power of AI as an amplifier for marketing and creative work. It's an immediate litmus test for where we need to dig deeper, what's actually delivering value, and where the gaps are.

When you're willing to stress-test your own tools under real conditions, you earn the credibility to help others do the same. After all, the It Starts with Adobe campaign really did start — and come to life — with Adobe tools.

Rachel Thornton is Adobe’s chief marketing officer for the enterprise business, helping organizations deliver exceptional customer experiences at the intersection of marketing, creativity, and AI. She leads strategies and activations that position Adobe as the leading marketing and AI platform, while energizing and empowering CMOs and experience makers worldwide.

With more than 25 years in B2B technology marketing, Rachel has held leadership roles at Amazon/AWS, Salesforce, Cisco, and Microsoft. She has built and scaled enterprise marketing, driven customer acquisition and revenue growth, and led go-to-market strategies across field marketing, advertising, sports marketing, and events, including marquee experiences like re:Invent and Dreamforce.