Like a student cramming for a test the next morning, Elmer’s had too much to do and too little time to do it.

The iconic school supplies brand was expanding its line of slime products and wanted to make them a focal point of its annual back-to-school marketing push. The marketing team at Elmer’s needed to build several unique deliverables, used for social media content, ecommerce product detail pages, and retailer media campaigns. Typically, a campaign of this magnitude would require months of planning, shooting, editing, and producing — but with a reimagined content supply chain powered by AI, Elmer’s could achieve this in a fraction of the time.

Their secret weapon? Adobe Firefly Custom Models, AI that learns a brand’s signature aesthetic and even the desired mood or tone for a creative campaign. For Elmer’s, the team was able to produce hundreds of digital assets and deliverables in far less time. The concepting process alone normally takes a full month — but with Custom Models, robust concepts can be produced in a matter of days.

While generative AI unlocked new speed and scale, Elmer’s also needed to ensure that every asset stayed on brand and aligned with its trusted reputation. Firefly Custom Models delivered both efficiency and creative governance.

“Consumers know exactly how our products should behave, react, and perform,” says Samantha Tuttle, director of marketing and commercial excellence at Newell Brands. “We can’t risk inconsistency just to move faster. With Firefly Custom Models, we gained both speed and control.”

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A quick study.

The Elmer’s campaign achieved quick success because the content foundation had already been built across Newell Brands, Elmer’s parent company, with a global portfolio including more than 50 heritage brands, including Sharpie, Paper Mate, Oster, and Graco.

Earlier this year, Newell partnered with Adobe to modernize its content supply chain using Adobe Workfront for enhanced creative project management, Adobe Experience Manager Assets for content storage and reuse, and Adobe Firefly and Adobe Express to streamline production, maintain brand consistency, and amplify creative work. The suite of AI tools was a key force in the company’s vision to fuel five times more content to help keep Newell products top of mind with consumers.

At the same time, Newell began experimenting with Adobe Firefly, starting with Custom Models to accelerate on-brand content creation. The Paper Mate team piloted a Firefly Custom Model to develop consistent illustrations evoking handwritten visuals across campaigns. Meanwhile, Oster successfully reused creative generated in Firefly for Adobe Express across digital and retail placements — an early win for cross-channel scale.

These pilots showed how Firefly, paired with Adobe’s broader tech stack, could give teams both flexibility and control. The success of those early programs laid the groundwork for Elmer’s high-speed back-to-school campaign.

Acing the test.

To ensure consistency and quality, Elmer’s creative team trained Firefly Custom Models on its brand assets. Designers used prompts to generate hundreds of backdrops tailored to different slime products and campaign themes, ranging from close-up, texture-focused scenes to zoomed-out lifestyle visuals. The team then finalized each creative asset to be shared with digital retailers by pairing the generated backdrops with the appropriate brand product images.

This human-guided pairing ensured that each visual met Elmer’s brand standards while giving the team flexibility to experiment and refine the creative faster than ever.

Finished assets will be tagged and stored in Adobe Experience Manager Assets once the brand is migrated over in the current implementation. The project itself was planned and managed from concept to launch through Workfront, a powerful project management tool with a built-in AI Assistant that can summarize projects, generate and update records, and automate approvals.

The result of this reimagined workflow was a content creation process that moved at the speed of social media. Elmer’s is now able to produce campaigns five times faster than previous productions.

“Adobe Firefly is beginning to transform how we work — not by replacing creativity, but by enhancing it,” Tuttle says. “The tools handle repetitive tasks, like resizing or adapting content, so our teams can focus on high-impact ideas and brand storytelling. We’re delivering more consistent content at scale, without losing the human touch.”

By training on-brand models to digitize previously analog (and time-consuming) routine production work, creatives and marketers could stay focused on high-value work— unlocking new campaign ideas while preserving quality and trust.

Expanding their knowledge.

The Elmer’s campaign is just one example of how Newell’s new content supply chain is powering content at scale from concept to consumer, with AI playing a supporting role in enhancing creative productivity rather than replacing it.

For a Mother’s Day campaign with Yankee Candle, the European team created a Firefly Custom Model for testing, which could wrap a bow around a candle — an intricate design task that would otherwise require advanced post-production or custom photography. With Firefly, the team generated dozens of variations in seconds and performance-driven creative choices to test how the campaign performed with and without a bow.

“Firefly helps transform tedious work into easy iterations,” Tuttle explains. “The data from our testing shows those creative touches, such as the bow on the candle, perform better with consumers. And now our teams can test, iterate, and scale them faster than ever.”

Newell is also exploring Adobe Firefly Services, a collection of creative and generative APIs, to further streamline digital merchandising. Firefly Services streamlines asset production by automating tasks like background replacement and product compositing, allowing teams to efficiently generate engaging visuals for ecommerce. This automation ties directly into Workfront and Experience Manager Assets, helping teams push content live faster while maintaining visibility and governance. And with Firefly Creative Production, marketers can use an intuitive interface to generate, test, and deploy creative more efficiently in real time.

Together, these tools form the backbone of Newell’s next-generation content supply chain — an ecosystem where AI handles the heavy lifting, and creative talent leads the charge.

“We’ve proven heritage brands can be pioneers too,” Tuttle says. “AI helps us scale while staying true to what our consumers trust. This is just the beginning. We're building a content engine that doesn’t just respond to market needs but helps us stay ahead of them.”

Watch Newell Brands’ 2025 Adobe MAX session to learn how creativity and AI, plus a fully integrated content supply chain, drives their business forward: Paper Mate, Sharpie, and More: Crafting an AI-Powered Content Supply Chain.

Aaron Mitchell Finegold is the head of product marketing for Adobe Firefly Enterprise, a suite of generative AI offerings that includes Firefly Services, Firefly Custom Models, and Firefly Creative Production. Previously, Finegold was the Chief Marketing Officer at Kinglsey Gate, a professional services multi-national, where he developed large and small language models. Earlier, he served as a business operations leader at LinkedIn, an associate partner at McKinsey & Company, and a strategy consultant at Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide. He has been published in Harvard Business Review, McKinsey Quarterly, and Thrive Global and holds an MBA from INSEAD.

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