The need to produce more high-quality content is a pain point for organizations of all sizes — from small businesses to global enterprises. As expectations rise, marketing leaders and content creators alike need tools that streamline content production without sacrificing creativity or quality.

To better understand how organizations are meeting this challenge, Adobe commissioned IDC to survey more than 2,000 customers. The takeaway? Businesses are increasingly turning to Adobe creative solutions to produce more content, while yielding higher quality, more effective results.

Adobe Stock and AI — creative ideation from the start.

Survey respondents highlighted a common pain point — the creative process often stalls at the start. Overcoming the “blank page” problem is critical, and tools like Adobe Stock and AI-powered solutions can jumpstart ideation.

Creators value solutions that help them quickly explore, iterate, and share ideas for faster approvals and stronger creative alignment.

With Adobe Stock’s vast library of royalty-free, commercially safe assets and Adobe Firefly’s AI capabilities  integrated into apps like Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, and Adobe Premiere Pro, teams can easily generate, customize, and refine visual content. Firefly lets creators turn text prompts into visuals or enhance existing assets to dramatically accelerate early-stage creation.

As projects move through the production pipeline, AI tools automate time-consuming tasks like retouching, resizing, and localization. This frees creatives to focus on producing high-quality work, while speeding delivery to numerous channels and markets.

Locked templates unlock creative demands.

According to IDC’s survey, the demand for visual content is growing faster than creative teams can hire. This has increased the need for people outside traditional creative roles to contribute to content production.

Anyone who has ever created content for a large brand knows how intricate — or even impenetrable — style guides can be. From logos to font sizes to voice, staying “on brand” can be daunting for anyone less familiar with the guidelines. That’s why it’s always been the exclusive domain of creative directors, designers, writers, and editors to produce public-facing assets that include marketing collateral, ads, social media, websites, email campaigns, and much more. Add to that the increasing need for localization to accommodate a global market, and your creatives are tasked with producing a tsunami of content.

But what about sales decks, internal meeting presentations, support documentation, and HR information — which also need to be on brand? Do you burn out your creatives by piling on more work than they can reasonably handle? Or do you risk letting non-creatives produce collateral that might not adhere to your standards?

Templates offer a solution. In our survey, 91% of the respondents said templates would help marketers get on-brand content out faster. The key lies in having the designers create the templates with proper branding, and then “locking” everything that shouldn’t be changed.

Adobe Express has become a go-to solution for organizations of all sizes. With locked templates, marketers or other non-designers can still customize templates according to their needs.

It’s incredibly simple to change text in a template. With access to Adobe Stock, images can be easily swapped for different occasions or uses. Or, using Adobe Firefly, marketers can spin up visuals that are both commercially safe to use and adhere to the branding of the template.

One solution fits all.

IDC found that even small organizations have experienced the demand for more content as the number of outlets and channels has increased. Large enterprises with a global presence may need to create campaigns with thousands — or even millions — of assets on tighter delivery schedules.

Solutions like Adobe Creative Cloud and Express with Firefly AI features not only help every business keep up with the pace of the marketplace, but they also help a variety of people acquire new skills that expand their ability to be more creative and self-sufficient.

Adobe commissioned the IDC papers Driving Creative Efficiency and Quality Using GenAI and Stock and From Chaos to Symmetry: How Branded Templates Help Scale On-Brand Content to do an in-depth exploration of the content-creation landscape of large businesses beyond what we’ve summarized here.

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