Iconic brands don’t just follow trends — they set them. To continue delivering engaging content at scale, The Estée Lauder Companies (ELC) is embracing Adobe Firefly Services to transform its digital marketing operations. Today, Adobe and ELC announced a partnership to adopt Adobe Firefly, redefining how the global beauty leader produces and launches digital marketing campaigns. ELC has a presence in roughly 150 countries and territories and a portfolio that includes Clinique, Estée Lauder, Jo Malone London, La Mer, and M•A•C Cosmetics. With such a diverse and unique consumer base, ELC is investing in innovation to accelerate content creation, drive efficiency, and empower its creative teams to focus on high-impact storytelling.

Marketing campaigns across digital channels require a wide range of formats — including text, image, shopping, and app promotion — each with multiple sizes and variations needed for distribution. This results in hundreds of thousands of assets produced each year. In fact, survey stats show nearly two-third of marketers* believe the demand for content will quintuple between 2024 and 2026. The sheer volume of work means creative teams often spend more time on repetitive tasks, like resizing, than on actual creative work — leaving them with less than a third of their time to focus on new ideas.

By leveraging Adobe Firefly Services — a collection of creative and generative APIs — ELC is able to reimagine its approach to content production. With features such as Generative Expand seamlessly integrated into existing workflows, images can be intelligently resized and optimized for various formats. This allows teams to quickly deliver assets with text and imagery intuitively positioned for seamless distribution across digital marketing channels.

This partnership aligns with ELC’s newly unveiled Beauty Reimagined initiative, a bold strategic vision focused on establishing ELC as the best consumer-centric prestige beauty company in the world. A key focus of this plan is accelerating innovation to bring campaigns to market faster while increasing investments in consumer engagement and acquisition. By integrating Firefly into its content creation process, ELC can streamline workflows and enhance its ability to connect with consumers at scale.

“Maintaining mindshare on digital channels such as social media is important in the competitive beauty industry, but the content requirements for each platform often stresses our ability to deliver new campaigns,” says Justin Edwards, Vice President, Global Digital Creative and Brand Image, M•A•C Cosmetics. “The M•A•C Cosmetics team was the first to explore the potential of generative AI for the company through Adobe Firefly Services, and we believe it will remove hurdles that currently prevent our designers from focusing on their craft.”

Adobe Firefly Services provides a suite of APIs, including powerful generative AI capabilities to assist with daily tasks that are crucial but can be quite repetitive and time intensive. The Estée Lauder Companies have shown an incredibly compelling and practical application of generative AI, which allows design teams to focus more of their time on ideating eye-catching creative for its portfolio of nearly 25 brands.

As part of its new content production workflow, ELC also needed to modernize its digital asset management (DAM) system, which houses the company’s entire library of images, logos, patterns, and other essential brand assets that anchor the creation of digital content. By leveraging Adobe Experience Manager as a Cloud Service, ELC has enhanced its DAM to drive greater operational efficiency. This system creates an architecture that enables faster uploads, improved search capabilities, and actionable insights, allowing teams to quickly find and manage assets. It further shortens the time it takes to build and deliver creative assets for digital campaigns.

“At The Estée Lauder Companies, we need to keep pace with a changing environment where an increasingly large share of transactions is happening through digital channels such as mobile devices,” says Yuri Ezhkov, Vice President, Creative Center of Excellence, The Estée Lauder Companies. “We have a trusted partner in Adobe to provide generative AI technologies that are safe for commercial use, with tools that enable our design teams to operate more nimbly and be free to focus on ideating.”

By integrating Adobe Firefly and Adobe Experience Manager, The Estée Lauder Companies is not just keeping up with the evolving digital landscape — it is setting a new standard for content production in beauty marketing. With generative AI streamlining workflows and enhanced asset management improving efficiency, ELC’s creative teams can focus on what truly matters: crafting impactful storytelling and delivering exceptional brand experiences.

Discover how to elevate your digital marketing workflows with Adobe Firefly. Then, watch this Adobe Summit 2025 session to learn how M•A•C Cosmetics boosted creativity and productivity to generate on-brand content at scale using Adobe Experience Manager Assets and integrating Adobe Firefly and generative AI into the creative process.

*Adobe Survey of 2,841 marketers in markets including the U.S., Australia, France, Germany, India, Japan, and the U.K. (fielded from Feb. 27 to Mar. 7, 2024)

Varun Parmar is the general manager of Adobe GenStudio — an industry-defining, generative AI-first application that enables marketing teams to quickly plan, create, manage, activate across apps and publishers, and measure on-brand content. Previously, Parmar was chief operating officer at Miro, a digital collaboration platform, where he led a global team of over a thousand people across product management, engineering, design, customer engagement, and partnerships. Earlier, he was chief product officer at Box, co-founder of a document collaboration startup that was acquired by Box, and chief product officer at Dell EMC. Parmar graduated from MIT with a joint master’s degree in business and engineering.