Not long ago, only a few gatekeepers — newspaper editors, movie producers, or radio programmers — controlled what was published for mass consumption. Now, the proliferation of social media platforms, streaming services, mobile apps, and digital properties has created an overwhelming abundance of content channels. All these different ways to reach consumers have resulted in skyrocketing demands for personalized content experiences.
According to the recently published Adobe AI and Digital Trends report, the requirements for exceptional customer experiences are expanding. 71% of consumers want brands to anticipate their needs with personalized offers or helpful information, but only 34% of brands deliver.
The landscape of creativity is evolving faster than ever, with the last two years witnessing more changes than the previous thirty. Two significant challenges presently facing marketers are the pressure to simultaneously increase speed of development, reduce costs, and scale content, while also generating more creative asset variations to fuel personalized experiences and optimize campaign performance. With existing production workflows struggling to keep pace, creative teams are finding it increasingly difficult to meet these demands. My own creative team at Adobe has been working tirelessly to manage the surge in requested creative variations for campaigns across social media, email, events, and more.
Faced with this paradox, the question becomes: how can generative AI help with increasing content demands? First, it’s important to note that AI is not a magic wand that will generate instant brand differentiation and simplify your content supply chain. Instead, AI is a tool that, when guided by strategic human insight and thoughtfully integrated into organizational culture, workflows, and tech stacks, can build a bridge between the content needs already being fulfilled and the unmet needs we are struggling to meet. In short, it can become jet fuel for your team.
In my role as Chief Brand Officer at Adobe, I spend a lot of time talking about the role of AI in creativity and marketing with both customers and my own creative team. In those conversations, I’ve found that one of AI’s greatest promises lies in its ability to supercharge creative teams while empowering marketing teams. For instance, by generating thousands of variations of assets for different channels and markets, generative AI enables designers to concentrate on crafting impactful creative concepts while automation takes care of scaling. This capability allows marketing teams to self-serve in specific campaign scenarios, effectively reducing bottlenecks and permitting creatives to focus on more strategic tasks.
A prime example is our approach to Adobe’s largest annual marketing promotion, Black Friday. Previously, managing the vast scale of production involved intricate workflows and extensive coordination with external agencies. We streamlined this process last year with our own content supply chain solution, Adobe GenStudio, which significantly accelerated content delivery across teams. Adobe Firefly and Firefly Custom Models allowed both commissioned artists and internal creative teams to extend their creative options. Our global marketing teams then used Firefly Services to assemble and export all necessary assets.
With the help of Adobe GenStudio, we dramatically increased the Black Friday content available to our marketing teams, producing more than 16,000 asset variations (averaging around 20 assets per minute) and localizing content in more than 30 languages for 78 regions. This integration ultimately slashed production time from weeks to just days.
