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.
Adobe’s Black Friday 2024 creative assets
Another noteworthy instance is Adobe GenStudio for Performance Marketing, our generative AI-powered application that empowers marketing teams to create ads and emails to drive impactful, personalized marketing campaigns. Our performance marketing team leverages this tool to generate assets rapidly, adhering to the guardrails established by our in-house creative team. This collaboration exemplifies how marketers and creative teams can effectively utilize AI within their workflows. Our creative teams trained the models (LLMs) powering GenStudio with our brand guidelines and provided best practices for writing prompts. This partnership allowed marketers to produce performance-driven content more swiftly while ensuring brand consistency and enabling creative teams to focus on more prominent brand campaigns.
Creative assets generated with Adobe GenStudio for Performance Marketing
As the two examples above show, our global marketing organization and our agency partners here at Adobe are moving beyond legacy models of content creation and embracing a new, more dynamic approach that balances the speed and efficiency AI offers with the irreplaceable creativity of human storytellers. Creativity has always been central to Adobe's brand promise. For more than 40 years, we have served both the creative community and the marketers who rely on their work. This legacy informs how we approach AI — not as a replacement for human talent but as a way to empower it.
The challenge for today’s marketing leaders is not whether to use AI, but how to leverage it to liberate creative teams to work on larger-scale campaigns and less mundane tasks, while empowering marketers to meet their content needs. As we all navigate this new era of AI-powered marketing, the brands that will succeed are not those that rely solely on AI-generated content, but those that leverage AI to push the boundaries of storytelling while keeping human creativity at the center.
Heather Freeland is the Chief Brand Officer at Adobe, leading global brand marketing, strategy, and integrated campaigns. She excels at building high-performance teams and scaling impactful marketing across global markets. Heather serves on the MMA North America Board, ANA CMO Growth Council, and Spotify's marketing advisory council. She graduated from the University of Virginia and holds an MBA from Columbia University.
