Harness the power of generative AI with Adobe GenStudio for Performance Marketing
Study: Save time, optimize spend, and drive ROI with generative AI
However, these tools are rarely used to their full potential because most organizations lack the amount of content variations needed to serve unique audiences. Facebook’s advertising algorithms, for example, require a minimum of 10 versions of an ad image to serve up the right version to a particular user for optimal performance. For marketers, that means every product, audience segment, and campaign needs at least 10x the content to optimize their social campaigns.
To further explore this, we surveyed more than 300 marketers to uncover the pain points of content supply chains for performance marketers. We then analyzed Bureau of Labor Statistics median hourly salary data for marketing specialists and managers to determine potential time and cost savings that generative AI could provide at each stage of content production. This analysis aims to assist marketers in enhancing their productivity throughout the content supply chain.
Key findings
- Integrating AI saves time and money – the marketers surveyed in this study utilize AI to save 114 minutes weekly on content creation, that's 98 hours saved each year, leading to yearly savings of $3,520 per employee for marketing teams.
- Marketers who used AI in the last year were 21% more likely to gain or earn additional production budget than those who hadn't adopted AI
- Marketers utilizing AI in their workflows say they use the extra time to improve the quality of their work (61 percent), improve work-life balance (49 percent), and learn new skills (45 percent).
- A majority of marketers (56 percent) are now receiving AI training from their employers.
Solving content demands with Generative AI
Many organizations are struggling to generate the rapidly increasing amount of content needed as budgets, capacity, and infrastructure remain the same. The sheer volume of content is outpacing teams’ abilities to create and deliver. And the answer isn’t just hiring more people. Rather, it requires technology that can scale content beyond what is humanly possible, while empowering marketers and creatives to work together to deliver content that is on-brand and personalized to each audience.
Embracing generative AI in the digital supply chain not only presents an opportunity for marketers to secure increased budgets but also enables growth. Our recent study uncovered that a significant number of the marketers surveyed have seen their budgets rise or remain stable (38 and 35 percent, respectively). According to our findings, marketers using AI reported increased budgets 21 percent more frequently than non-users.
The data also revealed that 62 percent of the marketers surveyed experienced an increase in content production volume over the past year. As demand increases, fluctuations in staffing levels have led to further difficulties with the digital content supply chain.
25 percent of marketers in our study reported a decrease in staffing levels in the past year. With decreased staffing levels, 63 percent of marketers surveyed have integrated AI into their workflows. Despite this, about 1 in 10 surveyed encountered challenges in seamlessly integrating generative AI into their content supply chain.
GenStudio for Performance Marketing is ready to assist marketers by addressing the top challenges highlighted in our study. By harnessing the power of generative AI, marketers can refine strategies with brand-compliant content and tailored assets that resonate with target audiences, and achieve performance marketing objectives.
In most organizations, all creative work is done by in-house studios or external agencies with structured workflows in place for marketers to request new content. Marketers write creative briefs tailored to a specific campaign and present them to creative pros, who then iterate over versions until final assets are created. It can be a lengthy creation and review cycle that’s challenging for both teams, making it impossible to quickly create enough content to take advantage of the full power of targeting algorithms and personalization tools.
Often, the marketer’s only option is to serve the same content to all customers. But if this single piece of content doesn’t perform well, they can’t quickly adapt it for better performance. Instead, they must restart the creation cycle. This process doesn’t provide the speed, agility, or data-driven optimization marketers need to drive impactful campaigns.
Accelerating content creation to scale marketing impact
Generative AI technology can provide marketers and creatives with better tools to augment and accelerate content creation so organizations can deliver better experiences faster than ever. This technology can democratize content creation by giving marketers the ability to create the content they need at scale, increase speed to market, and leverage the powerful targeting algorithms available.
“By clearly codifying our brand and voice guidelines, we were able to build templates and LLMs to help marketers easily create content using Adobe GenStudio for Performance Marketing. GenStudio for Performance Marketing then helps ensure this content is on-brand and maintains consistency and brand integrity across all our channels. It also streamlines approvals by our brand team, allowing us to go to market faster.”
Heather Freeland
Chief Brand Officer, Adobe
Besides quickly creating new content, marketers can also reuse existing content to generate additional variations, including size, language, format, or even variants for testing, with easy, self-serve tools like text-based natural language prompts. Instead of sending a creative brief and waiting weeks for content, marketers can articulate what they need, and AI can generate it in minutes. This allows marketers to fulfill their needs using their existing skills and uplevels the entire marketing organization.
Save time and money with the integration of generative AI
To better understand how performance marketers create content for customers, our study analyzed the content supply chain to determine which stages are consuming the most time and money for businesses.
Nearly 1 in 3 marketers (30 percent) surveyed share that their content creation process involves managing six or more stages, highlighting opportunities to automate and scale the content supply chain. The biggest challenge in the content supply chain is production. Marketers surveyed revealed they spend over two hours (135 minutes) per content project working through the production stage, and 37 percent desire to move faster. Marketers using AI tools for blog posts in our study are reclaiming almost an hour each week, slashing production times by an average of 50 minutes.
Marketers who integrated AI into their workflows saved 32 hours annually in the production stage of the content supply chain, resulting in a yearly cost saving of $2,395 for a marketing team. Overall, the integration of generative AI leads to substantial financial benefits from time savings, with annual labor cost reductions for companies totaling approximately $3,520 for marketing specialists and $7,380 for marketing managers. This ability to save time and money with generative AI allows marketing teams to redirect their focus toward high-impact work.
Marketers need the power to create content themselves
Marketing teams are closest to the campaigns — they know their audience and what they’re looking for better than anyone in the company. Yet they must rely on creative support for every version of a social graphic, email, online banner, webpage, or video clip. At the same time, creatives are closest to the brand and know what content meets a brand’s style and voice guidelines. Teams need a better way to work together. Ideally, marketers would be able to generate new content variations based on approved assets and templates while creative teams ensure they’re consistent with brand guidelines.
It’s not just about creating more content — it’s about creating content that’s on-brand and tailored to customers. That requires the ability to glean real-time insights on content performance, and then rapidly optimize or create new content and push it live to the targeted audience while it’s relevant.
Creatives play a critical role as brand guardians
With the volume of content that marketing teams need outpacing human capacity, creatives and marketers must find ways to make content creation more efficient. Creative teams don’t want to spend most of their time doing the repetitive work of creating variations, resizing, swapping images, and so on, as this takes them away from the strategic and innovative creative work they would rather focus on.
To ease the burden on creatives, marketers need the ability to self-serve content for those manual and mundane tasks that can be automated with technology. This requires establishing brand guardrails that marketers can use to create new content and experiment within.
Because creative teams own the brand, they play a critical role in establishing and managing these brand guidelines, creating original content for major campaigns, developing approved templates for different content types, and providing the guardrails to ensure brand consistency for all types of content and campaigns.
The ROI of integrating generative AI
Once brand guardians establish creative guardrails and marketers optimize workflows with the help of generative AI, they can then focus on the broader benefits of AI integration. To reveal the top benefits, we asked marketers how they utilize the time freed up by AI and what type of AI training they are receiving to further streamline their content supply chains.
Integrating generative AI into workflows saves time and money, produces a higher quality of work (61 percent), and helps employees achieve a better work-life balance (49 percent), according to the marketers surveyed, reflecting a positive return on investment.
In our study, marketers using AI across all generations prioritize improving work quality with their newfound free time. However, their secondary time-saving goals differ. Gen Z (54 percent), Millennials (51 percent), and Baby Boomers (55 percent) prioritize improving their work-life balance. Meanwhile, Gen X (49 percent) dedicates the extra time to strategic planning. Marketers who haven't yet adopted AI say they would use their extra time to improve the quality of their work (49 percent), learn new skills (43 percent), and engage in more strategic planning (43 percent).
Marketers are realizing the benefits of integrating generative AI into the content supply chain, as 56 percent report receiving AI training from their employers. Interestingly, only 2 in 5 marketers know who oversees AI systems in their workplace.
GenStudio for Performance Marketing can support marketing teams from ideation of on-brand content to generation and activation. Take a consultation with an Adobe representative for walkthroughs and training on how to generate content with enterprise workflows and governance.
GenStudio for Performance Marketing — Adobe’s generative AI-first application
GenStudio for Performance Marketing enables marketing teams to quickly find, remix, create, and analyze content in support of paid media, email, and organic social channels, all with generative AI and brand governance guardrails in place. It simplifies the complex content process used today and uniquely delivers value with:
Generative AI content creation: Marketing can now self-serve content creation for digital channels using generative AI while adhering to brand guidelines. Marketers can easily create new emails, paid media, or display ads and generate variations to meet the campaign needs for different personas, products, brands, and regions.
Content insights: Easy access to content performance insights lets performance marketing teams adjust content to improve engagement and ROI. Understand what’s resonating with different audience segments and regions to create more high-performing content. Optimize campaigns by focusing on content that drives engagement and modifying low-performing content.
Brand compliance: Ensure that all content created by your marketing team is on-brand by uploading your brand guidelines, brand-approved content, and channel templates. AI brand checks, human review, and approval workflows can verify that content adheres to brand standards and identify out-of-compliance content before it’s published.
Activation: Seamlessly export content for digital campaigns — from email to paid media to web — so you don’t miss an opportunity to engage with your customers. Publish content in channel-specific formats directly to paid media platforms.
Campaign content: Performance marketing teams can reuse previous campaign content, experiment with variations of content, or localize content to different regions and markets.
Campaigns: Organize all work in the application by campaigns so that performance marketers can create, analyze, and retrieve content through a single campaign view. Organizing objects around a specific campaign brief provides strategic and creative context to generate more relevant and higher performing campaign content.
Adobe also announced expanded partnerships today to integrate with Google’s Campaign Manager 360, Meta, Microsoft Advertising, Snap and TikTok. Coming soon, brands will be able to activate campaigns directly across leading advertising platforms and make timely adjustments through direct performance insights. This shortens the time it takes for creative and marketing teams to deliver advertising and marketing campaigns.
“Adobe GenStudio for Performance Marketing is a game-changer for the modern digital marketer. Our marketing teams are producing more on-brand assets, more quickly for paid social ads and marketing emails. This means better customer journeys through greater personalization, and increased ROI by reducing fatigue and increasing the volume and diversity of content in each program.”
Patrick Brown
Vice President, Growth Marketing & Insights, Adobe
Marketers today face the imposing challenge of delivering hyper-personalized, on-brand, high-performing content in an efficient manner, and generative AI has made it possible to meet this challenge.
Adobe GenStudio for Performance Marketing provides one of the most innovative and comprehensive ways to benefit from generative AI. With this generative AI-first application, marketing teams can find, remix, create, and analyze content for marketing campaigns with unprecedented speed and scale.
Methodology
We surveyed 348 US marketers to explore the return on investment of AI within marketing. This sample size provides a 5 percent margin of error at a 95 percent confidence level. The survey relied on self-reported data. We then combined this data with the Bureau of Labor Statistics median hourly salary data for marketing specialists and managers to determine how much money AI saved. This study also refers to the US Department of Labor's principles and best practices for developers and employers.
Learn more about empowering your marketing teams with Adobe GenStudio for Performance Marketing.
Purnima Rachoor Roy leads product marketing and strategy for Adobe GenStudio with an emphasis on customer engagement. Prior to Adobe, Purnima led marketing for Deloitte Consulting’s multi-billion-dollar portfolio of cloud service offerings, focusing on building brand awareness and demand generation. She also spent several years in management consulting helping clients build best-in-class marketing organizations. Purnima is passionate about products and technology that have the power to elevate and improve all aspects of the customer experience. She holds an MBA in marketing from Columbia Business School.
