First look — Lenovo talks personalization, branding, analytics, and Adobe GenStudio for Performance Marketing

At Adobe Summit 2024, we gave attendees a glimpse of how Adobe GenStudio for Performance Marketing could help marketing teams plan, create, manage, activate, and measure on-brand content quickly and at scale. Almost everyone I spoke with at the event had the same question: How do we get our hands on it?

The preview generated a lot of excitement, and we had hundreds of customers requesting to be a part of the beta so they could test it out themselves. Over the past few months, I’ve personally talked with many customers who are facing the same pressing marketing problem — keeping up with the flood of content required to meet campaign personalization and optimization goals.

Global technology leader Lenovo participated in the beta. They’re delighted with how GenStudio for Performance Marketing is helping them scale content while providing insights and data to inform their content strategies. Since Lenovo communicates with their customers through dozens of channels and platforms, they recognize the need for hyper-personalization to connect their products with the right audiences. Tim Furlow, Lenovo’s senior manager of ecommerce personalization, and Demian Hardister, senior manager of ecommerce marketing technology, are embracing the ability to generate more content variations using generative AI. Their teams are creating more content and adapting existing content so they can target different personas with personalized variations across channels.

I recently spoke with Tim and Demian about how their team supports Lenovo’s growing content requirements and got their thoughts on achieving personalization at scale.

Lenovo is a massive global company. What challenges do you face when it comes to personalization at scale?

Tim: If you look at the amount of content that we need to achieve end-to-end personalization, it’s pretty astronomical. To give you an example, we just launched a campaign for four products across eight marketing channels, four languages, and three variations. That campaign alone required 384 assets. We see an opportunity to scale campaigns with our ability to meet increased demand for content with generative AI.

You’ve been beta testing Adobe GenStudio for Performance Marketing. What are some of the ways you’re using it so far?

Demian: We’ve been exploring how Adobe’s generative AI solution can support the requirements of our content supply chain for ecommerce marketing, and the promise of AI is compelling. It can definitely help us scale personalized marketing campaigns while maintaining brand consistency.

This really begins with defining our brand and channel guidelines as well as personas in order to generate content that is on-brand and supports personalization across our many segments. Of course, we have very well-established brand guidelines, however, we were missing documented guidelines for specific channels and details around our personas.

GenStudio for Performance Marketing readily allows us to create many on-brand variations for Lenovo. We can then take content and automatically adjust it across channels so that we can deliver the right message wherever customers want it. We can also make small changes to localize content for different geos or to better target content for various audiences and personas.

One specific example was a product launch for our Yoga laptop line. The platform allowed a designer to drop a branded laptop asset onto a blank canvas and write prompts for Generative Fill to replace the background to optimize the experience.

Delivering more variations will also help us expand testing, reach more channels, and enable change at scale to learn with greater efficiency. Our goal is to personalize our website, email, and advertising experiences to match the needs of our customers and continue to create cohesive, cross-channel experiences. The analytics side is also very compelling, and we look forward to using insights from GenStudio for Performance Marketing to assess not only our marketing efforts but our marketing content as well.

Can you tell us more about how you are experimenting with analytics and how you think incorporating generative AI into analytics will transform the way Lenovo’s marketing team will operate?

Tim: Everyone talks about scaling content creation, but what really transforms your business is scaling analytics. Content metadata analytics will be the center of our future content supply chain process. It’s how we’re going to get that feedback loop that continues to improve the content we create so we can deliver more effective and on-brand visuals to better engage with our customers.

For instance, we have hundreds of Facebook accounts across products and regions. All that information gives us huge potential to understand what’s most effective to reach different personas and bring them the best Lenovo experience. But analysis is only one part of the challenge. Communicating what we’ve learned is another. In our beta testing, we leveraged machine-learning algorithms to analyze content and share insights through a central platform. That information usually never funnels down to content creators, but everyone having these insights puts us all on the same course to success.

As a global company, maintaining brand consistency across every geo is challenging. What does that look like for Lenovo?

Demian: Staying on brand is critical to our success, although it represents a growing challenge as we look to scale consistent and personalized campaigns across channels and geographies. Generative AI allows us to incorporate brand and channel guidelines and score generated content against these guidelines. It also lets us more efficiently create additional on-brand variations across various products, segments, and personas. This is critical for us to reach the scale required to grow our ecommerce business.

How does putting your brand guidelines, personas, and standards into the product help teams stay on brand and monitor what’s being created?

Tim: It’s hard to describe the feeling of working in GenStudio for Performance Marketing other than saying it’s a tool that challenges the way you think. Product standards are the key to modern storytelling at scale, and the Adobe generative AI solution takes that to another level. By adding our granular channel guidelines, like the length of a subject line, the application allows us to be brand compliant in addition to saving time on prompting.

We believe that having more guidelines around content in the AI workflow and user approval model is key to expanding content at scale. It sets up guardrails that help marketers open up creatively without getting off track. We create a lot of content, and now we’re able to use AI to make sure it’s on brand.

How do you envision generative AI transforming your marketing team over the next few years?

Demian: Generative AI represents an immense opportunity across our business. We truly believe that it can revolutionize our marketing content supply chain. To do so we’ll need to not only focus on the technology platform but also on people and process components. The end result can help us continue to more efficiently scale on-brand content and deliver personalized campaigns across channels to grow our ecommerce business.

To learn more about Adobe GenStudio for Performance Marketing and discover how it can help your organization, watch the overview video or read the report. Discover how Adobe’s global marketing team creates fresh content, launches worldwide campaigns, tests assets, and tracks performance in real-time with Adobe GenStudio for Performance Marketing in this blog.

Purnima Rachoor Roy leads product marketing and strategy for Adobe GenStudio with an emphasis on customer engagement. Prior to joining 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.

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