Building an AI-powered performance marketing machine.
Faced with exploding content demands, Adobe transformed its email and paid media workflows with Adobe GenStudio for Performance Marketing.
6 days
to overhaul the end-to-end email creation workflow
96%
time-savings in email campaign creation
20+
global regions needed localized on-brand content
“Creative has always been a huge lever for Adobe, but the ability to stay fresh and relevant is more important than ever in today’s age of content fatigue. GenStudio for Performance Marketing has helped our teams scale up their content production across channels while simultaneously making our campaigns more targeted and personalized.”
Patrick Brown
Vice President of Growth Marketing and Insights, Adobe
Creating stand-out content in the AI era.
Like many enterprises, Adobe needs to create more content than ever to fuel its marketing campaigns. It also needs to work faster and refresh its storytelling rapidly to ensure campaigns keep performing on paid media channels like Meta, Display, and LinkedIn. These demands have placed enormous pressures on Adobe’s creative teams, who, until recently, found themselves handling a deluge of briefs from across the global marketing organization and scrambling to keep up.
For global companies like Adobe, the scale and speed of content creation required to stay top of mind for customers in a crowded market requires a new approach to performance marketing. One that allows companies to channel the unique vision of their creative teams while leveraging the scalability and efficiency of AI. Adobe’s Performance Marketing team was an ideal testing ground. So, they partnered with Adobe’s product teams to serve as “Customer Zero” for a new content creation application powered by GenAI—later made generally available as Adobe GenStudio for Performance Marketing.
Fast forward 18 months and the lifecycle marketing team has transformed its operations and streamlined its creative workflows. Meanwhile, the paid media team can roll out experiences at the scale and velocity required to drive results across paid channels. Put simply, GenStudio for Performance Marketing has helped eliminate bottlenecks and made Adobe’s marketing teams more efficient, and impactful.
Accelerating the email lifecycle.
Like many enterprise lifecycle marketing teams, Adobe teams collaborate with in-house creative professionals and agency partners to develop content for email campaigns. Between the need for advanced planning and lengthy approvals processes, it could take six weeks or more to roll out new campaigns, which made it difficult to keep up with current events or speak to customers’ interests in the moment.
“Our email review process used to require a lot of back and forth across the organization,” recalls Brown. “It was difficult to work as quickly as we needed to hit our campaign timelines, much less push ourselves creatively.”
These issues made email the perfect place for Adobe to test GenStudio for Performance Marketing. An early project was a five-touch email journey designed to guide new Adobe Creative Cloud customers through the onboarding process. However, the initial series had failed to resonate—achieving click-through rates of just 1%, well below Adobe’s historical average for B2B campaigns—and it was time to try something new.
Working closely with Adobe’s product experts and creatives, the lifecycle marketing team crafted a new messaging strategy and developed more precise audience profiles for the campaign. They also developed GenAI-optimized prompts that would deliver compelling creative variations while respecting Adobe’s guidelines around email formats, brand voice, and product descriptions. Finally, the teams ensured visual consistency across all their campaign content by using pre-approved images from Adobe’s creative teams to make each asset.
These tactics helped the lifecycle marketing team slash content creation time from 27 days to just one day and take the entire Creative Cloud onboarding campaign to market in just six days. The changes also delivered tangible results, with click-through rates for the campaign rising 84% quarter over quarter. Best of all, these successes gave the team new confidence in their abilities to use GenStudio for Performance Marketing for iteration across all email campaigns.
The transformation of the Creative Cloud onboarding campaign is a prime example of how AI-powered content variations can serve email marketers. By combining the marketer’s core expertise with the advanced capabilities of GenStudio for Performance Marketing, the team was able to launch more quickly, drive better engagement, and build a scalable recipe for future campaign success.
Hitting a stride with paid media.
Adobe’s paid media team also collaborates with in-house creative professionals and agency partners to develop ads. And, as with the lifecycle marketing team, the back-and-forth across these groups was growing. The team needed to create so many ads and variants to feed Adobe’s paid media channels that their only option was to use the same image and copy across platforms. In a world where brands’ performance on social channels hinges on their ability to deliver a high volume of frequency and variability of content, this approach needed a refresh.
“Platforms like Meta recommend that brands have 20 to 25 active ads in any ad-set for optimal performance. Even with all our resources as an enterprise, Adobe couldn’t hit that number without leaning on GenAI,” explains Brown. “Large companies everywhere face this challenge, which is why GenStudio for Performance Marketing is such a compelling offer for the modern enterprise.”
“Platforms like Meta recommend that brands run 20 to 25 ads in any ad-set for optimal performance. Even with all our resources as an enterprise, Adobe couldn’t hit that number without leaning on GenAI. Large companies everywhere face this challenge, which is why GenStudio for Performance Marketing is such a compelling offer for the modern enterprise.”
Patrick Brown
Vice President of Growth Marketing and Insights, Adobe
Adobe’s paid media team had already begun experimenting with AI design and editing technologies to create variants of the ads provided to them by Adobe’s central content team, ranging from simple copy tweaks to the use of different color palettes and background schemes. Using GenStudio for Performance Marketing alongside these solutions, the team was then able to test which variants worked best and adjust their approach accordingly.
Testing content performance based on color choices revealed that Adobe’s customers prefer blue attributes in creative media assets to green ones. It also gave the team new insight into how people engage with Adobe’s ads and campaigns. For example—they were surprised to see gray attributes in some social ads outperform the bold and colorful content Adobe is known for. Then it became clear—those gray attributes matched the real-world look of UI elements in Adobe solutions, which is why customers identified with them so well.
Looking beyond color, Adobe’s paid media team also used GenStudio for Performance Marketing to test social asset copy based on different readability scores, a tactic which revealed that the simpler the language in ads, the better the ads perform. These tests didn’t just improve the performance of Adobe’ paid media campaigns, they provided real-world insights from GenAI that marketers and creatives alike could incorporate into their craft.
“Creative has always been a huge lever for Adobe, but the ability to differentiate is more important than ever in today’s age of content fatigue. GenStudio for Performance Marketing has helped our teams scale up their content production across major channels while making our campaigns more targeted, unique and personalized,” says Brown.
Empowering teams to deliver at scale.
One of the biggest unlocks for Adobe since it began using GenStudio for Performance Marketing has been the way in which GenAI has accelerated content development across the marketing organization. Creative teams can focus on developing original concepts and setting brand guidelines, while marketers can rapidly refine and generate brand-safe variations at scale.
The teams are now on track to create more than 400 original experiences for Meta, Display, and LinkedIn per quarter. “Working with AI tools gave our organization a catalyst,” says Brown. “It felt daunting at first, but the payoff has been a major windfall for users that serves both their individual careers and Adobe’s collective success as an organization.”
On that note, one of Adobe’s biggest challenges as a global business is to create content at scale while localizing experiences for different regions. Smaller teams with limited bandwidth often use US-based assets in their campaigns, with minimal room to adapt them for their local audiences. Since introducing AI-powered content workflows to the mix, Adobe marketers have been able to customize core creative assets for their regional audiences in more than 20 countries a brand-safe way.
That includes teams in Latin America, which have cut their asset localization times by 75% since they began using GenStudio for Performance Marketing. Previously, localization was especially time-consuming for the region given the need to translate content into both Spanish and Portuguese. Email campaigns are now launched weeks faster than before, allowing marketers to stay ahead of local trends and deliver experiences that feel relevant and timely for customers. During an initial test campaign, the team observed that the paid media assets they customize are performing better than those without customizations, cutting the cost per acquisition in Latin America and Brazil by 7%.
“The beauty of GenStudio for Performance Marketing is that we can empower marketers across Adobe to experiment with content variations on their own, while building in guardrails to make sure their assets stay compliant and on-brand,” says Brown. “This peace of mind also allows us to outsource localized content creation to our trusted agency partners in international markets.”
Reinforcing strengths across the content supply chain.
One of the biggest concerns Adobe hears from brands that are still unsure about GenAI is change management. The prospect of rethinking their content processes and upskilling their marketing teams to adopt new ways of working is, understandably, intimidating. But GenAI tools are stepping in to help alleviate the tedious and time-consuming tasks creatives often face in their work, so they can focus on what only they can uniquely deliver—capturing the emotion and connection that brands need.
Eighteen months into its journey with GenStudio for Performance Marketing, Adobe has enabled creative professionals to focus on what they do best and provided the guardrails for marketing teams to meet rising demands for content variations across channels and geographies.
“GenStudio for Performance Marketing is like a rapid response tool,” explains Brown. “It fills content gaps for your marketers that traditional workflows couldn’t cover so they can create at scale and drive revenue while speaking to our customers on a more personal level and focusing on what makes your brand unique.”
Recommended for you
