Guide
The creative multiplier.
The value of enterprise-wide on-brand content creation.
A blueprint for safe, on-brand content creation across enterprise functions.
Content creation has moved beyond the studio, with AI multiplying both opportunity and risk. This guide, created in partnership between Adobe and Accenture, outlines how organizations can democratize content creation across marketing, sales, and knowledge workers while safeguarding brand, legal, and reputational integrity. It also quantifies the business impact — showing that enterprises with an estimated value of $30 billion annual revenue can achieve up to a 9x ROI over three years by enabling employees to create on-brand content with the right tools and governance.
The CMO challenge: Safeguarding the brand as content creation expands.
Nearly every employee across the enterprise needs access to high-quality content, whether creating it themselves or relying on others to produce it. Yet demand increasingly outstrips supply, leading to missed opportunities or rogue content creation by functions that studio teams do not support.
To better understand this gap, we surveyed 1,457 professionals who create content and found:
- 72% of non-creative employees require weekly creative support, yet over 50% report that support isn’t available quickly or cost-effectively.
- 58% of these employees spend up to 29 hours a week creating visual content independently, often without proper training or tools.
- Only 1 in 5 of them feel confident in using generative AI effectively for content creation.
This leads not only to a content bottleneck, but also to significant risk to the brand and to the business at large. One mismanaged asset can result in millions in lost brand equity or legal liabilities, such as IP infringements.
Rogue content
Assets created outside of approved brand or governance systems. The following are sample potential outcomes of rogue content creation:
Low quality, brand adherence, or accuracy
Off-brand assets, misaligned messaging, low resolution, or inaccurate visual representation
Rights violations
Unauthorized use of copyrighted content, lack of disclosures, misuse of assets where rights have expired or are geo-gated
Ethics and responsibility concerns
Trust and societal harm due to bias, misinformation, insensitive content
“When every employee can create, the question isn’t volume — it’s brand integrity. CMOs and marketing leaders who give teams AI freedom and clear guardrails will reach customers faster, deepen loyalty, and accelerate revenue.”
Rachel Thornton, CMO Adobe Enterprise
The value of democratizing content creation across the enterprise.
Organizations that proactively equip the entire enterprise to create standout, on-brand content can ensure consistent and compelling experiences for their customers, employees, and other stakeholders.
To seize this opportunity, marketing leaders can drive change both within and outside their remit, empowering three distinct groups of employees to create content independently while staying on-brand. The table below lays out these three groups:
- Regional marketing
- Event marketing
- Affiliate marketing
- Field marketing
- Social media marketing
- Brand teams
- Content strategists
- Product marketing
- Account reps
- Business development reps
- Customer success
- Sales enablement
- Sales specialists
- Customer care
- Retail & in-store sales
- Inside sales
- Communications
- Finance
- Community outreach
- Research
- Human resources (learning and development, talent acquisition, etc.)
Why it matters.
When every employee can create on-brand content, value compounds fast.
- Marketing teams gain speed and consistency and can power more activations.
- Sales and business development teams can nurture and convert pipelines through more targeted communications.
- Knowledge workers can amplify culture, brand, and trust internally and externally.
For a $30 billion enterprise1, those layers stack to nearly $90 million in annual upside2 and a 9x ROI — proof that AI-powered content self-service is as much a growth strategy as it is a governance one.
While the value scales exponentially as influence extends across the organization, value per full-time employee (FTE) is highest the closer we are to core creation. See below how these estimates break out by group.
Annual run-rate impact by employee group.
A systematic approach:
In this model, creative and brand teams are still critical in setting creative direction, brand standards, and shared systems for the entire organization to use. Their remit now expands to develop the foundational backbone to help scale creativity across the enterprise, inclusive of brand kits, templates, approved libraries, and custom-trained AI models.
Next comes enabling and empowering every team to create. The following deep dives explore each of the three groups, outlining priority functions, common use cases, and best practices to guide your democratized content creation journey.
2. This value is the average across industries. The value by industry breakdown can be found in the Appendix.
Marketing
The marketing organization shapes and executes the brand strategy, orchestrates comprehensive campaigns, and creates critical pathways that convert demand into revenue. Nearly every program depends on on-brand, visually compelling content to engage prospective or existing customers.
While growth marketing and experience orchestration teams typically get support from centralized creative teams, other marketers tend to remain underserved — leaving opportunities on the table or resorting to sub-optimal content.
Where the value comes from.
A democratized content creation solution can change this. Below are representative marketing functions and corresponding use cases that will benefit from the opportunity:
- Regional marketing: Localize approved campaign assets with relevant imagery, language, pricing, and cultural context.
- Event teams: Craft content for conferences, trade shows, and local events — inclusive of signage, social promos, landing pages, and email banners.
- Social media teams: Create, remix, and resize content quickly to drive paid or organic engagement — inclusive of images, video, copy, animations, and audio.
- Affiliate marketing: Enable channel and go-to-market partners to easily adapt approved assets — delivering growth across the ecosystem.
When marketers can easily self-serve, adapt, and publish approved assets, the organization moves faster, spends less, and grows revenue. With intuitive AI-assisted tools, we estimate that these groups can free up 12 hours per week to focus on higher-value work.
In all, our analysis shows that these benefits represent an estimated $10 million annual upside for a $30 billion organization — split between productivity gains (60% of the value) and incremental revenue growth (40% of the value).
Marketers today spend
per week creating or retrofitting visual content3
Source: 3. Company-wide creation survey
CMO takeaway.
Enabling marketers to unlock greater content velocity, especially those in groups underserved by core creative teams, is a critical opportunity. Starting this enterprise-wide effort with marketing teams can not only prove early wins but also surface learnings and best practices that can scale to every other function.
Bringing it to life.
ABB empowers global teams to create faster.
ABB, a global leader in electrification and automation, empowered its marketing teams across 100+ countries to create quality, on-brand content with Adobe Express. From customizing social media posts and captioning video content to translating, localizing, and re-sizing assets — marketers across ABB are now able to deliver content that is on-brand, faster, and produced with less effort. Initial results include a reduction from 8 days to 30 minutes in localization and translation, and 6x higher engagement rates versus prior baselines. Read more here
Sales and business development
Sales teams and their supporting ecosystems are under immense pressure to build relationships, create pipeline, and ultimately close. Next to marketing, they are often the top external ambassadors of the brand, yet often lack the time, ability, or resources to create visually compelling content tailored to customers, partners, or sales strategies.
The result: teams resort to retrofitting old materials, searching the web for what they need, and piecing together what they can. Not only does this detract from valuable time spent selling, but it often leads to a poor representation of the brand.
Where the value comes from.
Empowering sales and business development teams to easily create and adapt content can take many forms. The following are sample roles and related use cases to consider prioritizing within this group:
- Sales representatives: Enhance and customize customer-facing communications — for example, email visuals, templated presentations, and leave-behind materials.
- Business development leads: Create compelling imagery for social prospecting, promotions, or email outreach that stands out.
- Sales support teams: Bring customer-facing documents to life and tailor them as needed — for example, brochures, manuals, and detailed product overviews.
- Sales enablement teams: Build fit-for-purpose training materials, templatized presentations or sales collateral, video tutorials, and other informational resources.
Our research has found that 33% of individuals in sales organizations spend more than 20 hours a week on content creation. Deploying AI-powered, easy to use content creation tools can help them reclaim 10 to 13 hours of lost time each week.
For a $30 billion organization, the opportunity can unlock up to $19 million in incremental productivity gains. This represents roughly $6000 of annual value per individual in this cohort. Additional revenue tied to allocating more time to be customer-facing and utilizing more effective content were not quantified in our model and would be incremental.
CMO takeaway.
Marketing leaders can partner with sales to empower teams to spend more time selling and more meaningfully relay the organization’s value proposition in their communications with customers. Identifying the right stakeholder to pilot the opportunity, along with appropriate training and enablement support, will be keys to success.
Enterprise-wide knowledge workers
Roles across the organization such as talent acquisition, corporate communications, learning and development, investor relations, and community outreach are increasingly creating content to engage their stakeholders.
As with sales teams, these groups get limited support from creative teams. Hours are lost searching for assets in brand portals and trying to adjust them with sub-standard tools. Ultimately, this leads to content that does not perform — and worse, can damage brand perception.
Where the value comes from.
The opportunity to support teams across the organization with this capability is vast. Below are examples of roles and use cases where a self-service approach can drive results:
- Talent acquisition: Attract and engage with quality candidates via visually compelling job postings, correspondence, and social outreach.
- Communications: Create and update on-brand content for external-facing corporate collateral — for example, announcements, press releases, and blogposts.
- Learning and development: Craft and easily update onboarding and training materials and uplevel learning portals and on-demand experiences to drive engagement.
- Employee experience: Effectively promote internal events, corporate updates, calls to action, and announcements — for example, townhall meetings, newsletters, and open enrollments.
- Finance: Enhance investor relations presentations, financial reports, and other collateral for analysts with visually compelling content.
Our research estimates that equipping knowledge workers with this capability can unlock approximately $65 million in annual value for a $30 billion organization. This larger amount is driven by a wide reach of the solution — impacting the most employees by increasing both the efficiency and effectiveness of their communications.
CMO takeaway.
While content from knowledge workers is typically not governed by marketing, it directly shapes brand perceptions, employee trust, and overall credibility. Partnering with leaders in HR, finance, and other corporate functions to roll out a governed content creation solution enables marketing leaders to mitigate brand risk. This also allows them to show up for every audience — from candidates to investors, regulators, and more — with a single, consistent brand voice.
Bringing it to life.
Ricoh reimagines content creation to increase learning.
Ricoh Japan’s HR Development Center supplies learning content to 18,000 employees. To boost the appeal of its training platform, the group leveraged Adobe Express — creating a library of 200,000 templates and rights-cleared assets for team members to craft eye-catching content. AI-powered tools keep visuals on-brand while a single, self-service hub replaces lengthy design queues. Results include higher learner adoption, with usage rates jumping from 30% to 75%, and 50% faster creation for elements such as video thumbnails or course graphics. Read more here
Best practices to empower content creation across the organization.
Without an enterprise standard, quality, and brand consistency fracture across silos. By leading the charge on an intuitive, centrally governed solution, CMOs can help meet functional needs while preserving brand expression and reducing risks.
To this end, organizations must establish:
- A strong brand and creative foundation
- A governance structure that both empowers and protects
- Technology solutions that fuel growth without sacrificing control
Below are five best practices to consider:
1. Establish a steering committee.
Form a cross-functional SteerCo among marketing, IT, legal, and other key functional leaders to gain alignment and oversee strategy, priorities, and governance.
2. Lean into AI safety and integrations
Select tools that support responsible AI practices, IP protection, and brand safety. Prioritize solutions that easily integrate into your existing content supply chain ecosystem to ensure faster adoption and higher asset re-use.
3. Deploy a scalable creative foundation.
Work with brand and creative teams to create modular brand kits, templates, and guardrails that can be centrally managed, customized, and updated. Ensure templates, libraries, and approved assets are available directly from creation tools.
4. Pilot and learn via early adopters.
Start with strong internal sponsorship from marketing and one additional functional team. Identify priority users and business needs to focus on the first, celebrating early wins to build momentum and excitement in the rest.
5. Expand across the organization.
Use insights from early efforts to refine best practices and strengthen broader enablement efforts. Then, expand the program to additional teams based on readiness, need, and strategic priorities — turning early efficiencies into enterprise-wide growth.
Ready to get started
Whether you are embarking on your journey to democratize creativity across the enterprise or are looking to optimize existing efforts, Adobe is here to help you navigate complexities and deliver value. Contact an Adobe representative today to learn more.
Appendix
A. Variance across industries:
Industry differences in estimated value center mostly around three factors — how much time employees spend producing on-brand content, the size of the potential user base, and the scale of AI-enabled efficiency gains.
The table below summarizes the opportunity by grouping and ROI for the industries we evaluated:
B. Methodology
Research approach: Adobe and Accenture partnered to estimate the financial impact of content creation and production transformation across six areas of value in six distinct industries. Insights are rooted in four research components — survey data, expert interviews, econometric analysis, and secondary research.
Company-wide survey: Two 30-question online surveys gathered insights from 1,457 respondents who actively worked on content creation during October and November 2024.
- Geography: Respondents were based in the U.S. and Canada.
- Roles: All respondents held full-time positions at the manager level or above and demonstrated active involvement in the creation of creative content for their brands yet fell outside of core creative teams. Functions in the surveys include marketers (both creatives and non-creatives), sales and business development, and knowledge workers.
- Industries: Retail (n=318), consumer packaged goods (CPG) (n=269), high tech (n=214), financial services (n=203), pharmaceuticals (n=217), and media and entertainment (n=236).
- Statistical significance: Survey results maintain a margin of error of ±8 percentage points for percentage-based statistics and ±2 percentage points for estimates such as averages, assuming a 95% confidence level for both.
Expert interviews: 37 individual interviews were conducted to gain qualitative insights across industries. The following subject matter experts were interviewed:
- 9 Accenture creative and design experts (panel of Accenture employees)
- 15 Accenture industry experts (3 in retail, 4 in CPG, 1 in financial services, 2 in pharmaceuticals, 3 in high tech, 2 in media and entertainment)
- 8 Accenture marketing transformation experts (panel built, including former CMOs and advisors)
- 5 Adobe experts
Econometric analysis: The following outlines the assumptions and sources used to build the value case model to quantify the value of transforming content creation and production workflows:
- Company size: All calculations based on an organization with $30 billion annual revenue
- Value capture: 30% in year 1, 50% in year 2, and 100% in year 3
- Risk adjustment: 20% to reflect realistic estimates
- Discount rate: 10%
- Costs: Projected ROI calculations based on estimated benefits and costs of implementing AI-tools.
- Estimated benefits: Projections are based on survey respondents’ self-reported estimates on the impact of AI-tools in current end-to-end workflows in content creation and production. Findings from the survey pool were then validated by Accenture experts by industry — based on observed outcomes from supporting clients in implementing Gen-AI in marketing functions.
- Estimated AI-tool implementation costs: Calculations are based on estimated incremental costs for technology licensing and support (provided by Adobe) and change management and training required to realize value opportunities.
- Operational efficiency: Includes time savings from streamlined tasks, increased asset reuse, and simplified review and approvals (based on fully loaded hourly costs), in addition to reduction of hard costs (for example, physical production costs and agency spend).
- Revenue growth: Projected revenue lifts from enhanced content impact from more personalized and targeted campaigns and higher volume of content, based on industry average click through rates (CTRs), impressions, and conversion rates.
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