[Music] [Paul Gray] Successful marketing leaders are using AI to transform how they build, manage, and optimize websites, making them more dynamic, more personalized, and more engaging than ever before. In this session, we'll speak with marketing, design, and product leaders who will share real world examples, expert insight, and actionable strategies. Recently, Webflow published our second annual State of the Website Report. It breaks down the current state of the website, as well as marketing leaders' priorities heading into 2025. We spoke with 500 marketing leaders about their websites, and here's what they told us. Tech stacks continue to grow as marketing leaders build more capabilities to personalize their websites. The website really matters. In fact, 91% said it drives more revenue than any other channel, and almost 70% plan to increase or maintain investments in AI tools. With Generative AI, marketing teams can create and refine on-brand and highly-personalized content quickly, cutting down on the time, complexity, and effort involved. Whether it's generating visuals, copy, or even interactive elements, AI is removing roadblocks and enabling creativity at every stage of the process. Let's take a closer look at how teams are leveraging AI. We'll start by exploring how IMB Bank, one of Australia's leading financial institutions, is using Adobe Express within Webflow to streamline their website content creation. We'll hear from BBDO to understand how creative and marketing leaders are creating rich and immersive website experiences that convert. Finally, we'll speak with Adobe on how AI is helping to democratize creative and developmental skills to enable website owners to scale their impact. Let's get started with Adam Ruse from IMB Bank.
Since 1880, IMB Bank has been supporting people and communities across Australia to achieve their financial goals. It offers a range of financial solutions, from banking to home and personal loans, business services, and more. The team uses Webflow to build, manage, and optimize their websites, and they've been experimenting with artificial intelligence in applications from information retrieval to insights to content creation. Recently, the team was updating their business banking web page, and they used Adobe Express for Webflow to create on-brand imagery to help communicate financial products, things like accounts, payroll, loans, and other business services. Let's speak to Adam Ruse, UX and UI Designer at IMB Bank, to learn about how they used artificial intelligence in content creation for their website. Adam, it's great to meet you. [Adam Ruse] Great to meet you, Paul. So, Adam, IMB Bank recently re-launched its business banking pages. Can you tell me a bit about what your goals were for this re-launch? Yeah. The primary goal was to create a distinct aesthetic for the business section. So we wanted something that stood out from the personal section of the website. We started off with some feedback from the business banking team that we wanted something more professional and modern that would match our user base and personas. So ultimately, we were aiming to increase engagement with the pages and encourage more users to reach out to us. And so I imagine you had like a different ICP for your business banking pages than you would for your consumer pages and different brand guidelines and style approaches? Yeah. So we have a distinct style guide for our business section versus the personal section, and that's driven by our personas and the user needs and to make sure that that matches what they're looking for because they've got different needs and pain points compared to our personal banking uses. You used Adobe Express for Webflow to generate images for your business banking pages. Why did you choose to do that? We chose to use Adobe Express because our team is small and nimble, so we're always looking for ways to speed up design and development process. Adobe Express was perfect for generating images for a few reasons. Firstly, it allowed us to create unique images instead of using common stock that other websites might also be using. Secondly, it ensured consistency by allowing us to hone in exactly what we wanted to achieve. And then lastly, it enabled us to work quickly and efficiently, which was crucial because we wanted to turn around the revamp in a very short amount of time. And as I understand it, you used reference images, style guide, brand guidelines, as the basis when you started. Was that correct? Yeah. So we used reference images that we'd created in other software, and we used that to then brief in Adobe Express on what images we wanted to put out and spin off versions of that. We have a design system in place, so we want to make sure that everything we output is very consistent. And with the business banking section as well, it has a unique aesthetic that we needed to stay very familiar with for the user. So in addition to generating images, did you do anything else with the app? Yeah. So we used it to remove background images, and export it directly into Webflow, which sped up a lot of time. We could also export it to our design system in Figma, where we could then turn into all the animations that we could import into Webflow. So we had a few different uses for how we used it. So it really sounds like Adobe Express for Webflow helped you get creative powers that might have typically relied on specialists with really extreme skills in advanced software to remove backgrounds. That's a pretty complicated thing to do, generally. It seems like it's a lot easier now. In that sense, how does this process compare to what you did in the past, maybe working with third parties or outside agencies or designers or to help you do this, how is Adobe Express changing your workflows in terms of speed and effort? Yeah. I think that's probably one of the biggest advantages to Adobe Express is that any user can really use it. You don't have to have a degree in graphic design or any hands-on experience in more complicated image processing. So that really helped us to generate the images, to modify the images by removing backgrounds and then import them directly into the website with really no technical expertise. So it's less hands-on, less people involved, but I think the end result was just as powerful. And that really sounds like what the potential of AI is. It's giving people's capabilities to do tasks that might've been challenging in the past. So if you can give a marketing team member the ability to do some of the basic design work themselves, that allows your design team to then focus on the much more strategic things, like building out a brand entirely, or working on more larger projects. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I think that's probably the biggest advantage to it is, you can do more powerful things with less resources. What have been the results since launching this updated business banking page? Yeah, we've had very positive feedback from the business banking team and we've seen our conversion rates and engagements with the business banking section, increase significantly since we implemented the changes. So overall, we've seen all of our metrics that we use to measure user experience have increased. Lastly, what are your plans for using AI to further optimize your website? Yeah. Well, I think every second conversation we have at IMB is about AI. We're already using it in the banking industry across most of our touch points. So AI-powered chatbots, we're generating images with AI, our A/B testing and optimizing the website is using AI, it's involved in our ad creative and our copywriting. So I think, it's just going to get more involved and more incorporated into all of our different touch points across the website and digital experience. Adam, thanks very much. Thanks very much, Paul.
Building creative marketing and sales solutions is critical for business, whether B2B or B2C. As customer behavior evolves, buying journeys change, and AI introduces new ways of building, managing, and optimizing websites, it's more important than ever that marketing leaders take advantage of these new opportunities. James Young is EVP and Head of Creative Innovation at Omnicom, a leading provider of data-inspired, creative marketing and sales solutions. With group agencies like BBDO, they're committed to helping businesses and brands scale growth with creative experiences that keep buyers engaged and taking action. James, it's great to speak with you. [James Young] Great to speak with you as well, Paul. Thanks for having me. So we're seeing so many new tools and technologies powered by AI around creativity and generating content. How should marketing leaders tackle learning about this and using these in their workflows? I think it's what you just said, just using it, like the reps. Put the reps in, explore the tools that are out there, understand the tools that are coming, understand where these tools are going. Sounded like your teams, which challenged or in different ways to try out these new technologies, what did you find to be the most effective for that? We're trying a lot of different methods and approach to getting people involved because different people learn and approach this stuff in different ways, and we want to try to come from as many angles as we can.
We started, guess it's two and a half years ago at this point where we set up a stable diffusion server to give people access to image generation, which is where really people start to get particularly excited about this. Everyone was excited about mid journey, but the model of that wasn't one in such that we could give access to say like hundreds of people in an agency. So the stable diffusion server allowed us to give that access to everybody to play around.
It's a little bit more complex, and so we put a lot of energy into education. We did presentations to the agency where we walked them through how to approach these tools. We got really focused on prompt writing. And then we expand from there. We've had small, little focused workshops. We've had larger agency wide workshops. We've had partners come in to present. We've had partners work with us to set up pilot programs or beta programs to give everybody access to some of the tools they're developing. And then we've done little fun stuff, contests internally, to give people an opportunity to explore this stuff totally agnostic of any clients so that it takes some of that stress and expectation off of it. But we're still learning. We're still trying things. We've got a partner coming in a few weeks, for example, where we're going to do a film festival type of experience where we group people together and give them a prompt and then give them a couple weeks and support to explore this thing to create in their own way with their own stories and again without the stress of having to create for clients. But, of course, that all has led to and with the idea that it's going to fuel creating ideas for clients, providing inspiration, providing the opportunity to showcase ideas in ways that we couldn't before, whether it's because of time or resources, whatever that is. And so, it all starts with just raising the floor of our agency's skill set and giving them the comfort and resources to bring that into their ideation and then production of those ideas. That makes sense. I remember speaking to a Webflow customer, Oyster HR, and they were excited to test out using AI for image generation, but the company wasn't ready yet from, I guess, like a policy and a legal point of view to use final artwork on the website. So what they did was they used Adobe Express, in this case, to generate potential concepts for maps and site layouts. So it would generate one of those AI hallucinatory images of your hero image and buttons over here and different components across the page just in different iterations, different color palettes built off their brand guidelines. I guess, curious in the work that you've done with clients and educating clients on testing, how are you managing different teams? Obviously, there's a creative team that's generally going to be more interested in testing out, but what about product teams or tech teams or legal and compliance teams? What's their journey of learning to use AI like? Man, so many ways you're going out of question, like there's so many different, I guess, groups.
Creative, like you're saying, I think a lot of what we're talking about, it's provided for the wider agency, but the creatives are the real target because they're the ones generating the ideas. That's the approach we took there. We have a creative technologist within the agency that helps to explore a lot of these tools. And we've got some tools that have already been approved by Omnicom and are accessible to the agency, and they're viable for consumer facing work from a legal standpoint, and that's where we focus a lot of the mass scale energy. But we also make sure that we're testing a lot of the newer tools that are coming out, see what might be possible to, can bring into our different workflows.
Adobe in particular, we've come to find that, Firefly specifically is particularly really good when it comes to graphical outputs and text-based outputs. And so that has become a pretty key part of a lot of our creatives' workflows when they're generating images and ideas and getting more and more so towards consumer-facing work in that space. On the legal side of things, there's a very smart group of people at the Omnicom level that I'm lucky to be able to work with and learn from that is really getting deep into, at the enterprise level with a lot of these tools, developing those relationships, figuring out the types of licensing agreements we give to get wide access, and then most importantly, getting to that point where we're comfortable with the models, we're comfortable with, what's training those models, and we're able to use these tools to create work that, again, we can put out into the world. It'd be great to dig into a couple of examples. I know you've shared some. One of which was BACARDÍ, which I think did a really cool AI-powered project. I guess before we get into the details of that, maybe if you could talk about from an overall brand and go-to market perspective for a brand like BACARDÍ. What are they generally trying to do as it relates to a website or digital experiences or digital engagement? What's the general goal? And then maybe we can talk about this particular project. Yeah. We're really lucky that, we have BACARDÍ as a client because particularly the space that I work in in emerging tech and innovation that's been the space that they have invested in for years now. We've got a program called Music Liberates Music with them where we're pretty much consistently finding ways to bring some of the more emerging cutting-edge technology into our ideas, all supporting the platform idea of do what moves you. And so that has been a driving force of a lot of our ideation. We do, of course, the general go-to market and platform type of thinking for them, but there is this consistent opportunity to explore these types of spaces and produce the ideas that go-to market based on some of these technologies. And so this campaign was with an artist, Boi-1da, and I understand there was an AI album of sorts made. Can you talk through the brief, the process, and what was built? Sure. So Boi-1da is a music producer that works with essentially, everybody you can imagine in pop from Kendrick Lamar to Rihanna and everyone in between. And so with this Music Liberates Music platform, the major goal in driving force with this thing has always been to find ways for us to take our resources, us to take the relationships we're able to build with some of these well-known artists to provide opportunities for lesser known artists to get their music created and exposed. So in this particular case, we worked with Boi-1da where we took a bunch of his unreleased music that he had produced that hadn't been used for any of his partners. And we trained a model on it so that it was able to output, basically, net new music that sounded like it was generated by Boi-1da. And the way that this came to life was, once we had that model trained, we created a front end where, an artist could go to this front end website. They can put in their lyric track or their dialogue, their vocal track, few fun knobs and buttons of tempo style and whatnot that still fits within the style of Boi-1da, and then it would generate music that fit that song. The output of this program was a professional mixed song that then was uploaded to Spotify, as a part of this record, underneath the moniker of the concept album. That's a great experience. It outlines how you can involve a community, give them some tools with some guardrails, I imagine, with the way you've built it, that then allows lots of people to get really involved and interested in this. You shared another example, which was Adoptables, I think by Pedigree. Can you share a little bit more about the brief, what the client was looking for, and the execution using AI, especially around the digital experience in the website? Yeah. Sure. And that's one that was produced out of our office in Australia, Colenso BBDO, who is also really well-known for creating this type of work.
So this is an idea where we wanted to be able to scale the idea of showcasing dogs that are available for adoption regardless of the area that you're in. Through this program, Pedigree agreed to or has decided it's going to have all of their online advertisement include some opportunity or prompt to be able to go adopt a particular dog. In this case, what we did is we're able to draw from the API of an adoption, an overall adoption source. Based on where you are, it's able to find a dog that is available for adoption in that area. And then using AI, it was able to take that image and map it over, what a model of that breed of dog. Because there's the problem with these types of projects and this type of approach that we've been trying to find solve for a long time that AI is now enabled where you could see an image from an adoption agency, but maybe it's not the best image of a dog and it doesn't fit with overall style and placement and all that of an ad that you're needing to scale automatically like this. So by able to use AI where it's going to take that image, understand what the dog is, take the specifics of that particular dog, that particular breed, and then again map it over this model so that it feels as part of one larger cohesive campaign. It really feels pretty compelling that it makes it so personalized and I guess, in this case hyper-localized to where you are. So if you're in a certain city or area, the dogs that you're seeing in these advertisements are actually the ones that are in that local area. Is that a key component around personalization, would you say? Absolutely. That's the the golden goose with this stuff to an extent of the ability to scale and target at a level that just wasn't possible before. And we're just really, I believe, at the beginning of exploring the potential of this thing of that hyper-targeting specific to you, specific to where you are, who you are. I think, we're just scratching the surface. So, yeah, two really great examples of where AI tools are providing creative execution, whether it's music or image, really wrapped around localizing and personalizing to the audience in each case. Definitely sounds pretty powerful. And I guess to that point, what do you think is going to be... How will things shake out in 2025 as it relates to how marketing leaders should be using AI, especially to create more personalized or more impactful content experiences on their websites? So I think 2025, I expect to be a year where you see just the floor be raised in regards to the individual understanding, but also the adoption of things like utilizing, image generation and advertisement. So it sounds like the takeaway for marketing leaders is education for teams, experimentation, testing things out, and then just running and having a go at things, would you say? Yeah. And I think whatever you can do to put people in a position where they can have fun with this stuff, don't have the stress of, like, this output needs to be put in, and out or whatever that is. Give them the time, the space, and the resources to play and get excited, and then organically let that show up in the work. James, thank you very much. Got it. Thanks for having me.
Adobe has a long history in equipping product, design, and marketing teams with tools to create rich and engaging content and experiences. Marichae Coleman is a Product Manager on the Adobe Extensibility Team, and she's been working with Webflow to bring Adobe's capabilities to over 300,000 brands using our platform. Marichae, it's great to speak with you. [Marichae Coleman] Nice to speak with you too. And nice to see you again, Paul. So, I mean, Adobe is amazing. It's been empowering creators for decades. And at Webflow, we're very proud about giving everyone development superpowers. I'm keen to hear how Adobe is now giving everyone creative superpowers. Yeah. No. This is a great question. I'll admit that. Before working at Adobe, I had never really used our professional creative tools like Photoshop or Premiere Pro. I found them really intimidating to use, but I knew who Adobe was. I knew that we were trusted, and so I was really excited to join the team and be able to be a part of the launch of Adobe Express. That's when I truly recognized the power that we have to empower everyone to be creative with easy-to-use design tools. And then by being thoughtfully integrated into the tools and workflows where we know that users are already familiar, like in Webflow, we expose all types of creatives to the types of tools that enhance their process. It's a really fantastic product. It gives so many powers that perhaps in the past, you needed a lot of experience or a degree in graphics design. What are some of the capabilities? And as you were building this tool with marketers in mind, how did you prioritize and identify which tools to build and how to set them up? Yeah. Yeah. I work in a really fun intersection, I think, with Adobe Express and our partners where our core product team gets to learn from users and dictate some of the core features and see what translates well. And then I get to take that a step further and explore what resonates when partners are, again, in the context of their actual workflow, and they're outside of Adobe Express. So when it comes to integrating with our partners, we've taken a more modular framework so that developers can even feel empowered to customize their users' workflows. And this is why we think Webflow is such a great partner to work with in prioritizing that developer experience as well as the marketing user so that everyone is empowered to make sure that their team wins. Can you talk us through a couple of the most popular features that people can do with Adobe Express? Yes. Of course. So including some of the features that we have available in Webflow, remove background, resize image, these simple image editing actions, they're actually powered by capabilities that exist in our flagship products like Photoshop. So even the day-to-day marketer can do these tools without having to learn complex tools like Photoshop. Marketers are always asking for more access to new content and templates to start with, giving them inspiration, but then they also want their teams to be able to keep content that's on brand. So we have template locking and more controls so that marketing teams cannot just be empowered to create content, but keep their content that's really on brand. That's such an important point. And I know we spoke to IMB Bank who was part of the launch of the app last year and how they used the product. And they explained how they uploaded reference files and brand guidelines, which the Adobe Express app for Webflow then took into account when it was generating images they were using. Is that a common feature you'd hear from marketing teams? Yes. The need to use an AI to produce content that's like placeholder images. This really helps teams get started faster with content that's still true to the vision that they want to represent. So instead of having to search for a bunch of results, you really get to use reference images and refine your prompt, which is we're so familiar with creating text and storytelling that it adds that visual element to it when you have the power of Adobe Firefly. In the work that you've done with Webflow customers and then other partners, has it been any really interesting feedback or learnings that you've gotten as to how people are using this product? Yeah. I think first off, just as it has related to how we work with partners, I've been surprised that instead of taking this all in one approach, we've taken a step back as Adobe, and we're really thinking, how do we build modular focused environments so that we don't have users be distracted bit with AI, but really use it as a tool, that's really intentional in specific points of their workflow. I've also been really, I guess, delighted by how much users want to be able to collaborate with other people when they're working in Express, which is always fun and challenging as a PM team to think of those live co-editing capabilities. But it brings a fun challenge to us, and it helps us go along with this theme of empowering everyone to be creative and keep marketing teams working really proficiently together. Yeah. It's such an important point, the collaboration. So giving people tools and technologies to help, give them superpowers is great, but how do they then work with the existing workflows and tools and projects? Even at Webflow, we've been building capabilities for design approvals and making it easier for different team members to collaborate, as they're building out sites or refining those websites. Totally. It's so important. I mean, even I as a PM and maybe not our core market for Adobe Express, but I work directly with our marketing team. So anytime that they're sending me content, I need to be able to easily access it and collaborate with them as well. So that's been a good learning that we've gotten from Adobe Express and excited to do more there. So it's been such a year of advancements in AI. What are you excited about for the future of AI, particularly as it relates to Generative AI tools and content creation that marketers would use in building and managing their websites? Yeah. And so I'll take this even a step back and say that I have been intimidated to use AI as someone who builds it. And so I've had a bit of a learning and a trust curve myself. And so I have trained myself to always start with where I'm already confident. A lot of times that is in this ideation stage. So if there's a small project that you're working on, that's a great opportunity to introduce AI in ways where you know that you can already, if-- Worst-case scenario, you lose five minutes of time trying to learn something new and test something that you haven't done before. But best-case scenario, you have even more content that, again, it really aligns to your vision and helps tell your story. I think I'm really excited to just see how more people start to interact and engage with AI. The only way for innovation to happen is if we experiment and we take new approaches and continue to learn from the results. So I think as we see more people start to be trusted and start to trust AI, especially with Adobe Firefly having collections that are designed to be commercially safe for users, the innovation will really start to be endless. It's an exciting time. Marichae, thanks for speaking with us. Thank you so much, Paul.
We've heard how AI is transforming how teams build, manage, and optimize websites. The results? Empowered teams, creating incredible personalized websites that convert. If you're at Adobe Summit, we'd love to connect. Come meet us at Booth 482 and see Webflow in action. And to learn more or book a demo, visit webflow.com. [Music]
