[Music] [Vaishnavi Srivathsan] Welcome everyone to our session at Adobe Summit 2025. I'm Vaishnavi Srivathsan, an elite business strategy and operations for GenStudio and Firefly Services at Adobe. I'm joined today by Illianna Acosta from LinkedIn and Marie Knight from Adobe. In our session today, we're going to explore how AI is transforming B2B marketing by converting data-driven insights into measurable versus impact, particularly for companies navigating complex buying committees and extended sales cycles.
Let's begin with the stakes. Content today is the primary driver of B2B purchasing decisions. According to a recent Forrester study, about 62% of B2B buyers develop selection criteria or finalize a vendor list solely based on digital content. This statistic underscores a critical reality. Before your sales team engages with prospects, nearly two-thirds of them have already determined whether to consider your solution purely based on your content assets. This fundamentally means that your content is not just a marketing tactic, but it's a fuel that drives revenue. Given content's pivotal role today in B2B marketing, it requires a three-part approach. It's about producing more content but also making that content better and accelerating the content delivery timelines across multiple channels. When you combine these content refreshes frequently with highly personalized messaging and position them across all the relevant channels. They achieve measurably improved marketing and sales outcomes. This creates a direct correlation between content strategy and revenue performance. Our data shows that organizations implementing this approach have seen significant improvements in engagement rates, lead quality, and ultimately conversion metrics. This presents a substantial competitive opportunity as most organizations aren't executing effectively in these areas. Our research indicates that social media and email remain two of the top three channels through which B2B buyers discover new solutions. However, only 30%, less than a third of the brands, refresh their LinkedIn creative weekly, presenting an immediate advantage for companies that update their content more frequently on these platforms. And when it comes to personalization, about 69% of buyers tell us that personalized content influences their engagement decisions. The personalized approach shown in this example demonstrates how targeted messaging that addresses specific role-based concerns resonates more effectively with decision-makers, champions, and influencers in your target accounts.
Yet, despite understanding these imperatives, 59% of marketing teams report their creative resources simply cannot meet the growing demand for content. The scenario depicted here reflects the reality facing many creatives, multiple stakeholders requesting various content assets simultaneously, creating significant bottlenecks in the content production workflow. This challenge typically stems from three critical constraints, volume being the first one. Companies are facing a 5X increase in content demand, reflecting both the proliferation of channels and the need for more personalized assets. The second being time. Traditional content generation processes typically require about three to six weeks from concept to completion, which severely limits responsiveness to market trends and changes. And finally, cost. Even when accounting for all the resources involved and getting the volume and the time, dimensions right. Each content piece typically costs about $2,000 to $6,000, creating significant budget pressure as volume requirements increase for a enterprise brand.
Generative AI presents a solution to these fundamental challenges by transforming the content creation paradigm. For volume challenges, AI enables creation of multiple variations from a single generation, dramatically expanding output capacity. For time constraints, content generation becomes significantly faster through prompt-based workflows, reducing turnaround times from weeks to hours or minutes. And for cost concerns, AI allows content generation at a marginal cost, fundamentally changing the economics of content production. These capabilities represent a strategic advantage for B2B marketers needing to scale personalized communications.
However, enterprises remain hesitant, and we understand that there's a common set of reasons across the board. Many question whether AI-generated content meets professional standards and production standards. Others worry about whether these models are capable of creating content that reflects their brand tone and voice. Performance effectiveness remains unproven for many, and governance concerns persist. A particularly telling statistic that is that only one in four enterprise leaders feel that their organizations are prepared to address governance and risk-related issues with the usage of Generative AI technology.
These challenges informed our development at the Adobe GenStudio for Performance Marketing, a comprehensive, Generative AI first content workflow application designed specifically for marketing and creative teams to come together. The platform enables organizations to create and activate omni-channel content for digital marketing campaigns with four essential capabilities, maintaining brand integrity, enabling audience personalization, optimizing performance, and ensuring compliance.
Let's take a look at each of these.
GenStudio implements built-in guardrails through brand guidelines and templates to ensure generated content maintains your established brand identity. The AI-powered brand validation system evaluates your content against specific guidelines, identifying potential deviations before publication. The example displayed shows how the system analyzes visual elements and copy against defined brand parameters providing specific feedback on alignment with brand standards.
The second capability addresses audience customization. GenStudio enables efficient creation of role-specific and industry-specific messaging variants. As demonstrated here, content can be precisely tailored for different decision-makers, such as a Chief Data Officer versus a Chief Security Officer with appropriate pinpoints and messaging for each, all generated efficiently. This level of personalization, which would have traditionally required extensive resources, becomes operationally feasible through AI assistance.
The third pillar focuses on performance intelligence. GenStudio provides comprehensive analytics through centralized cross-channel insights and aggregated asset performance data. The AI-powered attribute analysis identifies specific visual and messaging elements that drive engagement, enabling continuous optimization based on empirical performance data. This analytics approach ensures marketing investments generate maximum returns through iterative improvement and experimentation. And the fourth capability addresses compliance requirements, often the most significant concern for enterprise marketing organizations. When we talk to customers today, they tell us that AI can definitely solve the content generation problem and creation aspects of it, but they're worried that there will be a bottleneck created on the review and approval processes front.
Through integrating structured review and approval workflows, as well as supporting accessibility guidelines like ADA and offering specialized compliance modules for regulated industries, the system can proactively identify potential compliance issues before publication, reducing organizational risks.
Integrating these capabilities creates a transformative content ecosystem where marketing teams can efficiently self-serve content needs across channels while maintaining appropriate brand governance. The system balances democratized content creation with necessary controls to brand validation scoring and streamlined review and approval workflows across marketing, legal, and creative/design stakeholders. This expanded view demonstrates how teams can generate coordinated content across different channels, be it display ads, be it email, be it social media, or even banner advertising, maintaining consistent and coherent messaging while optimizing for each channel specific requirements. This approach eliminates channel silos and ensures cohesive customer experiences across every single touch point.
To summarize, GenStudio enables organizations to scale enterprise-grade, production-ready content across all critical dimensions. It preserves brand integrity through built-in guardrails, facilitates audience customization, provides performance insights for optimization, and ensures regulatory compliance, all while dramatically improving operational efficiency.
Looking ahead, we're building several significant enhancements to the product, starting with integrations to other Adobe products. We're providing seamless integrations with Journey Optimizer, Marketo, Real-Time CDP, and Adobe Experience Manager Sites that will create a unified content ecosystem for your enterprise. Second, image and video generation. We're integrating with Adobe Firefly to provide you the ability to generate video and visual assets inside of GenStudio, including support for custom models. Third, extensibility. Through APIs, we will facilitate integrations with partner tools, including specialized compliance modules for regulated industries. And finally, through channel activation, we will streamline your workflow to go from content creation to activation across multiple platforms, starting with Meta, Google, Microsoft, TikTok, and LinkedIn. Speaking of LinkedIn, I am excited to announce that today, Adobe and LinkedIn are announcing a special partnership where customers can start creating on-brand, high-performing, compliant content specifically optimized for LinkedIn campaigns. This integration is particularly valuable for B2B marketers like you, where you can enable personalized content at scale for a platform where many B2B purchasing decisions occur. The capability supports sophisticated account-based marketing strategies with personalized content for specific target accounts and roles. If this is all interesting to you, I encourage you to connect with your Adobe partner or speak with any Adobe representative here at Summit to explore how GenStudio for Performance Marketing can help your organization drive revenue outcomes by using content at a strategic level. In today's digital B2B landscape, organizations that harness AI at scale to create personalized content will have significant competitive advantage, and we are excited to help you achieve that transformation.
With that, I'll turn it over to Marie and Illianna to talk a little bit about the announcement that we're making today as well as some trends in B2B marketing. [Marie Knight] All right. Thank you, Vaish. I appreciate it. So my name is Marie Knight. I am the Director of Technology Partnerships for Content and Commerce and GenStudio for Performance Marketing. And I'm super excited to announce that as of March 18, we are adding LinkedIn as one of our strategic partners for GenStudio Performance Marketing. Our new partnership is going to help B2B advertisers automate, review, and optimize creative content, which will also help them reduce time for building on-brand, high-performance, compliant assets for their B2B marketing campaigns on LinkedIn. Here with me today to talk about this exciting new partnership is Illianna Acosta, who's the Senior Manager of BDE at LinkedIn. Welcome, Illianna. [Illianna Acosta] Thank you. Thank you for having me. Yeah. We're excited to talk about this today. So we want to get into all the goodness of what this means for Adobe and LinkedIn together. But first, let's learn a little bit more about you. What should we know about you that's not on your LinkedIn profile? I'm an open book. So if you follow me, you'll know that I post and keep it real. But I love to travel. I didn't have much growing up. And so once I started traveling and seeing that there was such a big world out there to see, I was hooked. So I'm probably up to about 50 countries or so. Wow! You have maybe for sure. That's awesome. All right. Let's get into the business. So, Vaish mentioned in her presentation that about 69% of buyers are reporting that if an ad is personalized for them, it influences whether they even read it or not. So tell me a little bit about how building creative is different for B2B use cases versus B2C. For sure. Unlike B2C where a single individual makes the purchasing decision, in B2B, B2B's buying cycles are far more complex. It involves multiple stakeholders, think, finance, IT, procurement, legal, so on and so on. All of whom have different priorities and concerns. And our research shows that B2B marketers must influence an entire buying group, not just one person, which requires a much more strategic approach to messaging, ensuring that each stakeholder sees the unique value of a product or solution. Think about it, like, if you're buying a car, but instead of making the decision alone, you need approval from your parents, your lawyer, your BFF. Right? Each person cares about something different, whether it be safety, cost, reliability, how cute the car is. And so your approach needs to be tailored to address their specific concerns. And that's what makes B2B marketing so unique compared to B2C. It's about aligning the messaging, value prop, and engagement strategies to resonate with a diverse set of decision-makers ensuring that the entire buying group sees the impact and the ROI. And so that tailored messaging is critical because different stakeholders, like I mentioned before, have different unique priorities. CMOs, for example, focus on unique or rather, brand impact and market positioning. CFOs prioritize ROI and financial efficiency. And so with AI-powered automation, marketers can now create tailored creative assets for each persona and now dynamically adjust the messaging based on real-time engagement insights. And so capturing attention isn't enough. You need to build trust, educate stakeholders, and maintain that visibility throughout those long sales cycles in B2B. Yeah. That's a lot. I'm glad we have tools to help us do that. It sounds like a lot to keep track of as a marketer.
So that's everything we have to think about today. What are some of the big trends you're predicting for the rest of 2025 in B2B? You know one of them is going to be AI. I'm just going to preface that. But I think B2B marketing will be shaped by a few major trends. First, I think the dominance of video, specially, around real-time analytics for better measurement and AI-powered personalization. Short form video is rapidly becoming one of the most effective ad formats with marketers seeing the highest ROI from social video and increasing their investment accordingly, which is great. And that shift isn't just about engagement. It's about making more content accessible, educational, and aligned with today's modern buying behavior. And there's such cool emerging formats like CTV, which isn't new, but the new formats available in CTV are awesome. AR and VR are also further accelerating that same trend.
And at the same time, real-time analytics will help bridge the ongoing measurement gap in B2B marketing. While most marketers feel confident in their ability to track performance, so many still struggle to prove actual ROI, particularly in B2B where there's long and complex sales cycles. And so AI-driven analytics will help marketers to optimize campaigns in real-time, connecting marketing efforts more directly to revenue impact, which is a win. And then finally, obviously, we can't run from AI and the power and the impact it's having and will continue to have across industries, particularly in tech. And AI-powered personalization will move beyond just content generation to become a key driver of campaigning performance. The future of B2B marketing isn't just about personalization. It's about hyper personalization at scale. And, again, talking about ensuring the right message reaches the right decision-maker at the right time. And so I think this combo, this AI, video, and data-driven insights will redefine how B2B brands engage with their audiences, creating more impactful, measurable, and personalized marketing strategies that drive long-term success. Yeah. No, I think those are all great predictions. I've even started to see this with short form video for Adobe Summit of people recording, what to know before the show or "Here's what I'm packing." And that's obviously at the individual level. But as we think about how enterprises scale that, I could see that being-- It's hyper-engaging for me as a B2B consumer. Oh, yeah. So I'm excited to see more of that come using AI to help generate more personalized content in the future. All right. Videos all over our LinkedIn feed, and so it's not going away. - It's awesome. - Yeah. For sure. For sure. All right, one last question in the interest of time, how do you think about-- You touched on this a little bit in the predictions and trends, but how do you think about GenAI helping to engage an audience on LinkedIn specifically as a channel? What is unique about that when you're thinking about GenAI as the tool you're using? Oh, yeah. We're hearing a lot around this. A lot of what we do with the marketers on how they're using GenAI includes things like, again, enabling scalable personalization, driving smarter content strategies, and automating content creation without losing human creativity. I think in the case of B2B, on LinkedIn, AI allows marketers to tailor content for different stakeholders within the B2B buying committee or buyer group as we've been talking about. This can allow brands to dynamically generate LinkedIn ads and sponsored content that resonate with each persona that helps them drive even more meaningful engagement, which is amazing. I think beyond personalization, those AI-powered insights are golden. Right? That can be used to help refine constant strategies by analyzing real-time engagement data, lead conversions, and audience interactions. That means that now brands can quickly adapt and optimize their LinkedIn content based on what's working, improving overall performance. And honestly, I love this for us, and I love this for our customers that we're here, that we've arrived at this point, and it's only just getting started. I think it also helps to streamline that content creation by automating those routine tasks, like text posts or ad copy. And it frees up marketers to focus on those high-value storytelling strategy. Rather than, I think, replacing creativity, AI enhances it. Right? It helps teams to create and test and scale content efficiently while keeping messaging fresh and relevant. And so I think, to answer, to sum it up, it's by leveraging AI, brands can now ensure their LinkedIn marketing remains impactful, data-driven, and hyper-personalized. And it's such an exciting time, and I can't wait to see how this all unfolds over the next year plus. Yeah. No. I couldn't agree more. I think at Adobe, we share that view very much so in that really empowering creatives to spend more of their time being creative and building the storytelling, building the story, and then automating some of the more repetitive tasks. And like you said, personalizing content across multiple buyer groups quickly, that just saves so much time for them to focus on what they're good at, which is creating unique assets. So we're excited to see, like you said, I think we're going to start to see that change this year in the LinkedIn feed in terms of content with this new integration. - Yeah. - We're excited for that. Already starting to see it. So I think this will enhance what we're already doing, which is super exciting. Awesome. Awesome. Well, I'm going to let you go. But before I do, you are our LinkedIn guru. You got to let me know who are you following on LinkedIn? Who should I be following? Who are your favorites? Tell me. I follow so many people, but it is March. So in the spirit of women history month, I will say Lola Bakare, who's super bold and an incredible marketer, and Mel Robbins, who drops gems regularly. And I listen to her podcast and all the things. So I see those two powerhouse women are two to follow. Amazing. Once we hang up, I'm going to go add both of them to my LinkedIn feed and follow them. Amazing. That sounds awesome. Thank you so much, Illianna. And for those listening in, please be sure to check out the new integration with LinkedIn and GenStudio for Performance Marketing. Again, if you're watching this after March 18, it's live. So we couldn't be more excited, and we'll talk to you soon, Illi. Thank you for the time. Thanks for having me. - Bye. - Bye-bye.
[Music]
