Combining generative AI and the content supply chain is the secret to unlocking personalisation at scale. Here’s why.
I’ve always loved telling stories. In fact, stories inspired my first career in film. And through filmmaking, production and marketing I discovered another passion: using data to understand people, craft business strategies, and think creatively about the best way to engage audiences.
For years brands have been trying to deliver personalisation at scale with varying degrees of success. Marketers might reach a relatively small audience with tailored experiences, but connecting with millions of customers worldwide with different needs and using different technologies elevates the challenge to a whole new level.
This is particularly true for a company the size of IBM. We operate in 170 countries and 17 industries with thousands of products and services. There are infinite ways to adjust marketing strategies to create experiences tailored to every customer. At IBM we know personalisation works, we’ve seen its success firsthand at IBM with personalised experiences resulting in click-through rates 4.5 times higher than less targeted approaches.
But achieving the holy grail that is personalisation at scale has remained elusive… until now. For the first time ever at IBM, we’re seeing how we can achieve it by combining generative AI and the content supply chain, thanks to our partnership with Adobe.
Igniting creativity with data and generative AI
AI has been at the heart of IBM’s business for decades. But it was when I saw a preview of Adobe Firefly at Adobe Summit in 2023, that I saw the potential to combine large language models and visualisation models to transform content creation at a whole new level.
At IBM, we believe the best way to test new technology is to experiment with it in market, so we became the first business to use Firefly and devised ‘Let’s Create’, a personalised social campaign launched at the 2023 US Masters golf tournament. Using simple text prompts, our team of creatives generated 200 assets and over 1,000 marketing variations for the campaign in a matter of minutes.
It was our best-performing campaign of 2023 by far with 26x higher engagement than average. And it reached valuable audiences, with 20% of respondents identified as C-level decision makers. It didn’t just succeed because we combined speed and real-time data to create more personalised content. The big breakthrough was how Firefly allowed our designers and marketers to create content at a scale never seen before, and that gave them more opportunities to experiment and be creative. From the success of the ‘Let’s Create’ campaign alone, we knew we were moving in the right direction with Adobe.
At the same time, we turned our attention to our content supply chain to better understand our workflows and identify inefficiencies. In marketing, we talk endlessly about ideas like content supply chain, but for most companies that’s a metaphor. But why can’t content actually be a supply chain, treated with the same rigor that an automobile manufacturer treats car parts? So we got very literal and actually built out a content supply chain with Adobe Workfront to clearly outline what content we have, where it is in the creative process, time to market, and costs.
Workfront gave us, for the first time, a clear view of our content and creative workflows. We learned that we spent about 80% of our time and cost on what I call derivative work — like translating assets, creating variations for every channel, and seeking approvals. These are necessary parts of the content process, but don’t add creative value and can be vastly reduced with the use of Firefly. The moment that we understood the content supply chain and the efficiency and scale that generative AI brings, we had a solution that significantly reduces that time and cost. For IBM, that represents a potential $140 million reinvestment straight back into creative.
Through our partnership with Adobe, we’re seeing generative AI and the content supply chain coming into their own at the same time, giving IBM a path forward to achieving personalisation at scale for the first time. For us, generative AI has already evolved from an experiment into a practical tool that we expect will increase IBM’s creative productivity tenfold. Meanwhile, the content supply chain delivers full visibility of our creative processes and opportunities to reduce costs.
Implementing generative AI for IBM marketing has reshaped my expectations around impact and timing. This transformation is happening faster and more profoundly than marketing and digital teams might even anticipate. Witnessing the substantial progress we've already achieved with Adobe fills both me and IBM with immense excitement for the future.
To learn how you can supercharge your content supply chain with the power of generative AI, click here.
Ari Sheinkin is a growth leader who specialises in applying advanced analytics to drive financial results. In his current role, he leads marketing demand generation globally for IBM directing $1B in spend to deliver over $20B in annual marketing sourced revenue. He leads an international team of over 1,000 employees responsible for all aspect of media, campaigns, and digital, and manage all the supporting martech, data, and analytics. His approach to business growth through data-science has been recognized with the ANA Genius Award, I-COM Grand Prize, Stevie Gold Medal, SAMMY Product of the Year Award, Google Customer Success Award, GroupM Search Award, and covered by press including Harvard Business Review. Prior to his marketing roles, Ari spent a decade consulting with companies across industries and government agencies on the strategic application of analytics for business growth. Prior, he had a short-lived career as a film maker which shaped his storytelling leadership style.
