Why leading brands are mastering their content supply chain

Impactful marketing is about creating moments of inspiration that stand out for your customers. But in a world where people are exposed to thousands of ads, blogs, newsletters, and branded videos each day, it’s difficult enough to cut through all the noise, much less deliver personalised experiences that strike at the right time and drive customers to act.

For their part, marketing executives must find a way to scale up their content production and campaign execution without blowing up their costs. According to a recent CMO survey, average marketing budgets in Western Europe and the Americas have dropped from 9.1% of overall company revenue in 2023 to just 7.7% this year. Put simply, marketing leaders must empower their teams to do more with less.

That’s what makes the rise of generative AI so compelling for CMOs and content marketers alike. Since implementing solutions powered by Adobe Firefly, Adobe’s family of generative AI capabilities, major brands around the world have made their content supply chain processes more time and cost-efficient by orders of magnitude. Meanwhile, their creative and content teams have unlocked new levels of speed and agility, allowing them deliver true personalisation at scale to millions of customers at once.

Creating standout experiences across every industry

A recent Total Economic Impact Study (TEI) from Forrester found that enterprises using Adobe’s content supply chain portfolio saw ROI high as 310% just three years after their investment thanks to the efficiency gains and cost reductions delivered by our solutions. For instance, respondent brands boosted their asset reusage by 30% while reducing content review times by 40% and cutting the time required to scale and localise campaign assets in half.

From global technology leaders, to major B2B players, to historic financial institutions, Adobe Firefly is helping customers across every industry draw on the power of generative AI to transform their content development and campaign management, and reap big-time returns as a result.

Let’s start with IBM, which used Adobe Firefly to put commercially-viable generative AI directly into its teams’ workflows. This allowed its marketing teams to develop 200 assets and over 1000 marketing variations for its landmark “Let’s Create” ad campaign in a matter of minutes, a process that would have previously taken days.

Speed wasn’t the only benefit for IBM. Its marketing team also achieved an engagement rate 26 times higher than their campaign benchmark. What’s more, 20% of respondents who engaged with Let’s Create campaign assets were C-level decision-makers, a notoriously difficult group to reach.

Let’s turn attention to Henkel, a German multinational proving that generative AI holds as much promise for B2B marketers as it does for consumer-facing brands. Henkel’s creative teams have seen an exponential rise in demand for personalised content to fuel the company’s omnichannel and digital marketing campaigns. Using Adobe Firefly and Adobe Experience Cloud, Henkel’s marketers have positioned themselves to deliver personalisation across its global brand portfolio, which includes household names from Persil to Schwarzkopf.

Using Adobe Firefly Custom Models, for instance, Henkel will be able to train and fine-tune its generative AI models using its own assets, empowering its marketers to create compelling on-brand content faster and at a lower cost. Takes the teams behind hair care brand, Schwarzkopf, who can now enhance their product recommendations for customers with visual assets that are personalised at the individual level based on each person’s hair colour, length, and style.

Finally, Lloyds Banking Group is showing the world that even a three-centuries-old financial services organisation can find new ways to empower its employees and delight its customers with personalised digital experiences. Using Adobe Workfront, Lloyds’ 750 campaign managers have automated processes across the company’s content and campaign management processes, including 30% of its Internet banking workflows. For their part, Lloyd’s digital team has cut its time-to-market for new campaigns in half.

As importantly for Lloyds’ campaign managers and key marketing stakeholders, all content and campaign data across the business flows through the Workfront software. That means everyone from creators to product teams can easily upload, access, and manage assets and content reviews in a single application.

These success stories mark the beginning of a content supply chain revolution. Each day, I speak with more business leaders who are ready to leave their disjointed content workflows in the past and adopt a modern, integrated approach powered by generative AI.

The best part is that they won’t have to wait years to see their investment pay off. According to Forrester’s study, enterprises that implement our supply chain solutions can expect to see their investment pay off in under 6 months and start driving measurable profits from that point forward. Speaking for Adobe, I look forward to being a part of that journey and seeing these gains materialise in the months and years ahead.

Ready to supercharge your content workflows with generative AI? Click here to get started with our content supply chain solutions today.