Great creative doesn’t just stop you in your tracks — it captivates and inspires — and Currys’ recent ‘New Term’ campaign does exactly that. This campaign not only showcased the power of AI technologies within its laptop range but does so in a brilliantly pioneering way — by using Adobe Firefly’s generative AI to bring the campaign itself to life. This clever and innovative approach resulted in a bold, vibrant, and effortlessly on-brand campaign that’s a testament to the creative team’s talents and the incredible potential of AI in the creative process. It’s a shining example of how technology can unlock exciting new creative possibilities without losing the human touch. But how did they get there?

Every second, two people enter a Currys store and 54 people visit Currys.co.uk. That’s a staggering 73 million in-store visits and 1.7 billion website views annually.

Each customer is searching for something different. Whether it’s the latest Samsung laptop, a PlayStation console, a Panasonic or Sony TV, or even a telescope, Currys offers products from many of the country’s favourite brands. Established in 1927 as a bicycle retailer (before expanding into home appliances and electronics in the 60s), it’s a household name and stalwart of the British retail scene.

However, a rich history isn’t always enough to keep pace with the demands of an increasingly competitive online retail market, where brands must constantly engage customers with fresh, compelling content to stay top of mind. With tight production timelines straining the team’s ability to deliver the volume of content needed, Currys had to find a way to produce and release campaigns into the market faster.

It wasn’t a lack of creative talent holding Currys back (just look at the brand’s self-deprecating viral TikTok series). Rather, the primary challenge lay in Currys’ ability to produce the high-quality content the creative team desired, at scale. Enter Adobe Firefly.

Armed with the game-changing generative AI capabilities of Adobe Firefly, Currys is accelerating its content supply chain to bring the brand’s trademark innovative campaigns to life in a commercially safe way. Early experimenters of Generative AI are seeing value fast, and Currys is no exception. For its recent ‘New Term’ campaign, Firefly helped save thousands of pounds in potential agency costs, and campaign ideation and production was roughly twice as fast.

Unlocking creative potential with Generative AI-powered design

The creative team’s first campaign with Adobe launched during a critical time for many retailers – the back-to-school period. For its ‘New Term’ campaign, aimed at promoting AI-powered laptops to students, Ben Hickman, Currys’ Senior Digital and Creative Design Manager, started by experimenting with different Firefly presets and generating structures around Currys’ circular brand elements.

Next, he sketched linear motion ideas in Adobe Illustrator, using Firefly's Composition Reference tool to refine prompts, before expanding the image in Adobe Photoshop with Generative Expand, and finally integrating brand assets into the structured design.

The result was a visually striking, brand-aligned campaign that seamlessly blended Generative AI-powered creativity with Currys’ signature design, capturing shopper attention.

Prior to Firefly, Hickman and his team would have relied on traditional design methods – such as manual concept development, tedious visual refinements, and lengthy asset integration – making the process significantly time-consuming and labour-intensive.

With Firefly, Currys is able to streamline asset creation, freeing its best creative minds to focus on visual storytelling and brand expression.

Pushing creative boundaries with commercially safe, Generative AI-powered storytelling

Beyond the over 50% reduction in agency costs and accelerated content ideation and production process for the ‘New Term’ campaign, Firefly has also enabled Currys to slash overall campaign development time from weeks to days, all while also maintaining that crucial creative control to scale output that’s both on-brand and commercially safe.

On average, the Currys creative team produces 20 campaigns each quarter, providing assets such as website banners, email banners, social templates, and digital ads. With Firefly, the team has almost doubled the number of creative options per campaign and increased the volume of templates created for each channel by 150%. These variations mean they can refresh campaign assets more frequently, keeping content engaging for longer and extending the overall lifespan of campaigns.

Currys' marketing and creative team thrives on experimentation, and they're eager to push their use of Generative AI further and apply Firefly to more campaigns and creative outputs – automating more tasks, enhancing storytelling, and redefining retail marketing.

“Firefly is more than a tool, it’s a catalyst for innovation,” says McDonald. “It’s enabled us to rewrite what’s possible in retail technology marketing, and we’re just getting started.”

Commercially safe AI with Firefly

For any brand, protecting intellectual property and maintaining compliance is just as important as creative innovation. With Firefly, Currys can confidently scale content production, knowing every asset generated is commercially safe. That’s because Firefly’s models are trained on licensed content within Adobe Stock, ensuring campaigns meet IP regulations without risk.

“We’ve worked with Adobe for years. It’s a company and technology that we trust,” says Hickman. “If you’re using Adobe software, you know you are on the cutting edge of technology. It’s the best in class for a reason.”

https://business.adobe.com/uk/fragments/creative-currys-the-genai