Reinventing Creative Marketing: Insights from Adobe Summit EMEA and Adobe MAX London
Adobe Firefly, Creative Cloud and Albus
What a week it has been! I report back from Adobe Summit EMEA and Adobe MAX London where a slew of announcements and exciting conversations happened. Let's dig in.
Featured Insight: The impact of generative AI on creative marketing
In the spotlight were the innovative applications of technology to creative production, highlighting two key themes: the transformative potential of AI for the industry, and the assurance to creatives that their artistic talents are not under threat but primed for amplification through these advancements.
The latest on Adobe Firefly
A step back, Adobe introduced us to Firefly, their generative AI software, in March. Since its inception, it has generated a staggering 200 million images, despite its invitation-only beta status until recently.
Firefly's evolution is remarkable, boasting an expanded feature set including generative fill (which allows AI to generate sections of an existing image) and a unique font creation tool. These features, now integrated into Adobe Creative Cloud apps like Photoshop (Beta), have seamlessly merged into the creative workflow.
As discussed previously, Firefly benefits from training on over 100 million Adobe Stock images, licensed images, and public domain images - contrasting starkly with OpenAI DALL-E or Midjourney, restricted by ethical sourcing and copyright issues.
Today, Adobe builds on its 2019 Content Authenticity initiative to label AI-generated content and flag tampering. Firefly-generated images now bear this trust seal, as do images edited in Photoshop using AI tools. These images can be uploaded to the verification website, bolstering authenticity and attribution. Imperfect as it may be, it provides significant reassurance for enterprise customers keen on leveraging this technology sans reputational risks.
What does this mean for corporate clients?
I strongly believe content marketing and creative operations will be the first marketing areas to be disrupted by generative AI technology. Content marketing has already changed, with large language models (LLMs) unlocking infinite content generation potential (a while back we talked about Writer). Creative marketing and operations are now poised for a big shift in the coming months too.
Generative AI offers in-house and agency teams a near-infinite well of inspiration, drawing from hundreds of millions of images which have trained the model. For instance, creating a mood board or initial design concepts can be accelerated from days to minutes. Once a creative concept is identified, generative AI can accelerate execution, building upon the human-generated idea.
This technology empowers wider groups of creatives to participate in ambitious projects. For instance, creating 3D models from flat images becomes possible, significantly reducing workflow times.
The capabilities of generative AI unlock the much-coveted goal of truly personalized marketing. The ability to generate content and creative assets at scale and in real-time enables truly personal conversations with customers in both B2C and B2B settings, which will become the expected norm.
No doubt there will be much spam out there, with some taking shortcuts using generative AI to churn out puff pieces and bland creatives (this is already a menace to AI models today). Customers will recognise this (just as they recognise content pieces produced just for Google today) and will crave story, craft and meaning. A flood of content will set a higher bar for customer experiences. Scale and efficiency will give more value to meaning and scarcity. Engagement will not happen by content but by meaning. There are all opportunities for creative talent and enlightened brands to shine.
I am very excited about the current evolution of the marketing discipline. In the coming weeks, we will explore how all this change can be accommodated in large, complex organisations via sustainable digital transformation programmes.
Very similarly to the first wave of transformation, the one that moved organisations from a siloed digital marketing team into an "everyone is digital" one, we will witness a much wider adoption of creative tools across the marketing department, which will reshape the relationship between product, media and creative teams forever.
In the meantime, there is one thing brands can do: focus on 1st party data. Data is the fuel that helps every user feel "known" and whilst the above developments in creative operations might take some time to materialise in large enterprises, the work on 1st party data can, and should, start now.
Spotlight On: Albus
Albus is a great tool to explore any topic by seeing a variety of content related to it and suggestions on what adjacent topics to explore. Fantastic for education and research.
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