Adobe on AI, emotion and the ‘enormous pressure’ for content

Adobe believes it is well placed to meet the “enormous pressure” for content marketers are facing right now and claims its “augmented intelligence” tools will enhance human creativity rather than replace it.

The design brand has been quick to implement AI into many of its most famous products – Adobe Photoshop and InDesign – and has also launched Adobe Firefly, its own native AI generation tool, which has generated 24 billion images since its launch in 2023.

Vice-president of marketing Simon Morris is well aware of the demand marketers are under to create more content across a variety of media channels and believes Adobe is “uniquely positioned” to bring creativity and marketing togethe to help brands drive growth.

“There’s this enormous pressure for content which has just exploded,” he explains. “There’s more channels, more ways of reaching customers and there’s this recognition from brands that they also have to deliver personalisation at scale if they want to deliver the best outcomes for their business.”

It’s a challenge Morris has to deal with himself. He understands the pressures marketers face to do “more with less” and battle against having enough hours in the day to do everything.

“You need monumental amounts of content,” he says. “The platforms are demanding ten variations, not three. There’s this pressure on the business to create content and to do more with less. We know what these tools will enable is for teams to meet that challenge.”

We are absolutely drinking our own champagne. We are the guinea pigs and we work hand in hand with the product team.

Simon Morris, Adobe

Firefly – as well as the rest of the Adobe suite – will enable marketing teams to “avoid the bottleneck” that comes with having to run every creative tweak through the studio team, he says. He also claims the AI tech will “unleash” the performance marketers who know how to optimise performance and channels, but lacked the tools to be able to do it quickly enough.

“We’re meeting the need of the businesses that know if you want to drive business growth, you need to produce more content to scale,” Morris adds.

Most importantly, he says Firefly is brand friendly because it operates on licensed content rather than scraping the web like many LLMs (large language models) do. This is “really important” for brands, says Morris, because they want to know if they are using these tools they’re not at risk of “violating copyright” and getting into legal issues.

“We are making sure that brands have the confidence and knowledge that the output generated is going to be commercially safe,” he stresses. “It’s not scraping the web; it’s using licenced content. That puts us in a very different space.”

Emotion still matters

A common criticism of many AI tools is that while they may help people to create work quicker, the result is an increasing sea of sameness as the playing field is levelled out and marketers turn towards the safest option. Morris believes AI will allow marketers more time to focus on the things that matter and create better, more emotional content.

“We know the importance of storytelling and finding those emotionally resonant experiences, campaigns and ideas,” he says. “That’s what it’s [AI] going to free up. It’s going to free up teams to be able to focus more on that and less on the tedious tasks like generating variations to various assets and images. I actually think we’re going to see an uplift in the quality of emotional content.”

Of course, with so many product innovations to keep on top of and market at the moment, Morris is comfortable with the marketing team at Adobe being a test subject.

This approach comes with two benefits: it builds a stronger relationship with the product team and means marketing has a greater understanding of how to market the AI offer to the customer.

You need monumental amounts of content. The platforms are demanding ten variations, not three.

Simon Morris, Adobe

He believes Adobe’s recently released LLM Optimiser is a good example of this, a tool which helps brands adapt to an AI search world. The product came about because marketing “saw the painpoint early” and worked with the product team to create a “solution” to take out to market.

“We are absolutely drinking our own champagne,” says Morris. “We are the guinea pigs and we work hand in hand with the product team to help them understand the pressures and business challenges we have within marketing to meet customer expectations, and we push them to ensure they’re delivering products that are ahead of the curve. It’s very close partnership.”

He is also aware of the dangers of focusing too much on AI innovations and neglecting Adobe’s core product offer. Morris believes the approach Adobe has taken with Firefly, and how it has been “deeply integrated” into the workflow creative professionals have been using for decades, has made the jump to an AI future easier.

“It’s not like you have to come out of Photoshop to use our AI tools,” he says. “It’s there in the workflow that you’re used to using and the tools you’re used to using. You just have these capabilities available for you. Tasks that might have taken you eight, 10 or 12 hours to do in the past, now you can do in minutes.”

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It is, in many ways, an approach that balances the past with the future – and something Morris carries with him when it comes to his marketing principles.

“I love the John Hegarty quote: ‘Principles remain, but practices change’. And we understand that we’ve been around for more than 40 years. Innovation has always been at the heart of what Adobe does,” says Morris.

“We know who we are as a brand, what we stand for, what our purpose is. But you need to be able to evolve that and connect with your customers.”

His customers are dealing with a level of change the industry has not seen for a generation. Morris points again to the “enormous” amount of content brands are expected to produce and believes that is only going to get “bigger and bigger”, meaning the pressure on marketing is going to increase in kind.

“What excites me most about working for Adobe is that we’re the only company that can bring creativity, marketing and AI together to help meet those demands,” he concludes.