Adobe and WPP Collaborate to Develop New Technologies for Creative Workflows and Campaigns

According to a survey Adobe commissioned from Forrester Research, experience-driven businesses see 1.6x more brand awareness, 1.5x more repeat visitors, and 1.9x higher average order value than non-experience driven businesses.

This is indicative of how big of a priority customer experience is for brands today; however, the challenge of scaling these practices can be considerable. Experience-driven marketing requires content velocity. This includes increased personalization, contextual awareness of the customer, and a greater variety of assets delivered with speed and frequency across channels. Brands continue to rely on their agency partners to help navigate these challenges through intelligent use of data and efficient design practices.

That’s why we’re excited to work with WPP, a world leader in communications services, to develop solutions that streamline asset workflows between creative and marketing teams to help scale content production and design.

Reimagining the Creative Brief

The brand-agency relationship often begins with the creative brief. Used correctly, it becomes a source of creative and design truth for an entire campaign. But in a world of ever increasing content velocity, the client brief too often falls short. Dynamic, scalable, experience-driven campaigns require a living document capable of evolving in real time as new information, assets and objectives emerge.

Adobe and WPP (via its agencies Ogilvy and Wunderman) are developing a new creative brief solution that does exactly that. The goal of this solution is to remake the static creative brief as a living hub to streamline brand-agency collaboration. From one secure portal, clients can submit design briefs, directly collaborate with their agency partners on the content, infuse real-time campaign data and assets to inform content, and quickly approve final assets.

The new creative brief hub will eliminate the redundancy and fragmentation that often comes from having multiple people work on one traditional brief. It will also enable designers to start work faster and make better use of their time.

Efficient Use of Design Tools

A single campaign can generate hundreds of thousands of visual assets, many of them generated through incremental changes and edits to image size, formatting or geo-localization. While many of these changes may be small, the time it takes designers to make them can become significant and impact the entire creative process.

By combining asset creation and management technology from Adobe Creative Cloud and Adobe Experience Manager, WPP and Adobe are developing solutions that allow for faster, more efficient content creation. This will reduce the time teams spend on non-creative and non-business-critical tasks, giving them more time to focus on content quality and innovation.

For example, Adobe is working with WPP agencies Grey and Wunderman to develop a Photoshop Imaging Engine that automates repetitive tasks and improves creative workflows around Photoshop in the response to a creative brief.

The Photoshop Imaging Engine will result in workflow improvements for creating, editing and delivering final assets to clients over the course of a campaign. The Photoshop Imaging Engine will provide up to a 90% reduction in time needed for template creation and up to a 95% reduction in time needed to change requests in templates.

Exploring the Next Frontier in Customer Experiences: Voice

Adobe and WPP are also exploring new technology to accelerate the design process and enable new kinds of customer experiences.

Voice interaction is an emerging area of interest for brands. Services like Alexa and Siri have become commonplace, and ecosystems are beginning to develop around them. With more consumers using mobile devices, and experiences like augmented reality and virtual reality around the corner, we expect voice technology will become an increasingly important part of brand identity and digital experiences.

Adobe and Grey are developing a project called Voice Information Architecture that will enable consumers to experience a brand site in a consistent way, whether they use their eyes or voices.

While each of these efforts offers significant stand-alone value, combined they have the potential to revolutionize the creative workflow for building digital experiences. Our collective vision is a world where designers are better informed and able to manage assets efficiently at scale to create incredible experiences on behalf of their clients.