Using AI to Get Your Creative Juices Flowing

Strate­gies for dri­ving cre­ativ­i­ty, and increas­ing mar­ket­ing pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and effi­cien­cy with AI.

Despite its name, much of the con­tent “cre­ation” process isn’t about cre­ativ­i­ty. Often the process is very man­u­al and even tedious as design­ers and mar­keters dig into time-con­sum­ing activ­i­ties such as image search­es — time and tal­ent that could be spent build­ing a cre­ative vision. While it’s nec­es­sary work, it’s not ide­al for the design­er or the organ­i­sa­tion they support.

That said, with more con­tent avail­able and more con­tent veloc­i­ty demand­ed, resources are con­stant­ly being allo­cat­ed to keep pace with con­sumer demands. “You have to be in the consumer’s line of sight 24/7,” says Shamb­havi Kadam, group prod­uct man­ag­er, Adobe Stock. “It’s hard to com­pete for the consumer’s atten­tion when they get infor­ma­tion instan­ta­neous­ly, and review it across mul­ti­ple chan­nels and devices. To do that, you have to cre­ate con­tent much faster and at a larg­er vol­ume,” she says. At the same time, the con­tent still must be high qual­i­ty and personalised.

A new paradigm for marketers

Giv­en these height­ened demands for increased quan­ti­ty, qual­i­ty, and veloc­i­ty, more and more com­pa­nies are lean­ing on arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (AI). “By weav­ing AI into core work­flows and process­es and inte­grat­ing a large con­tent repos­i­to­ry, such as Adobe Stock, mar­keters can gain the added time and band­width they need to be more cre­ative,” Shamb­havi says. This stream­lines com­mu­ni­ca­tion, col­lab­o­ra­tion, and over­all suc­cess, enhanc­ing and ele­vat­ing the cre­ative process from con­cept to kickoff.

Lever­ag­ing Adobe Sen­sei, our AI and machine-learn­ing tech­nol­o­gy, cre­atives and mar­keters can quick­ly, eas­i­ly, and accu­rate­ly search mil­lions of assets to find the desired con­tent. Lay­er in AI-pow­ered fea­tures like Visu­al Search and Aes­thet­ic Fil­ters in Adobe Stock, and mar­keters can real­ize gains that dif­fer­en­ti­ate them in the mar­ket­place. With Aes­thet­ic Fil­ters, for exam­ple, you can apply unique search fil­ters such as depth of field and vivid col­or with a sin­gle click. This instant­ly — and sig­nif­i­cant­ly — stream­lines image results by only show­ing images that match these pho­to­graph­ic prop­er­ties. It’s a sim­ple added step — and one that saves time and improves work­flow efficiencies.

Here are three ben­e­fits com­pa­nies real­ized once they incor­po­rat­ed AI func­tion­al­i­ty into their cre­ative process:

1. Streamline the creative process

Cush­man & Wake­field, one of the lead­ing real estate ser­vices firms in the world, fre­quent­ly uses cus­tom visu­als in its mar­ket­ing team’s sales col­lat­er­al. Giv­en the demands on the team — in 2017 they pro­duced more than 300 pre­sen­ta­tions and 500-plus dis­tinct deliv­er­ables — they need­ed to find tar­get­ed solu­tions to help them pro­duce big­ger, bet­ter deliv­er­ables in less time, rely­ing on remote team mem­bers and dig­i­tal col­lab­o­ra­tion to get the job done.

The Cush­man & Wake­field team was par­tic­u­lar­ly chal­lenged when it came to obtain­ing stock images that they would cus­tomise for their mar­ket­ing col­lat­er­al. At the time, their process involved first a design­er, find­ing a stock pho­to then email­ing a link to an account admin­is­tra­tor. From there, the admin would pass the asset back to the design­er, clos­ing the loop — and, often, tak­ing a good deal of time from request to com­ple­tion. It was a very tedious and man­u­al process that cre­at­ed sig­nif­i­cant inef­fi­cien­cies and bottlenecks.

After con­vert­ing to Adobe Cre­ative Cloud and Adobe Stock for enter­prise, Cush­man & Wake­field cre­atives and mar­keters gained imme­di­ate access to high-qual­i­ty pho­tographs, illus­tra­tions, graph­ics, and video that can be read­i­ly shared with­in the orga­ni­za­tion. What’s more, the team also began inte­grat­ing Adobe’s Visu­al Search and Aes­thet­ic Fil­ters into their process­es, gain­ing even greater cre­ative effi­cien­cies and broad­er capa­bil­i­ties. Visu­al Search allows the team’s design­ers to quick­ly and eas­i­ly drag images into the search bar and, from there, instant­ly find the right Adobe Stock image. “Being able to work with Adobe Stock direct­ly through our Adobe Cre­ative Cloud apps is a huge time-saver,” says Sheila Cheng, cre­ative direc­tor, busi­ness devel­op­ment, Glob­al Occu­pi­er Ser­vices at Cush­man & Wakefield.

This is the com­mon design chal­lenge that Visu­al Search was built to solve. “Instead of going through pages and pages of office build­ing images that don’t fit what I need,” Sheila explains, “I can find an image that’s almost right, and start look­ing for sim­i­lar images. With Adobe Sen­sei pow­er­ing intel­li­gent search options in Adobe Stock, we can get a lot more cre­ative because we know we’ll find exact­ly what we want.”

By weav­ing Visu­al Search into the cre­ative process, orga­ni­za­tions can artic­u­late their visu­al wants and needs with an image, instead of try­ing to cap­ture the request in sim­ple words and phras­es. “It’s real­ly hard to describe some­thing that you have visu­al­ly in your mind into a search engine, and get the same results,” Shamb­havi says. Visu­al Search instant­ly makes the process faster, smarter, and more intu­itive, elim­i­nat­ing count­less hours of man­u­al work — no more search­ing and sift­ing through thou­sands of image results with the hopes of find­ing “the one.” Now, that time can be applied to big­ger busi­ness-build­ing and cre­ative initiatives.

2. Find the right image

Dentsu Aegis’ Glob­al Cen­ter of Excel­lence for Social Con­tent — a cen­tral piece of the Dentsu Aegis Net­work — helps cus­tomers pro­duce more engag­ing con­tent and rich visu­al expe­ri­ences for a vari­ety of plat­forms and chan­nels. To sup­port this diverse work, the organ­i­sa­tion con­sis­tent­ly seeks high-qual­i­ty stock images and videos for mem­ber agen­cies. “Pre­vi­ous­ly, every group and mar­ket found their own stock pho­tos, using resources rang­ing from cre­ative com­mons to sub­scrip­tion ser­vices,” says Sab­ri­na Rodriguez, glob­al head of social con­tent at Dentsu Aegis Net­work. “Often groups weren’t get­ting the full val­ue of their sub­scrip­tion, per­haps pay­ing for 50 images a month but only using a handful.”

Since the shift, though, Dentsu Aegis has stan­dard­ised the process, dri­ving cost sav­ings and pro­duc­tion effi­cien­cies. This, Sab­ri­na says, “improves cost and pro­duc­tion effi­cien­cy while help­ing ensure com­pli­ance over ad-hoc meth­ods.” Now, cre­ators “can access Adobe Stock con­tent through Adobe Cre­ative Cloud apps to work faster and ele­vate cre­ative con­tent.” Addi­tion­al­ly, with Adobe Sensei’s Visu­al Search and Aes­thet­ic Fil­ters, teams can spend more time devel­op­ing inno­v­a­tive deliv­er­ables and less search­ing for the right image.

3. Leverage AI so you can do you

At the core of these ben­e­fits is an eye on the tasks that only you or your cre­ative leads can tack­le — and, beyond that, what you or these crit­i­cal play­ers can and should be focused on. Often, the answer isn’t image licens­ing but, instead, tasks involv­ing sig­nif­i­cant cre­ative ener­gy and a “human” touch.

By tap­ping into AI to han­dle tasks or sim­ply to reduce the time invest­ed, cre­atives and mar­keters can spend more time, tal­ent, and resources on high-val­ue projects, leav­ing the mun­dane to the machine. “For artists and pho­tog­ra­phers and oth­er cre­ative pro­fes­sion­als, that’s bring­ing cre­ativ­i­ty — some­thing a machine isn’t going to be able to repli­cate — that some­thing that’s inher­ent­ly you, and the rea­son you were hired into your role,” Shamb­havi says.

A good exam­ple is GP PRO, a divi­sion of Geor­gia-Pacif­ic that deliv­ers hygien­ic and food ser­vices solu­tions to cor­po­ra­tions in a vari­ety of indus­tries. The com­pa­ny recent­ly brought its mar­ket­ing func­tion in-house in an effort to bet­ter adhere to strin­gent brand guide­lines while ensur­ing improved con­sis­ten­cy in its cor­po­rate mes­sag­ing. By lever­ag­ing Adobe Cre­ative Cloud and, ulti­mate­ly, Adobe Stock for enter­prise for stock pho­tos, video, and vec­tor graphs, the team was bet­ter posi­tioned to sim­pli­fy and stream­line these process­es, while deliv­er­ing strong cre­ative outputs.

Now, the GP PRO team utilis­es intel­li­gent search capa­bil­i­ties anchored in Adobe Sen­sei, mak­ing the cre­ative con­tent search process more turnkey. By tak­ing this approach, licens­ing com­pli­ance is sim­pli­fied as well, thanks to uni­fied stored and shared rights incor­po­rat­ed in Adobe Stock — GP PRO’s design­ers and legal team no longer have to spend time on com­mon com­pli­ance issues which, again, reduce resource allo­ca­tion and tal­ent invest­ment. “That’s the ben­e­fit of our arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence,” says Shamb­havi. “We’re real­ly try­ing to give you back a lot of time, so you can focus on the things that only you can do.”

Read more sto­ries on arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence and find out more about Adobe Sen­sei.****