A day in the life of @Adobe socials at MAX

Picture this: a bombastic display of what’s exciting (and what’s next) in design, 3D, photography, illustration, and beyond — a who’s who of innovators and diverse multidisciplinarians and plenty of opportunities to connect with fellow creatives and learn new skills through technical workshops and practical keynotes. It can only happen in one place — Adobe MAX — the world’s largest creativity conference. It’s especially thrilling for our social team, who’s responsible for capturing every once of the conference’s energy and providing global audiences with a front row seat to all the excitement.

This year marks the second year that we’re back in person in Los Angeles after going completely virtual during the pandemic, but over 100,000+ global attendees still attend MAX as a virtual event. Creating real-time, authentic content around the on-the-ground experience is essential to bringing it to the virtual audience, which is why the full crew of creative producers and social content team is prepared, organized, and on their marks. Throughout the year the social teams regularly collaborate together, but at MAX it’s different — this agile team of nearly 30 is in a production room quickly churning out engagement-worthy content that needs to fit and perform on all platforms. It’s a true all-hands-on-deck moment, where content is trusted to be aligned and efficient, while templates and workflow need to already be in place. The prep is real.

"We create and post it all — platform and trend-specific creative recaps, highlighting big announcements, interviewing speakers backstage, and 'person-on-the-street content' in the Creative Park (formerly Community Pavillion). Our goal is to make everyone feel like they’re at MAX, including a glimpse of what goes on behind the scenes ,” senior creative producer Tarn Susumpow shared.

We chatted with Tarn Susumpow, as she shared the social team’s critical social content creation tools they use, and moments to anticipateo bring the story of Adobe MAX to life — on the fly.

On-the-street style interviews with Adobe Premiere Pro

As a slightly seasoned Adobe MAX veteran (Tarn went last year in-person, and virtually in 2021), she shared that the fashion of the attendees is a highlight — creatives are known for their self-expression, after all. Since voyeuristic, on-the-street casual interviews are trending on TikTok and Instagram, Tarn and her team have built in an interview plan during the two-day conference.

To automatically generate transcripts and add captions from these interviews into videos for social content, Tarn and team use Speech To Text on Premiere Pro. The tool serves as a critical shortcut for the team team to then use the preset function to make the font size, location of the text and font colors uniform to save time and make everything as consistent as possible. The best news? You don’t need to be a graphic designer or video producer to use them either — anyone on the team can apply it to social content.

“We use the ‘person-on-the-street' format to engage with on-the-ground attendees about all things MAX. We tend to wander around the MAX conference, this year will be mostly in the Creative Park — asking attendees questions about our products like Adobe Firefly, their editing workflows or best Creative Cloud tips,” Tarn explained.

Preparing for the unknown

Tarn and the team also plan to engage speakers and attendees in different ways — like gamifying moments and creating virality, building out content franchise segments like, “I try all the new Creative Cloud features in 60 seconds.” There’s an entire dedicated production and studio space to film social content with Adobe MAX Insiders (pros at what they do), and the goal is to demonstrate how they use the tools and share some insights about their day jobs. The team uses Adobe Creative Cloud for ease and accessibility — because filming the turnaround is lightning quick.

The team uses Adobe Express templates and Creative Cloud Libraries to edit and format their content, giving them access to a full library of branded assets, fonts, graphics, and preset frameworks and sizing for all social platforms — that can be shared and collaborated on by anyone with access.

Whether it’s stickers, fonts, templates for stories or more, everything falls within the correct branding and design dreamscape of the social team. “Even the simplest thing such as a color palette, we’ll drop in. It's so easy when I'm in the flow doing something and I don't need to go and look through an old deck to see the exact color red that we use as a brand color for Adobe, for example. Just a click and then it'll give me the right shade. It’s a huge time saver,” Tarn said. “We're trying to come up with the rough framework of how we'll approach things, so that we make sure to leave enough space to capture anything that happens more spontaneously.”

Accessibility fosters more creativity

Every video posted during MAX includes closed captioning, to improve accessibility and boost engagement. Cue the likes.

Tarn and the team created a preset for subtitles to create consistency across the board and further enhance the agility of the team: now every video text will now include the same font, same color, same size. Another perk of using the preset? “Since we're posting the same video on so many platforms, we pick the best location for the text so that it doesn't get caught [in bad placement] on the screen,” Tarn said. “Even little things like, [the preset will] always recognize when you say, ‘Adobe Premiere,’ and ‘Photoshop,’ the P is capital. It just knows.”

Going Insider

MAX includes so many types of creative standouts: keynotes, teachers, workshop leaders, Sneaks presenters (“Adobe Researchers talk about their potential future projects which may get built into products at some point and it’s fun, because you're just completely mind-blown,” Tarn says), and Insiders. This group of talented individuals — some names this year include Tina Lee, Adrian Per, Courtney Quinn, and Kelli Endmann — range in vocation from designers, photographers, to content creators. They have a special experience plan with the conference, which translates to exciting content buildouts. Tarn and her team (production partner Team 13) will have in-studio sessions with each Insider and have them demo their work and share behind-the-scenes of their creative process.

As for the keynote speakers, Tarn says she’s buzzing for Karen X Cheng. “I’ve always worked in social [in my career]. If you work in social, you've seen her, and you've seen her do the most cutting edge, creative things,” she says.

“I think MAX was my first experience with Adobe beyond just the software. As a creative professional, this software just means a lot to me, right? I just feel very seen while there, meeting other people who geek out on the same things, who are as excited about the colors and graphics and being so aesthetically-driven. There’s an aspect where I feel, ‘Everything's created to please people like me.’”