The missing link: AI and the content supply chain

Image credit: Adobe Stock/ kite_rin.

At the recent Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, it was clear creative content is playing a more important role than ever. Virtually every marketer across every industry is looking for new ways to make their content break through increasingly crowded marketplaces. Virtually every social strategist is looking to bring more content into the world more quickly, so they can refresh their campaigns in days or weeks rather than quarters or months. Meanwhile, virtually every business — whether they primarily market to consumers or other businesses — is looking to build more personal relationships with its customers, which can require a massive volume of content (true personalization at scale can require tens of thousands of variations to be made of each individual creative asset in order to tailor it to individual customers).

Everyone wants more and better content, but businesses of all sizes are struggling to keep pace with demand — particularly enterprise businesses, which face bottlenecks at each stage of the content lifecycle. As chief revenue officer for Adobe, one of the world’s largest tech companies, I can personally attest to this. Both my own company and the companies I meet with every day are looking for the most impactful solutions for bringing more content to market more quickly and more impactfully. We’re increasingly finding that artificial intelligence — particularly generative AI — can be the missing link.

While businesses have generally been looking at creative generative AI as something to experiment with (some companies I talk to literally have hundreds of experiments going at once), over the past year, Adobe and our partners have been taking this new tech out of the playground and into production.

Take, for example, IBM. They were one of the earliest companies to take Adobe Firefly generative AI for a spin in their social marketing with their visually stunning “Let’s Create” brand campaign. Using Firefly, their teams generated 200 assets with over 1,000 marketing variations using simple text prompts. What previously would have taken their teams days, weeks or even months now took a matter of minutes. Best of all, they achieved 26 times higher engagement versus their normal campaigns. What’s more, one out of every five customers they reached was a C-level decision maker.

For companies like IBM, campaigns like this are not created by just one person or one team. The content that goes into them is planned for, produced, delivered, managed and ultimately analyzed as part of a chain of complex processes known as the “content supply chain.” I hear every day from enterprise executives that linking up this chain is often their biggest bottleneck or roadblock to getting breakout content into the world more quickly.

Pfizer is another example of a company doing great things by linking up their content supply chain as they bring scientific breakthroughs to market at unprecedented speed. Adobe and Pfizer have been teaming up to pair AI with data-driven insights and leading creative, experience and document solutions so they can make their content supply chain even more seamless and efficient, replacing siloed tools and processes across country and product divisions with a standard way of working. As chief marketing officer Drew Panayiotou told us, “we’re trying to figure out ‘how do we have a full journey for our customers.’ It’s not just about one message or interaction, it’s about a series of interactions.” They’ve found that with a unified understanding of which audiences are using which content to inform strategies for making it better and more impactful, they’ve been able to achieve a 15-20 percent improvement in content engagement.

One of the things that Pfizer, IBM and Adobe all have in common is that not only do our successes depend on being able to create content that truly breaks through — we all need to account for scale in both our inputs, the tens of thousands of employees who work across our teams, and our outputs, the millions of customers our content must reach to have an impact. We’re all seeking to achieve personalization at scale, and we’re all seeking to drive productivity in our own businesses at scale.

Henkel is another example of a company doing amazing work addressing the challenges involved in working at scale. Known as “pioneers at heart for the good of generations,” Henkel is living their pioneering legacy in how they’re using AI to strengthen every link of their content supply chain.

Henkel is using Adobe’s Firefly Custom Models to train and fine-tune generative AI models using their own branded assets. This is empowering them to create on-brand content while accelerating content production and streamlining repetitive tasks. For example, teams behind their hair care brand Schwarzkopf are generating visual assets that are personalized to individual customers’ hair color, style and/or length.

Ultimately, for these assets to truly land, they have to be delivered to the right customer, at the right time on the right channel — and that’s where bringing AI to the rest of Henkel’s content supply chain becomes so important. They’ve been working with us to pioneer this tech to do everything from auto-generating targeted messages to upleveling their web and mobile customer experiences.

If it sounds like we at Adobe are beyond excited about this emerging tech and what it means for content creation and the content supply chain, it’s because we are. Using our own generative AI solutions to bolster our content supply chain, we’ve been able to drive down the time it takes to produce most social content by 80 percent. Meanwhile, we’ve literally quintupled the number of images we’ve been able to produce across our channels. Best of all, we’ve achieved a 60 percent increase in campaign engagement when we bring Firefly to our marketing.

At the end of the day, content is on everyone’s mind at Cannes and beyond for a reason. But wanting to bring breakout content to market quickly and cost effectively and actually doing that are two very different things. AI is proving to be the missing link, and Adobe, our partners and customers have been finding that when we bring it to the content supply chain, we can strengthen every link so that personalization at scale and productivity at scale are no longer mere pipe dreams, they’re present realities. AI has truly become the content supply chain’s missing link.

Learn more about supercharging your content supply chain with generative AI.