How Adobe Express helped Red Hat marketing, an IBM company, achieve 10x time savings

I have been a senior business analyst in marketing operations and brand automation at Red Hat for over 17 years. In that time, I have witnessed Red Hat’s transformation from 2,500 associates to a global force of over 20,000. When Red Hat joined IBM in 2019, our ability to help companies harness the power of open-source software to build innovative technologies exponentially increased. As we expanded, my team began to encounter new challenges in our workflows, especially around keeping up with growing demand for more campaigns, personalized marketing, and expansion into new regions while maintaining operational agility. We needed a better way to streamline processes and meet the increasing scale.

Red Hat marketers had multiple campaigns they needed to run, but the time it took to create assets, along with challenges around efficiently scaling asset creation, meant that they were limited in what they could do. This slowed our team’s ability to respond quickly to market demands and limited our global reach.

We found a solution in Adobe Express for Enterprise. By training and enabling 400 marketers with Adobe Express technology, we empower more teams to create and deliver content efficiently, scaling asset creation across our global organization. This transformation helps Red Hat marketing teams to be more agile and meet growing demands more effectively.

A global bottleneck

Before the rollout of Adobe Express, our marketing operations required a lengthy process. If a marketer at Red Hat needed a new campaign asset, the request often went through multiple teams and several iterations, taking up to two days to complete.

This process slowed down the marketing machine. Supporting brand consistency was a major hurdle as well — the brand team needed to review all assets to ensure that they complied with brand guidelines. This reliance on the design team made it difficult to scale campaigns and respond quickly to emerging opportunities.

The solution needed to empower marketers to create their own assets quickly, without compromising Red Hat’s brand standards. That’s where Adobe Express comes into play.

Empowering marketers with instant creative solutions

With Adobe Express, it is now easier for our marketers to create assets on demand. They can grab a ready-made template for a social media post, tweak it with our branded fonts and colors, adjust the layout, and it’s done in just a few clicks. The process is straightforward, and they don’t have to worry about brand consistency.

What’s also great is how Adobe Creative Cloud ties everything together. Designers and marketers can collaborate more effectively. A designer can make a tweak in Adobe Illustrator or Adobe Photoshop, and quickly make it available to all marketers without needing to change the template they are using. This means marketers are always working with the latest version, and there’s no more back-and-forth — just a smoother, more efficient process.

Red Hat’s goal for rolling out Adobe Express was to empower marketers to create content quickly while keeping our brand consistent. With the help of marketing operations, we provided our team with tools for greater agility and efficiency. I wanted marketers to be able to go into Adobe Express and, in minutes, create kits that could be rapidly updated and deployed.

Adobe Express helps us to do that. It also opens pathways for enhanced communication between our teams. For example, I built out a template in Adobe Express with a marketer, and they mentioned that certain banners were driving more engagement than others. That information is being used to change what the brand team delivers. Being able to share that feedback both ways is a real measure of success.

Marketing agility in action

The results of bringing Adobe Express into our workflows have been transformative for my team. Tasks like creating digital campaign assets, product marketing materials, and event promotions that used to take days can now be completed in minutes. I believe that the most valuable asset for a marketer is time, and with Adobe Express we are able to reduce handoffs and automate certain steps in the process, yielding a tenfold increase in time savings.

Adobe Express enables creatives and marketers to do their jobs better. Now they can run two campaigns, where before they could only run one. It also helps us streamline asset creation, making it easier to remix campaigns quickly while keeping content on-brand. The ability to do more with the same resources is a big deal.

Adobe Express also gives us the critical advantage to keep all assets on brand, while simultaneously freeing up our designers and other creatives to focus on the invaluable — ideation, iteration, and inspiration.

Looking to the future

I’m excited about what Adobe Express can offer our teams. We will be able to elevate our marketing operations by incorporating generative AI capabilities through Adobe Express and Adobe Firefly integration. These tools unlock new creative possibilities while boosting the speed and efficiency of our team’s marketing efforts.

This deployment demonstrates collaboration between marketers, designers, and operations teams, and a willingness to try new technologies. I’m proud of what we have achieved together, making our workflows more efficient, localization easier, and at the same time always staying on brand. I’m confident we’ll continue pushing boundaries and setting new standards for what’s possible.

Learn more about how to transform marketing operations with Adobe Express.

Don’t miss Monty’s Adobe MAX 2024 session On-Brand Content Creation.