Adobe Express: The secret superpower behind the Adobe brand refresh

Like many of my colleagues here at Adobe, creativity has always been a part of my life — from doing watercolors at the kitchen table with my grandmother to part-time jobs as a graphic designer in high school and college. Now as Adobe’s chief brand officer, it’s thrilling to witness technology evolve to help accelerate and amplify human creativity.

As the world of marketing and brand-building evolves, the demand for content seems to be growing exponentially with it. People expect more personalized experiences and the need for brands to break through with more cohesive content is critical. From communications and product teams to human resources and sales, every team needs more content — and it needs to be on-brand.

That’s why I am so excited about Adobe Express. It takes effortless content creation to the next level, allowing everyone to confidently develop on-brand content, no matter the size of the team or scale of the project.

Over the past year, Adobe embarked on a global brand refresh, evolving our identity and design system to ensure we continue to stand out in a crowded marketplace. This meant a massive rollout across the entire organization. Adobe Express made coordinating those branded assets across multiple teams instantaneous and worry-free.

Just weeks after my team rolled out our new design system to the entire company, Adobe’s internal teams were already saving days of work and thousands of dollars using Adobe Express to build on-brand content — from presentations to social posts — with ease. For a company of our size, that’s no small feat.

We joke about my team being customer zero, because leading the creative team at Adobe means we’re not just marketing the Adobe brand, we’re also often the first to try our products before they’re released into the world. We really put that to the test this summer when we delivered newly branded assets and templates in Adobe Express to more than 29,000 employees to use in their everyday work.

Now our teams across creative, product, marketing, and beyond are saving time and money by taking creation at scale into their own hands.

The never-ending demand for content

This need for more content isn’t unique to Adobe and it isn’t unique to marketing. Communications, HR, sales, and legal all have content creation needs. Previously, these teams would have to tax my creative team with constant requests that they can now handle on their own. This has been a huge unlock so that my team can now focus on the bigger, more strategic projects.

Employees now have access to the most current branded assets, in one place, because Adobe Express and all content are in the cloud. Assets are already in the application so they’re easy to use, always available and always up to date. Plus, branded templates are lockable, which protects the brand by enforcing guidelines for colors, fonts, logo use, and more. This empowers teams by speeding up manual tasks and safeguarding brand choices.

Frequently used resources like a branded email signature and presentation templates are in our Brand Center and were made broadly available in the new Adobe Marketing Hub, which was updated to use Adobe Content Hub — the latest innovation in Adobe Experience Manager Assets.

Amping up in-house creativity

From the very beginning of this rollout, we had enthusiastic employee buy-in and teams quickly jumped in and started customizing and deploying the new assets.

Our B2B marketing team immediately started using Adobe Express to make custom branding for the bespoke events that they produce globally. These types of assets need to be localized and often require quick content edits. Malin Persson, senior global brand engagement and storytelling manager on the Creative Cloud B2B team, said Adobe Express allowed her team to self-serve instead of having to constantly brief in projects to their agencies. “My budget is limited and deadlines are tight, so being able to edit and deploy content ourselves has been brilliant,” she said. “We’re customizing dates, times, locations, and languages. The templates gave us the confidence that our work would look great and be on-brand. As a bonus, they were easy to use.”

For each program her team puts together, there are 12 iterations of the graphics for teams to remix. Previously, an event kit could cost up to $7,000. Now, the team has created four themselves, saving $28,000, with the bonus of only taking four hours to create in Adobe Express. With templates, marketers are empowered to make on-brand content and supercharge creative teams by giving them time for the most important projects.

Teams across Adobe have experienced success implementing Adobe Express. Here are some examples from my colleagues.

The employee communications team:

• Using Adobe Acrobat AI Assistant and Adobe Express, a meeting recap video that would normally take three days and cost $5,000 can now be made in just over an hour. This saves the team about a month of time and $140,000 annually.
• The internal event recap video helped increase click-through rates by 45 percent.

The demand generation team:

• With Adobe Express and Microsoft Outlook, a new dynamic newsletter template was created that can be easily customized, edited, and deployed without allocating creative resources.
• The team expects to save 104 hours and $12,000 annually.

Looking to the future

As a leader, I love to see our teams connect more efficiently and effectively with their stakeholders through amazing content. At the end of the day, the greatest value of Adobe Express is that it allows more time for creativity while also making our brand accessible for all. And while its powerful generative AI tools may have shortened time to content and help us scale further than we ever thought possible, we know human creativity will always lead the way.