How Generative AI is unlocking creativity

At Adobe MAX, we met with creative leaders and marketers from multiple industries and countries about GenAI and what it means for the future of content. Improved efficiency, productivity, and innovation are some of the benefits sought by today’s organizations investing in AI. For brands and content teams who are under increasing pressure to do more with less, some may see GenAI as merely a shortcut or time-saver. This has created the incorrect perception that GenAI hinders or discourages creativity. As we’ve discovered in our own work with clients and through the insights we gathered in Miami at Adobe MAX 2024, creativity at marketing organizations is surging thanks to the varied, unique capabilities of GenAI.

Facing the future of content

Some of today’s marketing teams are still stuck on legacy technology transformation that never delivered, with only 56.5 percent of purchased martech tools actually being utilized in operations. Some may see these figures and worry that GenAI will only accelerate this trend, locking them in to processes that are solely focused on driving performance efficiency, volume, and endless optimization without a regard for quality. These assumptions appear to be unfounded.

For many future-facing organizations, GenAI is already a creative collaborator for their brand and marketing teams. Nearly half of all surveyed companies currently use GenAI for content marketing, with that proportion expected to rise to 71 percent by the end of this year. These early adopters are driven by an inherent curiosity about their customers, culture, and creativity, and understand that GenAI enables creativity while freeing them from tedious processes that may come with manual production.

There are three key ways that GenAI can unlock a range of benefits for today’s marketers:

1. Supercharge the creative process to drive innovation

2. Accelerate processes to unlock capacity

3. Connect more deeply with customers via personalization to increase impact

1. Supercharge the creative process to drive innovation

A predominant benefit of GenAI is its foundation of — and continuous learning from — large data sets. As brand and marketing teams try to synthesize vast amounts of information about their customers and the market at large, GenAI tools can help summarize real-time trends and emerging themes from their data sets so that leaders can focus on what these insights means for their brand and customers.

By having this information easily accessible in their toolkit and rapidly generated rather than calculated manually, marketers can more easily narrow down demographics, channels, topics, aesthetics, and other factors that ultimately shape an end-to-end campaign. And, they can react in real time to the ever-changing shifts in the landscape that require their brand to be agile and future-ready.

2. Accelerate processes to unlock capacity

For a full campaign, the timeline from creative brief to launching into the market can be long. At every stage, more layers of processes tend to pile on. From approving the initial idea to activating it across dozens of touchpoints, brand and marketing teams can often lose weeks in the back and forth between agencies, collaborators, and leadership teams. The speed of marketing calls for a far more rapid cycle of creation and execution in order to keep up with the expectations of today’s customers.

This is where GenAI comes in. Whether creating a GenAI program internally or adopting an established GenAI solution from external vendors, organizations can speed up their time to market while maintaining content quality. They can also keep their content supply chain flexible and nimble as trends and customer preferences shift in real time.

One example of an external GenAI solution that we’ve integrated into our own content production strategy is Adobe Firefly. When our creative team was evolving our brand’s visual identity in 2023, we wanted to develop a tool that created compelling, compliant brand imagery quickly. With the help of Adobe Firefly’s GenAI capabilities, we created the Deloitte Digital Orb Foundry. This platform democratizes creative ideation for designers and non-designers alike, allowing our practitioners to input simple words, phrases, and themes that are then translated into brand assets within minutes.

Because programs such as Adobe Firefly can be trained on a brand’s style guide including logos, color schemes, fonts, tone of voice, and more, marketers can utilize GenAI for campaign tasks. Whether optimizing the same core content for different platforms (such as social media versus print ads, for example) based on leading practices or language translations that remain brand compliant across formats, these programs create full suites of content rapidly and can help compress the sign-off process from leadership.

3. Connect more deeply with customers via personalization to increase impact

More than 50 percent of today’s surveyed brands see personalization as crucial for a successful customer strategy, with plans to increase spending on personalization by an average of 29 percent by the end of this year. Brands that prioritize and excel at personalization are 71 percent more likely to report improved customer loyalty. Among consumers, the sentiment reflects much of the same. 78 percent of today’s consumers want personalized insights that help them save money, and 84 percent said that special discount offers or bundles had a medium or high influence on their purchase decisions.

Executing personalization at scale can bring varying levels of complexity and expenses depending on the data maturity of an organization. Transforming the content supply chain with GenAI can bring quality, tailored, timely content to the market at scale. As the demand for digital content increases, brands can respond to the moment by harnessing the right GenAI tools and by prioritizing customer connection and trust as the foundation of their content creation strategy.

Looking ahead

Encouraging an open dialogue between an organization’s leadership, budget stakeholders, and creative teams around the role of GenAI is an important step to take before implementing this technology. By assessing objectives and ensuring AI-readiness, marketing leaders can get the most out of GenAI as the technology continues to develop and evolve. Greater brand consistency, amplified creativity, and new insights that can enable teams to quickly test and iterate ideas are just some of the potential benefits that today’s marketing organizations can reap by adopting GenAI tools for their content strategies.