Seven West Media increases audience engagement by creating social media with Adobe Express

In an era when demand for quality news and programming grows daily, companies must adapt how they create content. Seven West Media, a leading media and broadcast company in Australia, stands out in providing quick access to a variety of trusted content.

The business leverages cross-functional skills to deliver breaking stories at any moment. “The news never stops. It doesn’t matter if it’s the weekend or the middle of the night. When news hits, whoever’s manning the news desk needs to be able to publish an article and post to social media in minutes,” explains Olivia Desianti, graphic design manager at Seven West Media.

Seven West Media reaches 84 percent of West Australians through its TV network, news sites, podcasts, and newspapers, among other products. Ms. Desianti works on the editorial side, overseeing everything from front page graphics to social media posts. Senior Designer Jessica Hankinson leads the design team for marketing, where she and her team find fun ways to drum up excitement through marketing campaigns promoting the company’s digital and paper products.

Ms. Desianti and Ms. Hankinson work with designers throughout Seven West Media to keep the company’s monthly audience of 14.4M watching and reading the news that impacts their lives. The designers know that a well-crafted graphic can transform a news story by simplifying complicated information or illustrating ideas in creative and thought-provoking ways.

As Seven West Media brands aimed to deliver more content across more channels, the workload of the graphic designers started to skyrocket. That’s when Ms. Desianti turned to Adobe Express. The online design app makes it simple for anyone, anywhere to create clean, on-brand graphics that help stories stand out and attract attention.

Unlocking creativity in everyone

“The West”, “Perth Now”, and “The Nightly”, Seven West Media’s portfolio of news brands, publish approximately 3,500 stories a week. To support these articles, social media managers, editors, and digital producers create approximately 60 Instagram posts and 70 graphics per week using Adobe Express.

Graphic designers create templates in Adobe Creative Cloud apps such as Photoshop, InDesign, or Illustrator and use the integrations with Adobe Express to upload their designs. The templates lock down certain elements to maintain brand consistency. One video template, for example, quickly adds a watermark to video before posting. Anyone — no matter their level of design experience — can drop custom copy, images, or video into the templates to quickly create social media graphics, image collages, or author banners that are well-designed and on-brand.

People can access templates on any device, with no need to download software onto their computer. Even journalists covering a story in the field can quickly create a social media post to accompany their breaking news article. Ms. Desianti also created libraries to store elements that people regularly need for their templates, such as bylines, logos, and fonts to make them easily accessible.

“We manage a portfolio of high-profile news brands, and we want to make sure that everything carries the sense of trust and quality that people expect from us,” says Ms. Desianti. “With Adobe Express, we are able to lighten the load of our graphic designers and have confidence that content created by others is on-brand.”

Raising the bar on news content in a fraction of the time

Before working with Adobe Express, it could take an hour for a digital producer to meet with a designer and request a social media image. Now, it takes just five minutes for one person with any level of design experience to create a high-quality post.

With more frequent and engaging posts, major brands such as “The Nightly” and “PerthNow” have seen significant increases in social media engagement, with the Instagram following for “PerthNow” increasing by several thousands in just 10 months. Graphic designers now spend less time meeting with producers and working on simple graphics for social media or digital stories, freeing them up to focus on eye-catching front pages or infographics that perfectly illustrate a story.

“We’re taking time back and putting more thought into our designs because we have the tools we need to work faster,” says Ms. Hankinson.

Getting ideas onto the page with generative AI

One way that Ms. Hankinson levels up her designs is by using Adobe Firefly generative AI in Adobe Express to brainstorm and bring her ideas to life. For instance, for a recent campaign for “The Nightly”, she wanted to create a visual where news posts would flow out of a phone on a glowing ribbon. By typing a few prompts, Firefly generated an ideal curving shape that she could use as a reference for the design.

“Working with Firefly helps our team get ideas onto the page about 30% faster,” says Ms. Hankinson. “We can quickly determine whether an idea is worth pursuing further and share ideas so that we can start collaborating and refining designs with colleagues.”

Many other creative teams across the Seven West Media business are following Ms. Desianti and Ms. Hankinson’s lead by promoting Adobe Express as a tool that anyone can use to create visuals that connect audiences with stories.

“We’re always excited to see what new apps and features are coming from Adobe,” says Ms. Desianti. “It allows us to do more and play a bigger part in storytelling for some of the biggest news brands in Australia.”

Learn more about Adobe Express here.