Why AI will be a creative game changer - Simon Morris, Adobe

0:06Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to Uncensored CMO. Now, I'm in Cannes this year, and the Creative Champion of the Year has been announced as the CEO of Adobe. Adobe, as you know very well, are famous for making lots of products that help creators produce advertising content. And so I'm catching up with their VP for marketing, Simon Morris, to find out, is AI a threat or is it an enabler when it comes to human creativity? He's got some fascinating answers to that question. So to find out more, here's my episode with Simon. Welcome to the show, Simon. Thank you. Great to be here. Good to be here.

0:36On the fourth day of Cannes. On the fourth day of Cannes? Sounds like the beginning of a song, doesn't it? Feels like the 14th day of Cannes, if I'm honest. But anyway. Absolutely. And you guys have turned up in style, I see. Is this like a, is this particularly big activation for you, Cannes? Yeah, well, it's the festival of creativity. And so, you know, it feels very appropriate for Adobe to have a strong presence at the event. And as you said, yeah, we're not just, we've not got our own, just our own presence at the Majestic, where we're hosting a lot of conversations and customers. but it's great to see Adobe activations on a lot of our partner beaches, whether it be on the Stagwell Sports Beach with the Adobe Express activation and the Pinterest Beach House, but, yeah, even up at the Palais with the Coca-Cola activation.

1:21So it's just really great to see the Adobe Red everywhere you look. Yeah, well, it's only anecdotal, but from my constant walking up and down the Quasette, I can definitely say I think you've won the brand, most noticed brand on the beach award. Thank you very much. I'll let our team know. Yeah, give me feedback. Yeah, exactly. Before we get into what you're up to as well, for everyone listening and watching, tell us a little bit about how you got into marketing and how you ended up at Adobe. Yes, gosh. So I mean, I've only ever worked for two tech companies. Probably says something about me that once I'm in, I'm really in, invested, if I believe in the business.

1:57And so the first company was actually a small Israeli software company where I was the first employee in Europe. And it was really about, it was basically a startup. So I was doing everything from answering the phones, doing the sales meetings, business development, putting the events together and whatever it took to kind of get the business going. And it was very much in the enterprise kind of space. I quickly realized that I really enjoyed influencing and persuading people. And so I guess it was either sales or marketing. And I went down the marketing route. I was at that company for 14 years.

2:34We helped take it public and grew the business globally. And so I was running the marketing globally. At that point, Adobe kind of knocked on the door. And it was really around the time that Adobe was going through a significant kind of transformation. It wasn't just the move to the subscription business on the creative cloud side. But they just acquired Omniture. And people's eyebrows were being raised as, you know, this creative company is buying an analytics company. And they're really starting to think about how do we grow into the enterprise and build out the marketing stack. And so as a marketer, the opportunity to do marketing for a marketing company, two CMOs, was kind of like a dream job.

3:15And obviously, the Adobe brand had an amazing reputation. And so, yeah, I took the opportunity to join Adobe in an EMEA role. and I'm actually coming up to my 14th year at Adobe and to have been part of that kind of transformation, reaching new audiences, growing my remit from Europe, Middle East and Africa to Asia Pacific, now most recently Latin America is just really exciting. And for someone who studied international relations, the opportunity to kind of work with different marketers in different regions and understand the nuances and the cultures and the humor and how that then needs to translate into the type of content we have to deliver.

3:57It's just been so exciting. I never thought about that, but I think you're right. International relations is probably a pretty perfect grounding when you have to navigate a large organization and consumers and customers in many different places. And those diplomatic skills come in very handy. I'm sure they do. And I love how meta it is, a marketer working in a marketing company marketing to marketers. That's very deep, isn't it? Exactly, dream. We'll have to unpick what that means in a minute, but that's great. But I must give a big congratulations to your CEO because he's just won Creative Champion of the Year, which is amazing.

4:28So what was it that he's done that you've done together at Adobe that's led to that recognition? Yeah, I think the whole company was so proud to see Shantanu up on stage. I don't know if you had a chance to see that video showing some of the work. It was just really emotional and moving. And I think that for over 40 years, Adobe has been really focused on empowering individuals and students and creative professionals and businesses to share their story, to empower them, to give them the tools to create their stories to the outside world. And I think the recognition was really the fact that we've been doing it over such a long time, continue to reinvent, continue to look around the corner and make sure that we are equipping our customers with the tools that are going to help them achieve their business outcomes.

5:15And those outcomes will vary enormously depending on who you are. But I think it was really recognition of that. And I would say, you know, most recently it was because I think everybody knows, you know, Adobe for its kind of creative tools for the creative professional. But, you know, more recently with the introduction of tools like Adobe Express and obviously now our Firefly models, we're really and truly democratizing creativity and empowering everyone, anyone around the world to tell their story. So to have that recognition was just lovely for the whole company. Yeah. Talking about looking around the corner, I had the honor actually joining you guys at Adobe Summit this year, which was, wow, was that an eye opener for me.

5:54I had no idea how far AI had kind of come on, you know, from the sort of early ideas of getting AI to sort of complete a task for you to now the point where you can employ different agents to complete different tasks and how they can all work together to, you know, to kind of deliver for you. I mean, it's a massive education for me. But where have you seen AI have the biggest impact in terms of the marketing, you know, the marketing landscape? Where has it transformed it? So the way we think about AI is augmented intelligence. So it's a technology that's going to enhance and amplify human creativity, not replace it.

6:32So if you think about a creative professional, people who often have a very clear kind of creative vision in their mind, It's really about eliminating those kind of tedious time-consuming tasks like generating variations or kind of minor edits to things. So it's really about saving them time because if you speak to a lot of kind of creative pros or agencies, the biggest thing they crave is time. Often the briefs come in super late. They've got 48 hours to turn things around and they're always able to do their best work. And so I think for the creative professional, it is about eliminating, reducing those tedious time consuming tasks and allowing them to focus on bringing their creative vision to life and building those emotionally relevant experiences.

7:19for the kind of business professional or people who just need to communicate visually, which is kind of everybody. I certainly put myself in that bracket. Often like we, I mean, I speak for myself. The biggest fear is that blank page. Like, where do I start? I've got an idea, but where do I start? And so it kind of eliminates that fear of that blank page by providing that spark, generating some ideas from which you can then iterate on. And so I think that's the real key. It's kind of different workflows depending on the different audiences. Again, for marketers, it's about taking care of the things that are time consuming and allowing you to focus on what you do best, which is really the storytelling and the strategy.

8:06Kind of irrespective of audience, for us ultimately, it's about AI being in the service of creativity and not the other way around. That is really reassuring to hear that message, particularly in Cannes, obviously, because we're celebrating creativity. But there's a lot of people arguing that actually AI will replace creativity. But it sounds like, you know, you're using it in service of creativity rather than replacing it. Yeah, I mean, absolutely. And as I said, you know, if you're able to free up that time, that's not the most productive or creative use of a creative's time to enable them to come up with a bigger, more creative, impactful campaigns.

8:40That's going to see some great work. And, you know, if I think about tools like Adobe Express and, you know, what that's done, even just if I look across Adobe, it's empowering the entire organization to be able to create standout content really quickly and easily. And yes, you know, we build the brand templates and brand guidelines and kind of guardrails in the tool because it leverages our Firefly, you know, models. We know that it's commercially safe, but it's really empowering everyone across, you know, all departments, literally all departments to communicate more impactfully visually. And so it's really democratizing creativity.

9:19Now, we're talking about the power of what AI can do. I came across this very funny Rick Rubin video. Well, not funny necessarily, but he said, he said the one thing AI won't be doing is being unreasonable because humans are by their nature very unreasonable. So it just got me thinking though, what areas do you think AI won't impact? Or to flip it the other way, where will human kind of skills be most required as we see AI change marketing? Yeah, I think that there'll be some of the tasks that even like generating variations that might have been required a very manual amount of work to tweak a banner or multiple formats.

9:56We know that the demand for content has exploded and is only going to get bigger and bigger as brands desire to deliver personalization at scale. And we all know that the more personalized and relevant experience we receive as consumers, the more likely we are to respond. You want your brands to know you and deliver the right contextually relevant content. But to do that at scale is very challenging unless you've got the tools to help you. So quickly creating like variations for all the different platforms. You know, there are things that you can use the AI tools to do. I think that, but for us, ultimately, you need great ideas.

10:35Like you need dreamers, you need emotion and storytelling. And I think that's where human beings will really be able to focus more energy on doing the stuff that's really going to drive impact. Yeah. I was chatting to Greg Hahn about how they use AI. And he kind of describes like an hourglass. He said, when it comes into interrogating the brief, understanding the audience, getting some data, we go wide and we use AI. And at the other end of the hourglass, when it comes to executing across multiple platforms and different versions and producing things very quickly, we use AI. He said, but there's the little bit in the middle, which is the real thought.

11:09What's the thought that's going to drive the idea that's going to create something that's entirely different? And he said, you know, at the end of the day, you're looking for something that might be illogical or unusual that hasn't been done. That, you know, is the unreasonable bit that Rick Rubin talks about. And I think, well, I like your point. If you can free up the time from the top and the bottom to focus on that middle bit, which is the ingenuity, that's going to. Yeah, and I think it's also about removing some of the bottlenecks that we see today in marketing. And again, we pride ourselves at Adobe on being customer zero for all of our technology.

11:42So we work very, very closely with our product teams to ensure they understand some of the business challenges that we have within marketing and the things that we want to try and find solutions for. And they then go and develop those solutions. And so if you think about Gen Studio for performance marketing, this was addressing a real challenge that we faced. The performance marketing teams knew that they needed to have a monumental amount more content to really feed the platforms to really optimize those engines and get the best results. And the creative teams just couldn't deliver quickly enough the sheer volumes of content we needed.

12:22And it was kind of a real challenge. And so when Adobe released, you know, Firefly, it was like, OK, where do we there were so many different ways in which we could apply it. So where do we start? What are the most painful business challenges today? And it was around like more variations and reducing some of the bottlenecks of the of the creative team to allow them to focus on those bigger, bigger campaigns. And so, you know, we actually got some teams, we put some creatives, some performance marketers, some product people together to sort of play around to see what the impact would be of using this tool, which eventually became Gen Studio Performance Marketing.

13:02And actually, initially, we saw like incredible results, incredible results in terms of improved click-through rates. And it gave us the confidence to scale this out to the wider marketing organization. And we saw a slight drop-off in performance. And we were like, what's happening? What's gone wrong kind of thing? Or why is it not working as well? And we looked at the first group that came together. We saw that the creative people, the designers and the creative directors, they had a – who kind of put their hands up to be part of that first group. they had a good understanding of performance marketing and why it was so important and what it needed.

13:45And the performance marketers who were the first ones to put their hands up had like photography side hustles or they kind of had an appreciation for the aesthetics of the content. And so it kind of worked. But when you scaled that out, we soon realized that actually we need to make sure we've got the training. You've got the brand guardrails and the frameworks for people to work within. and so we put that in place within that tool which now gives us the confidence and our customers the confidence they can scale the use of these tools across the wider teams to address the real challenge of this content explosion.

14:22That's really interesting because almost everywhere I go, the first bit of advice I give most people is you are not the customer. But I think in your case, you actually are your own customer, aren't you? We absolutely are. You test things out on yourself first. Yeah, for all of our products, for absolutely all of our products, You know, we, if you think about Acrobat, you know, we launched AI Assistant, gosh, I think about a year or so ago. And again, we, you know, we're the beta customers of that. We're using it. We're pressure testing it. But also seeing which are the most applicable use cases for that tool and being able to use that to get like summaries of very long documents.

14:59Or, you know, here's the five minute summary from the company or from the employee at all hands and then sharing that. just seeing the increased engagement rate for the content is just really amazing. It's really transformational. So given you are your own customer, right, what campaign have you got live now that's been created by your own software? I mean, if I think about something very, very close to home, we have a big campaign in the UK around Adobe Express. We wanted to kind of raise awareness of Adobe Express in the UK. we specifically wanted to focus on kind of solopreneurs and small businesses.

15:35We actually featured real local small businesses from the UK in the advertising. But so much of that content was created using those workflows and those tools. We manage all the assets through Gen Studio. So we've got the kind of single view of all the assets. We can quickly see what's working and what's not working. and yeah, it's proving to be really impactful as an overarching campaign and seeing it kind of run through the whole funnel, not just kind of awareness, but allowing us to retarget people more with the right content. So yeah, that's probably the best example. I think I saw that one actually because it actually attributes the creator's name at the bottom of the creative, doesn't it?

16:16Which I thought was lovely. Absolutely. So you kind of hero your own customers in a way. Absolutely. Which is a great thing. What advice would you give someone working with creators? because the creation economy is booming. In fact, probably the conversation at Cannes this year, there's been a lot of conversation on the kind of creators and how you do that. What advice would you give? Yeah, there's also a huge presence of creators at Cannes on a lot of the panels. And I would say there's a few learnings we've got from working with creators or influencers or ambassadors, whatever you want to call them.

16:46Firstly, we see more success when you have longer term. Firstly, there needs to be a genuine, authentic use of our tools. We like to work with creators who genuinely use our tools day in, day out. And so they are kind of fans of Adobe. And we tend to build like longer term partnerships. So it's not like a one-off transactional relationship. We're not too prescriptive in terms of their content because they're the ones that know their audience is the best. They have that trust and credibility. That's something that's really important to us, long term, not being too prescriptive. And then the way that we scale is by having a kind of consistent measurement framework.

17:25We kind of categorize our kind of social content into four buckets. We say entertain, educate, inspire, or inform. And we have that consistent content framework, consistent measurement framework. And then we allow the local marketing teams to work with the influencers that best resonate with their local market. So obviously the humor and tone is going to vary enormously from one market to the other. So we enable the regional teams to work within that framework with the local influencers that are going to have the best impact. And one of the tensions that everyone talks about is, because you talked about brand guidelines earlier, there's always this tension between I must stick to brand guidelines, give them a script, control what they say.

18:10So how do you get the balance right between the freedom to kind of go create versus the kind of guardrails to stick to? Yeah, I think that we make sure that our marketers and all of our employees understand like, you know, who the brand is, what does the brand stand for? How do we want to show up? But we try and give a lot of freedom, like kind of creative freedom to the local teams to work within that. It's not, as I said, it's not too, you know, it is real just guardrails. There's a lot of sort of flexibility within that to ensure that they're being relevant. like you have to be relevant in the local market and you have to be able to move quickly to tap into local trends and and because if you haven't got a process in place that allows you to quickly produce content that taps into that trend within like hours like it's gone and so you know great you might have you know if you're working to a lot of processes that many brands have like you need to get the approvals by the time you get the approval of the content and the tweaks you have to make, it's gone.

19:09The moment's passed. So you have to be able to ensure that your marketing can move at the speed of social, which is a big change for a lot of brands. That's a huge change, isn't it? I mean, you mentioned a number of your products as we've been talking, like Adobe Express. You recently launched Adobe Firefly on mobile as well, haven't you? Which is a big new launch. What's the secret to a product launch being a success? What goes into making it work? So firstly, we want to make sure that the marketing and the product is indistinguishable. So we have a very, very tight relationship with our product teams.

19:40We also ensure that we are working very, very closely with our creative community on the development of that product. So we have, you know, beta programs in place with our creators. We have our own Adobe evangelists. So, you know, we have confidence because we've had a lot of feedback in that development process. It gives us the confidence to know that we've got the right offering that's going to meet the need for our customers. And so then it's about making sure we've got that truly global launch moment. And one way in which we do that is through creating a lot of our own content. So if you saw the Firefly video that we used, that was made entirely using Firefly.

20:24And just a stunning piece of content that is very relevant globally. So we were able to take that asset and run it globally. but then in terms of the the the next phase we would tend to work with like local influencers and creators to work on some very specific use cases to that to that market or or um landmarks in that market things that you want to show off that are relevant to that country so we have kind of global scale but then uh local relevance and obviously we use yes obviously creators play a big a big part of that and and then leveraging all the different you know social platforms and media channels and then we measure everything.

21:00And you also partner, don't you, with like sports, different sports properties as well as another element of the whole mix, I guess, more for broader brand building. What role would that play? Yeah, I think we've always tried to connect, you know, what we're doing to the passion points of our customers. So whether that be fashion or art or music, I would say, you know, over the last couple of years, we've lent more into the sports arena because we see sports brands are kind of certainly the bigger ones to consider themselves to be entertainment houses. They're competing for attention and time.

21:33They have to deliver an incredible fan engagement solution. And thankfully, a lot of them are turning to Adobe to help them do that, bringing together all of the incredible rich data they have on their fans across multiple sources, just bringing it into a unified kind of customer profile, then connecting the content, and then making sure you've got the right journeys in place to deliver that amazing fan experience. Take a Real Madrid as an example. Only a fraction, a tiny percent of their fans, of their hundreds of millions of fans, are ever going to get to a game, or ever going to get to the Bernabeu.

22:07You've got to make sure that you are finding a way of keeping those fans engaged in a contextually relevant way, whether they're in Buenos Aires or in any other part of the world. So, yeah, they're really thinking about that fanning experience. And I think they recognize that because Adobe can bring creativity and marketing and AI kind of together in one offering, we can help them deliver that fanning experience. The context of the Adobe Women's FA Cup, a slightly different challenge there that we wanted to get involved in. There's like 500 clubs that enter the competition in the first qualifying round.

22:48Most of them are amateur clubs. They've told us they haven't got the skills, they haven't got the time, they haven't got the money to create content for their clubs, promote their games, to share their stories. And so we gave them Adobe Express, provided training, which they all wanted, now that they're now able to create standout content for their clubs and their players and their fans. And it's ultimately inspiring more women and girls into sport, which we're really proud of. That's a great thing to be involved in. Yeah, absolutely. Especially for someone who loves football. Yes, exactly. Yeah, I know.

23:18Well, it's funny, the kind of stereotype of a sponsorship is, oh, yeah, I bet the CMO loves that particular sport, doesn't it? So anyway, occasionally it's nice when it overlaps. Absolutely. I know one of the challenges, and I mean, I picked this up a lot when we were chatting at Adobe Summit, was that the role of the quality of data and IP and trust, which actually the more you think about it, the more we delegate to AI to go and kind of fulfill tasks and we're training it on different data. How do you approach kind of, you know, because obviously it's a big, you know, when you're making things at scale, it's really important to know that, you know, the data quality is there.

23:52You're not going to ruin your IP. You're not going to get any kind of, you know, you're not going to be making decisions on the wrong data points. So how do you ensure the kind of level of trust that your customers can put in the platform? I'm a very big Marvel fan. And you might wonder what that's got to do with your question. But there's a superhero, Spider-Man, who famously once said, with great power comes great responsibility. And I think that that's for us how we've approached our AI models. And we wanted to make sure that they were commercially safe. They were not going to violate IP. and I think that approach of like responsibility, transparency and accountability is really what sets us apart from a lot of other models that are out there and it's why I think so many brands are turning to Adobe because they can trust that it's a commercially safe solution and that's a lot of the feedback that we get from customers but something that was so important to us.

24:53You know, we wanted to make sure that creators were compensated. we wanted to make sure that it was a commercially safe solution and we could reassure our brands that that was the case. So that's absolutely the approach that we take. I think you've got a massive role in this. I can really see how your brand is going to help that because there's so many questions on who owns the IP, particularly with creators and using other people's images and that kind of thing. Yeah, and we've been part of the content authenticity initiative, which was announced a few years ago and a lot of brands have signed up to that.

25:30It's now a way of, we launched a content authenticity app at Adobe Max in London and that gives us a way for creators to be able to sign up to content credentials, market they don't want their work to be trained on and we are increasingly looking for content credentials to be applied to as many digital assets as possible so that just as a consumer, when you walk into a supermarket and you can pick up a piece of food and look on the back and see the nutrition label as to what goes into it, we believe that should be the case for any digital asset. You should be able to see who made it, when it was made, was it touched by AI, what type of AI touched that piece of content.