Why creativity matters more than ever in the age of AI - Adobe CMO, Lara Balazs

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0:38All right, without further ado, let's go on with the show. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to Uncensored CMO. Now, in this episode, I'm talking to the CMO of Adobe, Lara, and she joins me to talk all about the big change that they are going through. Now, she has got some previous in this because before she was at Amazon, she was also at Nike and at Visa. She's got lots of experience about what it takes to manage serious change. This is a fascinating conversation about how marketing can sit in the driver's seat, transforming an organization, using the power of AI, but in service of a bigger mission.

1:09This is a fascinating conversation. Here it is.

1:18So, Lara, welcome to Uncensored CMO. Great to be here.

1:22Lara Balazs:Thanks for having me. Now, I thought I yesterday I did a talk in the Palais called The Startling Power of Surprise. Yes. So I thought it would be a bit of fun just to ask you, is there anything about you that people might be surprised to learn? Oh, perhaps that I've actually I've done two marathons. I never wanted to do even one marathon, but I was signed up for a half and in Vancouver, Canada, actually. and I go out I was going to do half of the you know 26.2 miles and I thought you know what I'm just going to keep going and I but I I because they had a full marathon as well and I I kept running and then I thought this is going to take forever so I just ran as fast as I could and because of that I qualified for Boston what the Boston marathon and then my friend said you know you qualified for Boston and I didn't even really know what that meant and so I ran the Boston Marathon because if you qualify for Boston you have to run Boston and it was absolutely fantastic and such an experience.

2:26Had you trained for half?

2:28Lara Balazs:I had trained for a half but then I did start running longer distances because I thought oh a half will go even better if I've trained for longer distances. You know this was a long long time ago I I will say it was my younger self that I'm talking about. And so I had put some, you know, I put the miles in. You put the reps in, as they say. But I really did not go out to run the full. It does show the power of human potential, though, doesn't it? It really does. Because, you know, you planned to do half and you ended up doing twice what you set out to do. Yeah, and preparation. You know, I really wanted to get the, I wanted to do the half so well.

3:07Lara Balazs:Because I thought it would be the only half that I would ever do, let alone a marathon. Now, we're recording this here in Cannes. And I know CMOs are a competitive bunch, right? And I've basically spent all week, breakfast, lunch, dinner, talking to CMOs about their experience in Cannes. And just to give you a compliment, you come up, or Adobe comes up, I should say, more often than not in terms of who do you admire in terms of activation in Cannes. Oh, thank you. It appears you are everywhere. So what's, you know, in a very competitive, you know, short distance, which the Quasette is, there's a lot of people competing for attention.

3:41how do you manage to stand out amongst all the competitors yeah well thank you for the compliment

3:47Lara Balazs:and it means a lot I mean part of that is we and my job and my team markets from everyone from business professionals to students to individuals to creators aspiring creators and everyone's a creator today all the way to the biggest enterprises in the world and all of those people are here And so we have to think about how do we have the red thread, no pun intended with our beautiful Adobe Red, but how do we have a red thread while still speaking to those audiences? And I have a wonderful team. I just get to represent the work they do. But with that, you want to show up with an end-to-end story, which is from idea to impact is what we're doing here, which is now the power of creativity plus marketing plus AI, kind of magic across all of that and showing up in all the spaces.

4:42Lara Balazs:One really interesting story, too, is across La Crescette, we create 150 pieces of assets, static assets, 170 films. And then there's over, you know, 150 aspect ratios that go into when you have to create for all these different sizes across the entire tapestry here. and now with AI those aspect ratios which is not what you wake out of the bed is oh I just want to resize images all day if you're a creative that is all you know done by AI and our Firefly AI all in one studio so you know you're able to have fun and create the imagery you want to create because you're freed up now to do that and I'm so lucky because we use our tools amazing well it's having impact so so well done and it's impossible to miss if you're here yeah and and just we now have a creator beach too with lions and so we're the headline sponsor and so we're able to have creators come into our space and use our tools and give us feedback it's just phenomenal love that yeah well done well done um now i noticed you were named in the forbes influential cmo list in 2024 i'm I'm curious to know what makes a CMO influential and how to do it.

6:00Lara Balazs:Well, it's our teams. Whenever I get any kind of, you know, I'm humbled to get an accolade, an award, I always say I am really standing on the shoulders of my team. And I really, really mean that. And so I try to recognize them. And it's building. So therefore, it's building great teams. And then underneath that is given how much change is happening in marketing. And the fundamentals remain the same, but the technology has shifted from, it was DOS at one point, and then we went from on-prem to cloud, and we went from desktop to mobile, all these massive changes in now AI. that requires disrupting yourself and so having teams be learners and you know enjoy the curiosity of life is is really what's underneath that and so that you know I am so humbled that be at getting the accolades but it's really the teams now you've had a fascinating you know career and worked in some amazing places at times of incredible change you know Amazon for example Nike or Visa you know these are businesses going through rapid growth, facing rapid challenges at the same time, and now at Adobe.

7:13What kind of lessons have you learned about kind of coping with the kind of change you talked about? So what would your advice be, let's say, to CMOs about how to manage through rapid change?

7:22Lara Balazs:Yeah, disrupting yourself, reinventing yourself, reinventing your teams, trying, trying, trying every new offering out there. You know, at Adobe, in technology, we call it dogfooding you dog you eat your own product you yes or um uh my boss um shantan who's the ceo of adobe who says drinking your own champagne i've been talking about it here is drinking that's not great on the dog food well no but it or here you can drink your own rosé i guess but um we call it adobe on adobe or we're customer zero because i'm marketing b2c and b2b and B2B, we're co-creating the tools. My team is sitting with the engineers, the product folks, giving feedback in real time and often building the tools.

8:19Lara Balazs:So for example, and so that's key, but just an example is as everything has moved to a gentic search, and there is still SEO, but there's GEO now or AEO, depending on which acronym, you know, my team was seeing search come down on some of our, you know, key terms. And we realized everything's, you know, showing up in LLM searches. And so we were starting to build an LLM optimizer. And then we started finding there were companies out there, SEMrush, we just acquired. And now we have a unified platform to do both SEO and GEO search so you know you can find out where is your brand being discovered because discovery has totally changed in this world and brand discovery if you're not showing up all the marketing you're doing you know it's game over so we have now brand visibility which allows us to do that but that came because my team dog foods is customer zero Adobe on know be whatever you know term you want to use and and that's the magic in it yeah so this i mean this role is really unique i did actually meet someone at the sales director at mars uh pet care once and they do do that you know they go in and present the the new dog food range and they'll sit there and eat it well there you go that's really dog fooding your dog food right i have evidence that that does actually okay well there you go i think i might join a champagne company so drinking your own champagne is far nicer that would make a long day but there we go now you've been at Adobe a couple of years and you you've joined at an incredible time I mean you know talk about inflection points of you know radical change what's your sort of plan and vision for Adobe and how you're gonna you know what did you want to do when you joined so I was really lucky to be a customer and what's interesting about Adobe is you tend to think about it how you originally got to know it so I make my my my kids one of them was the head of the yearbook in his high school.

10:25Lara Balazs:And so he learned InDesign and that's how he thinks about Adobe. A lot of people think about it from Photoshop. You know, that might've been their first interaction with us. And for me, it was being a customer on the enterprise side. So I use them at Intuit across the brands there. And so we all had different, you know, you have a different, it's an empty vessel, but at the same time, the one thing in the DNA that is so unique to us, and you have to find that point of difference, you have to know your value prop and what makes you so different, and especially in what can be a sea of sameness. And for us, that DNA of creativity and creating, you know, we really believe that everyone is a creator, just like Nike believes if you have a buddy, you know, If you have a buddy, you're an athlete, no matter what.

11:21Lara Balazs:I mean, we believe everyone should be able to create. And so when I came in, we had a mission statement. And usually a mission statement, you kind of leave that alone. But I already knew to motivate my marketing team that I wanted, and it is incredible, but it should always be the most modern, agile, innovative marketing team in the planet because we're Adobe. So, you know, we should embody that and do that. I needed to have something so inspirational as a North Star and a mission does that. So and, you know, this is part of our craft is having both the rational and the emotional come together to create that magic.

12:04Lara Balazs:And so working with the executive team, which, you know, changing a mission statement is not for the faint of heart, working with them, I got the permission, you know, to do this and then bringing them along and my team helping me and others all throughout the company created our new mission, which is empowering everyone to create. And that is powerful because you can create a company, you can create an analysis, a campaign, or you can create, you know, what's in your mind's eye now. Anyone can do that with a prompt if you're using Firefly or all-in-one AI studio. Or Photoshop because, you know, you may love the layers and the power and the precision and that still exists.

12:49Lara Balazs:So, you know, the idea that everyone should be able to create is so key. So that was a big thing I knew. And that's super clear as well. Yeah. Yeah. And it's true to the DNA of the company. So what you want to do is you want to grab the legacy and be true to the original beginnings of the brand that are so part of the core, you know, your why. You know, what is your why? All the way to the future-proofing. and that will no matter what no matter what technology exists the idea that we create as humans and that's a human visceral need will always exist and we believe that and a human is involved you've touched on something that most marketers i think get wrong is in the desire to reinvent and do the new they forget that the answer to the question probably lies in the past and tapping into what is already true.

13:45Your job is maybe to rediscover it or retell it or bring it to life. But the amount of people that just change, and you lose all the benefit of the latent legacy that people already have, the impressions they have, the things they associate with you already.

13:58Lara Balazs:Yeah, and I'll tell you, you know, that's one of the beauties of knowing the founder story. So in the case of Nike, you know, you have Bill Bowerman, and you have, you know, Phil Knight. Those are the stories you tap into for the inspiration. So in our case, our founder, you know, John Warnock was one of our founders and he was just, you know, a guy who was involved and he actually worked at Xerox and then knew that there was an important capability and printing and fonts and so you know fonts are part of our background and that dates all the way back to the founder and there's an aesthetic and a quality there that that's what we tap into every day and so you can't lose that because then you're reinventing something that you didn't need to when there's so much other things that are now you have to reinvent because the technology is changing all the time.

15:03That's amazing. Yeah. Now we're here at Cannes, obviously a festival of creativity. The one conversation everyone's having is obviously AI. Yes. And I just wondered, any examples of where you think AI has been used powerfully in service of creativity that you've seen?

15:19Lara Balazs:Oh yeah. You know, and one thing that's interesting about AI, we have been using it for a decade most companies have especially if they have a tech team and every company has a tech team and that is because llms and machine learning have been running in the background doing the algorithms on the social platforms so yes there's absolutely seismic change happening with generative AI and agentic. And, you know, we're, we are at customer zero on that helping be part of building incredible models. And, you know, I'm very biased, I think, with the work that you can do with Firefly, which is our all in one AI studio, where you ideate off of Firefly boards, you can pull in images, video, use all of our tools, which are embedded and then, you know, go to market and see the magic.

16:20Lara Balazs:I think, you know, I am biased. I think some of our work, like here at the, at, at a camp, we have a, you know, Panda drinking a cocktail, you know, on the French Riviera is one of our big iconic pieces of creative and it gets so much positive feedback. So that's one. I also think, you know, a great example. Um, and I, I, I, you know, everyone is doing such great work. I'm so inspired by my peers, but we did what I think was incredible to start to kick off our Firefly product was we created something called the unfinished film and we asked a creator to come in and start the film and just begin the arc of a story and then open it up to creators around the globe to then finish the story finish the film and this unfinished film the arc of the story so amazing just about a journey of a person and fantastical experiences that were you saw in this end-to-end film with interesting narration and the plot line and that was giving my brand away to do that which as a marketer makes you so nervous you know now you know user-generated content creators that is all a thing and it's really powerful but you always get a little nervous and it has been one of our most impactful pieces of work and it's so you know you know the underpinning of firefly so there's a product truth underneath it all ai generated however the emotional takeaway of a story that you don't know how it's going to end because you've given away the control is also so powerful so that's you know one of my favorites i love that example because i think we're so fixated with AI make doing the same thing but cheaper yeah but in this case you're doing something that couldn't have been seen before oh completely lovely example I heard the other day um Pelé the world's greatest ever footballer apparently the greatest goal he ever scored wasn't filmed because I don't know why why that wasn't film maybe it's too old or something and so they set this project out so they interview people who were there they looked at photographs they looked at kind of newspaper rise-ups of the time.

18:33And using AI, they were able to recreate the greatest goal ever scored by the greatest footballer because of AI.

18:40Lara Balazs:That's so great. Do you know what I mean? So it's like imagining what couldn't have been done before rather than let's do the thing we already do and do it cheaper. Yeah, but, you know, and somebody had to think about that. So this is like what is in your mind's eye now if you don't have the power of the precision or know how to use those very high fidelity tools and for me Photoshop I never learned it because the layers and the gradation and the pixels that was something that you know for me was more than I was willing to take the time to learn now I can do that with a prompt but I still have to have the creativity in my brain and so the democratization and the ability for everyone to participate in creating which is again a human need I think it's just so powerful well I can tell you right so I do remember I'm gonna age myself now but I do remember at the university in the 1990s yes actually having Adobe Photoshop because I liked the idea of being a designer but I couldn't do it I just well why do I do the marketing side because I like to hang out with creators because I I could I couldn't do it but I'm so inspired yeah I remember the massive box I mean they were sort of always like shoebox sized boxes and the manuals were so big and all the discs and all the things and and the beautiful balloon on the with multi colors on the front page I just wanted to be that person the designer but I didn't have the technical know-how to do it.

20:16So I love the fact that now everyone can do what was once the preserve of experts.

20:20Lara Balazs:Yeah, and what's great is we just launched our Agentic layer, which is a creative agent, Firefly AI assistant, across all of these products. So InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, the list goes on. And it does open it up. Well, still you have the option to use the highest fidelity features within the products. Definitely. Now, I spent the last seven years working at a company called System One that measures the emotional response to advertising. So how do people feel when they see advertising? Five star scale, five stars at the top. And one of the highest scoring ads, I looked this up from last year, was your Let's Create campaign, Sweet Caroline, which is an amazing example of using human stories to demonstrate the power of AI, which I thought was very impressive.

21:10It's called a 5.2. 5.9 is the maximum score. So 5.2 puts in the top half a percent of all things. Because it showed that it connected emotionally with people in their lives. Yes.

21:20Lara Balazs:It still matters. And I say it still matters. I mean, I think most of us who got into this craft so studied the fundamentals of rational benefits that ladder to emotional benefits are really the name of the game. I mean, at Nike, I was so, you know, you learn so many things at different stages in your career. And there I learned, hey, the emotional side of sport and, you know, everyone is an athlete. You know, all of those matter so much. And when you're moved emotionally, that is the most powerful thing. That makes you want to buy the brand. But, man, we still nailed the shoe shot in the footwear because that product is what ultimately is the reason to believe and the proof point to ultimately getting you to the emotional outtake.

22:17Lara Balazs:And the emotion, I can't say in the brief, hey, be emotional. I have to, the what of the creative has to evoke that. And so that still matters. So I love hearing that. And that is such a great, great piece of work. And, you know, in the case of what I love about the global brands that I've worked at in that case that came not out of our United States team, I get such great work from the EMEA team. I get such great work from the APAC team, the Japan team. Like, I just got some incredible work out of Asia Pacific recently that was, you know, cherry blossoms. And it was all generated using Firefly.

23:01Lara Balazs:And it was just that it just spoke to anybody because of, and it was unique because it didn't come from just the sea of sameness that sometimes can come out of a market that you always tap into. And that's why I love having people in Brazil and, you know, people all over the world. And that's the shift we need to make, isn't it? From using AI because it's available to using AI to help us, you know, connect and deliver a message and create an emotion. Yes, it's an augmentation to humans. Yeah, yeah. Always, always. Yeah. So with all that in mind, what would you say, because obviously you lead a large marketing organization around the world, you know, in a company with, you know, a frontier of tech.

23:42What kind of skill sets are you looking for when you hire in your team and when you build the marketing organization required to take you there?

23:49Lara Balazs:More than ever, it's mindset. It always has been mindset, but and it's about embracing the gray, being a learner, curiosity. This is, you know, in this you have to disrupt yourself and reinvention. the idea that you have to ask the questions again and again, because if you're not learning, you know, then you think you're right. And, you know, at what cost to be right? You're, you're not going to expand your skillset, garner new, new tools for the toolkit. And, you know, in my own career, I think that has helped me because I always know I am not the smartest person in the room and as I've gone on my career you really I talk about jungle gymming through your career because the more experiences you get through learning and and you know I went down I took I went down to sometimes in my you know titling to go up did you yeah oh yeah oh yeah to get the learning experience yes to get necessary yes because you're trying to acquire skills and you know especially in the amount of change that marketing has experienced like you were talking about digital like what is that that's just marketing today but one time it was there was a digital marketer to get that experience you know you you have to go especially as you're coming up to go into that crap part of the craft um so that learning agility yeah you should jungle gym around and i did go down to go up yeah it's really interesting i think you've touched on I often get asked what connects all the most successful CMOs and I end up saying humility and curiosity which is a really odd thing you might think to say but I remember um interviewing Kofi Amu Gottlieb oh yeah yeah quite a bit impressive guy yes amazing things and almost the whole conversation he's going yeah I'm still learning um I decided to go from here to here because I wanted to understand you know this technology and then I went there because I realized I hadn't done much communication of this kind and it's almost like he's seeking out opportunities to learn start again oh yeah and you kind of look at you look from the outside at people like that and you know people like you and you kind of think well you must have you must have done it all by now you know and if anything that's becoming less and less true now because of the amount of change you cannot think you've done it all no and and you know that's why you hire great people that have superpowers that you tap into.

26:20I will always say, I care deeply

26:24Lara Balazs:about what my head of communications has to say, because she's so good at that craft. He is so good at that craft. And I am now, and increasingly with, you know, and we have customer experience orchestration as a entire framing to how we look at our enterprise businesses that we support, where we sit over a content supply chain from creating the asset, briefing, creating the assets, managing the assets, to putting them out, optimizing, keeping them in our CDP and making sure that we're creating, again, this massive amount of content because there's more content ingested than ever in the world.

27:07Lara Balazs:But through all of that, I am now just the chief, and we say chief marketing officer i'm the chief marketing orchestrator i'm the orchestrator because the you know the flute and the cello and the piano you're like all of these it's when you all of these come together that you create the alchemy of it all and and i can't know all of those things now what's interesting too is now as we use the power of ai and take out the repetitive tasks and all the things that why you didn't get into the craft and people are moving in squads then they're all working together product marketing you know finance all of it's working together using agents and so they're almost mini orchestras within the orchestra.

27:57I did a piece of research last year actually with a company called Worldwide Partners they're a group of independent and creative agencies. And they were saying to me, we want to sort of understand the CMO role a bit better. And they asked me, well, what are the kind of conversations you have when you're not recording, when people are completely open and they're not worried about what's being said? I thought that's a really good idea. Anyway, so we called it Confessions of a CMO. Oh, I love that. So we sort of did this, but we did it off the camera, right? Oh, that's great. And we found out. And it's really fun because in the summary that they wrote up, they basically changed the chief marketing officer to a whole range of things like you know chief momentum officer chief mutiny officer chief meaning officer chief mood officer and it was amazing because what you realized is the marketing bit in the chief marketing officer is only a small part of the job if anything but it was all the ability to kind of you know create the narrative in the organization um create the disruption to make people you know move you know

28:52Lara Balazs:sustaining momentum completely adding adding meaning to what you're doing it's all it's all So moving to the mission that I mentioned and having that North Star, one of the things also from the outside and then coming in, we have so many incredible tools, but it can be really complex, right? If you're a marketer and you don't know everything, but you need our tools and you want to understand. And then I found our employees don't even know all of the things we're doing. And if you do not have your employees singing off the same song sheet, no matter how big you are, no matter how global you are, you're already sort of cutting yourself off at the knees.

29:42Lara Balazs:And so I worked very hard with our strategy team to say, we've got to have a plan on a page for our company. And so what we did was I had that mission statement at the top. the customers we serve because it always starts with the customer so here are the customer groups which you know and and we've moved to a totally customer centric even even how we think about our holistic pnl is based on customers and then the core products that support those needs of those customers, and then ultimately the KPIs and OKRs that we have to serve up. And I am responsible for top and bottom line, you know, revenue at the end of the day for the company.