Adobe’s GenStudio For Performance Marketing Will Change How Ads Are Made

When Adobe released its Photoshop software, it changed the way we view and edit photos forever. Now the software giant is about to produce another seismic change with the launch of GenStudio for Performance Marketing, a new generative AI-first application for brands and agencies to speed up the delivery of their global advertising and marketing campaigns.

Adobe GenStudio for Performance Marketing is a new application that can learn a brand’s guidelines and then apply that knowledge to advertising and marketing materials aimed at different markets, countries and even users, creating highly personalized and targeted advertising that has more precision than ever before.

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, and the trouble is I don’t know which half,” complained the first Lord Leverhulme more than 100 years ago. He wasn’t wrong. However, with modern advertising platforms like Google and Meta, it’s never been easier to target, track and measure the efficiency of an advertising campaign. And with less waste comes the possibility that advertising budgets can be spent more effectively targeting more relevant content to more specific markets.

According to a survey that Adobe carried with 2,841 marketers, nearly two thirds of those asked believe the demand for advertising content is likely to grow by at least five times, mostly driven by consumers who now expect brand experiences to be dynamic and more accurately tailored towards their interests.

With GenStudio for Performance Marketing, brands have one tool that can create paid social ads, display ads, banners, marketing emails and more. The software provides a whole new level of speed and agility to the process by leveraging pre-approved and on-brand content. GenStudio brings creative and marketing teams closer together. Creatives can put energy into defining campaigns, while the marketing team can do the mechanical drudgery of customizing that content for individual markets while still respecting guidelines concerning the brand’s voice, channels and images.

Adobe GenStudio for Performance Marketing has powerful tools that can search for brand-approved assets that have already been created by the creative teams, such as copy, logos, images and advertising templates. Using generative AI tools like Adobe Firefly and third-party large language models to create the copy for emails, paid media and display ads can be created that are fully compliant with a brand’s standards.

Another feature of GenStudio for Performance Marketing is the integration with Google’s Campaign Manager 360, Meta, Microsoft Advertising, Snap and TikTok. Marketing teams can quickly activate campaigns and get direct performance insights. Both marketers and creatives can see what material resonates with consumers and why. Adobe’s AI features can even identify the attributes that make up an image or video, including objects in the content, background and foreground colors, the presence of people, audio genres and much more.

Adobe GenStudio for Performance Marketing is the latest application within Adobe’s GenStudio, an end-to-end content supply chain that optimizes the process of planning, creating, managing, activating and measuring content for marketing campaigns and personalized customer experiences. This includes applications across Adobe Experience Cloud and Adobe Creative Cloud such as Adobe Workfront, Frame.io, Adobe Firefly Services, Adobe Firefly Custom Models, Adobe Express, Adobe Experience Manager and Adobe Content Analytics.

“Delivering impactful global campaigns hinges on the ability to bring marketing and creative teams closer together, with generative AI-powered workflows that eliminate cumbersome and inefficient processes,” says Varun Parmar, general manager, Adobe GenStudio, during a sneak preview he gave me of the new software just a few days ago. “Adobe GenStudio for Performance Marketing enables creatives to focus on delivering deep creative designs that amplify a brand while empowering their marketing counterparts to create the high volume of content variations that are needed to drive customer engagement, personalization and conversion.”

One of the main tools that Adobe GenStudio for Performance Marketing provides is the ability to easily find and reuse marketing and creative assets that have been pre-approved. A built-in content repository lets users search for images, logos, videos and more which they can use in creating targeted marketing content for paid social, display ads, banners and mass emails. For brands using Adobe Experience Manager Assets, there’s a two-way sync that ensures assets can easily be reused across campaigns, without needing to start from scratch each time.

Creative teams can often be overwhelmed with adjusting and creating high volumes of content variations for their marketing colleagues. For example, they may need to produce multiple iterations of an ad by language, geographic market or even socio-economic targets. With Adobe GenStudio for Performance Marketing, marketers can do that work without asking the graphics or creative teams and they will be confident that the results will be fully brand-compliant. Users can create and remix content using Adobe Firefly—for generating images designed for safe commercial use—or through third-party language models to create sparkling email copy. The content can then be matched with different audiences to create highly personalized and targeted marketing campaigns.

As generative AI reshapes how content is created, teams need foolproof guardrails to ensure brand compliance. Guidelines for fonts, tone of voice and channel requirements can easily be uploaded and standardized over the new application, along with pre-defined content templates. A brand check feature, powered by AI, automatically inspects the generated content and can alert creative and marketing teams if anything needs tweaking to make it brand-compliant. Automated multi-step review workflows integrated with Adobe Workfront, provide an extra layer of oversight before the final content is delivered directly to advertising platforms or social media channels.

Users of Adobe’s GenStudio for Performance Marketing will also soon be able to publish content directly to social media channels including Meta, TikTok and Snap, or through display ad campaigns on Google’s Campaign Manager 360 and Microsoft Advertising properties. Integration with Adobe’s Journey Optimizer, when released, will let users create content for a brand’s channels such as email and websites. Adobe says the ability to automatically activate new content will speed up the delivery of advertising and marketing campaigns, letting teams adjust content in real time as trends or needs alter.

Because customer preferences are always changing, sometimes on a daily or hourly basis, GenStudio Insights provides attribute-level insights on things like colors, objects, styles or audio genres that are resonating with the target audience. Users can bring in direct performance insights from Meta and will soon be able to connect to additional partners including Microsoft Advertising, Snap and TikTok, producing a holistic view of how a particular campaign is performing. Teams will be able to adjust and optimize content quickly. Integrations across Adobe Experience Cloud applications such as Adobe Journey Optimizer, which is under development, will let users bring in insights to ensure consistency in how customers are engaged at every touchpoint.

Lenovo is one brand that has already been beta-testing Adobe’s GenStudio for Performance Marketing. The company communicates with its customers through dozens of channels and platforms and needs “hyper-personalized” advertising so it can connect the correct products with the right audiences.

Adobe has also collaborated with technology partners to bring activation and insights features that will soon be available from within GenStudio for Performance Marketing.

“From generating high-quality leads to driving awareness, Campaign Manager 360 helps marketers reach their desired audiences across websites, apps, video content and more, to accomplish their business goals,” says Stephen Yap, managing director, Google Marketing Platform. “Having compelling creative content that is tailored to the right audience is key to driving engagement, and Adobe GenStudio for Performance Marketing empowers brands to execute this at scale across any of the ad formats offered by Google.”

“We believe in the power of generative AI to unlock advertisers’ full creative potential and quickly build ad creatives at scale,” adds Cynthia Dinh, director of strategic monetization partnerships at Meta. “Our integration with Adobe is one of a variety of ways that we’re working to make the ad creative process as seamless and efficient as possible for businesses.”

“Generative AI is a powerful tool to enable richer insights, deeper personalization for consumers, greater efficiency and performance for marketers, and a more empowered advertising ecosystem,” insists Lynne Kjolso, vice president of global partnerships and retail media for Microsoft Advertising. “Our engagement with Adobe GenStudio will bring our joint innovations to a broader set of marketers, helping them reach high-quality audiences with ease and greater impact.”

Adobe is promising a huge change in how advertising and marketing content can be produced. A new world of nimble and highly targeted content across a myriad of countries, languages and markets is going to put rocket boosters under the online advertising industry. Adobe GenStudio for Performance Marketing has the potential to be as big a gamechanger as Photoshop was when it was first released. It will free creatives from the drudgery of producing hundreds of ads with minor iterations and that’s just the kind of task that AI was made for. It will be interesting to see how people use the new software.