As artificial intelligence revolutionises the speed, scale and possibilities of marketing communications, Adobe is one of the businesses with a front row seat.
The technology company’s digital experience business has been around for more than a decade, spurred by their acquisition of web analytics firm Omniture back in 2009 and has since been relied on by countless brands and agencies alike to build their marketing tech stacks. Alongside this, has been Adobe’s ever-evolving Creative Cloud business, known primarily in its earlier days for Photoshop before its wider portfolio of creative tools became a mainstay for graphic designers, video editors, game developers and all types of content producers.
Now, AI is being placed at the core of all of Adobe’s marketing-related technologies as brands, agencies and creators rush to take advantage of the incredible efficiencies and ease with which vast quantities of content can be conceived, assembled and distributed with varying degrees of automation. It puts Adobe’s role as creative enabler at the heart of the current industry debate around machine-generated content.
Last month in Cannes, Adobe added more short-form video capabilities to its GenStudio for performance marketing product that gives brands and agencies the ability to adapt, localise and personalise campaigns across markets using AI within the parameters of their own brand guidelines. At the same time, Adobe also rolled out major AI enhancements to its Creative Cloud and Firefly tools for creators to visualise their ideas and optimise their creations more easily.
Against this backdrop, Campaign caught up with Adobe’s chief marketer in APAC, Duncan Egan, following the release of its 2025 AI and Digital Trends report. Previously in charge of Adobe’s digital experience portfolio, Egan’s role has recently expanded to further encompass Adobe’s Document Cloud (Acrobat) and Creative Cloud businesses as the new VP of Enterprise Marketing. As such, Egan and his marketing team now represent all marketing-related Adobe products in their dealings with clients.
As someone who markets to marketers, what changes are you seeing AI have on brand marketing strategies that Adobe is adapting to?
AI shouldn’t necessarily change your overall marketing strategy, but it sure is going to give you more insights and intelligence to execute that strategy more efficiently, more precisely, and also more predictively.
You can use AI to create everything and with AI, there’s an explosion of content. But what are we all trying to do? Break through. So if I use AI to create an image and a headline and some messaging – is that really cutting through?
The convergence of creative with marketing though gen AI is not just an automated process where I push a button and it’s all done. It’s about how do you think deeply about once you have your strategy around your creative and your message. Are you going to the right persona or target with the creative message that is going to resonate with them whether it’s B2B or B2C? Is it helping to support a consistent journey? Do I have varying degrees of brand relevance that come to me via imagery, messaging, and tone.
It’s the same thing with enterprise brands. You want to be familiar to them, for them to know what you’re all about. But it’s very competitive and it’s very noisy.
For some, it could be an automated process. Meta wants marketers to give them their creative assets so they can provide automated campaigns. Adobe’s position still is in providing tools to help with creative marketing work, but might marketers actually want Adobe to provide even more full-scale automated creative for them? Would Adobe step further into that space?
Our roots are with the creative audience. One of our native gen AI products, GenStudio, allows marketers to speed up and be more efficient in routine or difficult tasks, but the aim is not to necessarily create whatever you want and send it out there. As a corporate marketing person, I can create the imagery with Firefly, our generative AI service, which will make sure that anything that is created is on-brand with checks and balances.
The second aim is to give local teams more control to manipulate the creative, like changing headlines and translating static dynamic and video into different languages, connect into Meta or LinkedIn, for example, and push this live. So for us there’s a balance between automation and creativity that is a really important balance. When I look to the future, I do believe that the creative power of individuals and agencies are a critical piece to the best marketing.
But there is the ‘time to market’ challenge, which we all face. We look at how to get that campaign quicker into market, quicker to optimize it with A/B testing in real time. There are so many people out there saying ‘we can do it all’ and part of Adobe’s strategy is to embed the AI into our products.
So if I go into Adobe Analytics, there’s a conversational window there where it says, ‘Hey, Duncan, what can I do for you today?” And I say, ‘We ran this campaign last week on, you know, Adobe Journey Optimizer. Can you tell me how it did?’ And it would come back and say: ‘We ran three campaigns to these three segments. This one did the best. Would you like to learn more?’ This saves me from having to go into some Excel pivot table. The conversation improves our ability to market to our customers in a more relevant way.
With AI tools, there’s more ability for brands to do more of their own marketing rather than outsource it to agencies. Does Adobe have a vested interest in this in-housing trend?
From my perspective as a B2B marketer, the beauty of using agencies is they work with a bunch of different brands with e a ton of different experiences. Having an internal studio is great because they know your brand, your products, etcetera. But I do think in order to have the best outcome, leveraging an agency is really valuable to push back on you. Because we’ll all sit around a table and love an idea that an agency might say was done six months ago and crashed.
So we don’t have a vested interest in one [kind of team]. We have a vested interest in in empowering creatives, agencies and companies to be efficient and put their best work out there for the customer.
One of the findings of your recent 2025 AI and Digital Trends report found that very few marketing practitioners described their organisation’s digital customer experience as exceptional. What do you think is driving that sentiment?
There is a chart that shows brands think they’re doing a great job, but if you ask their customers, they’re not. I think that stems from data. You’re only as good as your data. I do think there is a renewed sense of urgency on marketing fundamentals. Is my data in order? Do we as a company have a single view of the customer? Do we know where our data lives? Do we have good governance over our data?
Source: Adobe 2025 AI and Digital Trends Report
You get into trouble when you don’t have those things. And if you put AI over the top of really bad data, you’ll think this campaign is doing terrible. Well, actually you can’t get to the right people. So it’s actually the campaign is not doing terrible but you have terrible data. Fundamentally you have to have a handle on your data, which then lends to the ability to really market at scale and intelligently.
That can describe why there’s a disconnect between brand objectives and the actual digital realities, but if so few consumers feel their digital experiences are up to par, what are they expecting?
Consumers of B2B expect B2C experiences now. The difference is if I go to eBay or Amazon you’re 100% sure that’s going to be a great experience because the cost to them of not having that right is tangible dollars. In B2B marketing, if you fill out a form for an event and the form is broken, then that is that is just poor marketing and someone didn’t QA it. But you didn’t necessarily lose the sale.
So I think the difference is our expectations with anything digital is much, much higher than it used to be. B2B is not there yet but we’re moving in that direction. When we start to think about B2B with that sense of urgency, then every contact will feel so important to us and we will think about how we nurture and work with them to educate and engage with us in a way that is consumer friendly, not enterprise heavy.
B2B marketing strategies have been changing quickly with technology. How is Adobe’s own B2B marketing changing?
As a B2B marketer, many of my colleagues have always aspired to be able to do what the B2C marketers could do [especially through instant ecommerce]. Obviously B2B is different, with a longer sales cycle etcetera. But I do believe in the past two years the true promise of personalisation at scale for B2B is there.
We used to look at a linear funnel to get automated qualified leads that might end at our salesperson if they felt you weren’t ‘our guy’ and the opportunity would go away. Over the last 18 months, we’ve targeted buying groups at an account level and identify the people within who matter from an awareness and sales cycle perspective. That allows us to be really efficient in our spend. Rather than score individual leads, we look at account level data for 20 to 30 different engagement metrics from website visits to webinar attendance and came up with a recipe based on historical data of accounts that came through. So we know, for instance, how many times a company truly interested in buying our customer data platform might visit our website with how many employees involved.
Then, when it’s in the ballpark, us B2B marketers can align our marketing via social channels or third party websites to drive them to our website to learn more about customer journey orchestration. So the signals we pick up and the propensity information we have is much more conducive to a more customer-centric marketing engagement.
Much like car sales, another changing part of enterprise marketing is to share all the information you have on your products. Share the white papers and data on your website because that’s a criticial investment of your customer’s time. Why put up barriers if it makes them say ‘I’ll just go somewhere else.’
What’s different about marketing Adobe products to enterprise clients here in Asia Pacific as opposed to other regions?
In Asia the sense of urgency around personalization at scale and the ability to deliver to customers is paramount. That’s no different from anywhere else, but I do think in some Asian countries you can leapfrog some of the legacy technology because you’re adopting it further along. There’s an opportunity to not have as much legacy technical debt as some other markets that have adopted technology early [but failed to] evolve with the times.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
