[Music] [Heather Freeland] Hi, everybody. How is MAX going? Good? Good? Okay. Good. Well, I've decided to keep you on your toes. I'm going to give you a pop quiz at the end of the day. Four quick questions. First, how many of you have received any pressure from your CEO or CFO about the cost of your content? Anyone? Anyone? Come on, raise your hand. I see one back there. How many of you all feel like you need to be at keeping asked to do more with less? A lot of hands. How many of you feel like you've got all of your content development figured out? Everything runs smoothly, perfectly, no bumps in the road, no bottlenecks? Anyone? Okay. Last, how many of you have figured out how to seamlessly integrate generative AI into all of your workflows so that it works smoothly, easily, and everyone is using it? That's what I thought. By the way, if someone had raised their hand, I would have taken you out for drinks immediately after this. But that is what we are here to talk about today, so we can all hopefully get to a better place for the answers to those last two questions. So I'm Heather Freeland. I'm the Chief Brand Officer at Adobe, and I'm going to talk to you about what we're doing today and how we're thinking about this and the use of generative AI in all of our workflows. I'm also joined by Clayton Ruebensaal, the Chief Creative Officer at Comcast, and he's going to join me up on stage in a few minutes. But for now, I'm going to dive in and talk a little bit more about the demand for content. Right now, we're seeing a huge increase in the demand for content. We're seeing it across channels, we have to build content that works for every possible channel, we're seeing it across products. I know we have an increasing number of products, like all the ones you saw today, that we have to market. We are scaling globally, so we have an increasing number of regions and languages we have to translate for. And then there's different formats, different variations to satisfy the needs of our performance marketing teams for all of the optimization that we have to do. All of that is increasing, but why? The landscape for creativity has changed dramatically. And what's pretty amazing to me, I've been in this industry for more years than I care to admit, and the change that's happened in the last two years with the advent of generative AI has changed this industry faster than I have seen it since the beginning of desktop publishing, which, yes, I used to work at a drafting table as a graphic designer before desktop publishing. And the change that's happened has been faster and at a more rapid rate than we've ever seen, which is at once exciting, but also terrifying, and there's a lot to figure out about it still. But what's also interesting is that in addition to technology coming far and fast, we are also seeing this demand for content. So what's happening is we're seeing our customers crave more personalized experiences. And when they get them, you are received or you receive great benefit because you receive their loyalty. They feel more connected to you. They feel more supported as a customer.
But that means more content. And when you feed all of our media platforms that many more assets as I just talked about, they can then optimize them, and you receive that much better results or outcomes from your campaigns. But again, all of that requires more content. My creative team at Adobe is constantly being asked for more, more, more. We've gone from delivering hundreds of assets for a campaign to thousands of assets for a campaign, even tens of thousands of assets for some global campaigns. And they're asking for it across social, email, advertising, you name it. And ultimately, what happens is we're becoming a bit of a bottleneck, not just for our teams, but for the rate and speed and pace of the growth of the business. So we need to adapt how we're working.
So the question becomes, how can GenAI help with these increasing content demands? There's a demand for content that is not slowing down.
We as creative marketing leaders should be looking to harness the power of our generative AI tools. But the way we need to do this is we need to supercharge the creativity of our creative teams while also empowering marketers to do what they do best and to help scale. So by combining GenAI with human creativity, we can build a bridge between the two teams, and that can help us both fulfill on our content demand needs and fill an unmet need that exists now. But it is only when you bring these two worlds together in a powerful way that you can fully unlock the big creative idea and reach the scale and vast amounts of contents that we need to lead to growth in our businesses. So the good news is, and you heard some of this this morning on the main stage, that tools like Adobe Express, Adobe Firefly, and Adobe GenStudio for performance marketing are starting to help tackle these problems that we're all facing. And for the first time, we're seeing that creatives and marketers together can deliver on scale, on personalization, and on creativity. So I want to share a few of the examples from my team.
So this year, we officially launched a new brand redesign for Adobe. This was a labor of love over the last two years, and we reimagined what everything from the wordmark to the brand design to how each of our brands show within that. But when we did that, we thought about it in a materially different way than we would have in the past. We built it to scale. We built it in a world of generative AI. We built it so that it could be templatized, used by our marketing teams and teams across the company to build their own assets, to scale their own messages.
We built it so that we could train generative AI models on it so that it could scale even further, and we built it to really help a lot of these new tools help us scale it further. So an example of that in Adobe Express, we built out a brand kit with our new brand design. We built out tons of different tools and templates from presentations, to social posts, to email headers, sales presentations, you name it. And now anyone in the company, from HR, comms, sales, can go in and create an asset that they can publish at any time that is on brand that we can feel good about. Now that was a huge unlock for our team, but it wasn't just an unlock because we had more people creating content. It was an unlock because it enabled my team basically say, we've got a solution over here in Adobe Express. Don't bother me with the random tactical thing. I'm over here focused on the big idea, which is exactly where we want them focused. So it was a massive, really, freedom generator for our teams to have that time and energy to focus there.
The next topic, Adobe Firefly. So as you've heard, we've rolled out Adobe Firefly and Firefly Services that can help us scale our brands that much further. So every spring, we do an event called Adobe Summit. It's our event for enterprise marketers, just like this is our event for the creative community. And at that event, we created a brand design. And what we did was we then fed it in and trained Firefly Services on that design, and then we were able to generate dozens and hundreds of variations so that teams could post social about it. We could send out emails. We could create new assets, again, all on brand without us having to create every single one. Again, ultimately putting the brand in the hands of people who could deploy that brand, keep everything safe on message, on voice, while our teams focused on the big idea. Now you heard the team on stage this morning talk about how we did the same thing with the MAX design system this week. A lot of that was generated. We had a brand design system, and then we used Firefly to help us create dozens and dozens of variations, so it's ultimately an incredibly dynamic experience across all of our channels.
So finally, Adobe GenStudio for performance marketing. You heard about this, this morning, and this is one of the things that my team has been most energized about this year. So it's the first application that really enables marketing teams to dig in deep and partner with our creative teams in a really rich, meaningful way that's fueled on brand guidelines and results and insights. So just to give you a quick view into how this has worked for us, we fed in all of those new brand guidelines that I just talked about into the system, and as also, we trained it on our voice, we trained the LLM on our voice, and then we hook that up to all of our existing assets and then even new assets that we create. We've worked with our performance marketing team to train them on different prompts language that they can use to generate things that are on voice, and they work and sit hand in hand with our creative teams to generate emails, advertising campaigns, and dozens of variations in what used to take days now takes hours. But what's a huge unlock for our teams in this is that they actually get to see the insights related to each of those assets and what actually worked. So what you see here is an example of an email that we sent out that we built entirely in GenStudio. It generated all these different variations off of a single image.
We ran this. We could test and see, okay, this was on brand, this one's not. All the while, our creative team could make sure that they were getting a final look at things before it went out the door, and then we could run the creative to see what worked. They were all on brand, but you better believe none of us guessed that version 2.0 was going to be the one that won that when we put it in the market. I would have guessed the donut. I don't know about you guys. But there was 50% difference in the lift between the lowest performing and the highest performing. A huge difference. And again, something we might not have come up with on our own. So again, this starts to unlock new opportunities and new benefits for us as we all look to grow our business. And again, my team wasn't sitting there generating every single iteration, wasn't sitting there spending hours and hours toiling away on more tactical tasks, and they could focus on the big idea.
So it's mind blowing to me that for years and years and years, that is exactly how it worked. All of this was very tactical, time-consuming. And then in a matter of, again, the last two years, we've accelerated the pace at which we can create content, thanks to a lot of this new technology.
But I want to be declarative here. Goes back to something I've said time and time again over the course of this conversation that this is an unlock for creativity. No longer is my team spending days and nights and weekends building tactical things and producing dozens of variations. They're focused on the big idea, and that is massive.
But what we also know is that we're getting crystal clear on our brand identity, and that's critical for this as well. So we have to ground ourselves in what is true about our brands and really make sure we know and understand that so we can then help it scale and enable that change.
So when we think about this new GenAI world that we're all operating in, it comes down more than anything to the people involved. I often say that technology is a lot easier to change than people, and that is why investing the time in building the connection points between your creatives and your marketers, helping them build that shared respect for what each are trying to do, helping them learn how to collaborate, learn how to speak one another's language, learn how to write prompts in the way that will generate something on brand, and that creates this massive unlock for all of us.
And if you remember only one thing, creativity matters.
It matters not just to this world being a better, more inspiring place. It matters to our businesses. We see often that there's an 11 times ROI on great creative, and that can drive the growth that we all seek.
But GenAI only works from the power of the people who drive it, and it can be an unlock for them and their big ideas. So with that, I'm going to pass it over to Clayton Ruebensaal. As I mentioned before, he's the Chief Creative Officer at Comcast. He oversees all of their creative media sponsorships and more. And prior to that, he's been at incredible brands like American Express, Ritz-Carlton, and on the agency side as well. And please join me in welcoming Clayton to the stage. [Music] [Clayton Ruebensaal] All right.
So I think that Heather and I might have started working in advertising at the same time. When I started working in advertising is when the computer is getting mainstream. I know I don't look that old but I am. And one of the things that I remember the art directors teaching me about was what we were going from, which was like very fresh in their minds. We were going from people like this, who hopefully retired somewhere nice and lovely like Nantucket. But this guy was setting tight quite literally. And it was something that was a process that took when you thought about making an ad, this is something that took weeks to do, even once you have the idea. Just for fun, I made this using Adobe Express. It took me two minutes. And I'm not saying it's good, but I'm just showing you how quickly something can be created. And the thing that it made me think about was at each stage in my career, whether it's the computer, the Internet, going from 35 millimeter to digital photography or digital filmmaking, at each stage, we've had this similar worry of, well, what about my job? What about me? What about the end quality of the work? That's another thing. At each of those creators were convinced that the computer would ruin creativity because this craft would be gone, that the Internet would create only performance marketing. And I don't know about you, but I'm seeing a big rebound from that. And even this is unimaginable, but digital photography and digital filmmaking would ruin movies and even ruin ads, if that's possible.
And yes, AI and generative AI is definitely changing a lot. It's making us faster. The volume we can create is much larger, like Heather said. The power of analytics to know what's working and what's not working, that'll be massively improved. Targeting is something that'll get much better, and creative optimization. I would have gone with the guy with the hot dog. I mean, I think they were all five, very funny looking. But the power, like Heather said, to know what's working and what's not, it's crazy how quick that's going. I was in a conversation this morning with a gentleman on my team, and we were talking about a new tool that lets you review work through AI and basically get a hint of, like, will this work or not? Is it clear? Is it persuasive? What a help to make sure that what you're sending out the door isn't just, like, all the weight on your own shoulders of, like, is this going to work? That's amazing. But on the other side, what's not changing? The end recipient of what we do, whether we're designers, or filmmakers, or editors, or work in advertising, the human being is not changing. There is still a person at the other end of the screen, the billboard, the event that needs to desire your product. They need to love it. They will need to want it. We still need to have empathy to understand what makes them tick, what are their motivations. Differentiation, that'll never change. Even if the tools we use are-- Let's just pretend for a minute that they're just the best and the smartest thing ever. Well, we're all going to have them. Coke will have them and Pepsi will have them. If we carry that to the end, they're going to end up with the same thing, and one's going to have the power to say, "I'm just going to do something different." And that's always important. The attention span of the human being is actually getting worse. This is really scary because humans have been around for a long time. And in the last 20 years, our attention span has gone from 12 seconds to 8. That might not sound like a big deal, but do you know who's at nine seconds? The goldfish. This thing who we always thought was, just didn't even have an attention span. We're all worse now. Strategic decisions, that won't change. When we think about the products and services we create for our businesses, a big part of it, I believe in my heart of hearts and in all the experiences I've had, is what's right for us, our culture, our strategic direction, our partners, our footprint, our customer base. It's different. Mine isn't the same as Verizon's. Mine isn't the same as Netflix. Mine isn't the same as AT&T's. And I'm sure yours isn't either compared to your competitors. So there are some studies done on what's changing side. BCG did this study using 50 marketing departments. And no surprise, even in the early days, and it's crazy how early days it is, marketing departments were making 12% more stuff using generative AI, which is a big deal because we do need to make more than we ever have, and creating it 25% faster. And we're at the infant stages of this. So that will continue to accelerate. On the other side, what's not changing, a gentleman named Neil Patel did a study looking at content that was for blogs that was created by human beings versus content that was created by generative AI. The content created by humans still works a lot better, significantly better. We look at things like click-through rates and 0.02, 5x more traffic from the human created. Now I'm not trying to pit these two against each other. That would be silly, especially with Heather as my host. But the fact that human-generated content is generating more traffic and more SEO says that there's something interesting here. And it's not an either or it really truly is an end. It's about these tools in my mind, thinking about myself, thinking about my team. It is about these tools empowering creative people, not replacing us. But we really do need to harness what is the special sauce on the other side of that, why is human content doing better? And a designer I worked with talked about it in a way that just really stuck in my head, which was often what we're attracted to is the imperfections the gap in Lauren Hutton's teeth. That's what makes her beautiful. That's what makes us want to see her on screen. It'd be a criminal for a dentist to fix that gap. And it's the same with the things that we make. It is not the perfection that draws us in as human beings. It's the gap. So my message to you would be think about the things that this will open up for us. Think about not just the early innings of making us faster and we can create more stuff because that makes us feel like factory workers, but think about the things that we didn't dare to think about in the past that we may be able to in the future. So for me, multicultural marketing has been one of those where I've never had enough money to do what I want to do. I don't mean what I want to do, but what I really believe we should be doing for the business. I recognize that there are people living in this country, around this world that have walked a different walk in life, and that if I could really drill into what makes Pakistani Canadians and Toronto Special, I can have a much better chance of winning their business. But when I think about the reality of multicultural money marketing, I always run out of money too quickly. It's like, "Well, I could do Latino, Latina. I could do Black. I could do Asian." And then that's it. And even as I say that, I know already it's woefully inadequate. But when I think about if the number of people on my team and the volume that they can create changes, well, maybe in the future, I can, in the near future. Do great marketing for Vietnamese Americans, Thai Americans, Polish Americans. That's a totally new day for us.
Insights, when you think about the power of generative AI to let me know what's going on, what's making people tick, what's happening out there because right now, research is slow and super expensive. If this could allow me to be armed with more insights about what my customers or prospects are thinking, all the better. Training.
There's a new product called NotebookLM that I feel like I hadn't heard of two weeks ago. Now everybody's brought it up to me where you could take any PDF, put it in this system, and what comes out the other side is a podcast between two announcers, a man and a woman. Incredibly engaging. I think about what does that do to my ability to train my marketing teams in marketing, or sales teams, or product teams. That's amazing. And then the last piece, I would say just as a big press, the restart button, is this idea of my whole career, that you could have something fast and cheap, or you could have something high quality and cheap, but it would take a long time. But you can't choose all three. But maybe that's not true anymore. Maybe you can have something that's fast and cheap and high quality. So one thing that we're working on right now, if you could play the video is we're doing a pilot using a video version of Firefly to see if we can take this one sliver of our advertising that we spend a lot of money on that we call Rapid Response. Rapid Response for us right now is six weeks. I didn't use to chuckle when I said that, but I was proud of those six weeks, and those ads cost us on average $150,000. And what we're looking at with the ability to do this through AI is we could potentially bring that down into hours and thousands of dollars. That's a huge change, not just to bring cost down, but how much more marketing I could do. So here's a version of something that we populated with our visual identity system for Xfinity, one of our products that sells mobile phones, cable TV, and Internet services. And that's the thing where if we could create that inside of a day, if we could create that and get it to market inside of a week and cost isn't our big barrier anymore, what else would we do that previously we wouldn't have allowed our imagination to even consider? Because immediately, we would just be like, "Wow, we can't do that. That's ridiculous." So for me and my team, the last six months has been extraordinary. Extraordinary in terms of just opening up our minds and our hearts to think about all the what-ifs. And now we're rolling up our sleeves and getting into brass tacks with partners like Adobe on-- Let's test some of this out. Let's see what we can do. So it's exciting. So thank you. Appreciate it.
[Music] Thank you, Clayton. Amazing. Definitely got me thinking in lots of new ways for sure. Well, I want to start out by asking Clayton a few questions, and then we're going to open it up to the audience. So start thinking about all your burning questions for either one of us about the topic of generative AI and creativity. So to start off, I'm going to go a little off script. Of course. Because at the heart of why we are all here is the incredible power of creativity. And I want to hear like, what gets you inspired most right now about what is going to be possible with generative AI and what you are able to do? I think the biggest areas for me, I've definitely gotten over the hump of the productivity side of it, just because, again, each stage of our careers, we've seen that of, like, "Oh, no, this is going to ruin the quality." And what ends up happening is we create way more marketing. I mean, marketing departments are much bigger than they used to be.
And going to, again, what are the things that for my whole career, I have preemptively taken off the list that now I could open up. So I brought up one, which is multicultural. Being able to do that really well sitting in here in Miami, our most international city in the US, you're bombarded by the wonderfulness of what makes this country great and all of the different cultures that live here. But to say, "Oh, well, I did something for Latino, Latina." You already know, you haven't done your job. And having the tools to really get down and talk to I think about my family, my grandmother's from Uruguay, and we speak Spanish maybe 10% of the time in the house. They moved here before I was even born. But it's still a big part of our house. We were for in the World Cup, we were for the US and Uruguay until the US loses, and then we're rooting for Uruguay. But you think about what does that look like to be able to say to a family that moved here a month ago from Venezuela or that moved here when they were kids 25 years ago from Mexico. You start to say, like, "Okay, now I can really do what I always knew I should be doing, but it just wasn't possible." So those are the things I'm more excited about. And then the other thing that just even being here for a couple days that I've gotten really excited about is, funny enough, like, non-marketing and creative stuff of, what could I do, I mean, in the end, maybe it'll come back, but what could I do for training? What could I do for even that NotebookLM thing? Could I populate something like that, give it to one of our service professionals so that when they're about to talk to a customer, they've gotten like a 60-second brief on what products does Heather have? What is Heather in the store for today? Those what-ifs. Yeah. I mean, it really does unlock the whole concept of personalization and take it to a whole new level, for sure. Now you've been bringing your team on a journey. What has that journey looked like in terms of bringing GenAI into your workflows and driving that productivity you talked about? Well, it's been three distinct chapters for us, and I really, I'm blown away when I think about, literally how quick they were. I think about being at South by Southwest in March and talking to a bunch of other colleagues of ours who run marketing departments. And everybody was having the same, like, "I'm super excited. I want to get started. The lawyers won't let me." Itching to go because I haven't even touched and felt this stuff yet, but everybody's telling me it's going to change the world and might have problems for me in that. And from there over the last six months to go from figuring out, okay, you know what? Whether you take the perspective that we got to play because everybody else is or it's not that scary. We answered some of the bigger questions we had to make sure we don't get tripped up in IP issues and lawsuits, to pilots. If anybody has any questions about it, there's a guy on my team who's sitting in the right in front of these screens here who started our pilots with Firefly across Comcast. We did it within the cable business, the mobile phone business, NBC, Peacock, Sky in the UK. I think we did 150 licenses. And almost immediately, two things became clear. One, we need everybody using it. I'm interested in I was saying to one of my friends from Adobe last night. I'm interested in what would the administrative assistants use it for? What would the techs use it for? What would the finance team use it for? Not just the obvious marketing stuff, but the other thing was we did surveys the whole time with that there's that population of 150 people who are, like, making on-air graphics, or advertising, or retail. I can't even fathom taking it away. - Oh, yeah. - I think it'd be a revolt. Absolutely. We see the same with our teams, for sure. For sure. I mean, it's interesting. What I've seen is you-- There is opportunity in all of these functions in some way, shape, or form, and we just have to bring people on that journey. And what we've also seen is that there are people who naturally lean into this as well, and the more we can shine a spotlight on them and give them more time and space to experiment and inspire others, the more goodness comes to it. - And that's always the case, right? - Yeah. I remember social media was a really good example of that within marketing where there are people who just, like you said, Heather leaned in right away and they ended up their career shot up because-- - Yeah. - They got hands on firsthand experience. I think that's another fun thing is that mix of what you're doing in your personal life, and then bringing that into your professional life, and the other way as well. I just started using the AI version of Gmail. And the other day, I asked it to summarize all of the correspondence from my kid's school, and it was awesome. I get so many emails from my kid's school. It was four things. They're, like, you got to turn in this medical form. There's this coffee for the ninth grade parents. Yada-yada. That's super helpful. Okay. Now what could that do at work? - Totally going to use that. - Yeah. And that is a massive parenting element right there. You know what else? So just by coincidence, Heather and I were together last week. And one of the things that somebody said to us was that even some of the really obvious stuff that we need to know about prompts is so counterintuitive because we've been doing searches for so long. And searches, you try and limit it and get specific. And it was something I think from Google that was saying that the best prompts are around 30 words long. - Oh, it's insane. - Right? The more the better. You see some of these prompts are the team. - They're this long on the screen. - Right? And it's so interesting because you were talking about find the people who often have a passion in their personal life or what have you. One of the things that we found when we piloted, and we're still piloting GenAI for performance marketing was in the first few rounds, the performance marketers who were using it and were really leaning in were producing this amazing work. Then we come to find out that they all have a personal passion for design, or photography, or some creative outlet. And so it wasn't surprising that they were leaning in. Right. Because they've finally felt like, "Oh, this was something that they could feel they could find a creative outlet for in work." Now what was also interesting on the flip side of that is when we got to prompt engineering. Mm-hm. It was very difficult for our performance marketers to even know the language to use to generate a prompt like our creative teams do. The creative teams know how to use terms to describe the shimmery effects that comes down in a way that the model will translate into what they have in their mind. And our performance marketers did not have that. And so we had to spend a lot of time building out prompt guidelines, prompt training, really help them learn. And I think, again, it goes back to what I was saying before. It's having that unlock, and what we started to see was this shared respect for what the other did at a degree that they had never seen before or fully appreciated before. And that's when the partnership and that collaboration really came through, which was powerful. I think the other thing I can't help but point out because I know who's in the audience is there's something really funny about what we all do and I'm assuming everybody makes something, in that anybody could do it. But that doesn't mean that it's good, right? - Yes. - Anybody could write an ad. Anybody could make a poster. Anybody could shoot a commercial. But that doesn't make you Picasso. That doesn't make you a great director, or editor, or a world-class designer, what makes you great at what you do. And back to, I loved your style. I'm actually going to text you to see if I can get more of the background on it. Good creative has an 11x ROI better? Yeah. It's a massive difference between the charlotte and then the expert. And the expertise comes with understanding design, understanding communications, understanding film, understanding editing-- Yeah. Just because I can give you the tools. And I think that's a funny part of doing what we all do is, my finance partners or my CEOs through the year they all know they can do it. They have a computer, you know? Yeah. Oh, believe me. I think every creative in this room has probably been fallen victim to someone who is not a creative telling them exactly what copy they should write, exactly how that should sound, exactly what that should look like. But I think it comes down to the fact that what you said, "Is it good?" And often and this is where you the creative leader is so important because they have that sense of taste. They have that sense of what is truly good. They have that understanding of how to bring the unique human insight into their work in a way that's going to resonate in a way that just because I can type an email to you doesn't mean I can type an email to millions of people and expect them to buy something, right? There is an art to what we all do as creatives that is not going to be able to be replaced fully by these tools. So let me shift gears for a second. And I'm curious to hear how are you leading through this on your team? What does this look like from a cultural evolution? What does this look like-- How has this changed your own creative philosophy? Yeah. It's a lot of learning. But I think if I just gave you a current state of the union, it is about how can we use this technology and these tools to do a lot of the ankle-biter work, if you will, faster and cheaper? Because there's still big things we need to do to position our brands, to break through, to really differentiate from the competition.
And I want to save every penny I have to pour it into those incredibly special things. So whether that's working with Pentagram on design work, or it's working on an experience like this with our partners, GMR. I want to save my money for those things. I don't want to waste it on the things that are $150,000 that could be $500. Yes. That's where we're at in our development. And then the bigger things like insights and multicultural marketing, we're just in the early days just trying to figure it out of, like, "Okay, we know there's something worth pursuing there, but by no means do I know how we're going to do it." But it definitely the big flip is it all seems possible to me where before that door was closed. Yeah. I mean, it is amazing what an unlock it is. And what you talked about with budgets is no different what I was talking about with time, right? Yeah. Same thing. You want to put your money just as much as your time on the big ideas that are going to differentiate your brand, that are going to make you stand out. So I'm going to ask Clayton one last question. In the meantime, start thinking about your questions in the audience because we're going to bring the lights up next to answer anything you have. So, Clayton, last question for me, at least, is what is the one key takeaway you would have for the audience when they're thinking about the intersection between human creativity and AI? Yeah. Much like that difference between anybody with a computer could theoretically do something creative versus a real professional could create something great. Same thing here is just be the voice in your organization that these tools just like the Internet didn't just make marketing happen. The Internet didn't just make companies successful. They were empowered by it. It was definitely tools that allowed for scale, that allowed for new things to be achieved. But much in that way, when you think about AI and what can it do for marketing and design and production, being the voice of balance and reason in that story to say, absolutely, these tools are important. They are going to supercharge what we're doing, but they aren't the thing.
A designer that reports to me talked about it as he runs a pretty big team, and he was saying, "I don't want to demean it, but a lot of it, it could just be another plug in that they had just created." But this one has a lot of power and noise to it. But yeah, it's a tool, and it's a great tool. It's a powerful tool, and it's definitely a very new tool to us that we're just starting to wrap our heads around. But it's not the thing. The thing is what we create. It's the special product. It's the beautiful design. Those are the things that people are buying. Whether everybody in the organization realizes that or not, that's the truth. Yes. For sure. Okay, so we want to bring the lights up a little bit, there's microphones, I think, over here and in each of the rows, if anyone has any questions they want to come forward with. And while you're walking around, I just want to say thank you to everybody for coming. Yeah. Thank you. Heather's the host, but I'm just grateful to speak with. I'm glad people are here.
Okay. Let's go over here. - [Man] Hi. Quick question. - Hi. So this is still a thought that just sparked, but I wanted to share it anyway. So with the democratization of design and how it feels like creatives are going to move towards creative strategy, right, and a little bit of farther away from the craft. And while this is interesting for some, it might not necessarily be as interesting as it-- The work might not necessarily stay as interesting as it used to. So are we unintentionally going to make the creative industry less attractive for creatives? Oh, fascinating. I mean, listen, if you're a creative, one of the things that I know is universal about every creative person I've worked to is they like to make, right? Their happiness when they are happiest when they are making something, when they are creating something.
And I don't think that changes with this, right? I still think the act of creating, the act of making is going to be a part of creativity forever. But I think it will take some different paths, right? I think that making may start with the idea, it may come with providing strategic direction or creating a prompt instead of writing a brief. And what is that? How does that start to take shape? But I do think it will evolve, for sure. But I think making will not go away, right? I think you saw all of the tools that we rolled out today. They're going to take a lot of those mundane task off the plate, but ultimately, you have to take that idea out of your head and turn it into the reality, and that's not going to happen instantly with any model, right? You are going to have to shape and touch and feel that idea in real space to turn it into your vision.
But it is going to be an evolution of roles, an evolution of how you think about what creative careers are for sure.
Yeah. It's funny. I was just thinking about this podcast I was listening to, Acquired, which I would highly recommend to anybody. And each episode is a case study in some business, Nike, IBM. And the one that you made me think of was the one on Hermès, which talks about how-- At any point they could choose to dial up production. But they've kept it so that the Kelly bag and the Birkin bag are made by an individual craftsperson, and that's part of the value. And I think in your point of becoming more strategist versus designers, I think that the short-term, maybe we'll see some of that. But I think in the long-term, what we'll see is that if everybody does the same thing, we'll end up in a very homogeneous place. Yes. And then the easiest thing to do would just be to differentiate, where it's like, there's this great PDF or I don't know what it was, an image, a PDF that got shot around in design communities a couple years ago with all of the luxury brand logos that went from gorgeous, unique to literally almost exactly the same sans serif fonts. It's like, "Jesus, what a wakeup call." It's like these are supposed to be luxury brands. - Yeah. - They literally look all the same. It's might as well go to Target. And I don't mean that in a bad way. It's literally, you should go to Target. Why are you buying a luxury brand that looks like every other brand on the shelf? So I think that idea of not being like everything else on the shelf will still have enormous economic power. And because of that, it'll always-- Yeah. I think, keep an eye towards specialness, difference and also, I think what a lot of great designers do is think about what's unique to you. The work I'm most proud of that I've done in my career have been when I've had the opportunity to change the look and feel of brands, reinvent them, but did so in a way that really understood the roots of the brand. What is the history of the Ritz-Carlton or the history of American Express? And now let's make that modern. Let's make that feel like a big brand in a small WeChat space or whatever it might be. - Thank you. - Thank you. Kind of like to follow-up, though. The thing that I'm seeing is, with the demand that we have, right, and the increasing demand that we have for content and production, we are eliminating, well, we're creating tools to meet that demand, and I think this is a great one or the GenAI is a great one. But we are eliminating the space for innovative thinking and play. Honestly, and play is, like, a big part of the creative process. And so, yeah, that was-- Let me say one thing on that. So I think there is a lesson in history on this one, which is, if you-- I actually think what is going to happen because we are going to take all of the mundane tasks out of the equation, or a lot of them, and we are going to be able to focus on bringing big ideas and your own self-expression to life, is I actually think it's going to unlock the golden age of creativity, and the opposite is going to happen. And there's a lesson in history, which is the advent of the printing press, and everyone thought with-- I'm a font geek, so hand lettering was an art form, and everyone thought that that was going to be the end of this art form, the end of creativity, which is going to be mass produced books versus handwritten books or what have you. That led to the renaissance. It took all the time away from hand lettering every book and unlocked this entire, all sorts of new mediums because people could focus on the idea and new ways of expressing it. So I think that's a different take on it, and that's my sincere hope. And frankly, what I'm starting to see, I mean, what you saw on stage this morning, what people are creating with these tools is mind blowing. And so imagine when we can produce that much more, that much faster, that much bigger, and in new ways, I feel like there's going to be a really exciting future ahead. - Thank you. - Okay. - [Man] Hi. - Hi. Knowing what you know now, right? You guys are pretty far along, I would say, more than most in your GenAI journey. Are there things that if you were starting today, you would do differently? - Great question. - He ask more to you. Yeah. I mean-- I just would've-- Mine's easy. I just would've started earlier just-- I mean all of us, I think totally. I think what's funny is I think if I'm being honest, I would've been a little bit more aggressive. And this is funny because we joke that I'm Customer Zero at Adobe, much like patient zero, except hopefully with a better connotation and-- - Better ending. - Yes. And better ending. But we get to use all of our tools first. So that is an amazing gift because we can give people feedback, what have you, so it's built into my team. But I think I probably would-- I said this earlier today, and I say this a lot.
Technology is easy to change, people aren't. And I think I would have started on the journey of preparing people and the culture to be able to change and adapt and making people feel comfortable with that and focusing on building that growth mindset and helping people be adaptable to new ways of working and all of that. I think that sometimes gets lost in the change management journey, and we focus on the tools and how to learn to use the tools. But I think that is a huge important piece that cannot be forgotten for sure. - Thanks. - Yeah. Great answer. Okay. We've got one over here. [Woman] Hi. There was a piece of data that you presented, Clayton, around SEO 94% more. Can you elaborate a little bit more on that? Yeah. I mean, well, to a limit. It wasn't my data. I took it from a marketing consultant named Neil Patel, and the study was done specifically on blog content. So I don't know how universal it was, but the reason I pulled it in was more just to say that for the time being, it's interesting that the long form that we're creating is still having a bigger impact. And even like the work I shared, the test that we're doing, my hope would be able to create, I don't know, let's say I could create 500 ads that way. I don't think those will be my best ads. I don't think those will be the most remembered. I think there'll probably be really good value in them of getting things out tactically, being able to release a price point faster, jump on a trend, but in a massive way versus just a tweet.
But I still think, we just shot a commercial with Kathryn Bigelow, and I think, the craft she brought to that and the acting and the editing and the music. We had this ridiculous amount of talent on it, four Academy Award winners.
And I'm going to put my money on that one if I have to choose one, but it's not choose one, right? I think so that was the-- If you-- Can I say Google? Is that an anti to everything? - If you Google-- - Say whatever. Neil Patel blog study, you'll find it. Or if you find me, I'll send it to you. Fantastic. Thank you. Yep, no problem. Okay. Let's go back over here. I don't know if it's a Coke Pepsi thing. I don't want to be in salt. - I want to be a good-- - All good. All good. - I want to be a good guest. - We love all of our partners. Yeah. [Man] Thank you. So you're saying that technology is quick to change, people aren't. So seeing the potential here and the ability to scale everything up, if you had key stakeholders that are set in their ways or are really risk or change adverse, what are some ways that you found with this new advent of this technology, what are some ways from your experience of helping to assuage some of those fears or not wanting to change? And the second part of that question is say you get them on board, what's the starting point? Yeah. I mean, it's interesting. I do think that once you find those people in the org, we're talking about before, who are champions, who want to lean in first, put them on a pedestal, right? Celebrate their wins, celebrate what they're doing, and you cannot underestimate the power of competition or drive to be in the spotlight for a lot of people. So I think that creates some pull for that as well, and we've done a lot of that. I think the other thing I would say is that one of the things and we've talked about it, and I've heard a lot of people say it over the course of today is it's not that GenAI will leave people behind. It's that people who don't learn GenAI will be left behind. So I think it's about painting the vision of why this is critical to the path forward, why it's critical to their career development and growth, why because that's very motivating for people usually. And then I think it's also helping them see what's in it for them. I mean, we're all human creatures, right? I think helping people see, yeah, you can do that thing faster. You don't have to spend the next eight hours moving these pixels around. This can happen more immediately. And helping them see it at a personal level helps as well. I think the last thing I'll say on that is, I do think and I found this lesson to be powerful earlier in my career, which is like a change can be happening in the world around you. And you can either let that happen to you and fall victim to those changes, and you're going to be pretty bummed about the outcome. But you control your reaction to them. So if you focus on your reaction and instead you lean into the changes and embrace those changes, you know what, the outcome's going to be a heck of a lot better for you. And so I think it's about helping people understand their own agency in the change, making them feel that they have some sense of control can help them see, like, "Oh, I can help shape the outcome of this for me." And that's really powerful orientation too. The other thing I would add to that is thinking back to when social media exploded, all of these new technologies have a intimidation factor, and this one certainly does. AI, generative AI. It's like, "Oh, my God. I don't even know how it works, but it's cool, and everybody's talking about it." So I think, whatever we can do to demystify it and bring it into, like, "Hey, here's how you can start, my email example, here's a basic thing." Isn't that annoying that you have to read all of these emails? Well, you don't, you know? Heather's thing, you had to resize eight layouts. No, you don't. That's pretty nice. So I think, making it, demystifying it, making it more comfortable for people to experience. And then the other thing I would say thinking about the whole digital revolution of business, is I think too many people felt like, "Oh, shit, I missed it. I missed the boat." But the boat kept changing. Every six months, every year, I think about, how digital has just changed and changed and changed, and its impact on marketing has changed. So even down to search, if you were the foremost expert three years ago, but you haven't done any learning since then, you don't know nothing. So it's okay. You could start today. You didn't have to start yesterday or six months ago. Today is fine. If you want to wait a day, do it tomorrow. - Don't wait too long, but-- - Yeah. You're in the game. Totally. Thank you so much. We've got two more questions, and we are also at time. What I'm going to do is take them both, and we'll see if we can answer them quickly. Oh, I like that. So we'll do it at this, you start, then you go, then we'll see if we can answer. - [Man] You got it. Thanks for your time. - Sure. My question is, you see things like this with AI where it brings out the best of innovation, but then there's also people on the side who see it as making a quick buck, situations where recently where companies were just saying blockchain on their earnings calls and stuff just to boost the stock and whatnot during that boom, and there's definitely been a trend of that in AI as well. And, of course, there's companies like Adobe who you know trust them and you know that they're doing the right thing and doing things like that. But in your guys' experience, as we're all trying to navigate this landscape, what are some red flags that we should look out for when an individual or a company is coming in pitching software or programming with AI capabilities? Red flags that what's the difference between people who know what they're talking about and others who are just using it as a buzzword? - Okay. - Great question. Put a pin on that, yeah. I want exactly see how we're going to try it together. Exactly. We're going to try. [Man] Well, thank you. This has been super inspiring today, and I'm going to go back to my senior leaders and try to explain, I want to do these things. I don't have capacity or budget.
How can I go back and convince them that I want to do these things that are going to lead to faster outcomes and better outcomes, but it's going to take some time and some investment? - That's-- - Okay. I'm looking for some solid advice. Sure. Okay. We're going to do speed round answers. The first one is make sure they have your best interest at heart before you invest in them. And I think one of the things that's been super important for us is to make sure things are commercially safe, trained on owned assets, or that we're compensating creators for those assets that things are trained on, it's really critical, particularly when you're creating in a commercial environment.
Make sure you see the data and understand the impact that they're having for real situations like yours as well. And make sure they're respecting the community and the use of those tools and giving them credit where that is due. There are a lot of GenAI companies and AI companies out there that are using data that they don't own, that they shouldn't have access to, and you really need to be diligent about that. So that would be the number one thing I would say. And then going to you, and I'll let you chime in on both of these two, I think the easiest thing to do to make a case for these things is, first, make sure you have a baseline, right? Understand what your cost of content are now, what it takes you to develop this, how long it takes you to develop that, how many people it takes, how many assets you produce with that. Because then when you do a pilot and you can bring the idea of doing a pilot in, you can show, you went from here to here, right, on any of those dimensions. And it's really critical to have that baseline foundation. And we've learned that pilots are great because you can build the case, then scale. Build the case, make it work, dial it in for use case, and then scale. - Anything else you want to add? - Yeah. Real quick. I would say it made me think about when MarTech came up. It was an investment. It was like, "Oh, my gosh. I'm going to invest in these tools." And everybody in the company that I was in at the time thought, "Oh, that means we're going to have a smaller marketing budget." And it was interesting because my boss at the time, who was actually head of sales, he said, "No, no, no, we're going to create more stuff." And he was spot on. When we put the technology to it, we went from creating tens of units to hundreds or thousands of units. So I think it's like, "Yes, we're going to save money per, but we're going to get to market faster, so we'll be selling our products in 5 days, not 50 days," things like that. And then, you made me think of a billboard that I pass all the time on the New Jersey Turnpike that says, "Roadwork powered by AI." And so I think there's definitely more charlatans in the space than real McCoys. And I think I love what Heather said about make sure these are good people. Yeah. Because you can get into some huge trouble.
My butt's on the line if we get sued for something my marketing department does not, my own personal money, but my company money. And that's a big deal to me. Yeah, absolutely. So being careful about that. And I also think we're working with a lot of different partners right now, and I really keep pushing them to explain it to me, if it sounds too good to be true-- - Probably is. - It probably is. There might be a sliver of exception there where I'm too dumb to understand it, which is quite possible. But I think it's still worth trying to say, "Now really explain this to me. How does it work?" Perfect. Well, let's end on that. Thank you. Thank you all, and enjoy the rest of MAX.
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