Leveraging AI and Automation in Adobe Content Supply Chain

Personalized customer journeys require incredible amounts of content. Email, social media, and paid digital media campaigns require vastly different assets, and within those media categories are subcategories requiring customized content in order to perform well and create the level of personalization that leads to conversion.

Despite the need for high-quality content, the percentage of revenue set aside for content creation and delivery is expected to shrink over the next two years. Further complicating content creation are lengthy project timelines. Ideation, creation, review, approval, and activation involve multiple stakeholders across various departments who often juggle several projects at once to keep pace with demand.

The answer to scaling content production without adding to headcount? Optimize the content supply chain. When used correctly, AI and automation streamline each stage of the content supply chain while preserving the defining elements of your brand. In this article, we’ll discuss how leveraging these technologies to create personalized content at scale enables teams of all sizes to use their budgets and bandwidth more effectively while supporting growth.

Using AI and Automation for a More Productive Content Supply Chain

Each stage of the content supply chain presents opportunities for improved efficiency. For example, Adobe Workfront automates many of the tedious, repetitive, but necessary tasks that happen at project kickoff, such as producing creative briefs and aligning workflows across applications in the Adobe Experience Cloud. Native integrations allow team members to work in their respective areas of expertise while easily sharing project updates and approvals.

Content creation and delivery are the areas in which many marketing and creative teams run into bottlenecks. There can be several reasons for stalled progress, but one major holdup is the sheer volume of content that campaigns require. Adobe GenStudio for Performance Marketing, Adobe’s latest solution to comprehensive content supply chain management, links tools within the Adobe ecosystem to further streamline creating, managing, and activating content.

Within GenStudio, marketers and creative teams gain the generative AI capabilities of Adobe Firefly across a performance marketing automation platform. GenStudio also features Firefly Services for automation-type functionality to create various renditions of templates within an organization’s paid social and digital media channels, as well as email campaigns.

Let’s say the marketing team creates an email campaign using HTML. Through GenStudio, they can connect their email channels to the preferred campaign platform, and could then access pre-existing templates — all without disrupting the creative team. They could also write a natural language prompt (NLP) to create variations of the email campaign for specific personas while using brand-compliant templates. Marketers can create thousands of variations using these prompts before pushing out the content for activation within specific channels.

Better team collaboration

Organization-wide AI and automation buy-in leads to another benefit: improved team collaboration. Adobe’s content supply chain ecosystem allows teams to build in the review and approval process for simplified and faster collaboration between marketers and creatives.

After creating and selecting their favorite variations, marketers can submit content for approval with the creative team before pushing for activation. Instead of creating different variations of every campaign asset, the creative team approves the options that best serve the brand’s campaign and meet brand guidelines. This workflow reduces the time spent on one project, streamlines creation/review/activation, and generates brand-compliant content efficiently.

Easier access to content is also critical to better collaboration. A recent survey found that a vast majority of executives and content professionals need better asset accessibility. Adobe uses a unified AI assistant within the broader Adobe Experience that allows users to do cross-product assistance through a bot. If someone working in Workfront asks a question related to a specific project, the bot can transfer across tools to find and deliver the answer more efficiently than if the person had to contact multiple departments to get an answer.

How AI Impacts Content Personalization Within the Content Supply Chain

Serving every customer the same content and expecting everyone to have the same experience is unrealistic, especially in today’s personalized e-commerce environment. But imagine if everyone did have the same experience — and it was negative. Traditional creation and approval processes don’t allow marketing teams to quickly pivot and adjust content for better performance. AI-powered content supply chains are better equipped to not only produce more customized content from the outset, but to allow for additional customization or adjustments in response to real-time insights.

Marketers can create a custom language learning model (LLM) trained on brand guidelines, then further train the model to generate content for a specific demographic or customer persona. Instead of starting from scratch for each content asset, marketers can write an NLP to define the target persona. Users also have the ability to generate other variations (including by size, language, and format) from existing content. Adobe GenStudio then lets performance marketers activate the content across various channels.

Beyond automated activation, these tools also collect metrics from different channels for attribution-level details on variations of assets. The goal for GenStudio is to obtain real-time feedback on the performance of content generated through large LLMs to see what content performs best within that system. In this way, GenStudio is a one-stop shop for performance marketers to not only create variations of content using AI, but to also activate content from the platform and get real-time analytics back into the tool to review content performance.

How Adobe Is Addressing AI and Automation Integration Challenges

Leveraging AI and automation in the content supply chain can be a challenge for companies that don’t own their activation channels. The challenge comes in acquiring the analytics data on content performance, because larger digital media companies often don’t release this information.

Adobe is addressing this by creating integration points within their system to allow client partners like Rightpoint to build integrations with other ad platforms. Adobe’s ability to have native, intuitive integrations with large ad platforms could prove to customers that they can effectively handle activation internally.

Another challenge lies in convincing creative teams and marketers to trust that LLMs and text-to-image generation can create commercially friendly, viable content. Adobe encourages teams to start using the tools in internal processes, such as in ideation and concepting instead of creation. As teams experiment with generative AI, they’ll ideally begin to see how it can be used to develop production-ready content.

In terms of other LLMs, Adobe has created guardrails that make it the only compliant and commercially usable text-image generation. Adobe has several gatechecks within their learning models to not allow it to create any unsafe or harmful content. Adobe is spearheading the Content Authenticity Initiative and recently introduced the Adobe Content Authenticity web app to continue its commitment to protecting and supporting creators.

Rightpoint: Your Partner in Adobe Content Supply Chain Success

AI and automation empower content marketers and creatives alike to maximize their creative output and drive toward greater growth without overextending creative teams and resources. Adobe’s content supply chain tools synthesize workflows across departments to help organizations create and leverage their best-performing content while retaining the qualities that set their brand apart. If you’re ready to optimize your content supply chain or learn more about Adobe services, contact our experts at Rightpoint today.