A brand at the intersection of creativity, productivity, and marketing, navigating one of the most disruptive innovations across all three — generative AI.
Bringing the Brand to Life.
In my first full year at Adobe, our brand, our products, and the way we worked were forever changed by generative AI. We shifted from launching products 3x a year to 73x per year. We had to navigate sensitivities to a customer base that was at once energized and nervous. We had to fully evolve from the old boxed software company to a champion of innovation and creativity in every customer experience.
Project Red
The Adobe logo and design system hadn’t materially evolved in 40 years, but it was time to make sure that how we showed up engaged the next generation, gave a nod to our innovation, celebrated the people and creators who use our tools, all while paying respect to our heritage.
In addition, thanks to generative AI, our products were increasingly resonating with multiple customer segments and were increasingly interoperable. That meant, we had to evolve our brand architecture from being a house of brands to more of a branded house. We needed more cohesion to drive deeper engagement across the portfolio.
Hence, Project Red — our new brand design — was born.
And along the way, our brand continued grow in value, moving up the ranks of Interbrand’s Best Global Brands list, from #21 when I arrived to #17 now, cited as one of the “Top Risers” each year.
Celebrating 30 Years of Acrobat
To celebrate 30 years of the PDF, we decided to have a little fun — partner with comedian Hasan Minhaj to celebrate all that Acrobat is capable of. From seared scallops to an homage to Office Space, this digital only campaign reminded people that there’s a lot more to PDFs than they thought.
Adobe Express: Your Someday is Today
Adobe hasn’t had an awareness problem since its early days, so when we launched Adobe Express, our new “create anything” app, we had to build a new muscle. We had to set ourselves apart with creative that tapped into a universal human truth — that people want to stand out, but they don’t always know how. And from that insight, “Your Someday is Today” was born.
Our marketing challenges have been steep — build awareness for an unknown product, cast off perceptions that Adobe is hard to use, expensive, and only on desktop, and differentiate from the competition. So by highlighting real stories of real small businesses, using a device we affectionately refer to as the “swipey” (to convey how easy it is), showing how this product can enable your big dreams to come true, and tapping into cultural-icon-of-the-moment Benny Blanco, we’ve created an ecosystem of content that is currently taking over the UK (coming soon to the US).
Photoshop: Sweet Caroline
The magic of generative AI has to be seen to be believed. It can truly help you create anything you can imagine. So when we launched Firefly, Adobe’s image model, and integrated its capabilities into Photoshop, we wanted to make sure that the magic shone through. And what better way than through the big, big imagination of a child.
Acrobat’s Got It.
Most people know about PDFs, but they don’t know about all of the incredible capabilities included in Acrobat. And they also don’t realize how easy it is, driving real productivity for their businesses.
So we crafted the “Acrobat’s Got It” campaign, focused on key verticals and use cases to tell the story of ease and a breadth of features.