Accelerating Content Production with Adobe GenStudio – Six Five On The Road

From hours to minutes, GenAI is drastically reshaping content workflows and driving unprecedented ROI.

Host Melody Brue is at Adobe Summit, joined by Adobe‘s Varun Parmar, General Manager, Adobe GenStudio and Firefly Enterprise for a conversation on how Adobe is leveraging Agentic AI to change the content production landscape, moving beyond automation to intelligent orchestration.

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Key takeaways include:

🔹Efficient Content Scaling with GenAI: Adobe’s platforms are designed to address the increasing need for personalized content by streamlining the content lifecycle, from creation to deployment.

🔹Measurable Impact on Marketing Workflows: Customer examples illustrate how Adobe’s GenAI tools are contributing to significant time reductions in content production and enhancements to personalized customer experiences.

🔹GenAI Implementation in Enterprise: The industry is moving towards broader adoption of GenAI in production environments, necessitating strategic adjustments to skills and processes.

🔹Collaborative Innovation and Platform Development: Adobe’s approach emphasizes collaboration with partners to enhance platform capabilities and drive innovation in content creation technologies.

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Learn more at Adobe.

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Melody Brue: Welcome to The Six Five On The Road. I am Melody Brue with Moor Insights and Strategy, and I am here at Adobe Summit. I’m here with Varun Parmar, who is general manager of Adobe Gen Studio and Firefly Enterprise. Great to see you, Varun.

Varun Parmar: Good to be here, Mel. Thank you.

Melody Brue: Today we’re going to have a discussion about scaling content with Adobe Gen Studio for performance marketing, Firefly Services and Adobe Express. How are you?

Varun Parmar: I’m doing really well. Thanks for having me here. Nice to meet you Mel.

Melody Brue: Great to have you.

Varun Parmar: Thank you.

Melody Brue: So there’s so much going on here at Adobe Summit, lots of exciting announcements, everything. But what we really want to talk about is in today’s, like, fast paced environment, marketers really have this big challenge of creating content quickly that is personalized and at scale. So how are you helping to solve this issue that they have of creating all this content but not sacrificing quality?

Varun Parmar: So I think, like you’re mentioning, Mel, the single biggest challenge that the industry faces right now is this massive demand for additional content, which is driven through personalization. Right. And I think, like virtually every single CMO or Chief Digital Officer or CIO that we talk to is saying, can you actually help us solve that problem? What we’ve seen is in the past two years or so, generative AI has been this really magical, transformative technology that now allows them to create this content. But the challenge is how do you actually create this content at the scale that the enterprise needs, but something that’s on brand. Right. And Adobe, as you know, being the creativity company, we understand brands really, really well. And what we’ve done is through all of our applications, be it performance marketing app or Firefly, with custom models, as well as with express and brand kits, what we’ve done is codified that brand for the enterprise. And that’s a really unique value proposition that we offer. Beyond that, we know that a piece of content really performs well when it’s personalized, and it’s personalized to the persona or the segment that you’re targeting. So another area where we’re actually bringing some of our innovations to bear is how do all of our products integrate with some of our other technologies like RTCDP and others? Right. And then I would say another big area is that once you produce this content, in certain use cases, performance is really important. So in the case of paid media, where tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake, you want to make sure that piece of content that’s being used or being trafficked for a really big campaign actually performs. And that’s where the performance marketing app really shines, where we are able to extract out the key attributes that are working for that persona in that geography, across that channel, and then allow the marketer and the creative to put more fuel on the fire so that they can actually focus on the thing that actually works. So that, in a nutshell, has been the focus for the team.

Melody Brue: And along the way, as they’re going through those steps and they’re creating, they can go in and they can tweak those things. And let’s talk about the iterative process that allows marketers and others in their organization to participate in that process with Express, with Firefly, with all of the tools that you have.

Varun Parmar: So to your point, Mel, like, there’s actually a content workflow that’s there in virtually every single brand, and agencies are a big part of that. And usually, you know, at the highest level, there are sort of three steps that are involved in that. The first step is actually creating this content, right? So this is usually the creative production house of the organization that sits in the studio team or the agencies helping you out with that, where you are trying to create this omnichannel content across different formats, different asset types and so on and so forth. This is where Firefly Services comes in. We can really allow you to create “on brand” content using our custom models across different asset types. So be it image, video, audio, vector, etc. so you can create this stuff. So that’s the first step is around content production, which is enabled through Firefly services. The next step is how do you take all of these experiences and then stitch them into the actual activation units that need to be put through the respective channels. That’s where the performance marketing app comes in.

So all of this content that’s being produced through Firefly, all of these asset variants can then be made available seamlessly through all the integrations that we have with our digital asset management offering, which is AEM assets inside of the performance marketing application. And that’s where both the creative and marketer can go in and they can assemble this into whatever ad unit that they want, banner ad or across Meta or Google or TikTok or Snapchat or Instagram. And then you can one click activate this to the respective channel as well. And we are announcing at Summit expanded integrations with all of the ad networks, but also integrations with our first party activation system, particularly AJO for email activation, Marketo for B2B emails, as well as with AEM sites for publishing content on your web pages. And then once you have this activated, Express is an amazing piece of technology that basically allows you to enable every single person in your organization to do these last mile edits. A great example of that is that once you have this campaign activated, you might have folks sitting in EMEA or Asia PAC like if you’re a US headquartered organization and you want these people to have all of these HERO assets, all of these experiences and you want to activate them out in the field. Express is an amazing application that allows you to do that on brand very quickly, very intuitively and do it at scale. So that’s how all of these three products, Firefly Services, Performance Marketing app and Express come together into this three step workflow that starts with Asset Variance using Firefly Services, creation of the ads and activation using Performance Marketing app, and then finally last mile edits through Express.

Melody Brue: So you kind of beat me to this question a little bit, but I think there’s more to it. Some of the things that you’re announcing here at Summit?

Varun Parmar: I would say there are three big thematic areas that we are innovating. The first one is, you know, adding support for different file formats. So now you can actually inside of the performance marketing app create images that are on brand. You know, you are able to take an image and animate it, you know, for, you know, for a five second animation that you can then use inside of a Meta or a Google Ad. We are actually improving the quality of the text, the copy text that gets generated through the fine tuned model offering that we’re announcing. So just like better content, high quality content, doing it multimodally is like a big sort of area of innovation and focus for us. The next one is around activation, right? So we’ve briefly touched upon this, but the ability for you to now take a piece of ad that was created using the performance marketing app and one click activates it across Meta or Google. And more platforms are also coming very, very quickly. And what’s really unique here is that it’s not the process of activation that’s actually painful. What typically happens is that you have lots and lots of content across multiple campaigns that you need to put across an ad platform. And usually it’s the tracking ID. How do you actually take the particular ad campaign and add in all of the attributes that you will then look at to actually see what’s working versus not? We fully streamline and automate that tracking ID that’s going into the activation platform.

So that’s the second big area is the activation stuff. And like we discussed, you know, a big part of that is first party activations, integrations with AJO, AJO B2B, Marketo, AEM sites. That’s a huge announcement that we are doing. And then the third one that I’m also personally very excited about is making a performance marketing app into a true platform. So now you know, any application developer, any ISV or, or a systems integrator or an agency can take the performance marketing app and build add ons to it. So we are announcing 10 strategic partners like PwC, IPG, Fidelity Labs, Safer that have built these add ons for compliance use cases, either medical, legal review, which is the PwC add on, or in terms of financial compliance, which is around Safer that are now available on the platform. A number of them have actually already launched and we are looking for the community to build a lot more add ons as part of the platform. So that’s on the performance marketing side. Let me talk about Firefly services as well because that’s obviously a very big area of focus for us and the teams are innovating incredibly fast over there and I would say there are a number of things there, but the first one that stands out for me is around video. It’s all about video. Tremendous amount of innovation there. How do you take an existing video and resize it? And you know, for those who are sort of deep in video, it’s called reframing. Reframing video, which is taking a video and then resizing it, but doing it in a way that actually it’s usable. So having a focal point that actually shows Mel’s image, like let’s say we were actually trying to, you know, resize this video that’s being recorded, what’s the focal point? Where do we want Mel to show up in different file sizes? Like, that’s a big innovation. We’re also delivering audio translation, lip sync, where you can actually take and translate these videos into different languages. Imagine this video being translated in 26 different languages and doing it in a way where there’s actually lip sync happening. So what you’re saying in English is very different, how your lips would move if you’re talking in French or if you’re talking in German or if you’re talking in Spanish. So that’s an amazing piece of innovation that we’re delivering.

Also, once you’re creating all of these content at scale, one of the things that happens is that you stitch it together. You take the image and your text and different versions of the text into an experience. And InDesign APIs is another thing that we are announcing, which allows you to lay it out in the right way and then automate this. And then finally, I think, really amazing technology that we’re releasing around 3D. So this is Substance 3D, where you can take digital twins off your physical products. It’s a very, very amazing technology where these digital twins can be used for certain workflows. One of them could be object compositing where it’s a pixel perfect rendition of your product. And then you can actually use Gen AIi to create these background images. So that actually allows you to streamline, use cases around photo shoots and so on and so forth. So that’s everything around Firefly. And the last thing is the availability of custom models through APIs. So custom models have this amazing capability that allows you to take your intellectual property, fine tune our image models right now, and this is going to be coming to other formats as well. And then making that available as an API endpoint so that you can automate the end to end workflow. So that’s another big sort of announcement that we’re doing.

Melody Brue: There’s so much! I love the whole lip syncing thing because I feel like I could take a video and I could just automatically learn, “learn” every language. You know, we could put this video out in all the languages. You mentioned some of your partners and kind of some of the strategy around, you know, some of these announcements, how much and you had a whole section on a partner day here at Summit. How much of the kind of partner strategy is “go to” market strategy? How much of a role did partners in this next generation of this content scale that you’re trying to reach?

Varun Parmar: Yeah. So partners play an extremely pivotal role in terms of not only how we build the products, but also go to markets on both the dimensions. We just talked about how the performance marketing app is a platform now and we have 10 partners that have actually built these apps. And now the next thing we’re super excited about is actually taking this, these integrations out to market and making sure that customers can realize value. Similarly, on the Firefly services side, some of the early adopters of the platform and the APIs were agency partners. And so there’s some really amazing successes that we’ve delivered where these agencies are using Firefly services to create some of this content variance internally and making this available to their clients. Similarly, one of the things that at the partner day that we are talking to all of these partners is how can we actually now come closer in terms of some more strategic sort of go to market sort of relationships that we can deliver. And that’s another thing that the teams are working on.

Melody Brue: And some of the successes that you’ve had with customers, I know some of these things are announcements that are new, but you have some things that have been in the hands of customers already. What are some of the kind of big wins that you’ve seen so far?

Varun Parmar: Yeah, no, that’s actually an amazing question. I want to make sure that I quote the right thing. I have my notes right here. If you think of it relatively like these applications are new in terms of data availability out there, but we are already starting to see real big transformative outcomes that we are driving for our customers. So let me actually start off with Firefly Services, you know, and the first one that comes to mind is Gatorade. So Gatorade has this really unique offering on their website and I think like you mentioned you might have experienced this where you can go to their website and you can customize a Gatorade model for yourself. Think about that really amazing personalized experience that you can deliver to your site visitors. What Gatorade did was they actually generated 200,000 images, unique images using our Firefly Services model that are then available to all of their users when they visit the websites. This typical workflow would have taken them multiple months to create. Imagine the efficiency improvements that we’re delivering multiple months, down to a few hours and a few days. Right. So that’s one example of Gatorade. There’s Monks, which is an agency partner, and they were able to streamline their content production workflow in a very dramatic way where there was 96% acceleration in the versioning time it takes to create banner variants. In fact, they were able to create 270 banner variants in a single day. Think about that. Yeah, Again, sort of huge. And then they were able to accelerate their 3D asset creation time by almost 70%. Again, a big sort of outcome that we’re driving for them. And then Studio RX, you know, which is part of the IPG Health Network group, was able to increase the speed it takes for them to create these assets by 5x. So that’s on the Firefly Services side. So shifting gears a little bit. So, you know, let’s talk about Gen Studio for performance marketing. Right. And so highlighting three specific customer examples that have seen really amazing results. The first one is around Lenovo and in their case, they cut down the time it took to produce display ads. Guess what? From 19 days to just five hours.

Melody Brue: Wow.

Varun Parmar: Imagine that.

Melody Brue: That’s significant.

Varun Parmar: Like 19 days to just five hours. Under a day. Right.

Melody Brue: Yeah.

Varun Parmar: And it was similar when they were doing sort of banner creation as well. So display ads and banner creation and there’s like hundreds of thousands of dollars of savings that they’re driving, you know, through this process. Then if you think about Lumen Technologies, which is a telecommunication service provider, they were able to reduce the cycle time to start with a campaign idea and activated by 65%. 65%. You know, you talk about weeks getting translated into days.

Melody Brue: Yeah.

Varun Parmar: Transformational for the business. Imagine that. Right? You don’t have to start on a campaign like six months before the product launch. You. You can actually start in less than six days. What would that do for your business? That’s what you need to ask. And then finally University of Phoenix, which is an amazing, amazing customer, amazing partner of ours. They were amongst the first ones that actually onboarded on the platform. They were the first ones to do beta. So there’s a lot of really strong partnership that we’ve done with them. And for them, they were actually able to increase personalized experiences by 4x, 4x increase in the personalized experience without adding any more time as part of the overall process. So those are just some of the examples of what our customers, both on the agency side as well as on the brands, have been able to see with this technology.

Melody Brue: That’s great. I think it’s so nice to be able to actually quantify some of that ROI now because the last couple of years have been, well, I guess a year and a half, two years have been so much about making announcements about products, not just Adobe in general, in the market. And now to be able to actually see the ROI and be able to, you know, hear those customer stories is so great. Well, as we wrap up, is there anything that you want to share? What do you think we’ll be talking about at the next Adobe Summit?

Varun Parmar: Yeah, I think it’s a great question, Mel. And I would say, like, if you are, you know, an executive, you know, that is thinking about leveraging Gen AI and you could be sitting in a brand or in an agency. I would like you to say that 2025 is the year of going from playground to production, as we just talked about. Right, as we just talked about it like, you know, multiple customers, multiple verticals, multiple industries are seeing real tangible benefits with the technology. Obviously this comes with a big change in management. So it’s not that as an organization you don’t need to adapt in terms of the skill set, in terms of the mix of the team and who’s doing what. So there’s a little bit of change management that sort of comes in,which is true for any transformative technology that you deploy inside of the enterprise. But I think that’s the big sort of takeaway that we want folks to have as they think about this.

Melody Brue: Great. I love that. From playground to production. Well, thank you so much. This was great, great speaking to you and thank you all for joining us. Again, I’m Melody Brue, this is Six Five On The Road and we’re at Adobe Summit 2025. We’ll see you next time.

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