Adobe is making strides for performance marketers. Six Five On the Road makes a stop at AdobeMAX, where host Melody Brue is joined by Adobe‘s Vikram Viswanathan, Head of Product Marketing & GTM, for a conversation on Adobe’s introduction of GenStudio, a new product aimed at revolutionizing performance marketing.
Their discussion covers:
- The inception and vision behind GenStudio
- How GenStudio stands out in the market of performance marketing tools
- The specific benefits and features of GenStudio for marketers
- Vikram’s insights on the future of digital marketing and Adobe’s role in it
- Live responses to audience questions about GenStudio and performance marketing
Learn more at Adobe.
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Transcript:
Melody Brue: Hi, welcome to a very special edition of Six Five On the Road. I am Melody Brue with Moor Insights & Strategy. I am here at Adobe MAX. Adobe MAX is the creative conference. And I’m here with Vik … You tell me how to pronounce your name because I’m afraid of going to ruin it.
Vikram Viswanathan: No. Vik Viswanathan.
Melody Brue: Vik Viswanathan. It’s such a beautiful name but I didn’t want to ruin it for you.
Vikram Viswanathan: That’s okay.
Melody Brue: You have a really big special announcement here. You announced GenStudio for Performance Marketing. Tell me about that. And also, let’s talk about the problem that it solves for marketers and creative teams.
Vikram Viswanathan: No, absolutely. Thanks, Melody. We are super excited about the launch we had yesterday at MAX. And GenStudio for Performance Marketing is the application as part of the Adobe GenStudio solution. For those of you who’ve been part of Adobe’s journey on content supply chain, we’ve been at the forefront of trying to solve content supply chain problems for our customers. GenStudio for Performance Marketing is the first app which really goes end to end from a workflow standpoint trying to solve it. What it really tries to get at is creating content for personalization. You’ve been a CMO, you know that is a problem which is just getting bigger and bigger. You have more channels to put your content on, you want to personalize to more audiences. And all of that’s creating a massive load on the creative teams.
And the creative teams, budgets aren’t getting bigger so this demand is causing them to not be able to meet what marketers want today. What it ends up happening is marketers are either not able to use the right content they want to personalize for their audiences or they just pick a few segments they go after. But I think with the advent of generative AI we have the opportunity to do things differently. And GenStudio for Performance Marketing is really Adobe’s way of creating an end-to-end workflow that brings both creatives and marketers together to create content and content variations.
Melody Brue: You talk about creatives and marketers, it sort of allows marketers to be more creative. Because I think there’s a little bit of a misunderstanding I think in some ways that marketers aren’t creative or aren’t as creative as what we would consider the real creatives. So it allows non-creatives, or not the traditional creatives, to be more creative, right?
Vikram Viswanathan: Yeah. That’s an interesting one, right? In the scenario I talked about creating a ton of variations, what ends up happening is the creatives spend so time on making edits and resizing for different formats and different channels and … In fact, we did a survey of our creatives, and we found our creative customers spent up to 40% of their time just doing edits and resizing. That’s not why they got into the creative field. At Adobe MAX there’s so much excitement about the creative inspiration. That gets lost, right? This gives time back to the creative because we’re using AI to do some of this stuff which took so much time from them. And we are allowing the marketers to leverage the AI part but also be creative within guardrails so that we can create on-brand content. Because for GenStudio for Performance Marketing, at the foundation we want everything generated to be absolutely on-brand, high performing, right, because this is for performance marketers. We want it to be personalized for all the different audiences you’re trying to meet. And we want it to be compliant for your industries. Every industry has a set of compliance needs before content gets pushed out into marketing.
Melody Brue: So you talked about those guardrails. And that is, I think, from a compliance standpoint but also from a creative standpoint. Controls and guardrails, let’s talk a little bit more about that and why.
Vikram Viswanathan: Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s very important to our enterprise customers, right? AI gives the power for everyone to be able to imagine and create things. That’s an awesome thing. And at MAX we saw all the innovations that … How people can do stuff. But you want to make sure when you take that power beyond just your studio team which used to be … Which is very aware, and thoughtful, and conscious of your brand and you start letting people play with it, you want to have the controls and the guardrails in place so that your brand doesn’t get tarnished. And especially for our large customers, brand is so important. It’s such a big part of the ethos of the company. I mean, you can see at MAX, right, everything we have here is on-brand. There’s a theme, we are in Miami. It’s a very carefully constructed brand.
And so what we do in GenStudio for Performance Marketing is we provide those guardrails in multiple ways. First, all of the brand guidelines, which our customers have, are loaded up in your instance, the customer’s instance. If you have a document of all your brand guidelines, GenStudio for Performance Marketing can read that and understand what it means to be on-brand. Second thing we do is … When the marketer is generating the content, generating the variations, we read those brand guidelines. And the model is actually coming up with results based on those guidelines. So it’s guided to provide stuff on-brand. Once the content is generated we use the same guidelines and run a check against that to see, did you meet these guidelines. And we give a score for each piece of content. You saw the demo on that. Which is actually great. It’s great feedback because marketers sometimes are … They take a piece of content and they’re reusing it. They know it’s the creative content from studio but they’re like “Did I mess it up? Did I make changes? And is the copy really going to stand?”
And now we give you a score to give you the confidence to say, “Hey, this is 90% meeting all the guidelines.” And if it doesn’t, we tell you where it falls apart. So that’s the second way in which we do it. And the third most important one is, you can’t publish anything until you get the right approvals in place. It’s the creative who signs off. It goes back to the creative, every piece of content before publishing, because we have review and approval set up in the product. And the marketer pushes out for a review. And once the creative looks at it, approves it, they can do it in the product, you get an email, and then you’re ready to publish. And you can activate on the channels, we talked about at the launch, as well.
Melody Brue: So you’ve had this in private beta for a couple of months now. What’s the reaction been? What’s the feedback been from those customers?
Vikram Viswanathan: I’d say two things. We’ve been in beta for a little over three months now and we’ve had about 18 customers. It’s been fantastic. We’re very thankful for our beta customers helping us design the product in a way. And I would actually throw Adobe in the mix as well. This is definitely a unique way in which we built the product. Our marketing team co-built the product with us because they told us what they wanted to see, they told us what works for them, what didn’t. And the biggest testament to that is they’re actually using this product live, right? They’re using it for their production workflows. This is a new way of doing things. The fact that you’re taking away some of the mundane, repetitive tasks out of the equation using AI to help with that. And you’re getting marketers and creatives to have a handshake and have a common language in how they operate. Who better to do that than Adobe given our creative heritage and are experience cloud presence?
You need to take small steps, right? What we’ve seen from our customers is to pick the use cases which you want to start with, test it out, right, scale it up, and then start adding the other use cases. When you take Adobe, as an example, we’ve seen great results, right? Our own marketing team, when they used it, they found that they were able … For example, emails. Emails is one of the asset types which you generate within GenStudio for Performance Marketing. They were able to get 10% bump in open rates, 57% jump in click-through rates which is great because … It’s not enough to just create a lot of content, right? For performance marketers especially, purely content for content’s sake is not sufficient. So we heard that from our customers too. They wanted to make sure that we have the rich content insights flow back into the creation, and that’s part of what we’re building into the product as well.
Melody Brue: I think that’s really interesting, it’s Adobe on Adobe. I’ve heard that a lot from your product teams about … Some things were actually born out of an internal need and then they said, “Well, this is something that our customers would really” … “Could really use.” But it was really developed internally. And then realizing that well, the world needs this. And I think that’s a really great way to introduce a product. Some people call that eating your own dog food or drinking your own champagne.
Vikram Viswanathan: Champagne sounds better.
Melody Brue: Champagne sounds better. But sometimes it’s dog food, right, and then you make it into champagne I guess.
Vikram Viswanathan: That’s right.
Melody Brue: But you also announced some really interesting partnerships, in a way to get this content out, like Meta and Google. Explain how that ecosystem works and why that-
Vikram Viswanathan: Absolutely. The channels we support are starting with email, display ads, banner. It’s paid media, right? And social media. Paid social media is a big one. And we want to be able to push into all those channels. So we entered into partnerships to make sure that when the content gets created you can directly activate it from the product. And so that’s a big part of those partnerships. We are very appreciative of our partners there. And I think our ecosystem goes even beyond that, right? There is an activation part to it. But also there’s a broad ecosystem of our agency and integration partners who we expect to build and continue working with this on. Because again, we’re changing the way … How marketing gets done and we can’t do it alone. Customers need to be thinking about their marketing processes differently. And also we need the help of our agency and system integration partners to help fill in the gaps as well because this will require a village to change how we do marketing differently.
Melody Brue: So what’s next for GenStudio for Performance Marketing? What’s on the roadmap? What’s your vision, the big thing?
Vikram Viswanathan: No, we are very excited. Part of being at MAX you get rich feedback from customers. The launch has been less than 48 hours but we have had tons of good customer conversations and those influence our product roadmap, right? We want to build stuff which customers see value in. And I think we already hear some great feedback on being able to … One of the big pieces of GenStudio for Performance Marketing are the rich content insights which we can generate pulling in the performance data for all the content and campaigns out there. We want to be able to use that to help you generate better. Generate more content which is high-performing. So that’s something we will be investing time in. You can also expect us to expand the partnerships in terms of our ecosystem both in terms of channels as well as in terms of agencies and partners we work with.
And then we want to build on what we do in the product in terms of making it more compliant. And this is where some of our partners come in. A lot of industries have very specific needs for approvals. Approvals don’t just stop with one person reviewing it, they’re multistage. They also have very specific requirements for how … The MLR review or claims review in CPG. We want to build all of those for those different industry verticals in our product. We want to more deeply integrate GenStudio for Performance Marketing within Adobe solutions so that end-to-end workflow, we deliver on that promise. This is a V-one out-of-the-gate product, what you saw yesterday. And it’s a standalone product, it doesn’t require the support of any other tools to start with. But it works better in conjunction with all our other … With AEM Assets, with Workfront. You’ll see us lean into some of those integrations to make sure that we are delivering value on the GenStudio promise.
Melody Brue: Well, we can see by just this studio that we’re sitting in that when you put all the things together things become bigger and better.
Vikram Viswanathan: Yeah, absolutely.
Melody Brue: Well, thank you so much for this conversation. It’s been super informative. And it was really great to see all of the demos yesterday. And for everybody joining us, thank you so much. We are here at Adobe MAX in Miami. And if you want to see any of the things that we’ve been talking about you can go to adobe.com and check them out because there are some things that are really worth checking out. Thanks for joining us.
