IBM reimagines content creation and digital marketing with Adobe Firefly generative AI

While scrolling your social media feeds last year, you may have been one of hundreds of thousands of people who took notice of this striking image, part of IBM’s “Let’s Create” brand campaign which showcased the company’s focus on co-developing technology solutions with partners.

In the past, it would have taken a company’s creative and marketing team days — if not months — to develop assets like these. But this image was part of an early pilot with Adobe Firefly, which put commercially-viable generative AI directly into the IBM teams’ workflows. Using simple text prompts, the IBM team was able to generate 200 assets and over 1,000 marketing variations for the campaign in a matter of minutes.

As impressive as these images are, most notable of all, the campaign performed well above IBM’s benchmark, driving an impressive 26 times higher engagement, and reaching valuable audiences — 20 percent of respondents were identified as C-level decision makers.

The campaign performed well above IBM’s benchmark, driving an impressive 26 times higher engagement.

Adobe Firefly was built to be safe for commercial use, so companies like IBM can use the images they create with confidence. As a foundational piece of Adobe’s solution for content supply chains, Firefly allows brands to rethink how they produce and deliver digital content at a time when efficiency is a top priority — and teams are being asked to do more with less. IBM is leading the way here, showcasing how generative AI can reshape an organization’s process when it comes to planning, producing, and analyzing content throughout its lifecycle.

IBM is beginning to work with Firefly to support its marketing programs, as well as the campaigns they support for clients through IBM Consulting. Teams can access Firefly natively in applications including Adobe Express, Adobe Photoshop, and Adobe Experience Manager Assets.

Billy Seabrook, the global chief design officer for IBM Consulting, said, “We have started leveraging Adobe Firefly to revolutionize client experiences through AI-powered design, while also streamlining our internal creative workflows. With Firefly, our 1,600 professional designers within the IBM Consulting experience design team can focus less on tedious tasks and more on what they do best — creating innovative design solutions with AI that exceed client expectations.”

“Creatives spend too much of their days on mundane tasks that can now be automated with generative AI. The productivity gains are incredible, but even more exciting is the time we can make available for creative ideation.” added Billy Seabrook, Global Chief Design Officer, IBM Consulting

Thanks in large part to generative AI, creatives on the Consulting and Marketing teams at IBM can focus more of their time on imaginative brainstorming, visual storyboarding, and retouching designs, and this is expected to increase their productivity tenfold. Firefly can also help drive greater collaboration between the creative and marketing organizations — which matters more than ever as brands’ ability to deliver great customer experiences now hinges on producing a massive amount of digital content.

Ari Sheinkin, the VP of global demand at IBM, said, “Organizations are under incredible pressure to deliver highly personalized experiences across many different channels, and generative AI provides us a path to effectively scale these efforts. Adobe Firefly is enabling our marketing and creative teams to collaborate more effectively by streamlining the process of generating high quality content, which is then used in large-scale personalization campaigns that deliver tailored experiences for customers.”

“Brands have spent years trying to deliver personalization at scale, with varying degrees of success. Generative AI now makes it achievable for our industry and bridges a longstanding gap between creatives and marketers.” added, Ari Sheinkin, VP of Global Demand, IBM

This process of producing and delivering content that fuels effective customer experiences is an area that Adobe supports through its solution for content supply chains. IBM uses a set of applications — including Adobe Workfront, Adobe Experience Manager and Adobe Creative Cloud applications — which enables creative and marketing teams to plan, create, and activate on-brand content seamlessly. The use of these tools has improved time-to-market by 60 percent. And with Firefly, the company can optimize its content supply chain even further by speeding up the production process.

Firefly is also helping IBM realize the possibility of enhancing brand standards and guardrails across the enterprise. With more people using generative AI in their everyday work, it is becoming increasingly important to ensure all visual content aligns with IBM’s brand values and guidelines. Through applications such as Adobe Express, Firefly can help marketing teams empower non-designers to create compelling visual content that is on brand — without needing to rely on expensive creative resources.

The question mark ad creative that IBM generated with Firefly was in many ways a prompt to the broader business community: How will generative AI impact the way you operate? And how quickly should you move to avoid losing your competitive edge? These are questions that IBM has begun to answer, and we are fortunate to be IBM’s partner on this journey.