IBM and Adobe partner to help CMOs get personal

In today’s digital landscape, CMOs face increasing pressures to deliver engaging content across various platforms while often dealing with a fragmented, manual content supply chain—the entire content process from ideation to analysis. In response to these challenges, IBM has expanded its partnership with Adobe to introduce an intelligent content supply chain powered by IBM Consulting’s AI Center of Excellence, generative AI (GenAI), and Adobe technology in order to automate and augment the predominantly manual activities involved in the content creation lifecycle.

Capitalizing on the growing momentum of GenAI adoption, Adobe and IBM’s partnership offers an opportunity to drive AI-powered experiences

HFS views this as a promising partnership to create a more efficient, AI-driven content supply chain for marketing leaders. IBM’s consulting, GenAI, and data-driven capabilities, when combined with Adobe’s creative tools and design expertise, empower marketing leaders to craft personalized multi-channel content while harnessing data-driven insights into performance and engagement.

From our perspective, the most valuable aspect of this partnership for the enterprise CMO is the ability to gather real-time campaign performance insights to ensure content remains effective on the fly. At present, campaign performance is often a retrospective activity, dependent on lagging indicators that do not offer sufficient insights for optimizing future campaigns.

IBM and Adobe’s intelligent supply chain amplifies content creation, global reach, and data-driven insights

The synergy between IBM and Adobe in their intelligent content supply chain streamlines content creation and enhances global reach and data-driven insights. Here’s how this partnership achieves these objectives:

• Rapid content creation: The partnership includes Adobe Firefly, a suite of GenAI models that generates images and text for content creation. Users can quickly create AI-generated content that matches brand guidelines and IP.
• Localization of content: IBM watsonx enables fast content translation and localization for quick entry into regional markets.
• Intelligent insights: Organizations can connect performance data with IBM watsonx to gain insights at campaign milestones to optimize their efforts as they go—and to ultimately gather insights for their next campaign.

Within an internal pilot, IBM’s marketing team found that using Adobe Firefly’s AI-powered assets (200 initial assets and 1,000+ derivative assets) on social media platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn led to 26 times higher engagement than traditional paid social media performance. This heightened engagement allowed IBM to attract and interact with its target C-Level audience more effectively, resulting in faster brand awareness and customer engagement.

The marketing industry is ripe for disruption with GenAI

Given the current pressure on businesses to reduce costs, marketing is set to be one of the first functions to be impacted by GenAI (see Exhibit 1). By streamlining content creation processes utilizing GenAI, marketing efforts can become more efficient, cost-effective, and personalized.

Exhibit 1: Red, amber, and green boxes tell us how urgent it is to redesign roles; marketing sits in the red zone

Data sources: *Corporate Industry Service, Oxford Economics, McKinsey
Source: HFS Research, 2023

However, as with any use of GenAI in the content creation space, CMOs and other marketing leaders must tread carefully. While numerous marketing tasks can be automated, content creation demands special attention to avoid plagiarism and copyright infringement and to safeguard intellectual property rights. Establishing effective measures to protect your intellectual property and ensure originality in your content is essential.

Additionally, CMOs can anticipate a proliferation of GenAI solutions vying for a share of their marketing budget. However, caution is advised—they should avoid investing in solutions that might increase fragmentation across their supply chain. Instead, a collaborative effort between the CMO and CIO is necessary to bring technology support closer to the front line. This collaboration will ensure a mutual understanding of marketing needs, facilitating more effective scoping, testing, and co-creation of solutions with meaningful business outcomes.

HFS sees this partnership between IBM and Adobe as providing a unified approach for companies to align software, user experience, and marketing goals in a customer-centric manner.

The Bottom Line: IBM and Adobe’s combined capabilities provide enterprise leaders with a proactive opportunity to transform their marketing operations ahead of potential disruptions.

By harnessing this partnership from IBM and Adobe, enterprise leaders could cut costs and drive new sources of value with an intelligent content supply chain. For enterprise leaders, it represents a chance to leverage the disruptive potential of GenAI within marketing, enhance their strategies, and stay ahead of the curve.

However, IBM’s ultimate test of success will be its ability to deliver its promise of transforming the end-to-end content supply chain versus offering incremental benefits along the process.