Marketing Beyond with Alan B. Hart 9: What’s next for performance marketing? Insights from Ed Kennedy, group product marketing manager at Adobe
What if you could know how new creative would perform before you invest in it? This is the exact functionality Adobe's latest creative intelligence tools are working towards.
In today's episode, Alan chats with Ed Kennedy, group product marketing manager at Adobe, to explore their new Generative AI (GenAI) tools. These tools provide a gateway for marketers to scale the impact of GenAI while maintaining the balance between cost efficiency and performance. Ed leads all the go-to-market strategy for Adobe's new GenAI products. This includes GenStudio for Performance Marketing which provides granular insights down to specific attributes of each ad, so marketers and creatives can work simultaneously to activate high-performing campaigns.
GenAI is causing many agencies and brand leaders to reevaluate their operating model, but Ed tells Alan that Adobe believes in an "AI-created, human-perfected" approach. This means GenAI takes on the low-value, repetitive, mundane tasks in the creative process, and then humans review and approve. If “marketers are marketing to consumers or businesses, then the humans are going to be in the driving seat,” Ed notes in response to concerns around AI. He also outlines the best use cases for AI agents and cautions marketers against skepticism of this evolving technology.
Key quotes:
“We're big on "AI created, human-perfected" in all the go-to-market messaging that we're bringing out and helping CMOs understand they can do this.” - Ed Kennedy, group product marketing manager at Adobe
“If you can look at the performance of the ad itself on the content or creative level, you can quickly double down on what's working and turn off what's not working. And I think that's where we're saving our clients spend because we're just not putting dollars behind bad creative or just underperforming creative.” - Ed Kennedy, group product marketing manager at Adobe
“Our ultimate vision is that you should actually be able to score your creative before it ships – if it actually is going to perform well.” - Ed Kennedy, group product marketing manager at Adobe
“We're trying to get to a place... where the brief becomes the new prompt. So instead of entering a prompt to get content, you submit your brief and ... the agent starts working for you.” - Ed Kennedy, group product marketing manager at Adobe
In this episode, you'll learn:
Potential business use cases for GenAI today
How Adobe GenStudio is bringing marketers and creatives closer together through data
What the future of marketing jobs may look like
Key highlights:
[01:25] Yoga for work-life balance
[02:50] Ed’s path to Adobe
[03:55] The scope of his role
[04:30] GenAI to drive advertising performance
[06:05] Versioning with GenAI
[07:45] Reevaluating the operating model
[10:05] Scaling the impact of GenAI
[11:45] Cost efficiency versus performance
[12:50] What is creative intelligence?
[15:20] Bringing performance and creative closer to data
[18:05] AI agents and internal evangelists
[21:30] An experience that defines you: It’s a ride, not a race
[25:25] Advice to your younger self: Drop the intensity and expectations
[26:45] A topic marketers need to learn more about: F.I.R.E
[28:10] What are you curious about: AI video generation
[29:50] Largest threat to marketers today: Cynicism on the sidelines
Resources mentioned:
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