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Ad Age Marketer's Brief
How agentic AI is reinventing brand customer experience, with Adobe's CMO
00:25:33
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- [00:00]
A
This episode is sponsored by Kantar. Too often creative effectiveness is treated as a final check, not as a decision intelligence that helps shape campaigns while they're being built. Kantar's link changes. That link is an end to end creative effectiveness system built for modern, fast moving campaigns. It brings together deep human and cultural understanding. AI powered optimization and decision intelligence embedded directly into creative workflows drives stronger campaign performance and brand growth. With link by Cantor, visit try.kantar.com adage.
- [00:38]
B
Hey there. I'm Asa Hyken, technology reporter at Ad Age and welcome to another episode of the Marketer's Brief Podcast, our weekly discussion about marketing news and trends that have the industry buzzing. Agentic AI is about as buzzy as it gets, but in some ways the cart is coming before the horse. So many agentic offerings are out there already. Yet it's important that marketers understand the problems that AgentIQ can actually solve and how tech companies are offering to do just that. Today we'll be talking with Lara Balash, Chief Marketing Officer and Executive Vice President of Global Marketing at Adobe. At its recent conference Adobe Summit, the design giant launched a whole bunch of new tech aimed at helping brands incorporate agentic AI AI technology into their customer experience systems. I'm going to ask Lara to dive into some of these new offerings as well as the marketing pain points that early agentic tech seeks to address. Lara and I will also discuss Adobe's ongoing efforts in the Generative Engine optimization space, better known as geo, as well as how Lara navigates marketing to enterprises versus everyday creatives. Now here's my conversation with Lara Foreign. Laura Balash, Chief Marketing Officer at Adobe. Thank you so much for joining the Marketers Brief podcast.
- [02:05]
C
Very happy to be here. Thanks for having me.
- [02:08]
B
Awesome. Well, I want to jump right in and talk about, you know, how Adobe is meeting this AI marketing moment. the recent Adobe Summit, Adobe launched CX Enterprise, which really is about putting agents into the entire customer experience system for brands. Can you sort of tell me, you know, what pain points you think agentic AI can really address in brands Traditional customer experience systems?
- [02:39]
C
Yeah. So customer experience orchestration is a, is a huge game changer. You know there are a lot of inefficiencies when you think about the that marketing workflow from briefing to creating the creative and content and you have to create so much content today to putting it out in the marketplace, optimizing in real time and constantly iterating to make sure that you're driving the best outcomes. All of that. Now you think about that as a Platform. That's really what customer experience orchestration is. That now can be done through an agentic layer with agents talking to agents. And so that entire process, all those inefficiencies get removed, which gives you an incredible ability to move at velocity, move with impact, move with efficiency, and move with scale, if you're a marketer today.
- [03:39]
B
So agentic layer, I hear that term being thrown around a lot, the different layers of a tech stack. Can you tell me what it means to be an agentic layer? Is this really like in the background of CX Enterprise? Are we talking about multiple agents talking to each other? Like, if there are multiple agents, is it like on the scale of a few, is it dozens, hundreds? What does an agentic layer mean for a marketer's tech stack?
- [04:07]
C
Yeah, you know, I think the best way to think about it is agents doing tasks and agents are talking to agents and there will be creative agents and production agents and data agents. Those are all things that actually we have today at Adobe. We're using it at Adobe. We actually call it Adobe on Adobe, or we're Customer zero, where given I'm marketing to everybody from individuals and students to creative professionals, to up and coming creative professionals, to marketing professionals and the biggest enterprises in the world, all of these different entities, these different customer audiences. You know, ultimately you're going to have agents talking to agents, and your agents are going to talk to humans. And what I like to think about is this agentic layer, you're orchestrating across that and that manual work is taken out, but humans are still involved and they're still in the loop. And so it gives the marketers a very important role where they're still needing to use human judgment, whether it's taste, empathy, brand instinct, all of those things still matter. In fact, they matter more than ever. What now the agentic AI layer does. It handles the orchestration. And then humans make sure that the brand shows up in the way that we want your brand to. And that's really still about differentiation and breaking through.
- [05:37]
B
So when it comes to customer experience and agents, essentially freeing up marketers to focus on more quality duties, things that really need their time and attention, what do you see those duties being? The things that, okay, humans who previously were focused on, like manually looking after this customer experience system, now they can focus on blank.
- [06:03]
C
Yeah, well, if you get down into the dirty details of workflow, right, and the amount of content that has to be generated. So what used to be, hey, you know, or I should say has been, there's somebody who's creating 400 different versions of an asset to be placed on different platforms. Because at the end of the day, content is paramount. There's more content than, than ever and there's all of these assets that need to be created. And then on top of that, you're doing variations for countries, for languages, for different platforms. As I noted, that is all of the work that then goes and gets automated, that orchestration then is automated. Ultimately, what then the human is involved in is that judgment of, hey, that hero asset that's created, what is going to really connote your brand, be really clear about what your brand stands for, grab attention, be interesting to cut through all that content I just talked about. And that's where taste and empathy and context, all of those things matter. And that's where I believe that's where the human comes in and also where we get to truly a golden age of creativity. Because when that creative breaking through, that content breaking through matters more than ever, that's where that human insight is required. Because I still believe that the best connecting work, the best creative work, the best content captures a core customer insight, a core consumer need, desire or want.
- [07:51]
B
Yeah, it's, it's interesting because, you know, as you mentioned, there's, there's so much content now that can be created, you know, can be scaled across channels. And so you might think, hey, with so much content, the focus is on quantity. But you're saying that, no, no, no, it's still, the quality is almost needed more to rise above the insane amounts of quantity that are now being produced.
- [08:18]
C
Yeah, I mean, I think it's an end. If you, if you can nail the insight and get that quality, that creative, that content that really speaks to your core target. And by the way, that's more than ever more personalized that you can be, the better it is. And that's something that, what, you know, Adobe tools allow you to do, we've always been about that. It's now at a whole new level. You know, you take that and ad quantity and you have this perfect recipe to connect and, you know, drive the outcomes that you're looking to drive as a brand, as a company.
- [08:55]
B
So when you think about marketing enterprise to marketers, you know, how would you say you really sort of like, pitch that? Like, what do you, what do you think is kind of the, the front end of your pitch? Like the thing that you can tell marketers that they're like, oh my gosh, like, that's exactly what I need. Or, or that is a problem I have experienced. I would Love a solution to that.
- [09:18]
C
Yeah. So every company has a different pain point or a different need. And so it really depends on the company. And we are so good fortune to work with almost every single Fortune 500 company that exists today. And you know, across industries across the globe there are many similarities in the problems that they have, but there are many distinct needs. And so for many companies this getting started and what we often say is, you know, start with a use case or your biggest problem that you're trying to solve, take that, assign the right outcome or KPI to that, that may be increasing acquisition and maybe increasing consideration or roas. Take that and then take somebody who's, you know, the person that is the spark in your organization that loves to try new things. You know, we give them the right tool that attacks that specific need. It may be Gen Studio for performance marketing as an example where they need to get out assets and variations on real time, you know, across social platforms like meta or LinkedIn and take that, and take that person, apply them and build a swarm or a working team that can agilely start to use these tools, these Adobe AI tools and then they're going to see success and it'll go from there. That's where you can then, then start to think about okay, now that I have that I have some success, I can see that there's an end to end system that I can apply and really add this orchestrating agentic layer that you know, works across these workflows. Whether it's you know, the data to the content to the optimization and the asset management. That's really how we think about it.
- [11:06]
B
And then also at Adobe Summit, a new brand visibility solution. Can you sort of talk about how this new product fits into, you know, some of the other geo focused technology that Adobe is offering?
- [11:23]
C
Yeah. So you know, I think that's a great summary and semrush really bringing you know, together with our other tools this comprehensive brand visibility platform. You know, great other examples we have are one thing we for example have been working with Comcast Xfinity on is Adobe Brand intelligence. And what that allows you to do is apply brand governance, which, you know, brands and their unique place in people's lives that still matters. And so brand governance is applied vis a vis brand intelligence to a creative workflow. And so as, as we've heard CMOs say, it's like it almost allows me to not have to be the bottleneck because before I was reviewing all of these assets, you know, I talked about creating hundreds of assets that CMO Reviewing them those cycles, you can be a blocker. Having brand intelligence that puts those guidelines in ensures you have a consistent representation of your brand that is, you know, personalized content at scale. That that's what now Adobe brand intelligence brings to this whole system. I think another great example is just, you know, brand concierge. So that's another conversational interface you can apply to your website so that people can just have a conversation with your website versus having to, you know, click through a lot of pages. That journey to discovery, to decision, that whole journey becomes personalized in real time because you have this Adobe brand concierge that becomes your website and you can think about websites being simply a conversational interface going forward. And I think the list goes on. Still we have our great real time CDP that allows you to create very specific cohorts to be personalized when it comes to customers that you're trying to target or maintain and retain other, you know, journey customer journey analytics, those great data driven tools that we've had, they remain. Now you have this agentic layer that sits on top of them and it almost democratizes how many marketers can actually be involved in an entire journeying perspective of getting that customer connected to, personalized to and then drawn to your product and then maintained and retained.
- [14:02]
B
Okay, great. Let's take a quick break for this message from our sponsor.
- [14:14]
A
This episode is sponsored by Kantar. Too often creative effectiveness is treated as a final check, not as a decision intelligence that helps shape campaigns while they're being built. Kantar's link changes. That link is an end to end creative effectiveness system built for modern, fast moving campaigns. It brings together deep human and cultural understanding. AI powered optimization and decision intelligence embedded directly into creative workflows drive stronger campaign performance and brand growth. With link by Kantar, visit try.kantar.com adage.
- [14:52]
B
Welcome back to the Marketer's brief podcast where I'm talking with Lara Balash, Chief Marketing Officer and Executive Vice President of Global Marketing at Adobe. So Geo necessary but what? I guess, how far can you take it? How far can you really influence these LLM platforms? I mean it's still. It baffles me that I hear all the time the AI providers are. Someone from OpenAI or Google's asked a question about how is the AI model doing this? And they're like, well, we don't exactly know. And so for me the question is how can we be sure that geo is really having a causal impact on these LLMs and how they surface content?
- [15:40]
C
Well, look, this is an emerging discipline but you know it's happening because when you, you yourself are searching, you see brands shop up, pop up, even if it's, you know, outside, it's a personal pursuit that you're, you're looking at a hobby, you're buying a tennis racket or something. It's, you know, so it's a discipline. All of this is moving so fast, but it is out there, we need to be part of it. You know, we know that autonomous agents are browsing, evaluating and making decisions today that will happen on behalf of your agent one day, on behalf of users. And you know, as agentic AI just becomes more prevalent and how consumers shop and make decisions, you know, we really believe, and I myself as customer zero Adobe and Adobe, we're our biggest customer and learning and co creating, you know, we believe that we need to invest in ASO alongside traditional SEO and geo. You know, again that's why Semrush we're so excited about because they have this deep data and platform capabilities that can help position us in this space, but more importantly help our customers. And again, I know because I'm marketing just our products to everyday consumers and so I get to try them. And I know if I didn't have these things, I would not feel as if I'm as impactful and doing Adobe the service that it needs to do to help consumers and customers alike.
- [17:16]
B
So for this conversation we've mostly focused on marketing to enterprises. But Adobe is in a unique position in that yes, it has a bunch of enterprise customers, but you also have consumer customers. How does it differ marketing AI to just everyday creative consumers versus marketing it to enterprises?
- [17:41]
C
Yeah, well, it always goes back to the customer needs, wants and desires, you know, often spoken, sometimes unspoken and depending on where you are in the spectrum of what you want out of your day to day life, productivity, creativity. The reality is AI is everywhere. You know, people are using ChatGPT, people are using these tools and if you're not that creative professional, you want less high fidelity, power and precision, you want to still stand out. So you know, if you, if you have a teenager in your house or you know, a younger friends you're ultimately seeing, everybody still wants to show up and stand out on social platforms. So we take that into account when we're marketing our tools. Like Firefly, like Acrobat, like Express, Acrobat with Express now, you know, we think about that and talk to that consumer, meet them where they are in a personalized manner to use the tools that help them in their lives. You know, if you're a student today, you're constantly doing presentations in your classroom and you want to do it quickly but still get an A. So we have Acrobat and Acrobat Express for that. Those are the things that are really going to help and aid and abet whatever that individual wants out of their life. And we have those tools how I market to them and is going to be specific to their needs and wants versus, you know, a marketing professional that's sitting in a large enterprise may have to make sure that they're absolutely hitting efficiencies and scale. And that's what we think about when marketing to that end consumer. So those fundamentals of what you learned in the marketing craft, while you probably got into the craft, they still matter more than anything. A lot of this can be orchestrated and you as a marketer now are really more of, you know, if we think about we were sort of change transformation chief transformation architects, then we're, you know, now thinking in systems, now we're really chief marketing orchestrators. You're really orchestrating across all of these touch points in a way that is really open to all that didn't exist before.
- [20:07]
B
And I think here, even though we're now sort of talking about marketing to consumers, I think there's an important takeaway here for marketers because they ultimately are promoting their products to consumers. So what lessons do you think you've learned from marketing to consumers that you think, you know, might be important for your enterprise clients to know you know, something about? Like maybe that's communicating fears differently. Right? You might. The concerns of a single creative person are going to be different than an entire marketing team at a company. So, you know, are there any lessons that you've learned from marketing to consumers that you think might well be helpful to your enterprise customers too?
- [20:54]
C
Yeah. Well, and let me say this too. The life cycle of the customer is still relevant. You've got students, whether they're just in K through 12 or they're in college or they're in a design school, they themselves have needs and wants. That student base actually becomes your future workers. So that end user, end consumer becomes your customer. And so thinking about them from a long term lens is really important. The other piece of this is, and again, this is all built on driving outcomes. We are at companies that are trying to drive revenue, profitable growth. Storytelling is a unifying idea. I think no matter if you're marketing to an individual or an enterprise. A marketing professional at an enterprise, I often think about storytelling. I am not an engineer. We have so many incredible engineers here at Adobe as an example. And I'm often marketing to another marketer who isn't an engineer or a creative professional or an aspiring creative professional that's not an engineer, breaking down and sharing the story around how this technology can support you. Part of my job is taking what is a lot of technical capability and turning it into how that provides you a human value and makes your life easier. And so that storytelling, I believe that matters more than ever. And that storytelling, I think no matter if you're the biggest enterprise or just person going about your daily life, that is something that lives across, that is still important. Because the other thing is we don't, you know, we can't forget that in enterprises there are people and feeling is as important as thinking and doing. That tends to be how we think about the purchase funnel, which, you know, there's not a linear purchase funnel, but it is a great mental model for marketers to think about people feeling, thinking and doing as part of what we're driving people to do when they are affected by a brand, affected by a marketing activity such that they ultimately take impact and buy your product or service.
- [23:23]
B
Well, Lara, we are just about out of time here, but I do want to end on a final question that we've been trying to use at the conclusions of all of our recent Marketers Brief podcasts, which is the following. What's the biggest question you'd ask another CMO right now?
- [23:43]
C
How are you prioritizing your day? I just, there's a lot coming at us and it can be a lot of frenzy in everything that's been happening. But, you know, I think how do you prioritize your day to stay focused or you're going to have impact matters more than ever. And you know, for me, I think a lot of it is about getting our teams geared up and, and that change management. But I'm always curious, in this agentic AI world, in this exciting era, I really see it as a lot of opportunity where creativity, marketing, AI are coming together to create magic. How are you prioritizing your day? I think that's a great question for us all to ask.
- [24:29]
B
Awesome. Laura. I think that's a really good place to end. Really appreciate you coming on the podcast today to talk all things AI and agents. Adobe is doing a lot in this realm, so I appreciate you taking time out of your busy schedule.
- [24:46]
C
Thank you so much. AA it was a pleasure.
- [24:58]
B
That was Lara Balash, Chief Marketing Officer and Executive Vice President of Global Marketing at Adobe. And I'm Asa Heikin technology reporter at Adage. I'd like to thank our producer Lauren Ciardio and remind you that you can subscribe to Marketers Brief Podcast wherever you get your podcasts. See you next time.
- [25:17]
A
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- [25:22]
B
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- [25:24]
A
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