John Evans (3:59)

I never thought about that, but I think you're right. International relations is probably a pretty perfect grounding when you have to navigate a large organization, consumers and customers in many different places.

Simon Morris (4:07)

And those diplomatic skills come in very handy.

John Evans (4:10)

I'm sure they do. And I love how meta it is. A marketer working a marketing company. Marketing to marketers. Exactly. That's very decent.

Simon Morris (4:17)

Exactly. Dream.

John Evans (4:18)

But yeah, we'll have to unpick what that means in a minute. But that's. I must give a big congratulations to your CEO because he's just won creative champion of the year, which is amazing. So what was it that he's done that you've done together at Adobe that's led to that recognition?

Simon Morris (4:34)

Yeah. I think the whole company was so proud to see Shantanu up on stage. I don't know if you had a chance to see that video showing some of the work. It was just really emotional and moving. And I think for over 40 years Adobe has been really focused on empowering individuals and students and Creative professionals and businesses, businesses to share their story, to empower them, to give them the tools to create their stories to the outside world. And I think the recognition was really the fact that we've been doing it over such a long time, continue to reinvent, continue to look around the corner and make sure that we are equipping our customers with the tools that are going to help them achieve their business outcomes. And those outcomes will vary enormously depending on who you are. But I think it was really recognition of that. And I would say most recently it was because I think everybody knows Adobe for its kind of creative tools for the creative professional. But more recently with the introduction of tools like Adobe Express and obviously now our Firefly models, we're really and truly democratizing creativity and empowering everyone, anyone around the world to tell their story. So to have that recognition was just lovely for the whole company.

John Evans (5:46)

Yeah, talking about looking around the corner, I had the honor actually joining you guys at Adobe Summit this year, which is, wow, was that an eye opener for me. I had no idea how far AI had kind of come on. You know, from the sort of early ideas of getting AI to sort of complete a task for you, to now the point where you can employ different agents to complete different tasks and how they can all work together to, you know, to kind of deliver for you. I mean, it's a massive education for me. But where have you seen AI have the biggest impact in terms of the marketing, you know, the marketing landscape, where has it transformed it?

Simon Morris (6:20)

So the way we think about AI is augmented intelligence. So it's a technology that's going to enhance and amplify human creativity, not replace it. So if you think about a creative professional, people who often have a very clear kind of creative vision in their mind, it's really about eliminating those kind of tedious, time consuming tasks like generating variations or kind of minor edits to things. So it's really about saving them time. Because if you speak to a lot of kind of creative pros or agencies, the biggest thing they crave is time. Often the briefs come in super late. They've got 48 hours, you know, to turn things around and they're not always able to do their best work. So I think for the professional it is about eliminating, reducing those tedious time consuming tasks and allowing them to focus on bringing their creative vision to life and building those emotionally relevant experiences for the kind of business professional or people who just need to communicate visually, which is kind of everybody. I certainly put myself in that bracket often. Like we, I Mean, again, I speak for myself. The biggest fear is that blank page. Like, where do I start? Got an idea, but where do I start? And so it kind of eliminates that fear of that blank page by providing that spark, generating some ideas from which you can then iterate on. And so I think that's the real case. It's kind of different workflows depending on different audiences. Again, for marketers, it's about taking care of the things that are time consuming and allow you to focus on what you do best, which is really the storytelling and the strategy, kind of irrespective of audience. For us, ultimately, it's about AI being in the service of creativity and not the other way around.

John Evans (8:15)

That is really reassuring to hear that message, particularly in Cannes, obviously, because we're celebrating creativity. But there's a lot of people arguing that actually I will replace creativity. But it sounds like you're using it in service of creativity rather than replacing it.

Simon Morris (8:27)

Yeah, I mean, absolutely. And as I said, if you're able to free up their time, that's not the most productive or creative use of a creative time, to now enable them to come up with a bigger, more creative, impactful campaigns that's going to see some, some great work. And you know, if I think about tools like Adobe Express and you know what that's done, even just if I look at across Adobe, it's empowering the entire organization to be able to create standout content really quickly and easily. And yes, you know, we build the brand templates and brand guidelines and kind of guardrails in the tool because it leverages our Firefly, you know, models. We know that it's commercially safe, but it's really empowering everyone across, you know, all departments, literally all departments, to communicate more impactfully, visually. And so it's really democratizing creativity.

John Evans (9:18)

Now we talk about the power of what AI can do. I came across this very funny Rick Rubin video. Well, not funny necessarily, but he said the one thing AI won't be doing is being unreasonable because humans are by their nature very unreasonable. So it just got me thinking though. What areas do you think AI won't impact? Or to flip it the other way, where will human kind of skills be most required as we see AI change Marketing?

Simon Morris (9:44)

Yeah, I think that there'll be some of the tasks that even generating variations that might have been required, a very manual amount of work to tweak a banner or multiple formats. We know that the demand for content has exploded and is only going to get bigger and bigger as brands desire to deliver Personalization at scale. We all know that the more personalized and relevant experience we receive as consumers, the more likely we are to respond. You want your brands to know you and deliver the right contextually relevant content, but to do that at scale is very challenging unless you've got the tools to help you so quickly. Creating variations for all the different platforms. They're things that you can use the AI tools to do. I think that. But for us, ultimately, you need great ideas, like you need dreamers, you need emotion and storytelling. And I think that's where human beings will really be able to focus more energy on doing the stuff that's really going to drive impact.

John Evans (10:46)

Yeah. I was chatting to Greg Khan about how they use AI and he kind of describes like an hourglass. He said, when it comes into interrogating the brief, understanding the audience, getting some data, we go wide and we use AI and, and at the other end of the hourglass, when it comes to executing across multiple platforms and different versions and producing things very quickly, we use AI. He said, but there's the little bit in the middle, which is the real thought. What's the thought that's going to drive the idea, that's going to create something that's entirely different? And he said, the end of the day, you're looking for something that might be illogical or unusual that hasn't been done. That is the unreasonable bit that Rick Rubin talks about. And I think. Well, I like your point. If you can free up the time from the top and the bottom to focus on that middle bit, which is the ingenuity that's going to.

Simon Morris (11:32)

Yeah, and I think it's also about, like, removing some of the bottlenecks that we see today in marketing. And again, we pride ourselves at Adobe on being customer zero for all of our technology. So, you know, we work very, very closely with our product teams to ensure they understand some of the business challenges that we have within marketing and how things that we want to try and find solutions for, and they then go and develop those solutions. And so if you think about Gen Studio for people performance marketing, this was addressing a real challenge that we faced. The performance marketing teams knew that they needed to have a monumental amount more content to really feed the platforms, to really optimize those engines and get the best results. And the creative, this kind of creative teams just couldn't deliver quickly enough the sheer volumes of content we needed. And it was kind of a real challenge. And so when Adobe released, you know, Firefly, it was like, okay, where do we. There were so Many different ways in which we could apply it. So where do we start? What, what are the most painful business challenges today? And it was around like more variations and reducing some of the bottlenecks of the, of the creative team to allow them to focus on those bigger, bigger campaigns. And so you know, we, we actually got the some teams, some, we put some creatives, some performance marketers, some product people together to sort of play around to see what the impact would be of using this tool which eventually became Gen Studio Performance Marketing. And actually initially we saw like incredible results, incredible results in terms of improved click through rates. And we then it gave us the confidence to sort of scale this out to the wider marketing organization and we saw a slight drop off in performance and we were like, what, you know, what kind of what's happening, what's gone wrong kind of thing? Or why is it not working as well? And we looked at the first group that came together. We saw that the creative people, the kind of designers and the creative directors they had who kind of put their hands up to be part of that first group. They had a good understanding of performance marketing and why it was so important and what it needed. And the performance marketers who were the first ones to put their hands up had like photography side hustles or like, you know, they kind of had an appreciation for the aesthetics of the content and so it kind of worked. But when you scaled that out, you kind of like. We soon realized that actually we need to make sure we've got the training, you've got the brand guardrails and the frameworks for people to work within. And so we put that in place within that tool which now gives us the confidence and our customers the confidence they can scale the use of these tools across the wider teams to address the real challenge of this content explosion.

John Evans (14:22)

That's really interesting because like almost everywhere I go, the first bit of advice I give most people is you are not the customer. But I think in your case you actually are your own customer, aren't you?

Simon Morris (14:31)

We absolutely are. Yeah. Right.

John Evans (14:33)

I mean you test things out on yourself first.

Simon Morris (14:35)

For all of our products, you know, for absolutely all our products, you know, we, if you think about Acrobat, we launched AI Assistant, gosh, I think about a year or so ago and again we're the beta customers of that. We're using it, we're pressure testing it, but also seeing which are the most applicable use cases for that tool and being able to use that to get summaries of very long documents or here's the five minute summary from the company or from the employee, all hands and then sharing that. Just seeing the increased engagement rate for the content is just really amazing. It's really transformational.

John Evans (15:11)

So given you are your own customer, right, what campaign have you got live now that's been created by your own software?

Simon Morris (15:19)

I mean, if I think about something very, very close to home, we have a big campaign in the UK around Adobe Express. We wanted to kind of raise awareness of Adobe Express in the uk, but we specifically wanted to focus on kind of solopreneurs and small businesses. We actually featured real local, small businesses from the UK in the advertising. But so much of that content was created like using those workflows and those tools. We manage all the assets through Gen Studio so we've got the kind of single view of all the assets. We can quickly see what's working and what's not working. And yeah, it's proving to be really impactful as a, as an overarching campaign and, and seeing it kind of run through the whole funnel, not just kind of awareness, but allowing us to, to retarget people more with the right content. So yeah, that's probably the best.

John Evans (16:12)

I think I saw that one actually because it actually attributes the creator's name at the bottom of the creative, doesn't it? Which I thought was lovely.

Simon Morris (16:17)

Absolutely.

John Evans (16:17)

So you kind of hero your own customers in a way.

Simon Morris (16:19)

Absolutely.

John Evans (16:20)

Which is a great thing.

Simon Morris (16:21)

Yeah.

John Evans (16:21)

What, what advice would you give someone working with creators? Because you know, the creative economy is booming. In fact, crates is probably conversation at Cannes this year. There's been a lot of conversation on the kind of crates. Huge amount how you do that. What advice would you give?

Simon Morris (16:32)

Yeah, there's also a huge presence of creators at Cannes on a lot of the panels and I would say there's a few learnings we've got from working with creators or influencers or ambassadors, wherever you want to call them. Firstly, we see more success when you have longer term. First it needs to be a genuine, authentic use of our tools. We like to work with creators who genuinely use our tools day in, day out and, and so they are kind of fans of Adobe and we tend to build like longer term partnerships. So it's not like a one off transactional relationship. We're not too prescriptive in terms of their content because they're the ones that know their audience is the best. They have that trust and credibility. That's something that's really important to us long term, not being too prescriptive and then the way that we Scale is by having a kind of consistent measurement framework. We kind of categorize our kind of social content into four buckets, we call it. We say entertain, educate, inspire or inform. And we have. So we have that consistent content framework, consistent measurement framework, and then we allow the local marketing teams to work with the influencers that best resonate with their local market. So obviously the humor and tone and it's going to vary enormously from one market to the other. So we enable the regional teams to work within that framework with the local influencers that are going to have the best impact.

John Evans (18:00)

And one of the tensions that everyone talks about is because you talked about brand guidelines earlier, there's always this tension between, I must stick to brand guidelines, give them a script, control what they say. So how do you get the balance right between the freedom to kind of go create versus the kind of guardrails to stick to?

Simon Morris (18:16)

Yeah, I think that we make sure that our marketers and all of our employees understand, like, you know what, who the brand is, what does the brand stand for, how do we want to show up? But we try and give a lot of freedom, like, kind of creative freedom to the local teams to work within that. It's not, as I said, it's not too, you know, it is real, just guardrails. There's a lot of sort of flexibility within that to ensure that they're being relevant. Like, you have to be relevant in the local market and you have to be able to move quickly to tap into local trends. And, and because if you haven't got a process in place that allows you to quickly produce content that taps into that trend within, like, hours, like, it's gone. And so, you know, great. You might have, you know, if you're working to a lot of processes that many brands have, like, you need to get the approvals. By the time you get the approval of the content and the tweaks you have to make, it's gone like the moment's past. So you have to be able to ensure that your marketing can move at the speed of social, which is a big change for a lot of brands.

John Evans (19:17)

That's huge change, isn't it? I mean, you mentioned a number of your products as we've been talking, like Adobe Express. You recently launched Adobe Firefly on mobile as well, haven't you? Which, which, which is a big new, new launch. What's the, what's the secret to a product launch, you know, being a success, what goes into making it work?

Simon Morris (19:33)

So, so firstly, we want to make sure that, like, the Marketing and the product is indistinguishable. So we, we have a very, very tight relationship with our product teams. We also ensure that we are working very, very closely with our creative community on the development of that product. So we have beta programs in place with our creators, we have our own Adobe evangelists. So we have confidence, because we've had a lot of feedback in that development process. It gives us the confidence to know that we've got the right offering that's going to meet the need for our customers. And so then it's about making sure we've got that truly global launch moment. And one way in which we do that is through creating a lot of our own content. So I don't know if you saw the Firefly video that we used that was made entirely using Firefly and just a stunning piece of content that is very relevant globally. So we were able to take that asset and run it globally. But then in terms of the next phase, we would tend to work with local influencers and creators to work on some very specific use cases to that, to that market or, or landmarks in that market, things that you want to show off that are relevant to that country. So we have kind of global scale, but then local relevance. And obviously we use, yes, obviously creators play a big, a big part of that and, and then leveraging all the different social platforms and media channels and then we measure everything and you also partner, don't you?

John Evans (21:02)

We like sports, different sports properties as well as another element of the, of the whole mix, I guess more for broader brand building. What role play?

Simon Morris (21:09)

Yeah, I think we've always tried to connect, you know, what we're doing to the passion points of our customers. So whether that be fashion or art or music, I would say, you know, over the last couple of years we've lent more into the sports arena because we see sports brands are kind of certainly the bigger ones to consider themselves to be entertainment houses. They're competing for attention and time. They have to, they have to deliver an incredible fan engagement solution. And thankfully a lot of them are turning to Adobe to help them do that, bringing together all of the incredible rich data they have on their fans across multiple sources, bringing it into a unified kind of customer profile, then connecting the content and then making sure you've got the right journeys in place to deliver that amazing fan experience. Take a real Madrid as an example. Only a fraction, a tiny percent of their fans, of their hundreds of millions of fans are ever going to get to a game. They're ever going to get to The Burner battle, you've got to make sure that you are finding a way of keeping those fans engaged in the contextually relevant way, whether they're in Buenos Aires or in any other part of the world. So it's, yeah, they're really thinking about that fanning experience and I think they recognize that because Adobe can bring creativity and marketing and AI kind of together in one offering, we can help them deliver that fan in experience. The context of the Debbie Women's FA cup, slightly different challenge there that we wanted to get involved in. There's like 500 clubs that enter the competition in the first qualifying round. Most of them are amateur clubs. They, they've told us they haven't got the skills, they haven't got the time, they haven't got the money to create content for their clubs, promote their games, to share their stories. And so we gave them Adobe Express provided training, which they all wanted. Now that they're now able to create standout content for their clubs and their players and their fans. And it's ultimately inspiring more women and girls into sport, which we're really proud of.

John Evans (23:13)

That's a great thing to be involved in.

Simon Morris (23:14)

Yeah, absolutely. Especially for someone who loves football.

John Evans (23:17)

Yes, exactly. Yeah, I know. Well, it's funny, the kind of stereotype of a sponsorship is, oh yeah, I bet the CMO loves that particular sport, isn't it? So anyway, but occasionally it's nice when it overlaps.

Simon Morris (23:26)

Absolutely.

John Evans (23:27)

And one of the, one of the, I know one of the challenges, and I mean, I picked this up a lot when we were chatting at Adobe Summit, was that the role of the quality of data and IP and trust, which actually, the more you think about, the more we delegate to AI to go and kind of fulfill tasks and we're training it on different data. How do you approach kind of, you know, because obviously it's a big, you know, when you're making things at scale, it's really important to know that, you know, the data quality is there. You're not going to ruin your ip, you're not going to get any kind of, you know, you're not going to be making decision on the wrong, the wrong data points. So how do you ensure the kind of level of trust that your customers can put in the platform?

Simon Morris (24:03)

I'm a very big Marvel fan and you might wonder what that's got to do with your question, but there's a superhero, Spider man, who famously once said, with great power comes great responsibility. And I think that that's for us, how we've approached Our AI models, we wanted to make sure that they were commercially safe, they were not going to violate ip. And I think that approach of like responsibility, transparency and accountability is really what sets us apart from a lot of other models that are out there. And it's why I think so many brands are turning to Adobe because they can trust that it's a commercially safe solution. And, and that's a lot of the feedback that we get from, from customers. But something that was so important to us, you know, we wanted to make sure that creators were compensated, we wanted to make sure that it was a commercially safe solution and we could, you know, reassure our brands that that was the case. So that's absolutely the approach that we take.

John Evans (25:05)

I think you've got a massive role in this. I can really see how your brand is going to help that because, you know, there's so many questions on, you know, who owns the ip, you know, particularly with creators and using other people's images and that kind of thing.

Simon Morris (25:16)

Yeah, and we also, and you know, we've been part of the Content Authentic Content Authenticity initiative which was announced a few years ago and, and a lot of brands have signed up to that. It's now, you know, a way of. We launched a content authenticity app at Adobe Max in London and that gives us a way for creators to be able to sign up to content. Content credentials, Mark, if they don't want their work to be trained on. And you know, we are increasingly looking for content credentials to be applied to as many digital assets as possible so that just as a consumer, when you walk into a supermarket and you can pick up some, a piece of food and look on the back and see the nutrition label as to what goes into it. We believe that should be the case for any, any digital asset. You should be able to see who made it. When it was made, was it touched by AI, what was it, what type of AI touched that piece of content. So it's really about transparency and something that we're really reinforcing the industry now.

John Evans (26:19)

You're producing a lot, you're launching a lot. What do you see as the kind of, what's going to be the next thing that we need to pay attention to in terms of AI?

Simon Morris (26:26)

You know, we're constantly looking at how is kind of consumer behavior changing. And I think one of the big things to emerge over the last few months is the kind of rise of the large language models and how search behavior are changing much more kind of intent based search, conversational voice based search. And as a brand, you have to make sure that you're showing up in those LLM type searches, otherwise you're going to increasingly become irrelevant. And so I think there's going to be a lot of pressure to think about how do I influence those LLM engines? How do I create the right content that's going to show up? And I think that's going to be a really big focus for a lot of brands.

John Evans (27:13)

And a really good example of this actually on the podcast a couple of years ago. So just as a joke, right, when I launched this is probably about six years ago now. Oh, actually, have you read the book it's not how good you are, it's how good you want to be by Paul Arden? I haven't, yeah, it's, it's a few years old now, but it's a small book. It's really, it's a really quick, perfect for a kind of plane ride. And I spotted it in the airport. But it was this, it was the subtitle that really caught my eye because it's not how good you are, it's how good you want to be. The subtitle says the world's number one book by Paul Arden. And I was like, that is genius. So when I launched a podcast six years ago, right, I call it the world's number one podcast by John Evans, right? And anyway, I didn't think anything of it. I just bit of a joke. A few people took it seriously. Oh, congratulations. Well done. You know, Anyway, and then about a couple of, a couple of Years ago, this YouTuber in America did a seven minute takedown video like ranting about the podcast and reviewing an episode I did with Bob Hoffman. And I remember calling, calling me tyrannically British bullsh. The kind of phrase he used. Anyway, I am something. You got to think, well, what'd you do with this kind of bit of feedback? You can kind of laugh it off or get upset by. Anyway, I got in contact with him and I said to him as I dude, why do you pick on me? There are thousands of podcasts out there. There's plenty of podcasts much bigger than me that you could have picked on as you because he was launching his YouTube show. He said, I went to ChatGPT and asked it for the world's number one marketing podcast.

Simon Morris (28:33)

Brilliant.

John Evans (28:34)

So there you go, There you go. So it's worth doing.

Simon Morris (28:36)

Get in there. Exactly.

John Evans (28:38)

And you know, one question I was going to ask about. So your cmo Lara was doing a chat at the Forbes CMO dinner. She dropped this absolute humdinger of a quote saying marketing today is like day trading attention, which I thought was brilliant. Given that's the case. How do you build a brand in the context of all the optimization around attention and race for attention that we've got, how do you kind of build a brand for the long term?

Simon Morris (29:02)

Yeah, I think that I actually, if we're going down the quotes route, I love the quote from Sir John Hegarty who said principles remain, practices change. So I think you need to know, you know, who you are, what you stand for as a brand, but then like how you then, then bring that to life will, you know, will change. And I think the reality is there's, there's so much competing for consumer attention. Like to be able to cut through, you have to have that standout content and that standout idea and, and, and I think storytelling continues to be super important if you do want to sort of cut through all the noise. And so like how you do that, whether it's, you know, through your own innovative campaigns, then brought to life through whether it's creators, I think that's, it's really understanding who you are. But then thinking about how do you capitalize on new ways of getting your, your brand out to market quickly and.

John Evans (29:58)

Maybe to wrap up then I thought I'd ask you, you've 14 great years at Adobe, you've been very successful. What makes a great marketing leader today?

Simon Morris (30:06)

I mean I would like to think that I would have given the same answer early on in my career. I think you have to start with the customer. It's customer in like really taking the time to deeply understand your customer, the pain points, what matters to them and that, that should be your starting point. Then you kind of work, you know, kind of go forwards with like how do I, how do I solve that problem? Now if you, if you go the other way around, then you could create the great greatest products or the greatest marketing. But if it's not solving the real pain that your customers face, then it's going to be an uphill battle. So yeah, really start with that deep, deep understanding of the customer.

John Evans (30:46)

I totally, totally agree. I remember I worked in private equity for a few years and I remember that the time where I was really close to customer spent the maximum time with the customer. I was winning, innovating. It was fantastic. And the moment I started focusing internally on alignments, the internal meetings, you know, arguing for budget, all that kind of thing, that's the moment everything slowed down.

Simon Morris (31:07)

Yeah.

John Evans (31:07)

And I can literally correlate time with customer to rate of growth. I think the correlation was almost perfect, so I couldn't agree more. Simon, it's been amazing to have you on the show. Thank you for giving us the time. Congratulations on an incredible can. Don't think anybody would have missed you this year. So you can give that team a nice big excellent. A nice big thank well done from me.

Simon Morris (31:25)

I will do thank you very much for having me.

John Evans (31:26)

Great. Good to see you. Thank you very much for listening or watching Uncensored cmo. I hope you enjoyed that. If you did, please do hit the subscribe button wherever you get your podcast. If you're watching, hit subscribe there as well. I'd also love to get a review. Reviews make a big difference on other people discovering the show, so please do leave a review wherever you get your podcast. If you want to contact me, you can do I'm over on XenSoredCMO or on LinkedIn where I'm under my own name, John Evans. Thanks for listening and watching. I'll see you next time.