Storytelling is the whole job. That's it.
Dawn Miley Senior Director EMEA Growth Marketing & UK Regional Marketing, Adobe
Interviewed by John Horsley
Published
Dawn Miley is Senior Director EMEA Growth Marketing and UK Regional Marketing at Adobe. Her career started on a graduate scheme at a media agency, which she credits as the foundation for her marketing work. She has worked across B2B and B2C. At Adobe she leads a remit covering brand, performance, engagement, and retention across more than 40 markets and over 30 languages in EMEA. In this conversation she sets out the grounding-from-an-agency discipline she still hires from; the people, not buying committees principle; the 95-5 rule applied to thought-leadership investment; the case for brand on top to lift the rest of the funnel; the Adobe LLM Optimiser tool that identifies where the brand shows up in LLMs; the strong global frameworks, then culturalised locally operating model; the GenStudio approach to personalisation at scale in tier-two and tier-three markets; the I don't need everyone to do everything; I need everyone to respect everything team-design principle; the vision plus good judgement leadership model; the MMM and attribution have become too good and ruined the conversation observation; the storytelling as the capability every marketer needs line; and the start at an agency, have fun, meet your people closing advice.
Performance has become too easy, and that's now the problem
On the change over ten years.
I've worked across brand, performance, engagement, and retention. Growth marketing covers the full gambit. There's an obsession with performance marketing (how much revenue, how many leads). We've become really good at proving what marketing does and the impact it has. The CFO conversation in that world is super easy.
The problem now: everyone is really good at the same thing. As AI runs the optimisation, content generation, and insights, everyone can do roughly the same as we come into this AI world. The difference for businesses has to be how they go above and beyond performance.
On the discipline that follows.
Marketers need to stand up and say I can see this opportunity in this customer group with this product fit. That's my job. I think we need to go after it in this way. Brand on top of the funnel improves the inefficiency of the rest of the funnel; proved time and time again.
Less than 5% are in-market: the case for thought leadership
On the discipline.
It's less than 5% who are in-market at any one time. Keep the conversation going. Not everybody is ready for a salesman to call them right now, but they might still be interested in a thought-leadership topic. At Adobe we release thought-leadership papers; people read them. Open the conversation, have the connection, fund that as a business because it's long-term.
On the buying committee.
Buying committees can run 13 or even 20 people. Hard to do, easy to say: don't overthink it. Know the profiles of the people who need to OK the sale. Give them compelling reasons.
What Adobe is doing now: leaning into creators on the B2B side. Who better to explain what Acrobat Studio or Firefly Services did for their business than someone who has used it? An easier way as a brand to address the buying committee without the cost of producing all the content yourself.
LLM Optimiser: how Adobe addresses AI-driven discoverability
On the tool.
Around 95% of business searches now start on ChatGPT or similar. Search is completely disrupted as an industry by LLMs.
At Adobe we use LLM Optimiser to identify where we show up in LLMs and different models and where there's opportunity to show up more. It targets what we need to do and where to do more to be in the conversation.
On the discipline.
The difficulty with LLMs: no single thing works. You have to do all of it. Community, SEO, paid in certain instances, link-backs. Videos must be transcribed correctly because YouTube is one of the big science-of-search platforms. Everything has to work together. Tools help us pinpoint where we can have the biggest impact across different countries.
Strong global frameworks, culturalised locally
On the operating model.
Adobe is a big global company. The best way to balance global consistency with local relevance is strong global brand frameworks. Any campaign has an umbrella framework: how it should look, feel, sound, tone of voice. Local teams add a culturalised flavour. A campaign for Acrobat Studio that feels too American for a UK audience gets the framework but is rewritten so it's based in a UK business.
You can't make culturalised campaigns for 40-plus markets in 30-plus languages. We place our bets based on opportunity and business strategy and culturalise where we want to go deep.
On GenStudio.
We used to be a blunt instrument in tier-two and tier-three markets (paid search, programmatic display, social, the same content translated). With AI now we use GenStudio for performance marketing. Human behaviour is different in Turkey than it is in Poland. AI informs us from a research perspective, drafts content, creates that content, pushes it to platform, and localises by language. We end up more personalised at scale.
Vision plus good judgement, and the unicorn that doesn't exist
On leadership.
Strong vision and good judgement. There's no way a leader can be an expert in everything they manage once you reach a certain level. Stay curious. Listen. Understand all the problems. Be willing to learn.
What separates good leaders from great leaders is judgement: the ability to read what's needed in the moment on a bedrock of curiosity. A leader I worked with recently was fantastic at understanding the lay of the land, asking the right questions, then making a judgement, setting a vision, planting a flag, and running us all to the thing she could see was the right opportunity at the right time.
On the team principle.
I don't need everyone to do everything. I need everyone to respect everything. Someone who's great at tech, data, strategy, and creative would be a unicorn. Know who's really good at each thing and design the team so everyone respects each other and leans on each other's strengths.
The question for the board
If performance marketing is becoming table stakes as AI runs the optimisation, what share of investment goes to brand work that lifts the rest of the funnel?
