Demand for content is about to outpace every marketing team on the planet.

We are truly in a golden age of creativity, with the democratisation of creativity at the centre of it. Anyone who has a story to tell now has the tools and the ability to share those stories. The consequence is a deluge of content and a corresponding increase in consumer expectation for more personalised experiences. There are more ways to reach customers, which requires more content. And personalisation, properly done, requires the right content for the right audience.

Recent research we ran showed that 88% of marketing and CX leaders said content demand had doubled in the past two years, and they expect it to grow fivefold over the next couple. A constant content explosion. Generative AI is the layer arriving on top of that. There is some fear in it, but we see it as a tremendous opportunity for brands.

Over the last few years there has been an absolute obsession with media optimisation. Squeezing every penny out of the media spend. Not enough focus has gone on creative optimisation. As you start to think about more addressable audiences, the focus on creative optimisation becomes essential and can make an enormous difference to ROI.

If you have a better sense of how your audience engages with your different surfaces, whether on Adobe.com or anywhere else, and you know which types of product usage drive better retention, you can dial up your creative to focus on those features. Get customers using that aspect of the product and they are more likely to extract value from their investment, more likely to renew the subscription.

We take significant insight from product usage and what drives value, then connect that to the type of content we create and serve. The granularity is bounded only by the data you have captured. A subscription business captures significant behavioural data that customers are willing to share, respecting privacy. As long as you are using that data to give the customer more value, you can build segmentation and deliver personalisation right down to an audience of one.

In EMEA alone, at any given moment, we have something like 12,000 assets in market. Add special pricing across markets, test variants, language variations, and the pressure on the content function is enormous. Using technologies to introduce creative optimisation (DCO), quickly identifying what is working and producing more of it, materially improves the impact of the marketing spend.

The technology is one part of the answer. You also need the right processes in place. Take Adobe Express, our all-in-one tool for anyone to create simple content for social or internal communications. Anyone can use the tool. It is easy and powerful, with AI built in for image generation and audio enhancement.

At enterprise scale, you still need brand templates so that democratising creativity does not completely tear the brand apart. We pride ourselves on drinking our own champagne and feeding back to product teams about what we need as marketers. With the newer tools (Firefly, Express, Acrobat AI Assistant) the principle is the same: we are the showcase, and we use our employee base to test, give feedback, and build the tools into our own workflows.

In the past, every piece of content went through the studio team, who are incredibly skilled but inevitably became a bottleneck. Now we have ways of avoiding that bottleneck and letting more people create content, or making a simple change to an asset without going to an agency. The discipline is keeping that within guidelines. Brand kits and templates are the mechanism. The studio team cares about the brand and does not want to be the bottleneck. They focus on the higher-end production work and the bigger campaigns.

Adobe has always supported underrepresented voices, in music, in the creative arts. We have relationships with the NWSL in the US. The Women's FA Cup mattered to us because it starts in the community. 460 clubs enter in the first round in September, most across communities right across the UK. A lot of them struggle for resources. The same person who runs the club may be cutting the grass and trying to create the social content that draws interest to the next game.

We wanted to help those clubs tell the stories of their players, fans, and communities through Adobe Express. We have given every club Adobe Express Premium access and training on how to use the tools. They can then create the social content that draws interest in upcoming matches, tells the players' and fans' stories, and helps sell more merchandise. The final last weekend was great, an incredibly creative final, and it sold out. But what excites us most is the grassroots.