Simon Morris, VP of International Marketing at Adobe, on why brands have been optimising their media spend while ignoring their creative, why content demand has doubled in two years and is expected to grow fivefold, and what Adobe has learned from thirteen years of being its own customer zero.
"We have 12,000 assets in market at any one time in EMEA alone. The pressure on content variations is huge."
Why creative optimisation is the biggest missed opportunity in modern marketing, and what being customer zero for thirteen years has taught Adobe
Simon Morris joined Adobe almost thirteen years ago at the moment the company was transitioning from a box product business to a subscription model and acquiring Omniture to build out its digital marketing platform. He has watched from the inside as Adobe's own marketing function, which runs across EMEA and Asia Pacific with 12,000 assets in market at any one time in EMEA alone, has become the living proof-of-concept for every capability Adobe sells.
In this conversation Morris makes a sharp observation about where marketing investment has gone wrong: an industry-wide obsession with media optimisation at the expense of creative optimisation. You can squeeze every penny out of your media placement and targeting, but if the creative is not working, the optimisation is maximising a mediocre signal. He also talks about how Adobe manages the tension between democratising creativity (giving everyone the tools to create) and homogenising it (producing a world in which all content looks the same because everyone used the same templates).
"We are truly in this golden age of creativity where we are seeing the democratisation of creativity. Anyone who has a story to tell now has the tools and the ability to share those stories, which consequently is leading to this huge deluge of content being created. Expectations of consumers for more personalised experiences are growing. 88% of marketing and CX leaders said that demand for content has doubled over the past two years, and they are expecting that to grow by fivefold over the next couple of years."
Morris frames the content explosion as the defining challenge of the moment for marketers. The same forces driving it are also the solution: AI-assisted production can help teams manage volume at a scale that would have been impossible with manual production. But the explosion also raises the floor for relevance. With so much content in market, the only content that cuts through is content that is genuinely relevant to the specific person seeing it at the specific moment they see it. That requirement for personalisation is what makes the content challenge so acute.
"What we have seen over the last few years is an absolute obsession with media optimisation. Whether it is in-house or with agencies, so much focus on optimising, squeezing every little penny out of your media, and not enough focus on creative optimisation. Now as you start to think about more addressable audiences, the focus on creative optimisation becomes so, so important and can truly make an enormous difference to your ROI."
The imbalance between media and creative optimisation is partly structural. Media buying has been programmatised, data-driven, and measurable for longer. Creative has been treated as a more subjective discipline, harder to test systematically and typically produced by a different team with a different culture. As creative production costs fall and content variation becomes easier, the opportunity to bring the same rigour to creative optimisation that has been applied to media is significant. The brands that crack this will see compounding returns.
"We pride ourselves on drinking our own champagne. We are absolutely being customer zero. We release every new product to our employees first and foremost. We get feedback from employees because they are often the customers of these products. Whether they be knowledge workers or marketers or communicators, who better to test and give feedback than our own employees?"
The customer zero practice at Adobe is not merely a marketing positioning exercise. It is operationalised through the practice of releasing new products internally before or alongside external availability, using internal teams as genuine test users who provide product feedback that shapes the product. The marketing function, running a global operation with thousands of assets in market, has genuine operational needs that make it a meaningful test environment for enterprise-scale content, analytics, and AI capabilities.
"We have ways of avoiding bottlenecks and allowing more people to create content. We want them to do that in a way that is within guidelines. Creating brand kits and templates is one way that we are doing that now. We are just allowing more people to create content rather than everything having to be bottlenecked through a studio."
The democratisation of content creation creates a genuine organisational tension. If you give everyone the tools to create, you also give everyone the tools to create things that do not fit the brand. Adobe's answer is brand kits and templates that provide the creative guardrails within which regional teams and individual marketers can operate. The studio team focuses on high-production brand work and campaign creative. The distributed team uses templated tools for the operational content that previously created bottlenecks.
"If you have a better sense for how your audiences are engaging with your different surfaces, and you know that certain types of usage of products drives better retention, you can really dial up your creative to focus in on those features so that you know that if you can just get your customers using that aspect of that product, they are more likely to get value out of their investment and ultimately more likely to renew their subscription."
The connection between product usage data and content strategy represents a genuinely new capability in marketing. Traditionally, content strategy was driven by audience insights and brand priorities. At a company like Adobe, where the product generates rich behavioural data about how customers are using it, that data becomes a content strategy signal. Features that are correlated with renewal become the focus of retention content. Features that are underused but high-value become the focus of education content. The product data tells you what to say, and to whom.
"The democratisation of creativity means anyone who has a story to tell now has the tools to share it."
Host Talk us through how you came to be at Adobe and what your job means.
Morris I have been at Adobe for almost 13 years now. I joined just around the time it was moving away from being a box product company to effectively a subscription business. Moving the creative business to subscription, they had acquired Omniture to start making the move into digital marketing. It was a super exciting time to join. For most of the 13 years I have been focused on Europe, Middle East and Africa. The last couple of years I have expanded that into Asia Pacific and Japan.
Host How have things changed in digital marketing over the last five years?
Morris We are truly in this golden age of creativity where we are seeing the democratisation of creativity. Anyone who has a story to tell now has the tools and the ability to share those stories, leading to a huge deluge of content being created. Expectations of consumers for more personalised experiences are growing. 88% of marketing and CX leaders said demand for content has doubled over the past two years and they are expecting that to grow by fivefold over the next couple of years. It is a constant content explosion.
Host The scale of content you need to manage is staggering. How do you manage it?
Morris At any one time in EMEA alone we have something like 12,000 assets in market. You start to see teams wanting to introduce special pricing, different markets, just the pressure on content and the variations is huge. If you can use technologies to introduce dynamic creative optimisation, being able to quickly identify which content is working and what is not, and then create more of the content that is resonating with your customers, you are going to get better results. I think personalisation is the way out of the conundrum of peak content. Nobody needs to receive as many marketing messages as we all do every day.
Host Why has creative optimisation been neglected in favour of media optimisation?
Morris What we have seen over the last few years is an absolute obsession with media optimisation. Whether in-house or with agencies, so much focus on squeezing every little penny out of optimising your media and not enough focus on creative optimisation. Now as you start to think about more addressable audiences, the focus on creative optimisation becomes so important and can truly make an enormous difference to your ROI.
Host What does being customer zero mean for Adobe?
Morris With any technology, the technology is one part of the answer. We pride ourselves on drinking our own champagne. We are absolutely being customer zero. We release every new product to our employees first and foremost. We get feedback from employees because they are often the customers of these products. Who better to test them and give feedback? We are constantly using our employee base to test products and give feedback and build them into workflows they have already established. One thing is the technology. The other thing is adapting your processes to take advantage of that.
Host How do you balance democratising creativity with maintaining brand standards?
Morris We have ways of avoiding bottlenecks and allowing more people to create content. We want them to do that within guidelines. Creating brand kits and templates is one way we are doing that now. We use our studio for the high-end production stuff and bigger campaigns. Some of the day-to-day we can enable through marketing kits with templates, allowing regional marketers to take those, tweak some of the language, but use those assets locally rather than going externally to an agency. The studio does not want to be a bottleneck. They know they have to scale.
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