Customer Zero Always
Simon Morris, VP International Marketing at Adobe, has had a ringside seat for thirteen years as content demand, creative technology, and the nature of marketing itself have been transformed. His conviction is that the industry has spent years obsessing over media optimisation while systematically underinvesting in the one thing that actually drives results: creative optimisation.
“We have just in EMEA alone something like 12,000 assets in market at any one time. They expect demand for content to grow fivefold.”
Simon Morris is Vice President International Marketing at Adobe, where he has spent nearly fifteen years building out the company’s marketing presence across EMEA, Asia Pacific, and Japan. He joined Adobe just as it was making the transition from boxed product to subscription business, and has since led demand generation, campaign marketing, digital media, and the full international marketing function as the company built its Digital Experience practice around the world.
Before Adobe, Simon spent nearly ten years at ClickSoftware, progressing from Director of Global Marketing to Vice President of Marketing Operations to Vice President of Marketing. He was elected Chapter President of AFSM International in the UK in 2007, part of the leadership team that launched the UK chapter of the global services management association, where he grew membership from zero to 100 and won the Best Chapter Award.
At Adobe, his focus has been on the relationship between data, creative, and personalisation at scale. He was responsible for Adobe’s partnership with the Women’s FA Cup, giving all 460 clubs access to Adobe Express Premium as a way of helping grassroots communities tell their own stories. He sees this sponsorship as a direct expression of Adobe’s brand purpose: democratising creativity for underrepresented voices. In his view, the brand purpose has not changed in fifteen years. The mission of changing the world through digital experiences has simply gained one word: personalised.
“88% of marketing leaders say demand for content has doubled in two years.”
There has been an absolute obsession with media optimisation. Not enough focus on creative optimisation.
Simon’s diagnosis of the marketing industry is precise: the discipline has spent years getting extremely good at buying media efficiently and extremely inconsistent at using that media effectively. As audiences become more addressable and personalisation more achievable, the bottleneck is not the channel or the targeting. It is the creative. Getting the right message in front of the right person at the right time only matters if the message is actually good.
We pride ourselves on drinking our own champagne. Every product or technology goes to our employees first.
Adobe uses its own products internally before releasing them to market. This is not a marketing exercise. It is how the company gets honest feedback from people who are both the developers’ peers and the products’ actual target users. When Adobe democratises creativity for marketers and communicators, it does so having watched its own employees struggle with the same bottlenecks and benefit from the same solutions. Customer zero is not a tagline. It is an operating principle.
Democratising creativity across your teams is only valuable if it does not rip your brand apart in the process.
Adobe’s answer to the content explosion is not to centralise everything through a studio team, which creates bottlenecks, or to open everything up without guidelines, which destroys brand consistency. The answer is structured democratisation: brand kits, templates, approved assets that give regional marketers and non-designers the ability to create on-brand content quickly, without going back to the agency or the studio for every asset. The studio’s job becomes the high-end work that actually requires it.
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