IBM used Adobe Firefly over the last year to lower its content spend by 80% and reduced its ideation time from 15 days to 2 days in a marketing campaign executed in and around the Sphere in Las Vegas. Perhaps the bigger takeaway is that IBM's returns were largely driven by using Firefly at the front end of the creative process.
Joe Prota, Director of Brand Marketing at IBM, is a Constellation Research SuperNova Award finalist. Prota said the goal of the project was to scale Adobe's Firefly in its marketing efforts and leverage IBM's watsonX for governance. "We decided to take over the Sphere in Las Vegas and turn it into a giant fishbowl," said Prota. "We developed all of the assets used in the Sphere and surrounding the event as well as outside on other billboards throughout Las Vegas."
Here are some of the takeaways from Prota on leveraging generative AI in the creative process.
Adobe launches Firefly Video Model as GenStudio for Performance Marketing goes to GA
GenAI and creative development. Prota noted that the creative development process isn't linear since there are twists and turns before you land on an idea and the final assets that go with it.
Prota described the project and the process before and after. "If you think of each fish as a character, you have to define and develop those characters. And in a historical setting, an art director or copywriter or someone within the creative team is going to either hand draw what they think those characters look like or pull reference imagery from a number of different sources," said Prota. "Then it's going to be presented up through management. It's going to get refined, then it will come across my desk, and I'll have input on it. The whole process can take three to four weeks."
Using Adobe Firefly inside of Adobe Express, the creative team was able to take ideas, put them into a prompt and then have hundreds of different reference images, said Prota. "What took three weeks we were able to achieve in three days," added Prota.
Returns. Prota said the biggest return on genAI was time savings. "From a creativity standpoint, there was no gap between the person whose idea it was and the person who was reviewing the idea," he said. "Firefly allowed us to move much faster and build on another's ideas in a more productive and collaborative way than we normally have because the AI was absolutely representing what this person was trying to create."
Pilot, process and production. Prota said IBM chose to embed Firefly in the beginning of the creative development process. That move led to trust because the team knew it would have to catch mishaps--off brand logo colors and images--before they went to market.
"If you're using AI on the back end of the process in higher volume, and pushing content out quickly, there's more of a risk. We knew we had safeguards built into place, just by virtue of the way we were using the AI," said Prota, who noted that the models were fed brand guidelines and color palettes as well as humans in the middle of the process for fine tuning.
Prota said enterprises should think of generative AI as something that can be more helpful early in the creative process instead of the end when content is being churned out. "When you think of marketing materials there are certain assets that are high volume," he said. "Using generative AI early on has shown that it's really an invaluable tool because it sped up development time. The handoff between parties was much more seamless."
Ideation. Prota said Firefly was an accelerator to the creative process and generative AI's biggest return could be accelerating ideation and iteration. "I don't know if a lot of people are using genAI that way today, but I would highly recommend it," said Prota. "It allowed us to align ideas under a shared vision and accelerate the process."
Prota's game plan going forward is to scale Firefly on other projects along with IBM's homegrown tools.
