Joe Prota

Director of Brand Marketing, IBM

IBM integrates technology and expertise, providing infrastructure, software (including market-leading Red Hat) and consulting services for clients as they pursue the digital transformation of the world’s mission-critical businesses.

Supernova Award Category: 
Marketing & Sales Effectiveness
The Problem: 

With IBM’s Marketing transformation in recent years came a focus on delivering high quality, personalized experiences as a means for driving demand. The challenge for IBM then became to create the magnitude of brand-compliant content needed to produce and deliver truly personalized experiences, across different channels and markets. Given IBM’s scale (thousands of marketers, hundreds of products, 175 geographies, and vast data sets), the process of planning, producing, and analyzing content throughout its lifecycle was complex; collaboration across marketing and creative teams involved time-consuming, often manual processes and handoffs that had to be carefully managed. IBM challenged itself to deliver better content faster and cheaper.

The Solution: 

When Adobe Firefly was announced in 2023, IBM saw the opportunity to add the power of GenAI to its existing Adobe investments and efforts for optimizing its content supply chain. IBM saw the potential of putting commercially-viable generative AI directly into its teams’ workflows to vastly scale the creation and delivery of personalized content. The Marketing leaders took immediate steps to be the first to leverage Firefly for a Marketing campaign. 

The Results: 

For its “Let’s Create” campaign, IBM used Firefly to create 200 visual assets that involved rendering an image of a question mark in a variety of textures and colors. Designers could choose to then edit and refine a variation into a final product, dramatically speeding up what is typically a lengthy process to create compelling content personalized for targeted audiences.

Firefly was also used for ideation to create a campaign that was playful and inviting, but also educational. IBM’s “Trust What You Create” campaign involved a takeover of the Las Vegas Sphere and several other activations during Adobe Summit 2024 featuring Firefly-created surreal fish with strange shapes and digital errors to highlight the importance of taking the necessary steps to build trustworthy GenAI.

Use of Adobe Workfront not only streamlined collaboration and workflows, it provided IBM with visibility into the number of requests and time it typically takes to produce content, providing evidence of efficiency gains, such as the reduction of the back and forth between teams.

Metrics: 

IBM realized efficiency gains, cost savings, and quality and throughput improvements including:

  • 80% reduction in content creation spend (a substantial savings given IBM’s scale).
  • 77% decrease in email creation time and improved time-to-market by 60 percent.
  • For “Let’s Create” campaign: produced over 10 times the content in a fifth of the time.
  • “Let’s Create” campaign assets outperformed benchmark in social by 26 times due to more personalized and relevant content.
  • For “Trust What You Create” campaign, concept ideation reduced from 15 days to 2 days, giving teams time back for producing more cross-channel campaign elements.
The Technology: 

IBM uses Adobe Express for Enterprise powered by Adobe Firefly as well as other Creative Cloud applications and Adobe Workfront and Adobe Experience Manager. These applications enable creative and marketing teams to plan, create, and activate on-brand content seamlessly.

Disruptive Factor: 

IBM pioneered the use of GenAI in creating highly customized, highly creative campaigns, and has since rolled out the capabilities to roughly 20,000 IBM staffers with Adobe Creative Cloud licenses. However, being able to trust that the generated content is accurate and on-brand requires the right data and inputs into the generative models. IBM’s expertise and practices for tuning and training the model, and a task-specific prompt framework were critical. You can’t have trusted AI without trusted data.

Shining Moment: 

Scaling GenAI is not about the technology itself but about the people. IBM is cultivating the cultural mindset to make everyone a creator and feel involved in writing the story of IBM's future, with the safety of thoughtful governance guardrails. IBM believes that AI will not replace humans but augment us, and that having teams embrace the tools and technology in their day-to-day work is a means for driving innovation and new approaches, and ultimately competitive advantage, all while putting the fun back into marketing.

About IBM

IBM integrates technology and expertise, providing infrastructure, software (including market-leading Red Hat) and consulting services for clients as they pursue the digital transformation of the world’s mission-critical businesses.