Adobe Inc., the corporate parent of Adobe Advertising, has
significantly expanded its digital marketing and advertising ecosystem, deploying advanced agentic AI, generative media optimizations, and programmatic search visibility tools.
The advertising
division has recently introduced a slew of products and services before heading into Cannes Lions season -- including GenStudio for Commerce Media Networks, GenStudio for Performance Marketing, and
Creative Agent across Firefly & Creative Cloud. These are important because retail media, performance and creative platforms continue to attract more advertising budgets.
While many
outside companies rely on Adobe Advertising, so does Adobe, its parent company, to manage an entire suite of products.
It all started with a concept called dogfooding, and then executives realized that it worked.
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“When Adobe spends a $1 on a media
channel, I track what we get in return,” Steve Week, director of performance marketing at Adobe, told MediaPost. “When we spend $1 on Adobe Advertising vs. Google DV360, we know what
we’re getting based on the signals we get back.”
Adobe spent $1.4 billion on advertising in 2025 -- up more than 30% over the prior year's spending, reported Bloomberg in
February.
The company's advertising effort focused on promoting its own AI tools, including a series of TV ads and a strong presence at events like the Cannes and Sundance film festivals.
Week’s group is made up of media strategists, and their job is to interpret business goals such as investing $10 million in revenue for the quarter for products like Acrobat based on the data
they see. AI is assisting in terms of creative optimization and measurement, but for the strategy part AI only informs the group about opportunities, but humans make the decisions on what to do.
Sometimes the group builds custom algorithms, which gives the group additional signals.
Adobe will run several different platforms based on the campaign objectives simultaneously to
optimize conversions. DV360 and Quantcast are the two most used platforms by Adobe, along with Yahoo, Zeta and The Trade Desk.
Adobe has significantly expanded its digital marketing and
advertising ecosystem, deploying advanced agentic AI, generative media optimizations and programmatic search visibility tools.
It's not clear whether more advertising is paying off, but Week
and other corporate minds are exploring options.
“In the not-too-distant future, advertisers will be able to say, ‘here are my budget, audience, and KPIs, and the agents will help
manage bids,” Week said.
When asked whether AI would run an entire ad ecosystem some day, Week said Adobe has explored using platforms like Claude. Marketers would need to set up an
internal dashboard with proprietary platforms to connect to outside advertising supply sources to run the campaign.
In this world, marketers can create an interface to the way money is spent
and measured, but advertisers will still need to connect this dashboard to measurement and execution tools, because logic and algorithms in proprietary tools tell the platform how and what to bid on
to acquire the next consumer. It needs fuel from different channels to operate.
“Claude only knows what it knows, although someday it will probably get smarter,” Week said.
“When it makes recommendations today, it doesn’t know how we built the campaign, or how we’re bidding on the campaigns, or addressing the audiences or know the creative. Today, when
it makes recommendations today, it does it blindly. Sometimes they are not actionable, so there must be human insight.”
Bloomberg reported that the increase in Adobe’s advertising
costs coincided with the appointment of Lara Balazs as new chief marketing officer, who spent six years as the marketing chief at Intuit, the maker of TurboTax. It is famous for lots of online and
television ads during sporting events.
Adobe shared with MediaPost where most of the ad investment is going. The heavier-spend campaigns revolve around Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Creative, with
the majority of advertising focused on driving higher usage from a B2C perspective.
Target audiences for each of the major products that Adobe advertises includes Creative Cloud --
which is targeted at young communicators between the ages of 18 and 34 who are decision makers, as well as professions including marketers, social media managers, and business managers.
For
Acrobat, the focus turns to people who work in human resources, marketing, sales or a legal capacity at any company size, along with people who work in a company with under 100 employees.
Finally, Acrobat is targeted at B2B companies with between 5 and 500 employees.
Across Acrobat and Creative products, 70% of spend goes through Adobe Advertising because of
the improved performance they see compared with The Trade Desk and DV360. These Adobe campaigns are multi-format, including connected (TV), according to the company.