Estee Lauder Overhauls Digital Marketing Workflows With Gen AI
The Estee Lauder Companies (ELC) is overhauling its process of launching digital marketing campaigns using Adobe Firefly.
The prestige beauty giant is integrating Adobe's suite of generative AI-powered tools for visual content creation into its workflows to enhance efficiency and accelerate campaign execution.
By adopting Firefly within existing Adobe Creative Cloud applications like Photoshop and InDesign, ELC aims to streamline content production processes, allowing creative teams to focus more on ideation and creating new design concepts, according to a media release.
ELC said the move reflects its commitment to leveraging advanced technologies to meet the increasing demand for personalized and engaging digital content.
The ELC portfolio of nearly 25 brands — such as Clinique, Estee Lauder, Jo Malone London, La Mer, and Mac Cosmetics — connects with consumers across roughly 150 countries and territories.
ELC’s ‘Beauty Reimagined’ Initiative
This integration also supports ELC's "Beauty Reimagined" initiative, which seeks to grow sales and profitability by focusing on consumer-centric initiatives, accelerating innovation, and boosting digital advertising and consumer-facing investments. A key focus of its plan to drive innovation includes accelerating speed-to-market and new customer acquisition.
Through leveraging Adobe Firefly Services — a collection of creative and generative APIs — ELC can reimagine content production as additional campaigns are required to engage consumers “who are more digital than ever,” per the release.
Interestingly, an Adobe survey fielded in 2024 found that nearly two-thirds of marketers believe the demand for content will quintuple between 2024 and 2026, ELC cited.
“Adobe Firefly Services APIs surface decades of Adobe innovation across our foundational AI models and applications such as Photoshop and InDesign, to assist with daily tasks that are crucial but can often be repetitive and time-intensive,” Varun Parmar, general manager, Adobe GenStudio and Firefly for enterprise, said in the release.
With features such as Adobe’s Generative Expand integrated into existing workflows and Adobe apps, ELC can use AI to resize and optimize images for various formats. ELC teams can quickly deliver assets with text and imagery “intuitively placed,” ready for distribution across digital marketing channels, per the release.
“Maintaining mindshare on digital channels such as social media is important in the competitive beauty industry, but oftentimes the content requirements for each platform stresses our ability to deliver new campaigns,” added Justin Edwards, vice president, global digital creative and brand image, Mac. “The Mac team was the first to explore the potential of generative AI for the company through Adobe Firefly Services, and we believe it will remove hurdles that currently prevent our designers from focusing on their craft.”
ELC’s Digital Asset Management Modernization
As part of its new content production workflow, ELC also needed to modernize its digital asset management (DAM) system. The DAM houses the company’s entire library of images, logos, patterns, and other assets that anchor the creation of digital content.
ELC is now leveraging Adobe Experience Manager Assets as a Cloud Service to enhance its DAM and drive greater operational efficiency.
This creates an architecture where assets can be uploaded with greater speed, along with enhanced search capabilities for teams to quickly locate assets and insights on usage and performance. ELC said this further shortens the time it takes to build and deliver assets for digital campaigns.
“At The Estee Lauder Companies, we need to keep pace with a changing environment where an increasingly large share of transactions is happening through digital channels such as mobile devices,” added Yuri Ezhkov, vice president, creative center of excellence, ELC. “We have a trusted partner in Adobe to provide generative AI technologies that are safe for commercial use, with tools that enable our design teams to operate more nimbly and be free to focus on ideating.”
This article first appeared on the site of sister publication P2PI.
