The Estée Lauder Companies (ELC) has teamed with Adobe to adopt Adobe Firefly and redefine its process of launching digital marketing campaigns through generative AI.

As the parent company to Clinique, Estée Lauder, Jo Malone London, La Mer and MAC Cosmetics, ELC connects with consumers across roughly 150 countries and territories. With a focus on innovation and speed to market, ELC is investing in digital advertising to engage its diverse and unique consumer base. By integrating Firefly across existing Adobe Creative Cloud workflows, ELC will drive efficiency, accelerate campaign execution and empower creative teams to recapture time.

“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,” said Justin Edwards, vice president, global digital creative and brand image, MAC Cosmetics. “The MAC Cosmetics 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.”

Impactful Consumer-Driven Engagement

Across digital channels, different formats (text, image, shopping, app promotion) and sizes for marketing campaigns contribute to hundreds of thousands of assets needed every year. The company says teams are burdened with repetitive tasks that take time away from driving new design concepts and connecting with different audiences.

The partnership underscores ELC’s new Beauty Reimagined, a strategic vision aimed at establishing ELC as among the best consumer-centric prestige beauty companies in the world. A key focus of this plan includes boosting consumer-facing investments to accelerate new customer acquisition. By harnessing Adobe’s Firefly capabilities to streamline content production, ELC says it’s reinforcing its commitment to this vision—ensuring impactful, consumer-driven engagement at scale.

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. In fact, survey statistics show nearly two-thirds of marketers believe the demand for content will quintuple between 2024 and 2026. With features such as Generative Expand seamlessly integrated into existing workflows, images can be intelligently resized and optimized for various formats. Teams can quickly deliver assets with text and imagery intuitively placed, ready for distribution across digital marketing channels.

“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,” said Varun Parmar, general manager, Adobe GenStudio and Firefly for Enterprise. “The Estée Lauder Companies have shown an incredibly compelling and practical application of generative AI, which allows design teams to focus more time on their craft and ideating eye catching creative for its portfolio of nearly 25 brands.”

Modernizing the Digital Asset Management System

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 more—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 gain actionable insights on usage and performance. It further shortens the time it takes to build and deliver assets for digital campaigns.

“At The Estée 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,” said Yuri Ezhkov, vice president, creative center of excellence, The Estée Lauder Companies. “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.”