New Technology: The Projected Total Economic Impact™ Of Adobe Creative Solutions For Enterprise Powered By Firefly Generative AI

Boost In Productivity Of Creative Ideation

Evidence and data. Interviewees shared that their creative teams spent upwards of a fifth of their project time ideating and conceptualizing foundational creative concepts, including creating mood boards and experimenting with brand design colors or stylings. Much of the time spent on this work was inflated by constructive feedback from stakeholders, clients, or executives asking them to go back to the drawing board.

Interviewees said Firefly’s genAI capabilities in Adobe Creative Cloud’s applications, along with Custom Models, helped streamline this process. For example, the head of design at a technology company noted there was a speed advantage to creating these storyboards within Illustrator, using the text-to-vector graphic capability to automate iconography and pattern production with simple prompts. They could then use Generative Recolor to quickly apply feedback from stakeholders to revise those concepts.

Custom Models also enabled interviewees’ organizations to increase the volume and types of conceptual output beyond what was previously possible. The senior brand manager at an advertising agency spoke about training artificial intelligence on specific iconography and styles using Custom Models to maintain a level of brand governance in the creative output. With consistently on-brand assets, their team was able to conceptualize product presentations with many different scenes and backgrounds to show how products could appear in different contexts.

The senior brand manager said: “If we’re planning to widely distribute materials using our library of icons, we use [Custom Models] more as a concepting tool to add in some visual elements and flair. We did create a couple concepts from a model that would be production ready, which sped up the process a ton.”

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following for the financial analysis as applied to the composite organization:

• The full-time equivalent of 10 workers (2,080 hours per FTE) support campaign ideation and conceptualization. These workers include anyone providing input into this phase of work.
• The number of campaigns incorporating Creative Cloud’s Firefly capabilities and Custom Models expands year-over-year as creative teams deepen their expertise with Firefly to refine workflows, optimize how they leverage the models, and unlock more value from the technology.
• Productivity on impacted work improves between 25% and 70%. These results vary depending on how much the organization relies on genAI to influence ideation and conceptualization, as well as the type of content it’s trying to create and whether it’s iterative of previous content.
• The fully burdened average hourly rate for an in-house creative is $50 per hour, including salary, benefits, and payroll taxes.

Results. This yields a three-year projected PV ranging from $590,000 (low) to $1.4 million (high).

Accelerated Hero Asset Creation

Evidence and data. Interviewees said their organizations accelerated hero asset creation with Firefly in Creative Cloud applications. For example, they explained creatives were no longer limited to working with only photos and videos taken from shoots. The global chief design officer at a technology company said: “For us, it’s huge to have Generative Fill and Expand in Photoshop. Resizing, expanding, and manipulating photos is tedious work, and those features are an assistant in enabling our productivity.”

Meanwhile, the EVP and director of content creation at an agency called out After Effects and said: “The workflow capability to rotoscope or remove people from video is a huge time saving for us compared to how we used to work. It’s helped us generate new, high-quality campaign materials while doing video production work faster.”

In addition to Creative Cloud for Enterprise, interviewees said they trust Custom Model’s ability to consistently produce on-brand, high-quality outputs. After spending time training models on brand assets, the organizations’ creative teams didn’t need to focus on nailing the appearance of branding in new assets. The global chief technology officer at an agency said: “We have very talented designers who understand a brand’s value, and being able to codify that value through training a Custom Model is huge. It’s not just a time saver, it helps us capitalize on our design talent by replicating their quality outputs at scale.” They also shared that their organization saw a nearly 200% return on investing time into training sets with the time they had since saved.

The senior brand manager at an agency found value by training Custom Models on elements surrounding a brand’s products. They said: “Teams can train [the model] on the look and feel of scenery that they want, like weather or location, then put the product imagery in. That’s the longer journey we’re on: understanding how we can create environment parameters that are repeatable.” This approach helped some interviewees spend less time searching for tags to pull assets they were looking for since they could generate the desired image by just writing text.

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following for the financial analysis as applied to the composite organization:

• The full-time equivalent of 25 employees is dedicated to creating hero assets for campaigns.
• As with ideation and conceptualization, the number of campaigns leveraging Creative Cloud’s Firefly capabilities and Custom Models to create hero assets expands at the same pace year-over-year.
• The composite’s employees create hero assets 40% to 60% faster with Creative Cloud’s Firefly capabilities and Custom Models. The range depends on the complexity of the content, the asset, the level of automating repetitive tasks, and the designer’s proficiency in optimizing workflows and leveraging Custom Models.
• A TEI standard assumption for the composite organization is that large groups of employees who experience a productivity benefit rededicate two-thirds of their time savings toward additional work. This work can include more ambitious asset treatment and innovative creative designs. The remaining time savings are allocated to longer breaks or less late shifts, qualitatively improving the composite employee’s experience.

Results. This yields a three-year projected PV ranging from $1.3 million (low) to $2 million (high).

Increased Productivity In Creating Asset Variants

Evidence and data. Interviewees from organizations that used Firefly Services said their companies significantly scaled production of asset variants deployed across marketing campaigns and e-commerce experiences. Marketing teams were able to serve multiple versions of more relevant product assets to audiences, such as geographically localized backdrops or seasonal elements. Firefly Services’ API integration with creative workflows automated teams’ ability to personalize customer experiences and provide audiences with fresh content. According to interviewees, the solution could help increase variant production by as much as 10 to 20 times.

The head of martech and director of digital commerce at a CPG organization said: “We have demonstrated [with Firefly Services] that genAI can help in the personalization journey, because it’s a capability that we can scale. When we’re sending emails to different audiences, we now have a larger library of generated images to use that are relevant to the customers receiving that message.”

The interviewee shared a proof of concept for a hair conditioner product their organization sells: They prompted Firefly Services to create a variant image displaying hair attributes based on customer data (e.g., blonde curly hair, wavy brown hair, etc.). In the past, the interviewee’s team would create only four to five variant images to include in a campaign; however, the team created between 80 to 100 variant images during this pilot test.

Teams at the interviewees’ organizations were encouraged to create more variants because of the high quality of the assets. The global chief technology officer at an agency said: “We’ve used Firefly Services’ APIs to incorporate different templates and layers into images. But it’s not just replacing the background image, it’s doing things like realistically showing how reflections might work on a surface. It’s that kind of effectiveness with AI that’s huge for us.”

The global chief technology officer cited the variant creation feature as particularly helpful for a pilot case with a consumer electronics client that had thousands of products marketed to different audiences globally. Firefly Services helped their agency avoid spending extensive time creating different asset versions for each audience.

Firefly Services enabled other interviewees’ organizations to more effectively reach additional markets. The EVP of innovation at an agency shared that a client who initially only had budget to market to five priority regions was able to reach 50 regions using the solution.

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following for the financial analysis as applied to the composite organization:

• The full-time equivalent of 75 employees supports variant asset creation.
• The number of campaigns using Firefly Services to create variants slightly trails that of campaigns that incorporate Creative Cloud’s Firefly capabilities and Custom Models for ideation and hero asset creation. Employees spend time preparing the solution for their campaigns to receive the full complement of variants, including three variations of the hero asset (e.g., sizes, styles, etc.), each then made for eight channels, and then for eight languages. In total there are at least 192 variants for each hero asset.
• Variant creation accelerates by 70% to 80% with Firefly simplifying the process for the composite organization.
• The average fully burdened hourly rate for an extended creative support FTE  (e.g., global, off-site, and/or contractor workforce)creating variants is $30.
• There is productivity recapture of 75%, which is greater than with hero assets because the employees significantly increase their variant output by thousands. The remaining bandwidth not rededicated to meaningful work goes toward breaks, helping employees refocus and generate better outputs.

Results. This yields a three-year projected PV ranging from $3.9 million (low) to $4.5 million (high).

Reduced Time Spent Reviewing And Fixing Assets

Evidence and data. Each interviewee said Frame.io was a critical technology in their organization’s creative collaboration and review processes. The head of martech and director of digital commerce use cases at a CPG company said: “Frame.io eliminates a lot of the endless back and forth between creatives. You’re able to see end-to-end feedback given, decisions made, etc., all within one application. It makes work much more manageable.” They added that this was particularly helpful when working with agencies, as they could reallocate time from reviewing materials toward being more productive and iterating content.

For video content, Frame.io further improved the editing process for interviewees’ organizations by enhancing communication between teams. For example, editors were able to leave feedback on videos at specific timecodes and have Frame.io automatically notify colleagues. Editors rarely had to compile their notes in an email to send to their team or repeatedly nudge them to follow up.

Interviewees said that by training their models on approved, branded material with Custom Models, they were able to avoid review time if the AI-generated content was on brand. The outputs maintained brand consistency, which established trust among reviewers and relaxed their need to pore over specific branded elements like colors or styles.

If any issue was caught, it typically stemmed from their prompt and was a quick fix. The head of design at technology company said: “Features like Photoshop interoperability and the ability to leverage Generative Fill and retouch is a game changer. Something that would have taken a designer several hours to do right with a highly complex image or set of images can now be done in a matter of minutes.”

Interviewees found that Firefly Services was able to handle complex asset creation on the scale of thousands that didn’t require significant retouches or fixes. The head of martech and director of digital commerce use cases at a CPG company noted that their organization completely streamlined its review process and avoided four to five feedback cycles on variant content produced in its proof-of-concept experience with Firefly Services and Frame.io.

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following for the financial analysis as applied to the composite organization:

• The full-time equivalent of two in-house employees works on reviewing and fixing hero assets. The full-time equivalent of 10 extended creatives supports FTEs who review and fix variant assets.
• Time spent reviewing and fixing content issues improves between 65% and 75%. Frame.io streamlines collaboration and communication among team members and quickly identifies areas to fix. With models trained to produce on-brand content, issues with the content become less frequent and it becomes easier to identify and fix outlier problems.
• Productivity recapture isn’t applied to this benefit as the group experiencing the benefit is smaller than the impacted group noted in the previous two tables. In addition, time spent on this activity shrinks altogether with the help of these solutions.

Results. This yields a three-year projected PV ranging from $907,000 (low) to $1.0 million (high).

Greater Efficiency In Photography Expenditure

Evidence and data. According to interviewees, Adobe’s genAI capabilities enabled their organizations to become more cost efficient with existing photoshoots and expand derivative content. For example, teams could carry out a single product photoshoot without the need for extra time, travel, or expenses to capture the product in various settings or at specific times. Instead, they took photoshoot assets and leveraged solutions such as Firefly Services to show products against various backdrops.

For creative teams that operated on a limited budget, these cost and time efficiencies helped maximize their resources. The head of martech and director of digital commerce use cases at a CPG company shared that although their organization operates in more than 70 countries globally, it doesn’t have a photographer or crew readily available to produce new material in each country. By using Firefly Services, the company no longer relied on older content from a particular country or bought stock material. Instead, it automatically generated fresh, professional-grade product imagery in different locations and settings that only required minor touch ups.

This interviewee also shared an example from a product shoot for shampoo: After recognizing that an American-style bathroom wouldn’t resonate around the world, they quickly used Firefly Services to create content that showed the product in both UK- and Japanese-style bathrooms without having to travel or recreate scenes.

For some companies, production savings were not realized up front. The chief product officer at an agency shared that some brands their organization has worked with have put more money into shoots to build out asset repositories. The brands plan to train Custom Models on these assets to create evergreen outputs and expects long-term savings.

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following for the financial analysis as applied to the composite organization:

• Each year, 20% of the organization’s marketing campaigns require an entirely new photoshoot for marketing materials.
• The cost of these photoshoots is $50,000 per campaign, which consists of hard expenditures like travel, production facilities, and any third-party or freelance services required.
• Adobe’s Firefly solutions enable the composite organization to avoid potential reshoots and shoots in different locales. Depending on the complexity and details of the visuals, the composite’s employees become 25% to 50% more efficient with photoshoot budgets.

Results. This yields a three-year projected PV ranging from $1.2 million (low) to $2.4 million (high).

Revenue Growth From Increased Engagement

Evidence and data. Adobe’s Creative Solutions for Enterprise enabled interviewees’ organizations to serve audiences with a larger variety of fresh images and create more relevant experiences. A few brand interviewees said they saw their organization’s customers log higher engagement with visuals that featured local landmarks (generated based on the location being served) and products in customers’ preferred colors (generated based on past purchase data).

The head of martech and director of digital commerce at a CPG organization said Firefly Services was a key driver of this improvement. In an email campaign that previously would have used four templated emails, the company created between 80 to 100 variant images to leverage. The organization targeted a select group of recent customers, who bought hair products within the last 35 days, and served them images of hair in specific colors and shapes that reflected the results achieved with their previous purchases. Leveraging Firefly Services for this use, along with Adobe Journey Optimizer, the company saw a 300% improvement in click throughs to conversion.

Similarly, the global chief design officer at a technology company ran an early test and created a social campaign with 1,200 assets. Previously, building a campaign of this scale would have taken 10 days to complete, but asset generation only took two days using Firefly capabilities in Creative Cloud. The increased content volume combined with higher customer relevance resulted in over 26 times more engagement on social media content. The interviewee said: “It performed incredibly well. The variety and relevancy of content drove a huge performance gain. This was just the first experiment, but for it to be a cost saver, time saver, and a well-performing campaign is exciting.”

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following for the financial analysis as applied to the composite organization:

• The composite directly attributes an average of $10 million in revenue to each marketing campaign. The impact of each campaign varies depending on seasonality, messaging, and targeted audiences. This analysis does not factor in additional revenue from indirect sources like awareness, word-of-mouth, or customer sentiment gains.
• Campaign performance, as measured by revenue uplift, improves between 0.50% and 1%. This gain is driven by marketers using Firefly capability to create more engaging, localized, and relevant content, which makes for a more personalized audience experience. This impact is isolated from other non-creative Adobe solutions that primarily focus on enhancing marketing performance.
• A standard TEI assumption for the composite organization is to apply a pre-tax unadjusted operating profit margin of 10% to the revenue results. This is done to account for all operating costs, except the interest on debt and the company’s income taxes. Businesses that are not the composite organization can consider applying a gross margin to the revenue outcomes instead of the operating profit margin.

Results. This yields a three-year projected PV ranging from $2.4 million (low) to $4.8 million (high).

Unquantified Benefits

Interviewees mentioned the following additional benefits that their organizations experienced but were not able to quantify:

• Adobe’s commercially safe genAI training approach and IP indemnification mitigated risk. For several interviewees, Adobe Firefly represented the first commercially safe genAI solution they could leverage because of Adobe’s protection against copyright or intellectual property right infringement. Interviewees appreciated that Firefly is trained on Adobe Stock and content with permissions for use and does not scrape the internet for content, which could expose them to legal risk.
  
  Adobe’s indemnification clauses against copyright lawsuits also went a long way toward making users feel even more comfortable with Firefly. The EVP of innovation at an agency said: “For the legal department of a brand, Adobe has been very smart in training their AI on Adobe Stock and copyright-safe data sets. If a technology doesn’t provide indemnification, it’s assessed as a risk. … There’s a lot more comfort for a brand to engage with genAI content [from Adobe solutions].”
  
  Beyond deflecting legal risks, interviewees chose to work with Adobe Firefly to avoid intellectual property risks and reputational damage from using harmful content and to ensure creatives received proper attribution. The EVP of creative marketing at a media and entertainment company trained their Custom Models entirely on their company’s IP. Adobe’s promise that their IP wouldn’t be exposed to or incorporate unapproved third-party material made them feel comfortable with carrying out their test cases.
  
  Interviewees also appreciated that creatives received proper attribution for their work if it is used for Firefly training. The EVP and director of content creation at an agency said: “We like that Firefly was trained in an appropriate way and that artists are being compensated instead of being an amalgamation of scraping the internet. This is a tool that feels like it was created properly for commercial purposes.”

• Firefly Video Models and recent innovations bolster video content creation. Adobe’s new Firefly Video Model was in its early stages of beta testing when interviews were fielded for this study, but the solution held promise for users. The head of design at a technology company said: “Adobe has made good progress with video manipulation, and audio as well. … There’s a lot of value in some of those features where it doesn’t require additional time from a specialist to produce something of good quality.”
  
  Key features for enhancing productivity included Generative Extend in Premiere Pro, which allows for high-quality video to be generated instantaneously and cover gaps in footage, extend the length of shots, and smooth out transitions. Similarly, text and image-to-video capabilities via Firefly enabled users to automatically generate videos within seconds and further enhance outputs with capabilities such as controlling the camera to find different angles and zooms. Lastly, new Firefly Services video APIs helped in scaling out video content with the solution automatically transcribing, dubbing, and lip-syncing video dialogue across multiple scenarios or local markets at once.
• Adobe Express enabled self-service for non-creatives that is brand safe. Several interviewees said their organization was in the early adoption stages of Adobe Express at the time of speaking with Forrester. The designers interviewed at the technology organization spoke about seeing an opportunity to offload tedious tasks from their team with templates they generated for marketing teams to use. The head of design said: “We already have internal knowledge workers beginning to template videos [with Express] for meetings. They’re using it tactically. If you’re doing a briefing, then Express will create the intro, outro, and video content in between. … My design team isn’t capable of doing everything right now, and this helps keep them focused on the most highly impactful work possible.”
  
  Similarly, the EVP and director of content creation at an agency shared that Express was especially helpful for social content. Templatizing logos, specific disclaimers, and legal nomenclature for healthcare products, for example, helped users easily create variants across social channels while retaining master elements. The global head of AI and data product at another agency echoed this sentiment: “We want to help brands be more consistent in how they speak and appear in the marketplace. With Adobe Express and its straightforward feature set, we can help clients customize their master assets to make fast, reactive content. Generative Fill, for example, is a great tool that will help accelerate content creation workflows among non-creatives.”

• Comprehensive Adobe Professional Services support. Interviewees who worked with Adobe’s Professional Services team cited its support as being critical toward ramping up Firefly adoption and use. The global head of AI and data product at an agency said regarding Custom Models: “It’s somewhat deceptively easy to get started but can be hard to get precise in quality. We’ve been working with Adobe to finetune the results. … It took a little bit of back and forth with figuring out how to prompt images, but it doesn’t take very long when working with Adobe’s support team.”
  
  Meanwhile for Firefly Services, the head of martech and director of digital commerce use cases at a CPG company said: “We needed to tap into Adobe’s know-how. They brought in a couple of people to help us on a bi-weekly basis to make sure we were able to produce brand-accurate material. So instead of taking our own time exploring approaches, we had Adobe help do that for us.”

Flexibility

The value of added flexibility is unique to each customer. There are multiple scenarios in which a customer might implement Adobe’s Creative Solutions for Enterprise and realize unique business opportunities or additional use cases, including:

• Avoiding spending money on and managing competing genAI technologies. Interviewees that had conducted genAI tests before engaging with Adobe Firefly had worked with several competing technologies. The interviewees allocated budget from research and development to cover the costs, but knew their finances were finite. Given Adobe’s indemnification support, output quality, and Adobe ecosystem integration, Firefly became the preferred genAI solution at several organizations to focus their budget. The EVP of creative marketing at a media and entertainment company said: “We’re looking forward to our next steps with Adobe Firefly. They’re great partners and they really want to help us crack how to use genAI for everyone’s benefit.”
• Using new concepts and ideas from Firefly that drive value. In their early use cases with Firefly, interviewees looked at how this technology could help their content creation workflows. Based on the work efficiencies it created, they were excited about leveraging the technology to help build new creative concepts. The EVP of creative marketing said: “Firefly can help me as a creator. If I have a very vague idea of an image and it could go this way or that, instead of sketching it, I can leverage AI to take it from concept to sketch.”
  
  With these new concepts, the goal is to help inspire more engagement among customers and potentially drive value. The executive innovation director at an agency shared: “We’re looking toward finding larger use cases with Firefly. We’ve given designers access to these capabilities to enable them to produce quality output. Now the next step is how we can build marketing around these materials and how we can improve our product.”

Flexibility would also be quantified when evaluated as part of a specific project (described in more detail in Appendix A).