The Estée Lauder Companies taps gen AI for digital marketing campaigns with Adobe Firefly deployment

The Estée Lauder Companies is adopting Adobe Firefly in a bid to redefine its process of launching digital marketing campaigns through generative AI.

As the parent company to brands such as Clinique, Estée Lauder, Jo Malone London, La Mer, and M•A•C Cosmetics, ELC connects with consumers across roughly 150 countries and territories.

With a focus on innovation and speed to market, it is investing in digital advertising to engage its consumer base. By integrating Firefly across existing Adobe Creative Cloud workflows, ELC says it will drive efficiency, accelerate campaign execution and empower creative teams to recapture time, and focus on ideating and creating new artistic concepts.

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. Teams are burdened with repetitive tasks that take time away from driving new design concepts and connecting with different audiences. This partnership underscores ELC’s newly unveiled Beauty Reimagined, aimed at establishing it as the best consumer centric prestige beauty company in the world.

Through leveraging Adobe Firefly Services - a collection of creative and generative APIs - ELC says it can reimagine content production as additional campaigns are required to engage consumers who are more digital than ever. With features such as Generative Expand integrated into existing workflows, images can be resized and optimised for various formats. Teams can quickly deliver assets with text and imagery intuitively placed, ready for distribution across digital marketing channels.

“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,” says Justin Edwards, Vice President, Global Digital Creative and Brand Image, M•A•C Cosmetics.

“The M•A•C 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.”

“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,” says 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.”

As part of its new content production workflow, ELC also needed to modernise 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.

"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,” says 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.”

2025 RTIH INNOVATION AWARDS

AI will be a key focus area at the 2025 RTIH Innovation Awards.

The awards. which will open for entries in March, celebrate global tech innovation in a fast moving omnichannel world.

Our 2024 hall of fame entrants were revealed during an event which took place at RIBA’s 66 Portland Place HQ in Central London on 21st November, and consisted of a drinks reception, three course meal, and awards ceremony presided over by comedian Lucy Porter.

In his welcome speech, Scott Thompson, Founder and Editor, RTIH, said: “The event is now into its sixth year and what a journey it has been. The awards started life as an online only affair during the Covid outbreak, before launching as a small scale in real life event and growing year on year to the point where we’re now selling out this fine, historic venue.”

He added: “Congratulations to all of our finalists. Many submissions did not make it through to the final stage, and getting to this point is no mean feat. Checkout-free stores, automated supply chains, immersive experiences, on-demand delivery, next generation loyalty offerings, inclusive retail, green technology. We’ve got all the cool stuff covered this evening.”

“But just importantly we’ve got lots of great examples of companies taking innovative tech and making it usable in everyday operations - resulting in more efficiency and profitability in all areas.”

Congratulations to our 2024 winners, and a big thank you to our sponsors, judging panel, the legend that is Lucy Porter, and all those who attended November's gathering. 

For further information on the 2025 RTIH Innovation Awards, please fill in the below form and we will get back to you asap.