In a strategic move it claims will reshape the future of marketing, Brandtech Group has announced a partnership with Adobe that will integrate Adobe’s Firefly Services into Brandtech’s generative AI marketing platform, Pencil Pro.
The announcement is perhaps serendipitously timed, as news of Ominicom and IPG’s merger and WPP’s win of Unilever’s business over incumbent IPG indicate a pendulum shift in how investment in AI is factoring into the future of the industry, and the ways brands approach their use of the technology.
In a statement, David Jones, founder and CEO of Brandtech, highlighted the magnitude of the partnership in the context of the ongoing generative AI revolution. “2025 is set to be the year of tectonic disruption in marketing,” he states. “This partnership will give the world’s biggest advertisers a huge competitive advantage and marketing superpower.”
For marketers, this disruption is already here. Despite hiccups in public reception to recent AI generated campaigns by Coca-Cola and Spotify, many — with the right human-powered creative backing — have been well received. And the appeal and pressure of doubling returns on ad spend, generating content 10x faster, and cutting costs by 50% has made the tech an undeniable industry player.
Both companies believe the partnership is poised to change the economics of digital advertising and unlock significant efficiencies for brands, offering them an unprecedented combination of creative production technology and Gen AI-driven campaign optimization.
“Consumer expectations around generative AI-driven personalization continue to rise, and Firefly Services unlocks the possibility for brands and agencies to ideate and create the sheer volume of on-brand, commercially safe content now required,” said Kumar Vora, SVP of Adobe Emerging Solutions, in a statement. “Brandtech’s expertise in anticipating and addressing the challenges marketers face is very evident, and we’re delighted to be expanding Adobe’s partnership with the Group to transform how their teams and clients create the content needed to deliver personalization at scale.”
For brand marketers and advertising professionals, the partnership means access to a seamless integration of Adobe’s creative tools — Photoshop and After Effects — within Pencil Pro’s AI-powered workflows. The AI marketing platform, which is already used by brands like Miller Lite, Persil and Durex, allows users to create insights, predict performance, score quality, deploy media and generate creative content at scale. The company claims the integration of Adobe Firefly’s generative AI services will further amplify these capabilities, creating a comprehensive platform for generating on-brand, commercially safe content at lightning speed.
“The ability to create great work and then in the same platform understand its compliance to best practice and predicted impact in-market, means brands can quickly and confidently make and deploy work with objectivity,” Brandtech Group Partner’s head of emerging technology, Rebecca Sykes, told Campaign. “It also makes it very quick and seamless to creatively optimize content mid-flight, meaning we can iteratively increase performance whilst live.”
Sykes added, “Many of the largest enterprise businesses in the world are Adobe customers, and therefore interoperability between existing tools and Gen AI end-to-end platforms is a critical component of the efficiencies and competitive advantage available to those who seize the opportunity to scale Gen AI confidently across their businesses.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story misquoted Kumar Vora, SVP of Adobe Emerging Solutions. The article has since been updated to reflect the language included in the statement from Adobe.
