Adobe announced an expanded partnership with German multinational company Henkel. The company will use Adobe Firefly and Adobe Experience Cloud to advance its content supply chain with generative AI. The company expects to deliver personalisation at scale across its global brand portfolio.
Henkel manages a diversified portfolio, holding leading positions in industrial and consumer businesses through brands such as Loctite, Persil and Schwarzkopf. Like many global organisations, Henkel has seen exponential growth in the demand for high quality and personalised content. Such content is required to meet the needs of digital marketing and omnichannel campaigns and product launches.
With Adobe Firefly Custom Models, Henkel will be able to train and fine-tune Firefly generative AI models. The company will use its own assets to create on-brand content, accelerating content production and streamlining repetitive tasks. For example, teams behind Henkel’s hair care brand Schwarzkopf will be able to create a variety of visual assets to support true one-to-one personalisation around product recommendations, based on a customer’s hair colour, style or length.
Henkel says it is already a pioneer in delivering personalised customer experiences through its existing digital business platform RAQN. The platform is supported by Adobe enterprise applications including Adobe Experience Platform and Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform. As a result, Henkel has a single, unified view of B2B and B2C customers.
Henkel will train Adobe Firefly using its own assets through Custom Models in a pilot. This will enable teams to rapidly produce personalised content that is safe for commercial use while adhering to brand standards.
Disrupting marketing
With that, Henkel will leverage generative AI capabilities embedded in Adobe Journey Optimizer, built on the Adobe Experience Platform. The company plans to orchestrate journeys with auto-generated message variations that drive customer engagement. When combined with visual assets created in Adobe Firefly, Henkel can deliver personalised marketing campaigns, website creative, and mobile experiences. The key objective will be to strengthen customer loyalty and prevent messaging fatigue.
“Generative AI is disrupting the economy and society similar to the internet – but at lightspeed. We must adopt to and capture these new technologies early on to drive innovation. Moreover, open up new opportunities for Henkel,” said Michael Nilles, Chief Digital & Information Officer at Henkel. “Together with our strong partner Adobe, we will significantly advance our content and marketing workflows using responsible generative AI. This will allow us to innovate how we produce assets at scale and deliver personalised, omnichannel experiences.”
“Generative AI is reshaping what we thought possible to deliver personalisation at scale across data, content and customer journeys,” said Luc Dammann, President of EMEA at Adobe. “With Adobe Firefly and Adobe Experience Cloud, Henkel is leveraging natively integrated generative AI capabilities. This will support its digital strategy and set a new standard around efficiency. It will reshape how its iconic brands approach content production, campaign optimisation, and personalised customer experiences.”
Enterprise Times: What this means for businesses
This is one of the more interesting impacts of generative AI in marketing. From automating mundane marketing processes and enabling personalisation, to supporting the idea generation process. Generative AI is poised to be a major catalyst for a new age of marketing capabilities. In the past, digital marketing campaigns were often restricted to limited variations of assets and copy variations.
However, with the potential of generative AI, companies like Henkel can combine and tailor content for different channels. This will increase the volume of tailored messages. Content production tasks that would have taken hours or days can be brought down to minutes. Helping Henkel to create consistent, on-brand, compliant, and commercially safe content.
The expanded partnership will support Henkel’s content supply chain by scaling content production with generative AI. This is expected to help drive efficiencies and agile workflows across digital marketing campaigns. For a brand like Henkel, which has a variety of lifestyle and beauty brands, the ability to deliver personalisation to scale will be vital. The relationship with its key target audiences will be key to the success of all such brands.
