Dive Brief:

• The Estée Lauder Companies (ELC) has partnered with Adobe to refine the launch of its digital marketing campaigns through generative artificial intelligence (AI), per details shared with Marketing Dive.
• The beauty marketer will integrate Adobe Firefly Services into its existing Adobe Creative Cloud workflows to increase efficiency and accelerate campaign execution.
• The partnership speaks to ELC’s new Beauty Reimagined initiative that seeks to make the company more consumer-centric through digital transformation.

Dive Insight:

As the parent of brands including Clinique, La Mer, MAC Cosmetics and its eponymous label, ELC produces reams of marketing targeted at consumers across about 150 global territories. That amount of work is set to increase. Nearly two-thirds of marketers believe the demand for content will quintuple between 2024 and 2026, per a survey conducted by Adobe.

To meet climbing production needs, ELC has turned to generative AI through partnerships with major tech companies including Google and Microsoft. ELC is leveraging AI with Microsoft to uncover insights and maximize the utility of its data while the collaboartion with Google is around building scalable AI solutions and driving personalization at scale.

That latest partnership sees ELC integrate Adobe Firefly Services, a collection of creative and generative APIs, into its existing Adobe workflows for tools like Photoshop and InDesign. The goal is to help creative teams recapture time spent on repetitive tasks, such as versioning creative across different channels and formats, that can be better used on ideating and devising fresh campaign concepts. 

“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 and global digital creative and brand image at MAC Cosmetics, the first ELC brand to experiment with Adobe Firefly, in a statement.

In addition to integrating Adobe Firefly, ELC is now leveraging Adobe Experience Manager Assets as a Cloud Service to better utilize its digital asset management (DAM) system, which houses assets like logos and images that are the foundation for digital content. The improved DAM also promises to shorten the time it takes to build and deliver digital campaign assets.

The partnership with Adobe speaks to ELC’s new strategic vision, Beauty Reimagined, that seeks to burnish the company’s consumer-centric bona fides. The plan includes accelerating speed-to-market through digital innovation and boosting consumer-facing investments to step up customer acquisition. 

“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 for the creative center of excellence at ELC, in a statement 

Beauty Reimagined comes as ELC works to reorganize and reorient itself for a changing beauty landscape. To that end, the company in February appointed Jane Hertzmark Hudis as executive vice president and chief brand officer and announced plans to fill a chief digital marketing officer position. ELC saw net sales decrease 6% to $4 billion in the second quarter of its fiscal 2025.