Adobe Can Help With Your Black Friday Content Bottleneck

According to Adobe, this year’s holiday shopping season is set to cross $250 billion in online sales, which is an increase of 5.3% YoY, with Black Friday and Cyber Monday just around the corner. Retailers everywhere are in the last stretch of preparation for sales kick-off and are shifting focus to consumers, who increasingly expect tailored experiences, putting strain on content operations. This final stretch matters as much as the planning that began after last year’s retrospective; retailers who are chasing a bigger share of spend have optimized their supply chain networks, upgraded marketing, and rolled out specialized go-to-market platforms that integrate and automate workflows across their core systems.

Adobe is thinking about the pressure retailers are facing in the upcoming seasonal campaigns, such as Black Friday, and the resulting demand for massive volumes of content, personalized by channel, region, and audience. Black Friday rolls around every year, followed immediately by Cyber Monday, but many enterprises still rely on manual workflows for video cropping, format reframing, and creative translation. This workload is increasingly misaligned with market realities, especially in light of the capabilities that Gen AI brings to the market.

In a recent briefing, Adobe reported that format reframing was the hardest job taking the lion’s share of the content production effort. Their own digital media team begins with roughly 80 hero assets for Black Friday. Once localized by region, resized for platforms, translated into multiple languages, and personalized for audience segments, those assets expand into more than 54,000 final deliverables. In the past, this effort required months of preparation, with creatives locked in months in advance.

Adobe reports that they are able to use generative AI to reduce the time for creative production from months to minutes. Our take is that for content creation and optimization, generative AI no longer falls into a discretionary budget. It is necessary to meet the scale, speed, and personalization demands of Black Friday and other major retail events.

Adobe Announces New Features to Meet the Needs That Span From Content Creators to Enterprise IT

Adobe is future-proofing its creative platform by providing access to leading LLM models rather than restricting users to its own Firefly models. This marks the first time that Adobe has opened its platform to top external models from partners such as Google, OpenAI, and Runway (among others). This represents expanded choice for users and a larger array of use cases.

Other key improvements include:

• Bulk Video Reframing: Reframing is consistently cited as the most costly and time-intensive workflow in enterprise media. Adobe’s AI-based tools can generate portrait, square, and landscape formats simultaneously without losing the subject in frame.
• Automated Variants at Scale: Enterprises are using Adobe APIs to produce thousands of localized, resized, and personalized assets in minutes.
• World Models for Brand Consistency: Early Adobe pilots show brands training generative models on proprietary imagery (for example, CPG food photography) to maintain fidelity and brand voice.
• On-Brand Creation With Adobe Express: Adoption of lightweight tools continues to accelerate, even outside of design teams. Teams that traditionally focused only on marketing are now able to use Adobe Express to create on-brand presentations, social content, and digital signage, reducing reliance on specialist designers and shortening production cycles.

Aligning the Right Tools to the Right People

Adobe’s generative AI strategy attempts to align the right tools with the right people. Black Friday exposes this clearly since not every team needs Creative Cloud, but every team is under pressure to create. Adobe’s segmentation across these four key audiences helps organizations focus their use on business professionals, creators, creative pros, enterprises.

The new AI assistant in Adobe Express (now in beta) allows business users to adjust designs through simple text prompts. Capabilities include image editing, resizing, translation, and other routine modifications. Users can also apply brand-approved colors, fonts, and visual assets or adapt existing templates to ensure design outputs stay aligned with brand guidelines. Firefly allows companies to scale and drive efficiency for designers. API-based services like Firefly Services and Firefly Foundry enable enterprise production teams to generate localized, on-brand assets in minutes instead of months. However, the lift to implement and buy is not insignificant, and this performance is reflected in the price tag.

The key for IT and marketing leaders is to map Adobe’s tools to real workflow needs, not just job titles, allowing organizations to scale content without wasting budget or fragmenting governance.

Considerations and Limitations

While the efficiency gains are clear, adoption requires governance, especially at an enterprise level. Adobe reports that they are able to meet enterprise concerns and supply commercial safety of models, control of brand usage rights, and verification.

They also note that uneven AI literacy across departments limits ROI. Without structured training and change management, organizations risk underusing these capabilities, creating inconsistent results and eroding trust in the outputs.

While large platforms bring integration, scale, and commercial safeguards, smaller vendors can sometimes be the better fit. Niche providers can deliver some of this functionality at a smaller price tag and are often easier to deploy. Overall, for enterprise-scale models, we still find that Adobe provides the most governance-focused and IT-friendly environment.

Our Take

Black Friday and Cyber Monday represent a stress test for enterprise content supply chains. The greatest value of generative AI is not in novel creative outputs but in eliminating redundant rework and accelerating campaign readiness. We believe firms that modernize their pipelines with Adobe can scale personalization while reducing cost and risk. Enterprises that delay adoption will either overspend on labor-intensive workflows or miss critical market windows, placing them at a competitive disadvantage.

For technology leaders, this will be a win, aligning technology investment with outcomes that are critical to revenue and can be achieved with speed, scale, and personalization in the content supply chain.