IPG teams up with Adobe to bring AI-powered content to clients

IPG has spent over $100m on development of its own AI tech, and on the new Adobe partnership, according to Jayna Kothary, the company's chief solutions architect.

The partnership centers on the integration of Adobe’s GenStudio, a suite of AI-powered platforms designed to facilitate brands’ content supply chains, into IPG Engine, the company’s proprietary marketing platform. Leveraging data from Acxiom (an IPG-owned first-party data management company), the engine is designed “to create a more accurate picture of consumers and more authentic connections with brands,” as IPG described in a press release today.

The announcement arrives at a time of rapid evolution within the marketing sector sparked by the sudden and dramatic uptick in AI adoption beginning with the release of OpenAI's ultra-popular ChatGPT in late 2022. Brands across several industries have been rushing to incorporate the technology into their existing creative operations and establish their own, unique AI niches. Many major advertising agencies and holding companies, meanwhile – including Media.Monks, WPP and Publicis – have recently revealed plans to scale up their AI investments and infrastructure.

Adobe has positioned GenStudio as a kind of one-stop-shop for brands looking to reduce friction through the campaign development process – from brief to final approval – through the use of AI.

The new partnership is geared in part towards eliminating workflow redundancies and miscommunications across IPG’s portfolio of agencies.

“We're living in a world where clients are asking for efficiency, transparency, integrity,” says Kothary. “When we've got multiple agencies working on one client, they want a full view of the asset, full view of the production, what's being used where – one single workflow tool. So Adobe's GenStudio now is going to power every IPG agency across the entire content supply chain.”

IPG also aims to provide marketing teams with more direct control of their own audience data. “Every client wants to be the steward of their own tech ecosystem, and they want to own their own data,” Kothary says.

Through its new partnership with IPG, Adobe will have access to Acxiom’s extensive dataset to further develop its Customer Data Platform (CDP) and Adobe Experience Platform (AEP), both of which are used by brands to develop more personalized and targeted ad campaigns. “This is big, and very different, and a first,” Kothary says of Adobe’s side of the partnership.

According to Acxiom general manager of cloud and platforms services Jason Brown, the company has “data assets on every marketable consumer in the United States: 8000-plus attributes that cover everything from what they buy, to what their personal interests are, to how their professional and personal lives intersect. Everything you can think of as a marketer, we have a broad array of [relevant] data assets.”

Fusing Acxiom’s data capabilities with Adobe’s CDP and AEP platforms will enable brands to more effectively home in on the specific parameters for a target audience in a given campaign.

The newly GenStudio-equipped IPG Engine is also being positioned as a catalyzing force that can enable marketers to rapidly generate high-quality and personalized content at a scale at, per the company, “the speed of social.”

Kothary notes that IPG hopes not to sacrifice quality, human-led work in the name of efficiency. Echoing a sentiment that’s become common among brands deploying AI, Kothary emphasizes that the driving goal behind the integration of Adobe technology into the IPG Engine is to assist, not replace, human creativity.

“[We’re aiming to] upskill people to be able to focus on the thing that our industry takes great pride in, which is the big creative idea that's not coming from a machine,” she says.

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