To be at the company that actually markets marketing is incredible, says Lara Balazs, the new CMO of Adobe, the San Jose-based tech company that sells digital marketing solutions and posted revenues of $21.51 billion in fiscal 2024.
The go-getting marketer who has worked with Visa, Gap, Nike, Amazon, and Intuit, and is on Forbes’ list of most influential CMOs, says Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen offered her the job, saying, “how could you not come to a company that has creativity and marketing, and now AI — making it the coolest job for a chief marketing officer to have”. Excerpts from a freewheeling interaction with Balazs on the sidelines of the recent Adobe Summit in Las Vegas.
A lot of tech companies are suddenly facing challenges with the advent of AI. New products are emerging just too fast. As a tech company’s marketer, your take?
Well, the fact that we market marketing and have teams that are the best bar none in the world ensures that not only our bottom-of-the-funnel is fine-tuned, but so is our growth marketing, our performance marketing, our mid-funnel marketing and our top-of-the-funnel marketing. Then, we’re doing the PLG (product-driven motions) and GTM (marketing-driven motions) and using all of the signals. And we have all the tools, so any shift we see — say, for instance, changes in search (Gen AI is taking over the search process) — we’re able to react to that, and then we can share it with our clients too. Also we partner with so many tech companies worldwide — Microsoft, Google... the list goes on — that they’ll come to us to test some new things. We will do the same with them.
For a customer who’s just bought some product from you, and then there’s a shift in tech, it would necessitate a reinvestment. How do you sell that?
Well, one of the beauties of being in the cloud, and the great thing about SaaS business is our customers have been able to make that shift in real time.
And we’ve helped them make that shift as we can make real-time optimisation happen. We also have our partners that work directly with the clients, so they’re able to adapt. We’re good at making sure that, as things shift, we ourselves are innovating and then pushing code to update.
But what about the costs? There is a feeling that Adobe products are expensive.
We’re really importantly looking at value. I think we spend a lot of time to make sure that any pricing is equated to the value that we’re offering.
Adobe has so many different kinds of clouds — the experience cloud for digital marketing, the creative cloud, the document cloud. Which is the fastest growing for you?
So, we’re making sure that, where appropriate, all of our cloud products can be used together. As an example, you have Adobe Express (part of the creative cloud) and Acrobat (part of document cloud) that increasingly can be used together. So the clouds are coming together because the customer, at the end of the day, ranges from individuals, students, educators, consumers, creators... So when you have that breadth of customer range, you realise these things actually support, in one way or another, all of the customer audiences, and you can market these things as one.
And you know, now it’s creativity-plus-marketing-plus-AI, so all of this is more easily connected because AI is driving all of it.
A few years ago, there was this big debate about CTOs versus CMOs. At the summit, we heard something about befriending the CFO. Is there a battle at the table?
I’ve been doing marketing for a long time and one of the things that I have seen is, no matter the industry you are in, you want to make your chief technology officer your best friend. You also want to make your chief financial officer your best friend. And when you do that, you work collectively to do what’s best for the company, costs savings wise, and what’s best for the company to drive the top line. We call it the triumvirate actually — chief technology officer, chief financial officer, chief marketing officer. You have got to be tied at the hip. As for me, I also have the chief executive officer, who is in this, as well. And Shantanu was the CMO for some years, so he has great understanding and admiration for the craft because, as I said, we market marketing.
With AI, is there more complexity now in the marketing function? Or do you see your tasks easing?
I think everywhere you have change management when any big sea-change technology happens. What we’re seeing, though, is that, as people adopt it and get used to it, there is an incredible respect for how it makes their jobs better; and what comes with it is productivity and efficiency, because the time to do a task has dropped now with Gen AI. We’re, again, really lucky because we have Adobe Firefly, which is this AI-generated generative AI. The creatives it generates are beautiful and breakthrough. And when you see that, you say, gosh, this will make our job easy and fun.
Adobe itself is a Customer Zero for its own products, so that must help?
Customer Zero is also called Adobe on Adobe and also, what I like to call, dog fooding your products. Or sipping your own champagne. But we are able to give real-time feedback to our engineers and product partners on what’s working and what’s not, and it is a great advantage. We can go through Gen Studio (a generative AI app to streamline content), which allows you to create creative assets, and activate them. You have the digital assets and then you see how they perform and then you optimise. And that entire process has steps and engineering behind it. We make it seamless for the customer, but anything that we do to go to market, we use our own tools, so whether it’s our Adobe journey optimiser or whether it is CDP, we have used them all.
What do you feel about Coca-Cola chief James Quincey’s “two sides of the spectrum” view on technology that allows targeted push by marketers, but can anger customers?
We have to be really thoughtful as marketers. I like to say we need to be customer-obsessed and put ourselves in our customers’ shoes — whether it’s our B2B clients or our consumers. And we need to know what it’s like when you are online and an ad follows you. We are respectful that we need to show up in the best way possible. Part of the reason we are very smart about applying data-driven optimisation is that we want to make sure we’re not doing anything in your personal space that you might see as creepy... and we’re lucky we have the tools.