Brandtech and Adobe announce partnership with broader integrations to revolutionize Gen AI for global brands

Brandtech’s Gen AI marketing platform Pencil Pro unveils Adobe Firefly Services integrations, which give immediate, seamless access to Adobe creative tools and Gen AI foundation models.

New York, 08:00 ET, 12 Dec 2024 – The Brandtech Group and Adobe introduce a partnership to integrate the industry-leading and commercially safe Adobe Firefly Services into Brandtech’s established generative AI marketing platform Pencil Pro, creating huge efficiencies for brands’ marketing campaigns.

It means Brandtech clients using Pencil Pro will be able to interoperate seamlessly between Adobe Photoshop, Adobe After Effects, and generative AI workflows within Pencil Pro – a game-changing leap forward in a platform that, uniquely, already allows users to do everything from creating insights to generating creative content at massive scale, predicting performance and quality scoring, to media deployment and creative optimisation. Moreover, Brandtech Group will leverage Adobe Custom Models to provide content curated for clients’ specific brand requirements.

The partnership provides brands using Pencil Pro with a deeper level of creative production technology with Adobe Firefly Services, which are backed with the quality, trust, safety and brand confidence that comes from using Adobe. Since its launch, Adobe Firefly has driven incredible customer excitement with over 9 billion generations created, making Firefly the most popular AI image generation model designed for safe commercial use.

The two technologies work in parallel to give enterprises the best of both: the firepower and safety of Adobe’s creative and Gen AI solutions, combined with the proven capabilities of Pencil Pro, which uses Gen AI to create, scale, deploy and predict the performance of creative work.

“2025 is set to be the year of tectonic disruption in marketing as Gen AI is rolled out at massive scale by the world’s most progressive marketers,” says Brandtech founder and CEO David Jones. “I couldn’t be more excited about what this partnership means for our clients and the industry. This partnership will give the world’s biggest advertisers a huge competitive advantage and marketing superpower and, given the extent of the enormous shift that is unfolding, both Adobe and Brandtech will be huge beneficiaries.”

Brandtech Group Partner and Head of Emerging Technology, Rebecca Sykes, adds: “Brand safety is a key concern for global advertisers. They have confidence in the quality and safety of Adobe products, and Pencil Pro has been in-market since 2018 and has created more than 1 million Gen AI ads across 5,000 brands: building unparalleled experience in that time. Importantly, as proof that Gen AI isn’t the ‘future of marketing’ but is already here and now, Pencil is already delivering Gen AI assets for some of the world’s biggest brands.”

Adobe’s Firefly GenAI models and related solutions offer best-in-class creative production technology, and its quality, legal security and interoperability will ensure clients feel confident to launch and run Gen AI workflows using Adobe Firefly Services and the underlying trained models within Pencil.

Pencil, meanwhile, aggregates all the best of today’s large language models, and provides an end-to-end platform that creates a finished asset – not just the visual or video output, but right from the customer insight through to the media where Pencil plugs directly into various ad accounts, such as Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.

The $2BN in media spend that has passed through Pencil enables it to also make performance predictions. It’s the only Gen AI marketing company selected as a Most Innovative Company 2024 by Fast Company. Brandtech works with 8 out of 10 of the world’s largest advertisers and 60 of the top 100.

Reflecting on the partnership, Kumar Vora, SVP Adobe Emerging Solutions and Partnerships at Adobe, says: “Consumer expectations around generative AI-driven personalization continues to rise, and Firefly Services unlocks the possibility for brands and agencies to ideate and create the sheer volume of on-brand, commercially safe content now required. Brandtech’s expertise in anticipating and addressing the challenges marketers face is very evident, and we’re delighted to be expanding Adobe’s partnership with the Group to transform how their teams and clients create the content needed to deliver personalization at scale.”

Leveraging the embedded consulting resources provided as part of the Adobe Firefly Services offering, Adobe experts are consulting with Pencil, providing invaluable feedback, while Pencil is rigorously testing the deployment of Firefly Services on enterprise client briefs.

The partnership also emphasizes interoperability, ensuring that users can seamlessly bring in existing .psd or .ae files into Pencil, or export from Pencil to those formats. Using these common file formats available from Adobe Creative Cloud, Photoshop, After Effects, and beyond, allows for fluid transitions between Pencil workspaces, and ensures streamlined creative processes and maximized productivity.

Pencil Co-Founder and CEO Will Hanschell says: “This is game-changing for brands who embrace Adobe as the de facto quality and safety standard for creative production. Pencil is a Gen AI marketing platform, and integrating Firefly Services gives brands one safe creative space to import and export between workflows and will unlock massive benefits, creating a whole new standard for their Gen AI marketing capabilities.

“As we’ve been in the market since 2018, we already know that, through Pencil, brands can expect to see double the performance in terms of return on spend, we can create content 10x faster and at least 50% cheaper.