Adobe — Creativity with AI

Case study

Adobe’s Creativity with AI in Education report had already been through two rounds of LinkedIn promotion. Both underperformed. The existing creative used imagery pulled directly from the report — stock-style photos of students and educators — and led with data points as the primary hook. The target audience wasn’t responding.

The ask: start over. New concept, new visual direction, new copy — and build something that actually earns attention from higher ed decision-makers.

AI-generated image created with Adobe Firefly showing a figure in profile with books, flowers, and light erupting from the mind — the primary visual from an Adobe Higher Education LinkedIn ad campaign
Image generated using Adobe Firefly, finished and composited in Photoshop — chosen because the concept needed to feel like a visual argument, not an illustration.

The problem

The previous ads looked like every other LinkedIn ad in the space.

Institutional, predictable, easy to scroll past. The data-heavy headlines weren’t landing with the audience Adobe needed to reach — administrators and campus leadership who control curriculum direction and technology adoption don’t respond to statistics the way students do. They respond to stakes.

The creative also wasn’t speaking to them. It was describing a report. It needed to be speaking to a problem they already feel.

The approach

Two shifts drove the new direction.

Drop the stock photography entirely, and reframe the message around career readiness rather than the report itself. For the visual, the goal was something conceptually loaded — an image that felt like an argument, not an illustration. The Firefly-generated figure with knowledge and ideas erupting outward did that work. It’s unexpected for a LinkedIn context, immediately communicates what the report is actually about, and gave the campaign a visual identity that didn’t look like anything else in the feed.

The system was built for flexibility from the start. Rather than a single locked execution, the campaign was designed as a small set of images that could rotate against multiple copy directions — testing career readiness, skill development, and future-ready learning angles without needing a full creative rebuild each time.

Copy moved away from stat-forward hooks toward benefit-forward language written for the actual audience:

Building career skills through creativity and AI. / Future success starts with curiosity and AI. / Career prep for a wide-open future. / Future-ready learning starts here and now.

Short, direct, and written for someone who already understands the stakes — they just need a reason to act.

LinkedIn ad campaign mockup showing multiple single-image ad variants displayed across mobile and desktop, featuring Firefly-generated imagery and benefit-forward headlines promoting the Adobe Creativity with AI in Education report
Campaign built as a flexible system of Firefly-generated images designed to rotate against multiple copy directions — giving the media team options to test across audiences without a full creative rebuild.

Two rounds of conventional creative hadn’t moved the needle. The answer wasn’t a better version of the same idea — it was a different one.