Adobe and the Future of Marketing: It’s all about AR, AI, and 3D

Adobe MAX this year, like many things, was a bit different. Adobe held its annual creativity conference online for free to people around the world. That wasn’t the only thing that seemed different about this year’s Adobe MAX. The keynote address focused on storytelling and the new tools to get us there. Shantanu Narayen, Chairman, President & CEO, at Adobe said creating with a pen or stylus “is way more natural than a mouse.” Voice will become the primary way to communicate with our devices, “enabling creativity across every surface, OS, and web browser,” said Narayen.

Scott Belsky, Chief Product Officer & EVP, Creative Cloud at Adobe, spoke about how creatives are pressed to do more with less and how they need to keep up with new forms of creation like 3D and immersive. Even in the creative world, artists see artificial intelligence as a way to elevate mundane and repetitive tasks. New technologies like AI, AR, and 3D are the magic to craft entirely new types of experiences.

Adobe Sensei: AI & ML

Marketers, artists, filmmakers, and creatives from every category can work better and faster with machine learning and artificial intelligence. “In the future, we believe that AI and ML will shape entirely new categories of creativity, enabling you to uniquely focus on what you do best - create,” said Narayen. 

Adobe Neuro Filters were the star of the opening keynote. Powered by AI, Adobe’s Neuro Filters get continuously better and smarter as they are used. Belsky demonstrated on a photo of Conan O’Brien (the show’s host) how the AI in Photoshop can make O'Brien appear younger by reducing his wrinkles, or appear older by giving him a gummy smile.

In Adobe Rush, Adobe Sensei can analyze the region of interest in a video to auto recenter it and auto place the object of interest in the vertical center of the frame. Sensei can automatically analyze images and regions of interest to automatically create pan and zoom for a group of images. And Sensei can auto-detect cut points in a video. 

The future is augmented

Narayen spoke about emerging disciplines like “3D and augmented reality to enable rich, immersive experiences.” Adobe Aero lets anyone with an iPad or iPhone create and share AR from Adobe’s stock library or their own digital creations. “Augmented reality and 3D are all surging in this era of digital storytelling,” said Narayen.

3D for 2D, AR, and prototyping

3D is a big part of the future of storytelling at Adobe. New 3D tools - known as gizmos are added to After Effects. The new gizmos allow users to transform 2D designs into a 3D space. For instance, one can see how a card or app on a phone would look at different angles, such as in a person’s hand. It can also come in handy when designing an AR experience or for prototyping an experience. The 3D layers perform in real-time on a new game type engine.

Storytelling is changing, these are the tools to change with it

Belsky said in the keynote that in order to stay a master, you have to remain a student. For marketers, the tools, mediums, and narrative styles constantly change. From Adobe MAX, we can see that marketing is getting immersive. It’s taking on three dimensions that anyone can experience through their phones. And AI is smart enough to help marketers in the process. This is the beginning of an exciting future in creative marketing. As Belsky said, when we’re “forced to find a new way, we find a better way.”