By Chandra Sinnathamby, Director of GenStudio GTM and Sales, Adobe Asia Pacific and Japan
A new kind of pressure is building in marketing departments across Australia and New Zealand. You can feel it in shifting briefs, shortened timelines and a mounting sense that yesterday’s campaigns are already out of date. Culture is moving faster, and so are the expectations of the audiences that brands are trying to reach.
It’s no longer enough to deliver personalised moments. The opportunity now is to tap into broader movements and shape conversations, not just react to them. That shift demands a new kind of content engine: one that’s fast, fluid and built to move with the times.
The acceleration isn’t just a gut feeling. It’s a reality fuelled by AI. Not just as a tool for marketers, but as a force reshaping how consumers think, search and engage online. Adobe research already shows 71% of consumers expect brand interactions to be tailored to their needs, and on top of that, they want content that’s instant and deeply tied to what’s happening right now.
We’ve entered a world where algorithms reward what’s new, not what’s evergreen. The shelf life of campaigns is shrinking, and marketers who can’t adapt are watching their brand visibility and investment decay in real time. Remaining in the picture relies on systems built to operate at the speed of culture, blending the best of human creativity with the power and pace of AI.
Chandra Sinnathamby
The AI effect on consumer expectations
Search was once a moment of intent. That is, entering keywords or phrases to generate results that satisfy a need from brand discovery or education through to purchasing. However, that journey is now punctuated by AI-powered experiences and conversational interactions. More web users start with an AI assistant, with research showing that 90% of Australian users say it’s improved their shopping experience.
Audiences also increasingly consume media through an algorithmic lens. They’re scrolling through shorts and reels across multiple platforms, where what’s trending trumps what was relevant last week.
This shift is conditioning users to prioritise speed, novelty and cultural alignment, where static content, no matter how beautifully crafted, has less chance of breaking through.
The decay of static campaigns
Performance marketing was once a well-oiled machine. Brands could rely on consistent formats, predictable results and steady testing cycles. But today, even the best-performing ads are wearing out faster.
Why? Because the algorithms that once optimised for conversion are now optimising for customer signals and cultural momentum. They boost what’s trending, reactive and resonant in the moment. That’s bad news for slow-moving marketers. At best, a campaign created six weeks ago might feel stale by the time it launches. It’s likely much worse, where paid media might never see the light of day because it’s been buried by more culturally attuned content.
Meanwhile, micro-creators, meme accounts, and AI-assisted storytellers are outpacing entire marketing departments, beating the algorithm and testing multiple concepts daily, while brands get bogged down in approval cycles. This is performance marketing in 2025: if you can’t respond to emerging conversations as they unfold, intersecting flashpoints and real-time trends, you’re losing ground.
One clear barrier? Speed. At Adobe, repurposing content used to take as long as creating it from scratch, leaving campaigns to go stale and audiences to tune out. Using AI-generated updates to headlines, images and copy, we’re now adapting content across channels in two to three days, rather than two to three weeks, while still ensuring we maintain brand integrity.
Creativity needs a new production flow
To survive in this new environment, marketers need new creative infrastructure and new ways of working. Top brands are asking: Can generative AI help my creative team, or will it just create more noise? Welcome to the new world. Performance marketing is now part brand newsroom, part cultural war room, where AI surfaces real-time signals and social trends; where creative teams launch new campaigns in hours, not weeks; where copy and visuals are versioned, localised and adapted using generative AI tools; and where paid media teams deploy content in bursts, testing and iterating based on immediate feedback. Three-week turnaround times once made it near-impossible to capitalise on cultural moments or seasonal spikes. But by compressing timelines into days or even hours, Adobe has unlocked new levels of responsiveness and, in doing so, enjoyed a 9% lift in ROI.
Another example is a partnership between Adobe and The Coca-Cola Company. Known as Project Fizzion, Coca-Cola are using a customised Adobe Firefly generative AI model, allowing in-house designers to train AI to generate on-brand content at scale while preserving creative intent. The goal was to reduce misinterpreted brand guidelines and ensure consistency, ultimately increasing speed to market.
This is performance marketing that operates at the speed of culture. It’s about moving fast and building fluidity into your creative DNA. It’s about doing more with less, and how marketing teams are scaling campaigns without scaling headcount.
The new creative superteam
The spectre of AI overshadowing creativity remains, but the most effective marketing strategies will emerge from the combination of human and AI skillsets. While AI tools can produce endless variations, help model performance, localise and personalise at scale, human instinct is still essential for cultural nuance, for tone, and for storytelling that makes the audience feel something.
Together, marketers and machines can intercept emerging conversations, instantly develop multiple creative directions, personalise content without compromising brand voice, and ship ideas the same day they’re sparked. When AI is used to accelerate creativity, rather than replace it, it becomes the ultimate competitive edge.
We know from first-hand experience. Adobe’s historical content creation efforts were driven by human intuition, limiting opportunities for optimisation and consistency across campaigns. Using AI to analyse individual asset attributes, then tying those features to performance data, revealed the elements that drove the highest engagement.
For example, at Adobe, we applied insights to assets on our website, showing a specific template colour in Adobe Express drove higher engagement. We increased the number of templates using that colour, increasing downloads by 35%.
From moments to movement
The most successful brands today aren’t those with the biggest budgets, they’re those that can show up in the right moment with the right message in a way that feels both native and meaningful. And that’s what moving at the speed of culture means. It’s not just fast production, it’s smart, emotionally intelligent responsiveness. It’s about listening harder, iterating quicker and staying visible where it matters most: in the feed, in the conversation and in the here and now.
AI is already rewriting the rules for how people find, expect, and experience content. The brands that embrace that reality and build creative environments to match won’t just keep up. They’ll lead.