Adobe is offering marketers the opportunity to experience the power of Adobe GenStudio for Performance Marketing firsthand via a product sandbox.
This interactive space will allow users to see the product in action and is designed to simulate the GenStudio for Performance Marketing workflow.
Luckily for you, Perficient is part of a select group of Adobe consulting partners with access to a fully functional sandbox. We’ve learned a few things since using the app that you can benefit from as you experiment with this new product.
In the following blog, our Adobe experts Ross Monaghan, Principal, and Raf Winterpacht, Director, share their initial impressions of GenStudio for Performance Marketing, tips and tricks, and some pitfalls to avoid when using the product for the first time.
Initial Impressions of GenStudio for Performance Marketing
When marketers first dive into Adobe GenStudio for Performance Marketing, they can expect a mix of familiarity and growing pains. Raf found the platform intuitive, noting, “It feels like Adobe. So, if you’ve worked with some of the other products like Adobe Experience Platform or AEM Assets, it’ll feel familiar to you. There wasn’t a huge learning curve when I started using it.”
From Ross’s perspective, he shared that the app initially felt early in its development. He explained, “When we first gained access to our sandbox, there weren’t a lot of channels where we could activate our assets. For example, Meta wasn’t even an option yet. So, you could create an asset, but you had no place to activate it. Everything was labeled as coming soon.”
However, he acknowledged that the platform has since evolved, with users now having access to Meta and Google Campaign Manager 360, while Microsoft Advertising, Snap, and TikTok are listed as coming soon.
Powerful Key Features
When using the application for the first time, marketers can expect a powerful tool that significantly enhances the ability to personalize and scale content creation while maintaining brand integrity.
Ross emphasized the importance of personalization at scale, noting that GenStudio allows marketers to quickly create, resize, and reuse assets to produce numerous variations that can be leveraged across various channels and campaigns. He said, “It’s practically impossible to create all the asset variations you need without something like GenStudio for Performance Marketing. You could be looking at hundreds of thousands of asset variations for just a single campaign across 25 countries and several languages.”
Raf added that the ability to rapidly generate high-quality, on-brand content is another powerful feature. One of the first things you do within GenStudio is set up your brand and provide guidelines for brand voice, imagery, logos, colors, and channel usage. Raf said, “Doing this allows marketers to use the application’s generative AI models to create high-quality content that not only adheres to your brand guidelines but also allows for rapid generation of personalized content variations that can be leveraged in various channels and campaigns.”
GenStudio for Performance Marketing Tips and Tricks
To maximize the potential of Adobe GenStudio for Performance Marketing, our experts recommend focusing on two key areas: brand completeness and prompt engineering.
Raf suggested thoroughly completing the brand section in GenStudio, as well as including as much information about your products and personas. This may take some time and effort, but doing so will ensure a better asset creation experience in the app.
He said, “We had to ask Adobe what the best, most efficient way to upload our brand guidelines was, and we were told to use a PDF. Our brand guidelines live on a SharePoint site, so we had to do some trial and error to get our brand content into a PDF that lists out all the different guidelines as much as possible. From there, the app does a good job of picking up those details from the PDF. You could do this manually if you needed to, though.”
Ross called attention to prompt engineering when using generative AI to create assets. He said, “Prompt engineering is critical when generating content in GenStudio. We found it difficult at first to figure out what the best prompts were to get the desired assets. Unfortunately, prompting is an iterative process and takes a bit of trial and error.”
Hopefully, Adobe Experience League will host a list of prompts marketers can use as a starting point one day, but until then, you can take a look at Adobe’s user guide to writing effective prompts.
Common Pitfalls to Avoid When Using GenStudio for the First Time
As with any powerful tool, success with Adobe GenStudio for Performance Marketing depends on understanding its limitations and setting it up thoughtfully from the start. Both Ross and Raf shared that while GenStudio can accelerate content creation, it’s not a replacement for human oversight.
“Users should think of it as a highly efficient way to get dynamic content to review,” Ross said. “Users still need to be the editor and verify that the content is still on brand. I worry that people want these tools to do the entire job.”
He also cautioned against underestimating the need for UI engineering. “I think another pitfall that users should avoid is thinking that they don’t need UI engineering. That is something that you definitely need to set up your templates appropriately,” he said, noting that it took significant back-and-forth with Adobe to get templates just right.
Raf echoed the importance of thoughtful setup, particularly around permissions and workflows. “You’re going to need to have certain permissions and users and groups set up in there ahead of time,” he said. “There’s a little bit of upfront work and configurations and things that have to be done before you can actually get in there and really start using the tool in a good cadence.”
Making GenStudio a Powerful Tool in Your Marketing Toolbox
Whether you’re just beginning to explore GenStudio or are already experimenting in the sandbox, the key takeaway is clear: success lies in preparation, experimentation, and a willingness to learn. With the right approach, GenStudio can become a powerful ally in your performance marketing toolkit.
Are you looking for a partner to help with your GenStudio for Performance Marketing implementation? Connect with us.
And if you’re looking for more Adobe expert insights, check out our Adobe blog site!
