The Estée Lauder Companies (ELC) is stepping into the future of digital marketing with Adobe Firefly, integrating generative AI to accelerate campaign execution and streamline content creation. The beauty giant – home to iconic brands like Clinique, Estée Lauder, Jo Malone London, La Mer, and M•A•C Cosmetics – announced today a strategic partnership with Adobe, aimed at redefining its approach to digital advertising.
With consumers engaging across roughly 150 countries and territories, ELC is leveraging Firefly within Adobe Creative Cloud workflows to drive efficiency, allowing creative teams to focus on ideation rather than production bottlenecks.
Aligning AI with ELC’s ‘Beauty Reimagined’ strategy
This partnership aligns with ELC’s recently launched Beauty Reimagined vision, which aims to establish the company as the world’s most consumer-centric prestige beauty brand. A core pillar of this strategy is accelerating speed-to-market through transformative innovation – something Adobe Firefly helps achieve by automating and enhancing content creation.
By harnessing Firefly’s generative AI capabilities, ELC can scale consumer engagement with dynamic, high-quality visuals tailored for digital-first audiences. The shift marks a significant investment in digital advertising, ensuring ELC maintains its competitive edge in a fast-evolving beauty landscape.
Tackling digital content challenges in beauty
The adoption of generative AI addresses a critical challenge in beauty marketing – keeping up with platform-specific content demands.
“Maintaining mindshare on digital channels such as social media is important in the competitive beauty industry, but oftentimes the content requirements for each platform stress our ability to deliver new campaigns,” said Justin Edwards, vice president, global digital creative and brand image at M•A•C Cosmetics.
“The M•A•C Cosmetics team was the first to explore the potential of generative AI for the company through Adobe Firefly Services, and we believe it will remove hurdles that currently prevent our designers from focusing on their craft,” he added.
Bringing Adobe’s AI power to prestige beauty
Firefly’s AI-powered APIs integrate seamlessly with Adobe’s core creative tools like Photoshop and InDesign, unlocking efficiency for brands that require high-volume content production.
“Adobe Firefly Services APIs surface decades of Adobe innovation across our foundational AI models and applications to assist with daily tasks that are crucial but often repetitive and time-intensive,” said Varun Parmar, general manager, Adobe GenStudio and Firefly for Enterprise.
“The Estée Lauder Companies have shown an incredibly compelling and practical application of generative AI, which allows design teams to focus more time on their craft and ideating eye-catching creative for its portfolio of nearly 25 brands,” Parmar added.
Digital asset management upgrade
As part of this AI-driven transformation, ELC is also modernising its digital asset management (DAM) system. The company is now leveraging Adobe Experience Manager Assets as a cloud service to streamline access to its vast library of images, logos, and design elements.
“At The Estée Lauder Companies, we need to keep pace with a changing environment where an increasingly large share of transactions is happening through digital channels such as mobile devices,” said Yuri Ezhkov, Vice President, Creative Center of Excellence at The Estée Lauder Companies.
“We have a trusted partner in Adobe to provide generative AI technologies that are safe for commercial use, with tools that enable our design teams to operate more nimbly and be free to focus on ideating,” he added.
This partnership will not only help accelerate ELC’s speed-to-market but will also set a new industry standard for how beauty brands can leverage AI to enhance creativity, efficiency, and consumer engagement at scale.