How brands like Gatorade are creating personalised content at scale with Adobe

Firefly generated image of a Gatorade bottle
The ability to create custom designs using AI expands Gatorade.com bottle personalisation options. (Source: Adobe)

Modern consumers have access to more new content than ever before. From TikTok to Netflix, they are used to having a constant stream of new information and entertainment at their fingertips. So, it’s not surprising they expect the same from the brands they engage with. 

It’s no longer enough for brands to shoot a few campaigns a year. To capture the customer’s attention, they need to update their imagery and other brand assets frequently or risk becoming stale. 

“With social media, if you’re not refreshing content at least every week, things get stale, and the conversions you get do not perform the way that you want them to,” Ben Vanderburg, Adobe’s principal director of technical marketing and evangelism, said at Retail’s Big Show, the National Retail Federation’s annual convention and expo in New York City.

It’s not just the volume of content that is challenging for organisations to keep up with but also the different variations required for specific regions, languages, products and marketing channels. This ends up creating a huge bottleneck for teams. But increasingly, the rise of generative AI platforms like Adobe Firefly offer a solution. 

Same image, fresh look 

“We’ve created a foundation to create brand content at scale – whether it is visual content, vector content, design content, audio content, 3D, etc – and integrate it into all of our different applications,” Vanderberg said. 

For instance, he said that retailers can use Firefly to edit product images from different suppliers to make them look more uniform – for instance by cropping them to the same size and swapping out the background – without having to reshoot them. 

Retailers can also change the background of product images to make them more relevant to a certain time of year – for instance, changing Christmas backgrounds to Valentine’s Day backgrounds – or geographic location. They can even connect Firefly to their analytics to tailor designs to individual customer groups.

In addition, Firefly makes it easy for retailers to export images in different formats, including Photoshop, in case there are any last-minute changes, and push content out to other Adobe platforms, such as e-commerce and storage platforms. 

“This is something that people have desired, but [before generative AI] the cost and time that it took to deliver that didn’t scale when you had thousands of products,” Vanderberg said. “This [platform] can help deliver that so you have fresh content on the market.”

Guardrails for generative AI

What sets Firefly apart from other image-generation platforms, however, is the protections it has in place for brands using the technology. 

“That is something that is ingrained in how we approach generative AI,” Vanderberg said. “With Firefly, we make sure that we train it responsibly using all licensed stock images from Adobe Stock and public domain content so it’s not trained on brand images, unless you’re creating a custom model, which only authorised organisations would have access to.” 

Adobe also trains the platform with diversity in mind, and ensures it has the proper representation across gender, age, skin tone and different regions in the world to prevent bias. 

“We go through a very strict review to make sure that we are being responsible in how we approach generative AI,” he added.

In addition, Firefly provides content credentials with its images so users can see which images have been generated with AI, even on social media. 

Personalisation at scale

The true promise of generative AI platforms like Firefly is that they not only enable content creation but also one-to-one personalisation at scale. 

Vanderberg shared an example from Adobe’s partnership with Gatorade, where the beverage brand used Firefly’s image model to personalise its drink bottles.

“Imagine each of your kids going to soccer with a personalised Gatorade bottle. It creates an in-touch experience with your customers and your products,” he said.

What makes this technology even more powerful is the ‘All Create’ feature, which allows users to make changes in bulk, using a simple one-click process. They can edit up to 10,000 product images at the same time. 

“The value is really clear for our customers,” Vanderberg said. “Gatorade was able to generate 200,000 assets in under two weeks.” 

Meanwhile, a leading office supply retailer experienced a 95 per cent savings in the time it took to process images, and Adobe itself experienced a 63 per cent reduction in production costs with Firefly. 

As consumer expectations continue to drive the content cycle, brands will increasingly turn to generative AI platforms, so it’s key to understand the benefits and risks. 

  • Inside Retail’s coverage of the 2025 Big Show is brought to you by Adobe.