Retail’s Big Show, the National Retail Federation’s (NRF) annual conference, held in New York City from January 12-14, attracts the best and brightest the retail industry has to offer.
One of the biggest players in the business is none other than American big-box retailer Walmart.
With over 4700 locations spread out across the US, meaning one store is located within 10 miles of approximately 90 per cent of the population, and a workforce that is larger than the US Army with over 2.1 million associates, few retailers in the country are on Walmart’s physical level.
However, while consumers already have an image of Walmart as a reliable source of price-accessible consumables, David Hartman, Walmart’s VP of creative, explained that the retailer wants to be known for more.
One way the big-box retailer plans to shift perceptions is through the production of well-crafted and calculated content.
However, as any retailer can attest, producing large quantities of high-value content to suit a wide variety of consumer demographics is easier said than done. Businesses must invest in tools that can be used to accomplish the job as efficiently as possible.
During a fireside-style chat with Hartman, Marta Frattini, Adobe’s director of industry strategy and marketing, and Hannah Elsakr, Firefly for Enterprise’s VP of new business ventures, discussed how generative AI enables truly personalised, on-brand content at scale.
Walmart’s creative content investments
During the panel, Hartman explained that an essential part of the brand’s plan to remain competitive via content relies on a few major components, including the 400-plus member Creative Studio team and Walmart’s very own production facility, which opened last March.
The facility covers approximately 80,000sqft, including a 4300sqft soundstage, a daylight studio, a social production studio, multiple edit suites and more.
By investing in its own studio, Walmart is able to accomplish every step of the content creation process more efficiently, from concept all the way through to execution and delivery of assets, without getting slowed down or having costs added on by external agencies.
However, for those businesses that are unable to buy their own studio, other methods and tools can be used to optimise the creative content production cycle, such as generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI).
Why retailers need to tap into Gen AI for content creation
Hannah Elsakr, VP of business and new venture incubation at Adobe, pointed out that creative and marketing teams are essentially dealing with two large problems: Volume and time.
While creative content teams are being asked to do five times the amount of work they are already producing, Elsakr noted the reality of how less than one-third of the work is devoted to the actual creation of content, and the rest is largely spent brainstorming.
By integrating Gen AI into the process, Elsakr explained that the technology can especially aid retailers with content creation in three key ways.
- Localisation
Typically content is shot for a company’s main market, then translated to one or two additional markets. What Firefly for Enterprise helps retailers accomplish is taking the content and translating it into several local languages quickly.
- Seasonal refreshing
Elsakr provided the example of a brand surviving the holiday shopping season, only to realise it needed to come up with content for Valentine’s Day and every major holiday following afterwards. However, few companies are able to receive support for every single holiday content refresh as needed.
“But again,” the technology executive elaborated, “with the power of Gen AI, you can train models and have on-brand content to extend to what the creative team is already doing and give them [the team] their time back.”
- Personalised commerce experiences
“The third one, which is a really exciting use case,” Elsakr enthused, “is personalised consumer experiences.”
The Firefly executive pointed to a fairly recent collaboration between Adobe and Gatorade that allowed consumers to personalise their own ‘one-of-one’ Gatorade Squeeze bottle through Gen AI. Powered by Adobe’s Firefly Services, this new offering unlocked creative expression and empowered individuals to celebrate their unique passions and athletic journeys through an exciting new canvas.
As retailers move forward into 2025, Elsakr suggested that the theme for the year ahead should be “playground to production”.
She said that “lots of people were playing” with Gen AI in the content supply chain in 2024 and suggested that 2025 is the year when retailers need to “move into a production mode” – out of the playground.
- Inside Retail’s coverage of the 2025 Big Show is brought to you by Adobe.