Adobe Marketing Campaign Patent Adds to Professional AI Tools
Adobe’s recent patent signals that it may be creating a marketing co-pilot.

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Adobe wants to make it easier to get in customers’ faces.
The company filed a patent application for “content distribution based on a user journey” using machine learning. This tech uses generative AI to help someone take a content distribution campaign, such as a marketing campaign, from start to finish with just a prompt.
“Identifying relevant data for a user journey and then planning the user journey based on the identified data is both time-intensive and labor-intensive,” Adobe said in the filing. “Both users and content providers benefit when an intent, stage, and context of users are understood and a digital experience is tailored for the users.”
After getting a prompt from the user, Adobe’s system uses a generative machine learning model to create a “user journey.” That path is based on specific “touchpoints,” such as an email or social media post.
Based on that predicted journey, Adobe’s tech generates content to present to the user at different stages. The tech also makes several versions of this user journey and the content that goes along with it, and scores each one based on predicted effectiveness.
The tech in this patent fits squarely into the work Adobe has been doing for the past year and a half: embedding AI into creative tools in a way that professionals can actually use. The company’s patent history is littered with AI inventions in this vein, including generative image editing, video creation, and data visualization tools.
Publicly, the company has continued to integrate AI throughout its suite of creative tools, along with building out Firefly, its generative AI tool that can create, manipulate, and edit images (and soon, perhaps, video).
But using AI, especially generative AI, in commercial and marketing contexts can be tricky. There are risks of bias and hallucination when using generative AI in any context — something that Adobe has sought to fix in previous patents.
And training an AI model to do its job requires a lot of data that can come from a variety of sources, and oftentimes is scraped from the internet. Because of this, content generation models are facing copyright backlash, with Meta, Stability AI, and Midjourney all facing legal battles.
This element is where Adobe may see a leg-up: The company has claimed that Firefly’s services are safe for commercial use. It also updated its terms of use in June to clarify that it will not train AI on user content after backlash due to privacy issues.