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Hello from Las Vegas! I’m in town for Adobe Summit, escaping New York’s inability to fully commit to Spring in exchange for highly-technical Adobe workflows, half of which go right over my content brain. But, just like last year’s Firefly announcement, the keynote revealed a big AI creative innovation that creative marketers will wanna see.

In today’s issue, we’ll hit on:

• Why Adobe Firefly will be the marketer’s fav AI tool

• The finances of family vloggers

• 3 essays on social strategy

—Jack Appleby

Adobe just made AI content creation a whole lot easier with Style + Structure Reference

We’re smack dab in the middle of an AI arms race. Every company’s pushing to become the generative AI creation tool of choice, offering to transform your text-based prompts into gorgeous imagery.

While tools like ChatGPT, Sora, and Midjourney dominate the Twitter discourse, my money’s always been on Adobe to win, especially in making legally-usable AI-generated content. Since launching Adobe Firefly last year, the company’s focused efforts not just on their AI content creation, but integrating those creative tools across all Adobe products—a marketer’s dream.

Let’s get back to the fun stuff, though. Adobe just announced two very cool new tools for Firefly that’ll make AI content muchhh easier to make: Style Reference and Structure Reference.

Style Reference

If you’ve dabbled in Generative AI content creation, you know that it’s all about your ability to write a prompt. Even the best writers sometimes lack the adjectives or eloquence to explain to AI exactly what we’re looking for, especially if you’re aiming for a specific artistic style (I still think people use “painterly” incorrectly).

That’s where Style Reference comes in.

Instead of just using a bloated, verbose text-prompt, Adobe Firefly users can now upload a Style Reference image to help the algorithm understand what you’re looking for. Now your text prompts can focus on what you want in the image while that Style Reference sets the mood.

Structure Reference

Writing out specific camera angles in text prompts might be even harder than describing the intended vibe. Structure Reference solves that directorial challenge. Like Style Reference, you upload an image, allowing the algorithm to understand how to frame its output. Side-profile mohawk guy is the perfect example (and made me wonder if I could rock a flaming mohawk).

That’s just scratching the surface, though. The real magic of Structure Reference happens when you’re transitioning an image to a new creative style. Take a look at this example from Adobe’s blog, turning a painterly image (did I use it right?) into a neon dream while retaining the source material’s form.

By our powers combined

Yes, I just used a Captain Planet reference to make sure you understand that Structure Reference and Style Reference can actually work together. It’s quite literally a combo tool to make a new image that’s shaped like this one image but has vibes like this other image.

Take a look.

On the left, you can see an artist’s unfinished sketch as a Structure Reference. To the right, two different results using two different Style References. You don’t even need the text prompts to generate images like this—just mix and match to your heart’s content.

If you’re a marketer wondering where you should start dabbling in AI, I really do recommend Adobe—they just get the business side of this stuff, with an emphasis on making sure the resulting content is commercially-viable.

Steal this social growth hack from Nvidia and SaaStr

Short video is the #1 way that brands grow on social today.

But you probably don’t have time for it, right?

Neither do marketers at Nvidia and SaaStr — That’s why they use AI tools that do all the legwork for them, allowing them to post hundreds of shorts and get hundreds of thousands of views.

Here’s their strategy that you can rip:

1. Start with any of your company’s video assets, like a webinar

2. Upload it to OpusClip, and the AI will cut it into clips with branded captions, B-Roll, and more

3. Use OpusClip’s social media scheduler to queue 2-3 clips per day.

4. Repeat 1 → 3

Ready for an easy experiment? Try OpusClip’s Pro Plan totally free for 7 days

Social Cues

There are so many social big thinkers out there, writing all kinds of amazing strategies, analysis, and breakdowns. All ships rise with the tide, so here are a few reads from other places I think you could learn from.

What’s the price of a childhood turned into content? (Cosmopolitan)

The interviews with family vloggers confirming all the things you suspected—how it affects the mental health of children social media stars, and how the money does (or doesn’t) make it back to the kids who go viral.

Could de-influencers save the environment? (NPR)

We buy the things our favorite creators recommend. New creators are convincing us what we have is more than enough, and teaching us sustainability along the way.

How U.S. Adults use TikTok (Pew Research Center)

We think we know how people use social media, but really, we just know our little niches. Take a look at Pew’s data—one of my fav sources.