Own Where Your Brand Shows Up: Addressing the Brand Visibility Problem in the AI Era with Adobe

Sep 15

CRITICAL MASS INTERNSHIP - DESIGN INTERN

How a summer of research, creative strategy, and design at Critical Mass turned anxiety around brand visibility in the AI-era into a campaign idea.

Every year, more searches happen inside AI chat windows than on open websites. Sixty percent of them, according to Bain & Company, never reach a website at all. For a marketer, that isn't just a user experience shift; it's conceding their brand visibility and image to AI.

To preface, Adobe has already set out to develop well-integrated tools that help brands, specifically increasing brand visibility and user engagement in the prevalence of AI chats and LLMs along consumer journeys. Some of these products include, but are not limited to: Adobe Experience Manager, Brand Concierge, and Brand Visibility. Brand visibility has increasingly become a hot topic, and Adobe has the solutions, so what is the problem?

The Brief

Adobe came to us with a strange kind of win already on its hands. Over the past couple of years, Adobe was able to improve its brand perception of being a leader in AI (specific numbers redacted for proprietary purposes), largely hinging on the strength of Adobe's "It Starts With Adobe" campaign. The problem now wasn't credibility, but crowding. Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic were all racing to claim the same "AI leader" territory. Our brief asked a harder question than does Adobe lead in AI? It asked how Adobe leads, specifically around the emerging challenge of brand visibility in an AI-mediated world.

Finding the Insight

My team and I dug into market and competitive research, looking at previous campaigns of Adobe’s competitors (OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, and Anthropic), and highlighting how they position themselves in the market. We also consolidated consumer data on AI search adoption, and executive sentiment around AI fatigue. We found that a pattern kept surfacing: CMOs and CTOs weren't held back by fear of AI. They were stunted by fragmentation. Every competitor offered some sort of solution that presented itself as helping businesses adopt and/or tackle AI, but every solution added another tool to an already bloated tech stack. Adobe, meanwhile, was one of the only players that could plausibly own the entire pipeline: from content creation to governance to measurement, because of its existing products that are well embedded across many industries.

That gap became our strategic idea: Own where your brand shows up.

With this, we position Adobe as the partner who turns AI uncertainty into a confident, empowering path forward, delivering a competitive advantage.

From Insight to Idea

As the designated design intern on our team, I led the development of the creative concept, with the help and input of my team members. Translating "own where your brand shows up" into something a CMO would actually feel meant finding a visual language for absence itself — what it looks like when a brand simply isn't there. We landed on a motif of literal invisibility, playing off the fact that for a brand, invisibility is a terrible superpower. And, we wanted to go big.

Creative Execution

The idea was to use literal invisibility to set up a space where, with Adobe’s help, brands can reclaim and own where they show up. We thought of physical spaces, where spectacles, stunts, and virality could break boundaries of where content is shared and talked about, reaching our most important audience: CMOs and CTOs. This pushed us to think about the most renowned ‘visible’ place in North America, New York City’s Times Square, and what that would look like if, for even just five minutes, it went invisible.

This vision would become the visual anchor for the rest of the campaign, where, in more depth, we explored marketing channels (chosen through data-driven insights) and mockups of visual media (e.g., LinkedIn, YouTube, X, posters, etc.) to complement the main stunt feature and feature video (the creative executions cannot be shared for proprietary reasons).

What I Took Away

The most useful thing I learned was how strategy, creative, and media actually talk to each other in a real agency, with a real scenario. Research doesn't just hand creative a neat brief and step aside; the two keep negotiating until the idea is sharp enough to survive criticism and feedback with a client. Outside of the project contents, I learned about pitching theatrics; the importance of being enthusiastic and natural, as a projection of how much you truly believe in your proposal.

This wasn't a hypothetical exercise, either. Senior and C-suite executives from both Adobe and Critical Mass were in the room for the entire timeline of the project, from delivering the kick-off brief to sitting as the judges for the final presentations. Building a strategic argument that had to hold up under real competitive pressure, in front of the client actually living this problem, is the closest I've come to agency work that really counts.

Kaitlin Ip