Guest · Brand and performance
Dawn Miley
Senior Director, EMEA Growth Marketing & UK Regional Marketing, Adobe
Growth marketer through and through. Eleven years inside Adobe across six promotions, building the case that performance is table stakes and differentiation lives above and beyond it.
About
Dawn Miley leads EMEA Growth Marketing and UK Regional Marketing at Adobe, running brand, performance, engagement and retention as one joined function across 40 markets and more than 30 languages. A career that began in 2008 at a media agency and has been inside Adobe since 2014.
Dawn began in 2008 as a digital planner-buyer at All Response Media, working across direct-response clients in display advertising and running TV campaigns in an executive role. In 2010 she joined MediaCom as an International Interactive Planner/Buyer on the International P&G account, then rose through Senior International Planner/Buyer (leading digital for Dell Large Enterprise and Public Sector across EMEA), Account Manager and finally Group Account Manager on the Shell Corporate account, running the global "Let’s Go" digital strategy and a pan-regional partnerships programme working with PR agencies, events agencies and media owners.
In November 2014 she joined Adobe as Media Strategy Manager for Creative Cloud in EMEA. Fifteen months later she created and headed a new central team for all paid media spending across the region. Through Group Manager for Media and Search, Head of Performance Marketing, and Director of Performance Marketing, her remit steadily widened: first absorbing all paid channels across the Adobe clouds, then email and in-product notifications, and finally brand and top-of-funnel strategy as the function was re-architected around growth marketing in 2022.
Across the region, Dawn’s team works in two modes. Where Adobe goes deep, local marketing teams culturalize strong global frameworks. In tier-two and tier-three markets, AI-driven personalisation at scale through Adobe’s own stack (GenStudio, Journey Optimiser and LLM Optimiser) has replaced what she calls the old blunt-instrument era of translate-and-push. Around 95 per cent of business searches now begin on a large language model, which means discoverability and measurement are both being re-architected underneath her. The best capability a marketer can build in this moment, in her view, is storytelling: the one skill the machines cannot do for you.
Career18 years
- 2024 to now Adobe Senior Director, EMEA Growth Marketing & UK Regional Marketing
- 2022 to 2024 Adobe Senior Director, Growth Marketing, EMEA
- 2020 to 2022 Adobe Director of Performance Marketing
- 2019 to 2020 Adobe Head of Performance Marketing and Planning, EMEA
Show earlier roles: Adobe, MediaCom, All Response Media
How Dawn thinks3 convictions
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Performance is table stakes. Differentiation lives above and beyond.
Dawn’s read on the last decade is that marketing got very good at proving business impact to the CFO. The platforms (Meta, LinkedIn, paid search, programmatic) are effectively AI-run across the discipline. Everyone ends up in roughly the same place. The next differentiator is everything above and beyond the performance layer: brand at the top of the funnel, meaningful human connection, the 95-5 rule, and the long conversation with buyers who are not in-market today but will be. Brand funds the funnel. Every layer below improves in efficiency when it is in place.
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Marketing is the voice of the customer, in every market
Adobe is in 40+ markets and 30+ languages. Dawn splits them into two buckets. In the markets where Adobe goes deep, local marketing teams culturalize strong global frameworks with real human understanding. In tier-two and tier-three markets, AI-driven personalisation at scale (through GenStudio and the Adobe stack) has replaced the blunt-instrument content-translation model of the past with something much closer to properly local work. In both cases, the rule is the same: marketing carries the voice of the customer into every internal conversation. If you do not have that voice, you do not belong in the market.
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Hire deep experts. Not unicorns.
Dawn’s team-design principle is to stop looking for the mythical marketer who is equally strong across tech, data, strategy, creative and operations. Hire instead for depth in one dimension and the social intelligence to respect expertise in others. Great leadership at her level, she argues, is vision on a bedrock of good judgement and deep curiosity; leaders cannot be experts in everything, so the job is to stay learning and set up teams that lean on each other’s strengths. Almost all of her senior hires come from the agency world, where client-facing storytelling and cross-channel exposure are built in from day one.
