Guest · Creativity and creative effectiveness
Simon Morris
Vice President International Marketing, Adobe
Simon Morris, VP International Marketing at Adobe, has had a ringside seat for thirteen years as content demand, creative technology, and the nature of marketing itself have been transformed. His conviction is that the industry has spent years obsessing over media optimisation while systematically underinvesting in the one thing that actually drives results: creative optimisation.
About
Simon Morris is Vice President International Marketing at Adobe, where he has spent nearly fifteen years building out the company’s marketing presence across EMEA, Asia Pacific, and Japan. He joined Adobe just as it was making the transition from boxed product to subscription business, and has since led demand generation, campaign marketing, digital media, and the full international marketing function as the company built its Digital Experience practice around the world.
Before Adobe, Simon spent nearly ten years at ClickSoftware, progressing from Director of Global Marketing to Vice President of Marketing Operations to Vice President of Marketing. He was elected Chapter President of AFSM International in the UK in 2007, part of the leadership team that launched the UK chapter of the global services management association, where he grew membership from zero to 100 and won the Best Chapter Award.
At Adobe, his focus has been on the relationship between data, creative, and personalisation at scale. He was responsible for Adobe’s partnership with the Women’s FA Cup, giving all 460 clubs access to Adobe Express Premium as a way of helping grassroots communities tell their own stories. He sees this sponsorship as a direct expression of Adobe’s brand purpose: democratising creativity for underrepresented voices. In his view, the brand purpose has not changed in fifteen years. The mission of changing the world through digital experiences has simply gained one word: personalised.
Career24 years
- 2022 to now Adobe VP International Marketing
- 2022 to 2022 Adobe VP Marketing, EMEA and APAC
- 2020 to 2022 Adobe Senior Director of Marketing, Digital Media Business Unit, EMEA
- 2017 to 2020 Adobe Senior Director, Campaign Marketing, Consumer and SMB, EMEA
Show earlier roles: Adobe, ClickSoftware
How Simon thinks3 convictions
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Creative optimisation is the underspend of modern marketing
Simon’s diagnosis of the marketing industry is precise: the discipline has spent years getting extremely good at buying media efficiently and extremely inconsistent at using that media effectively. As audiences become more addressable and personalisation more achievable, the bottleneck is not the channel or the targeting. It is the creative. Getting the right message in front of the right person at the right time only matters if the message is actually good.
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Be customer zero before you evangelise
Adobe uses its own products internally before releasing them to market. This is not a marketing exercise. It is how the company gets honest feedback from people who are both the developers’ peers and the products’ actual target users. When Adobe democratises creativity for marketers and communicators, it does so having watched its own employees struggle with the same bottlenecks and benefit from the same solutions. Customer zero is not a tagline. It is an operating principle.
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Democratise creativity with guardrails, not without them
Adobe’s answer to the content explosion is not to centralise everything through a studio team, which creates bottlenecks, or to open everything up without guidelines, which destroys brand consistency. The answer is structured democratisation: brand kits, templates, approved assets that give regional marketers and non-designers the ability to create on-brand content quickly, without going back to the agency or the studio for every asset. The studio’s job becomes the high-end work that actually requires it.
