Adobe Firefly helps bring students' marketing campaigns to life

In the realm of digital marketing, understanding the audience is paramount. It's so important, it drives decisions that span from strategy to rollout.

“My students will hear me use the phrase ‘the audience comes first’ repeatedly throughout the semester” shared Crystal Alvarez, an instructor at Arizona State University (ASU). 

Part of Alvarez’s teaching includes two courses on digital audience development at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication — MCO 307: The Digital Audience for undergraduate students and a graduate-level MCO 561: Defining the Digital Audience.

Throughout the semester, students in both courses work through a series of assignments that culminate in a creative campaign for one of their favorite brands. A key component of the course is learning to develop a unique persona early on in their marketing campaign development. 

"Before a student creates any content, they need to know who they’re talking to,” Alvarez noted. “By creating a detailed persona, students can develop a deep understanding of their target market and create content that resonates."

These personas serve as fictional representations of a brand’s ideal customer, helping marketers tailor their messaging and campaigns to fit a unique value proposition that will draw their audience in. Each persona includes a visual representation of the customer, complete with a fictional name and other data-generated personal facts and traits, including life story, education, likes, hobbies and goals. 

And for the first time, students were invited to use Adobe Firefly to create a visual representation of their digital personas instead of digging through available stock images.

Bringing ideas to life with Adobe Firefly

Adobe Firefly is a generative artificial intelligence (AI) image generator and editor. Features include text to image creation where users create a prompt that describes their desired image; Adobe Firefly will nearly instantly generate the image for the user. 

To use Adobe Firefly, students draft and input a prompt that describes their ideal image. Alvarez noted the prompt writing adds another layer of critical thinking to reach the desired final image that brings the students’ persona psychographic and demographic traits to life.

“Many times, the first prompt won’t get students exactly where they want their persona to be,” Alvarez shared. “The prompting back and forth with the tool is another opportunity to dive deep into their persona and create a unique image that best represents their brand’s ideal customer.”

Other features of Adobe Firefly include generative fill and remove to add and subtract components from imagery. 

"Before, marketers and students were limited to stock images that often didn't accurately represent their target audience,” Alvarez said. “Now, they can create a visually compelling representation of their persona that captures the personalities, lifestyles and aspirations of those marketing targets."

The use of Adobe Firefly builds upon the university’s commitment to equip students with Adobe Creative Cloud, which is available to all ASU students, free of charge.  

Alvarez shared that more than 95% of her students used Adobe Firefly to complete their persona image; the assignment instructions did not require it.

Excerpts from a few persona examples from Alvarez’s classes include: