How Adobe Helps Creators Create (HBBIP #84)

Each week, we'll bring you select insights from our newsletter, How to Build Brands and Influence People (HBBIP). To have all of these insights delivered directly to your inbox, subscribe today! 

After an eventful few weeks, featuring special guest appearances from friends at YouTube, a custom Coachella analysis, and a recap of CreatorIQ Connect Europe, I for one am ready for a return to our regularly scheduled programming. 

Don’t get me wrong: I love the new features we’ve been running lately, all of which have expanded HBBIP’s scope and introduced some stylistic innovations to our humble little newsletter. But sometimes I just want my graphs, you know? Yes, they typically show a fairly linear up-and-to-the-right progression, bar after bar after bar, but they’ve become a calling card for HBBIP, and I’ve developed a soft spot for them. Plus, it’s been so long since I’ve put them together! Weeks and week! (For those keeping score at home, that’s a total of three weeks. But it’s a long three weeks.)

So with the knowledge that there’s more HBBIP innovation to come—stay tuned!—let’s get back to that good ol’ Classic HBBIP™: a single brand highlight! Bar charts! The occasional bit of humor! 

And who do we have lined up this week for a return to form? Why, it’s none other than a brand that I use with a fair degree of frequency. Give it up for everyone’s favorite plucky multinational creative software conglomerate…

The top brand of all time (of the week): Adobe

If you’ve ever touched up a photo, edited a graphic, done anything at all with vectors, whatever those are, or processed either words or images (does that include reading this newsletter right now? Maybe!), then chances are you’re familiar with our good friend Adobe. If you’re also into building structures with sun-dried clay bricks, then you’re also familiar with adobe, and probably miffed that the software folks blew up your spot.

It’s safe to say that Adobe plays a front-and-center role in modern office work, and therefore the modern world at large, but what I want to know is this: do they even do creator marketing? Don’t most people know about Adobe already? What does an ‘Adobe influencer’ even look like?

Well boy, do they ever. (If they didn’t, this would be a very short newsletter.) But the question remains: what does that look like for Adobe, exactly?

Let’s go to a graph!

Adobe EMV: 2018 - 2024 

In case you couldn’t tell, no Adobe products were utilized in the making of this graph. But I love it anyway—that’s the classic HBBIP style that I’ve been jonesing for!

As you can see, there are plenty of reasons for Adobe to love it too. Uninterrupted, year-after-year growth; a big surge in 2024; an overall increase of nearly 3x in six years. Does Adobe do creator marketing? The answer is clearly yes.

We’ll get to exactly what that creator marketing looks like in a moment, but first, there are some interesting dynamics at work in Adobe’s data when we look across all their stats. For example, creator count and post count—two closely linked metrics—maintain broadly similar patterns, underscoring a slight dip that Adobe took between 2020 and 2021, along with the brand’s gradual recovery from this setback.

Adobe Creator Count: 2018 - 2024

As with EMV, the overall margins here are nearly 3x’ed in six years…

Adobe Post Count: 2018 - 2024

Meanwhile, for post count, Adobe recovered a bit more quickly, underscoring the brand’s ability to attract active, recurring creators.

But engagements and impressions are where we begin to see other patterns emerge, which makes these metrics particularly interesting to me. Let’s start with engagements.

Adobe Engagements: 2018 - 2024

This is essentially an amplification of the trendline we saw for creator count and post count, but with the timeline shifted. Adobe garnered an anomalously high amount of engagements in 2021, to the point that it took two years for the brand to catch up to its own highwater mark. However, Adobe smashed past that mark in 2024, demonstrating that its recent growth in these stats stems from deeper resonance with social media users.

Adobe Impressions: 2018 - 2024

Meanwhile, with impressions, 2024 simply dwarfs everything that came before it. So those new creators that Adobe started working with weren’t simply resonating with their existing followers—they were helping to amplify Adobe’s message more broadly with wider audiences.

Alright, so Adobe knows how to play the game. But who were these creators that helped the brand explode in 2024? What strategies did Adobe use to spark such impressive growth?

I took a look at Adobe’s metrics from May 2024 to April 2025, and specifically how their community dynamics compared to the prior 12 months. When you compare those two time periods—May 23 to April 24, and May 24 to April 25—creators who posted about the brand during both stretches generated roughly the same amount of EMV: $89.9M EMV in the former, $92.2M EMV in the latter.

One big difference came from newcomers to Adobe’s community—creators who mentioned the brand between May 2024 and April 2025, but not during the prior 12 months. This cohort was responsible for a sizable $48.2M EMV. What’s more, many of these incoming creators played a starring role in Adobe’s biggest initiatives during the time period. What’s even more, most of these incoming creators were primarily active on—you guessed it—TikTok.

Take Lucia Liu, aka TikTok’s very own @luseeyalu. A powerhouse creator with 6.5M followers on TikTok, Lucia shared a sponsored post in which she put Adobe’s Firefly Video Model to the test by generating custom greenscreens for her videos. She also touted her attendance at Adobe MAX, Adobe’s creativity conference, and profiled the knowledge and career growth she gained at the event. Thanks to these thoughtful, substantive endorsements, which allowed creators to put their own spin on content while still giving shoutouts to Adobe, Lucia ranked as Adobe’s top EMV-driver among incoming creators, generating $909.4k EMV across 32 posts from May 2024 to April 2025.

But Adobe wasn’t just going after powerhouse creators like Lucia. The brand also wisely targeted smaller-scale creators like Amanda Belawski of Amandabfilms (@moes.queso on TikTok), a micro-creator with 82.7k TikTok followers. Amanda shared a video of her quick, easy, on-the-go editing process thanks to the Adobe Lightroom app—a perfect tutorial for creators who are, you know, trying to do the whole ‘creating’ thing. After not posting about Adobe from May 2023 to April 2024, Amanda ranked as one of Adobe’s top 40 EMV-drivers from May 2024 to April 2025, inspiring $467.2k EMV across just eight posts.

That was when it hit me: I’d been thinking about this all wrong. Adobe wasn’t just some faceless corporate software that would have trouble connecting with creators—it was a suite of tools that would help creators do their jobs. Clearly the message came through: you don’t garner this kind of engagement unless you’re helping creators speak directly to other creators about the creative process, which is exactly what Adobe is doing.

Before I get too far into Xzibit meme territory, let’s go back to the numbers. From May 2024 to April 2025, Adobe saw $48.6M EMV from TikTok, a 64% YoY growth. This went along with 2.4B impressions, an 89% YoY surge. Remember that impressions graph, and all that progress in 2024? This is why. TikTok saw far greater growth in these categories than any other social channel, underscoring exactly where Adobe’s momentum is coming from.

So I tip my cap to you, Adobe. You’ve recognized that for as much as creators like endorsing a wide range of brands, they all need a set of tools in order to do the work of being a creator. By constantly improving those tools, and letting creators show their expertise with them, you’ve created a winning formula for creator marketing. 

That’s right, dang it—I’m excited about Adobe! And if the numbers are any indication, I’m not the only one.

To get all of these stories, plus much more, delivered to your inbox weekly, be sure to subscribe to our newsletter.