Curious who’s partnering with the NFL for Super Bowl Sunday? Any guesses?
If you guessed Adobe, you were spot on. In an era when working with creators should be a tentpole marketing strategy, Adobe is setting the standard. Learn how Adobe built its first dedicated influencer marketing team, why creator marketing is now essential to them, and surprising ways creators influence Adobe’s products, workflows, events, and long-term marketing strategies.
In this episode of Earned, CreatorIQ CMO Brit Starr sits down with Leah Walker, Director of Social Media at Adobe, to unpack how one of the world’s leading creative companies is scaling its creator strategy. Leah reflects on her decade at Adobe and shares how the brand moved from scattered influencer activations to establishing its first dedicated influencer marketing team—marking a major shift in how Adobe views creators as core to its marketing engine. Leah offers an inside look at programs like CAMP, Adobe’s Creator-Led Content Amplification Program, which repurposes creator content across the full funnel to drive both awareness and measurable performance. She explains why long-term partnerships consistently outperform one-offs, and how creators are helping Adobe uncover new use cases and workflows for its tools through authentic storytelling. Brit and Leah also explore Adobe’s unique operating model, where the influencer team acts as both a Center of Excellence and a Center of Execution—centralizing best practices, governance, and measurement while directly running high-impact programs. Leah highlights Adobe’s commitment to empowering creators at every stage, from beginners using Express and Firefly to established creators shaping culture on platforms like YouTube.
Check out highlights from the episode below, or or tune into the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen!
The following interview has been lightly edited for concision.
“We're running the programs, we're measuring the programs, and we're optimizing, and then iterating and, and defining them again.”: Leah Walker on how Adobe is creating excellence and execution
Brit Starr: Tell me how you define a center of excellence. What does that mean to you?
Leah Walker: At Adobe we have both a center of excellence and also a center of execution. If you look up the definition of a center of excellence, it's supposed to be the kind of entity that sets forth the governance, the best practices, the standardization of tools and operating models, and we do all of that. So that's part of how I would define it;we set forth the best practices, the standards for how we're going to measure what the different types of activations that we do are. We need to have a framework for how we're activating influencers because there are so many different ways that you could do it, but our center of excellence also happens to be an executional one as well.
So we are not only setting forth the best practices, setting forth the governance, the tools, the measurement standards, the framework, the partnership framework, even things like the briefing templates and the legal agreement templates, all of that. We are a central point and a central resource for the company, but we are also executing. The way that my team works is we're going to be that for the company, and there are other teams that kind work with talent in different ways, not necessarily the same way that we do, but there are teams that work with talent and that talent is their influencers. It used to be, oh, we're going to find an artist and that artist may or may not have any kind of social presence at all that we want to feature in this campaign. Now, anytime you find any artist or otherwise, they're going to have a social media presence, and more often than not, they're probably going to be influential in their community and they're going to have a larger social following.
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