Cannes UnCanned: Navigating Technology With Creativity

As Adobe’s VP of experience marketing, Alex Amado [feature image] straddles the worlds of technology and creativity more than most.

And with advertising guru Peter Field last year heralding the advertising industry’s ‘Crisis of Creativity’, there are some that have suggested technology could be to blame.

So what does Amado make of this?

“I think technology has always been an accelerant for helping people tell stories and communicate. It lets us do things, it lets us tell stories faster and it’s really democratised the ability to be creative,” he said during a Cannes UnCanned session this week.

This notion of acceleration extends to collaboration, Amado explained.

“In my role and in my opinion as a professional who deals in creative, I think creative is best played as a team sport. I love being a part of the group and co-creating and really driving new thinking,” he said.

“Technology is making that easier too. It’s making it easier to collaborate and be cooperative to achieve a bigger creative goal.”

With Adobe offering well-known creative products such as Photoshop and Lightroom, Amado is able to witness creative technology in action every day.

But when it came to naming the technology that he believes has helped creatives the most, he explained this is something that might be happening in the background.

“A lot of creative professionals spend a lot of their time doing that sort of [mundane] work, where they could be freeing up their time to create more, to bring the spark that only they can bring, instead of doing production work,” he said.

“A lot of that is around how AI plays a role in taking the mundane tasks out of the way.”

When it comes to how Adobe approaches AI, it’s all about enabling creation.

“There have been a lot of subtle ways that AI is coming in to practice,” Amado explained.

“The way that we think about AI and machine learning at Adobe is really subject matter specialised, we’re not interested in creating an AI digital assistant that can do everything.

“We’re focussing on the things that we really know about as Adobe, where we have deep expertise that we can use as a platform to help people do what they want to do.”

You can click here to see the entire chat with Alex Amado.

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