Why creativity matters more than ever in the age of AI - Adobe CMO, Lara Balazs

**Jon Evans** (0:00)
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Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to Uncensored CMO. Now, in this episode, I'm talking to the CMO of Adobe, Lara, and she joins me to talk all about the big change that they are going through. Now, she has got some previous in this because before she was at Amazon, she was also at Nike and at Visa. She's got lots of experience about what it takes to manage serious change. This is a fascinating conversation about how marketing can sit in the driver's seat transforming an organization using the power of AI but in service of a bigger mission. This fascinating conversation, here it is.
So Lara, welcome to Uncensored CMO.

**Lara Balazs** (1:20)
Great to be here, thanks for having me.

**Jon Evans** (1:23)
Now, I thought, I, yesterday, I did a talk in the Palais called The Startling Power of Surprise.

**Lara Balazs** (1:28)
Yes.

**Jon Evans** (1:28)
So I thought it would be a bit of fun just to ask you, is there anything about you that people might be surprised to learn?

**Lara Balazs** (1:34)
Oh, perhaps that I've actually, I've done two marathons. I never wanted to do even one marathon, but I was signed up for a half and in Vancouver, Canada, actually. And I go out, I was going to do half of the 26.2 miles. And I thought, you know what, I'm just going to keep going.
Because they had a full marathon as well. And I kept running. And then I thought, this is going to take forever. So I just ran as fast as I could. And because of that, I qualified for Boston.

**Jon Evans** (2:10)
What?

**Lara Balazs** (2:11)
The Boston Marathon. And then my friend said, you know, you qualified for Boston. And I didn't even really know what that meant. And so I ran the Boston Marathon. Because if you qualify for Boston, you have to run Boston. And it was absolutely fantastic and such an experience.

**Jon Evans** (2:26)
Had you had you trained for half?

**Lara Balazs** (2:28)
I had, I had, I had trained for a half.
But then I did start running longer distances because I thought, oh, a half will go even better if I've trained for longer distances. You know, this was a long, long time ago. I will say it was my younger self that I'm talking about. And so I had put some, you know, I put the miles in, you put the reps in, as they say. But I really did not go out to run the fall.

**Jon Evans** (2:55)
It does show the power of human potential though, doesn't it? Because you planned to do half and you ended up doing twice what you set out to do.

**Lara Balazs** (3:01)
Yeah, and preparation. You know, I really wanted to get the, I wanted to do the half so well, because I thought it would be the only half that I would ever do, let alone a marathon.

**Jon Evans** (3:11)
Now, we're recording this here in Cannes, and I know CMOs are a competitive bunch, right? And I've basically spent all week, breakfast, lunch, dinner, talking to CMOs about their experience in Cannes. And just to give you a compliment, you come up, or Adobe comes up, I should say, more often than not, in terms of who do you admire in terms of activation in Cannes.

**Lara Balazs** (3:31)
Oh, thank you.

**Jon Evans** (3:32)
It appears you are everywhere.
So what's, you know, in a very competitive, you know, short distance, which the quazette is, there's a lot of people competing for attention. How do you manage to stand out amongst all the competitors?

**Lara Balazs** (3:45)
Yeah, well, thank you for the compliment, and it means a lot. I mean, part of that is we and my job and my team markets from everyone, from business professionals, to students, to individuals, to creators, aspiring creators, and everyone's a creator today, all the way to the biggest enterprises in the world. And all of those people are here. And so we have to think about how do we have the red thread? No pun intended with our beautiful Adobe red. But how do we have a red thread while still speaking to those audiences? And I have a wonderful team. I just get to represent the work they do. But with that, you want to show up with an end-to-end story, which is from idea to impact is what we're doing here, which is now the power of creativity plus marketing plus AI., kind of magic across all of that and showing up in all the spaces. One really interesting story, too, is across La Croixette, we create 150 pieces of assets, static assets, 170 films.