Adobe launches new Express tool for small businesses – and I spoke exclusively to its chief to find out the top 5 things you need to know
- Adobe Express for Ads is now live – I spoke to Express SVP to find out more
- Content integration with Google Ads, LinkedIn, TikTok
- Includes Social Safe Zone to refine ads for each platform
Adobe Express has introduced a new tool designed to help small businesses create and monitor online ads across popular social media channels.
Since Adobe Max London, the design platform has seen a host of new AI updates like Clip Maker and Generate Similar for spinning out new content based on existing images. Now, Express for Ads brings even more options for marketers and small businesses to scale up content production and track performance.
In an exclusive TechRadar Pro interview, I spoke to Adobe Express SVP Govind Balakrishnan to find out what users can expect from the new ad platform – and what else we can look forward to in the coming months.
What’s new in Adobe Express and what is Express for Ads?
This isn’t the first foray into social media content creation for Express, which has long offered the ability to create ad templates, and schedule and publish directly to platforms.
But the platform is giving users a jump-start of scaling up ad creation across core advertising platforms. You can check out the new Express tools by clicking here – but here’s what you can expect.
What this new update adds is the ability to create content workflows specifically for Google, LinkedIn, Meta, TikTok, and later down the line, Amazon, too.
As Balakrishnan told me, “What we have now done though is also bring in the tools and capabilities to make it incredibly easy for you to create content that performs well for the critical or prominent ad platforms like Google Ads, LinkedIn, Meta, and more coming in the not too distant future. We’ve essentially made it easy for you to start with the template or even generate a template, and create content using the best in class tools that we have available in Express.”
Alongside expanded ad platform support, users can now also use what Adobe’s calling a Social Safe Zone.
This is effectively a set of best practices to prevent the dreaded rejection of ads – and it’s currently supported for Facebook Stories, Instagram Reels, and LinkedIn Videos. There are plans to support additional formats soon.
“We’ve added a capability called Social Safe Zone,” said Balakrishnan. “It’s essentially a set of guidelines or guard rails that are incorporated as you’re creating your content to ensure that the key visual elements that you have in your content are not obstructed by the various social media platforms. So, it helps you essentially create content to ensure that the visual elements that you care most about are front and centre, and are optimized to be best-performing for each of the social media platforms that you’re targeting.”
- 3. A one-stop shop for ad creation
In a bid to improve the creative workflow, Adobe is now letting users play in the Express sand-box without having to move out to other apps.
Balakrishnan calls it a one-stop shop, adding: “We have made it incredibly easy to publish straight to the ad platforms, so we have made it. Express can establish a connection with Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, and Tiktok. You can go from Express directly to each of these ad platforms.”
Of course, Adobe Express has long offered the option to resize templates, but in this latest update, the company has gone further.
“We have now ensured that [Resize] works for these ad platforms,” Balakrishnan told me. “Essentially, you start with the template, you have Safe Zones to ensure that your content looks great for each, and now you have the ability to publish straight into these ad platforms. So, Express becomes this one-stop shop where you start with an intent, you create your content, you publish to various platforms, and you get your insights back right there. You don’t have to jump between various tools, various platforms.”
It’s an area that Balakrishnan is most excited for, telling me, “I am most excited about the fact that you can create for a specific ad platform and resize seamlessly for other platforms. As we all know, most marketing marketers are trying to reach multiple platforms and struggle to do that because they have to recreate a lot of their content over and over again for multiple app platforms. The fact that they can fairly quickly and easily create the best possible content for each of those ad platforms, I think, is incredibly exciting.”
- 4. Improved metrics and tracking
One of the best updates, I think, coming with Express for Ads, is the ability to now monitor ad performance across supported platforms, delivering much-needed feedback to refine future ideation and creation. With that in mind, Express now has included Metricool and Bitly add-ons.
Expanding on this, Balakrishnan said, “We’ve added the ability to get metrics and analytics on the content and how the content is performing through integrations with Metricool and Bitly. These are two recent integrations that we have launched where, once you post your content to these platforms, you now have the ability to get feedback on how your content is performing, in addition to obviously seeing how it maps to current trends and current fads that may be in play.”
And it turns out Adobe might’ve underestimated just how many users are welcoming this update.
Balakrishnan said, “I’m finding that a number of our users are excited about the Metricool integration. I don’t know if we had fully realised how compelling this could be, but as we have gotten deeper into the integration and as we have engaged with more of our user base, it has become clear that it is an integration that a large number of our users are incredibly excited about because they then get the insights from how their content is performing right there in the tool without having to leave the tool and go somewhere else.”
- 5. The future of Adobe Express
As Express continues to evolve, I couldn’t resist finding out what users can expect later down the line. Here, Balakrishnan teased a couple of future updates.
“The next stage that we are incredibly excited about, and I know it’s not necessarily related to the ads creation scenario today, but it will be relevant in the not too distant future is the ability to completely reimagine creativity or the opportunity to completely reimagine creativity through agentic AI. The idea there would be that you just enter a prompt and you get you start with a blank screen, you enter a prompt, and you interact through a prompt to essentially generate full-fledged designs from scratch. We are now making it even easier for anyone to come in and describe what’s in their mind’s eye and have that show up on a digital screen in seconds.”
That will come as little surprise for followers of Adobe, where agentic AI is fast becoming de rigueur across the company’s apps. But it’s not the only area where Balakrishnan envisions AI advancements. He confirmed he’d like to see “more advancements in the realm of generative AI” for Express users who don’t want to see a lowering of the barrier to entry via agentic AI.
And, as you’d expect from a platform that integrates across the Creative Cloud suite, the team is looking at further integrations with Adobe Acrobat.
Balakrishnan explained: “We are seeing an increasing trend, so to speak, where creativity and productivity are coming closer together and we see some incredible opportunities to leverage the very broad base of Acrobat users and give them the tools and capabilities to add more richness to PDF and Acrobat documents. And we’re doing that by building seamless integrations and workflows from Acrobat into Express, where you’re if you’re in Acrobat, if you’re in [Acrobat] Reader, if you’re viewing a regular PDF document, we are now giving you the ability to edit images, generate images to stylize your document all from within Acrobat.”
You can find out more in Adobe’s latest blog.
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