Bloomberg file photo of the Adobe Head Quarters in San Jose
San Jose: Adobe Inc. ramped up its advertising in 2025, spending $1.4 billion to promote its brand in the face of steep competition and skepticism from Wall Street that the company is a loser in the age of AI.
The marketing effort was more than a 30% increase over the prior year’s spending, according to filings from the maker of creative software. It also represented a significantly higher share of sales going toward advertising than other major tech companies like Salesforce Inc. and Meta Platforms Inc.
Adobe was long the undisputed leader in the market for creative tools with widely used products like Photoshop. But in recent years, streamlined editing software from those such as Canva Inc. and artificial intelligence media generators like Midjourney have gained traction. Adobe’s stock is down more than 50% since the start of 2024 - and hit its lowest closing price Tuesday since October 2019 - as investors have questioned whether the company can thrive in the AI era.
Much of Adobe’s 2025 advertising blitz focused on promoting the company’s own AI tools. A series of TV ads show how Acrobat - the software for working with PDFs - can now automatically generate reports, marketing language and data visualisations with AI. An ad run on YouTube includes surreal imagery such as a dolphin in a hotel swimming pool that was created by Adobe’s AI video generator. The company also had a strong presence at events like the Cannes and Sundance film festivals.
Perhaps nowhere is this ad push more visible than in San Francisco, where many of Adobe’s nascent competitors are based. The company’s distinctive red logo is splashed across billboards in the city and on rental bikes owned by Lyft Inc. "Quick. Easy. On-brand,” reads an advertisement wrapped around a pole in a downtown train station promoting Adobe Express, the company’s browser-based editor that is comparable to Canva.
Of course, Adobe isn’t the only company paying to push its tools. Google released a Thanksgiving-themed ad with clips generated by its Veo 3 AI model, which has seen rapid adoption by creators.
Canva released a string of ads that made it look easy and fun to generate digital media. Many of the billboards in San Francisco that don’t carry Adobe’s logo bear the names of others building AI hardware or software.
Even by the standards of corporate advertising, Adobe’s outlays are heavy. It is spending more - as a percentage of revenue and in absolute terms - than software industry peers like Salesforce, Workday Inc., and Atlassian Inc.
Compared with other application software makers, Adobe’s customer base includes a larger share of consumers who traditionally can be reached by mass advertising. But the company is even outpacing consumer-oriented brands such as Uber Technologies Inc. and Netflix Inc., as a percentage of revenue.
Adobe declined to comment on its advertising spending.
Media production is being rapidly transformed by AI, which is making it increasingly easy to create content for social networks without paying for professional-oriented tools like those made by Adobe. This is why even with tens of billions in high-margin sales each year, Adobe has become among Wall Street’s favorite punching bags. Since December 2024, the share of analysts recommending a buy on the stock has slipped from 75% to 52%.
The spike in Adobe’s advertising expense coincided with the appointment of Lara Balazs as new chief marketing officer. Prior to Adobe, she spent six years as the marketing chief at Intuit Inc.
Intuit, the maker of TurboTax, spends more on advertising than Adobe. It is famous for flashy ads timed for television broadcasts of sporting events like the Super Bowl. Intuit spends a similar share of revenue - about 11% - as consumer goods giants like Coca-Cola Co. and Procter & Gamble Co.
Many of Adobe’s AI tools have seen strong adoption. Its Firefly family of AI models have been used tens of billions of times, the company has said. Still, Adobe faces a challenge to convince creators and investors that its platform is the place where the most cutting-edge creative tools can be found.
"All the creative AI you need, all in one place,” reads an Adobe ad.
