The news: Adobe increased its ad spending to $1.4 billion in 2025 amid broader skepticism about the company’s position in the AI race. This effort represented a 30% YoY spending increase.

Increased ad investment was largely aimed at promoting Adobe’s AI tools, as the company faces rising competition from AI generators and editing software like Midjourney and Canva.

Adobe’s AI push: Adobe has made major investments in AI tools since the technology emerged.

• The company has boosted its AI GenStudio offering, a resource aimed at marketing professionals to streamline campaign creation and management. Features include tools to resize and reframe assets by the thousands and a content agent that produces ad materials based on briefs.
• Adobe launched AI Foundry Marketplace in 2025, a genAI model marketplace that allows brands to create bespoke versions of Adobe’s Firefly AI model, which was launched earlier last year.
• Adobe is promoting a slew of consumer and creator-facing AI products to combat general skepticism surrounding genAI. The company offers AI features in its Adobe Express product to generate and enhance visuals; AI-powered features for its Lightroom product like a generative remove feature; and AI tools in Photoshop to automatically alter images.

Investors remain unconvinced: Despite Adobe’s heavy ad push, investors remain skeptical. Adobe’s stock is down over 50% since the beginning of 2024, and hit its lowest closing price since 2019 on Tuesday, notes Bloomberg.

Why it matters: Adobe is struggling to keep up with the rapid pace of AI innovation, especially as rival genAI tools enable users to quickly create visual content without the cost of professional tools.

A notable portion of marketers are already using general purpose AI tools and image generators to create marketing campaigns. Forty percent of US marketers were using tools like ChatGPT or image generators like DALL-E in 2025, per HubSpot—a trend that will only increase as AI tools become more sophisticated.

And while Adobe’s AI tools have been used billions of times, the company is still struggling to convince investors that its AI tools offer measurable returns compared with established offerings from giants like Google and AI-first companies like OpenAI.

Implications for marketers: A heavier AI push from Adobe means marketers can expect more AI-led creative solutions vying for attention as platforms look to prove that their AI tools are the most innovative and effective. Marketers could face a landscape where differentiating between genuinely advanced tools and surface-level AI capabilities becomes more challenging.