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# Brandmakers: Adobe’s Simon Morris on Staying Ahead of the Marketers He Sells To
- URL: https://www.thesubthread.com/brandmakers-adobe-simon-morris-marketing-on-staying-ahead-of-the-marketers-he-sells-to/
- Published: 2026-11-03T10:14:38.000Z
- Updated: 2026-11-03T10:14:38.000Z
- Description: He’s spent 14 years at Adobe, watching it reinvent itself from boxed software to subscription giant to AI powerhouse. Now VP of International Marketing Simon Morris has a job harder than many: staying one step ahead of the very marketers he’s marketing to.
- Author: Alex Zeevalkink
- Tags: Brandmakers, #Brandmakers-podcast, Creativity

[Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/episode/3QiBWnJtOv1ZX9ECFBxehC?si=sfq4pICCRaq9q5LTdHwWAA&ref=thesubthread.com) | [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KEvkP3uL7Y&ref=thesubthread.com) | [Apple Podcasts](https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/brandmakers/id1885174166?ref=thesubthread.com)

In this episode of the Brandmakers podcast, Hannah is joined by Simon Morris, VP of international marketing at Adobe, where he’s spent the last 14 years – a rare stint in an industry that reinvents itself every few years.

Simon has had a front-row seat to almost every inflection point in modern marketing: Adobe’s move from boxed product to subscription, its leap into analytics that fused art with science, the industry-wide shift to performance and measurement, and the 2023 launch of Firefly that put generative AI at the centre of how brands create. 

The gap between how fast humans move and how quick technology moves is widening, Simon says. Search is starting inside LLMs, organic traffic is falling, and CMOs are, in his words, tearing their hair out over how their brands show up in a no-click world. The latter is a problem Adobe noticed early and dealt with – they spotted AI traffic growing at a rate of knots when it was still tiny and responded to this change by building Adobe Brand Visibility and [acquiring Semrush](https://www.thesubthread.com/brandmakers-with-ben-kendall-vp-brand-and-creative-at-semrush/).

In this conversation with Hannah, Simon explains how Adobe keeps content on-brand while producing it at the scale modern channels demand, why Firefly was built “commercially safe” from day one, how he thinks about long-term creator partnerships, and why – even in an age of infinite AI content – a creative’s time still matters most.

For more interviews with the brand marketers behind some of the world’s most innovative brands, [check out the full Brandmakers series](https://www.thesubthread.com/tag/brandmakers/).