It takes more than a good deal to draw consumers’ attention, according to Varun Parmar, the senior vice president and general manager of Adobe GenStudio and Firefly for Enterprise.
Adobe GenStudio applications are used by marketing teams to plan, create, manage, activate across apps and publishers and measure on-brand content. Adobe Firefly Services enables enterprises and agency networks to accelerate repetitive, time-consuming asset production tasks.
In his role, Parmar has a clear understanding of what marketers need to do to succeed. Here, he shares insights into recent retail campaigns and the current state of the consumer as well as the role AI can play in driving conversions.
Related Stories
Sourcing Journal: What does the popularity of Amazon Prime Day, Walmart Deals and Target Circle Deal Days tell you about today’s consumer?
Varun Parmar: Two things stand out. First, the deals themselves weren’t the draw; discounts topped out around 24 percent, about the same as they were last year, but people still spent 9.3 percent more. Indicating it’s not the size of the markdown that’s drawing them in. What’s happening is these events are now on the calendar, and shoppers hold off until one lands instead of paying full price the rest of the year.
Second, how consumers discover the deal is changing. Traffic from AI chat tools and browsers grew 89 percent during the event, and for the first time at a Prime Day event, those AI-referred shoppers converted 40 percent better than search, email or social. They’re using AI to do the research and arriving ready to buy, which means your site now has to be readable by a machine, not just a person. If an AI can’t parse your product page, you’re invisible at the moment the customer decides.
SJ: Recent data from the ICSC shows that shoppers are value-focused across household income streams. What do retailers and brands need to do to engage these consumers?
V.P.: The mistake is hearing “value-focused” and reaching for a bigger discount. People are cost-conscious for different reasons, so a blanket promo misses much of the audience it was aimed at. And the common fix of sending more offers backfires. In our recent Adobe Digital Trends research, 39 percent of customers already feel overwhelmed by how much a single brand sends them. More volume just pushes them away.
The better move is to stop treating planning, production and performance as three separate stages on three separate timelines. When they run as one loop, what you learned from the last campaign shapes the next one while it still matters, instead of landing in a report weeks later. That’s what keeps a brand relevant to someone who is actively tuning promotions out.
SJ: You advocate for a “quick turn, always-on” approach to marketing during peak shopping moments such as back-to-school to stay relevant and pique consumer interest. How does that work?
V.P.: Back-to-school isn’t a single moment, it’s a season where demand is maintained throughout. This year, our data showed kids’ apparel up 185 percent and backpacks up 130 percent by the end of July compared to June.
Most campaigns still run as a single event: plan it, ship it, read the report weeks later, by which point the window’s gone. Always-on closes that gap by feeding performance data straight into the next round, so you’re reacting to what’s converting now, with brand-approved templates keeping it on-brand as it moves. Relevance is a timing problem. This is how you stay ahead of it.
SJ: And what role can AI play in deploying these strategies?
V.P.: An always-on approach isn’t really possible without it. The volume of variation involved is well beyond what a team can produce by hand in the time you have, so AI is doing that production work. It also lets you act on results as they land, rather than waiting for someone to spot a trend and brief the next round manually.
What makes it work inside an enterprise is that the AI is trained on the brand itself, on years of what’s been approved and what’s been rejected. It behaves less like a generic content generator and more like a brand guide sitting inside production, so the creative comes out already shaped by the company’s standards rather than made first and corrected later. Without that, faster just means more off-brand work, sooner.
SJ: How does Adobe GenStudio enable retailers and brands to plan and amplify performance marketing campaigns quickly and effectively?
V.P.: It comes down to running the whole campaign as one workflow instead of a chain of handoffs. A team plans, builds every version it needs, tests, and activates across channels in one place, with results feeding back into the same system to shape what’s next. Nothing waits on a separate creative or analytics pass to move; that’s what makes it fast. And Adobe Brand Intelligence is an always-learning AI underlying the entire content supply chain that keeps content on brand.
It’s the same engine whether it’s a brand’s own team or a retailer’s advertisers running a media network, many of whom have no creative team at all—one system doing the same job at a different scale, not two.
