Overview

Lumen Technologies is a Fortune 500 enterprise digital networking company and the trusted network for many of the world’s leading AI and cloud providers. Its early, large-scale investment in fiber infrastructure across major metropolitan areas positions Lumen at the center of the next era of digital transformation, powering the connectivity behind a growing share of modern digital experiences.

Supernova Award Category

Marketing & Sales Effectiveness

The Problem

As digital expectations rose, Lumen’s marketing organization faced mounting pressure to deliver more personalized B2B campaigns, across more channels, at greater speed — while annual campaign volume more than doubled without a corresponding increase in team size. Content creation ran like a rigid assembly line, with each brief moving sequentially from copy to design to assembly, and every handoff adding delay. Lumen needed a way to scale on-brand content creation without adding cost, chaos, or creative bottlenecks.

The Solution

Lumen identified the bottleneck as a linear, specialist-dependent production process and rebuilt it as a connected content supply chain on Adobe’s technology. The team deployed Adobe Express with Adobe Firefly Custom Models trained on Lumen’s own brand IP — empowering marketers across the organization to self-serve on-brand content — and used Adobe Workfront to collapse legal and brand approvals into a single, agile review cycle. This turned a sequential handoff chain into parallel, governed, AI-accelerated creation.

The results

Before: roughly four campaigns a year, produced through a slow, linear process that funneled every request through specialized creative resources and routed approvals through stalled email threads. After: Lumen runs many concurrent campaigns with dozens of tailored, on-brand variations in market across LinkedIn, Meta, and display — launching in days rather than weeks. By shifting from one-off assets to modular, persona-based building blocks and embedding brand-trained AI directly in marketers’ hands, Lumen strengthened its entire content supply chain: faster speed to market, stronger brand consistency, greater content reuse, and materially lower production cost at scale. The model is broadly repeatable — any enterprise marketing org drowning in content demand can apply the same blueprint of brand-governed generative AI plus unified workflow.

Metrics

• Campaign launch time: reduced from 25 days to 9 days using Adobe GenStudio for Performance Marketing — roughly 65% faster. • Production time: down 90% on average with Adobe Firefly Custom Models inside Adobe Express. • Cost: an estimated $5 million saved through the new production workflows. • Brand familiarity: up 44% year over year — achieved while allocating only 1% of revenue to paid campaigns – an impressive ratio! • Social campaign speed: 3x faster time to market; 65% less time to produce Meta ad variations. • Designer efficiency: roughly one designer-hour saved per use of Firefly Custom Models, compounding across personas, verticals, and six-week refresh cycles. • Scale: on-brand output across 5 personas, 7 verticals, and 3 buyer-journey stages.

The Technology

Adobe Express, Adobe Firefly Custom Models, Adobe GenStudio for Performance Marketing, Adobe Creative Cloud, and Adobe Workfront — operating together as a single, connected content supply chain spanning planning, creation, approval, activation, and attribute-level performance measurement.

Disruptive Factor

The hardest challenge was democratizing content creation without surrendering the brand consistency and legal rigor a Fortune 500 enterprise demands — a balance most organizations get wrong in one direction or the other. Lumen solved it by training Firefly Custom Models on its own IP and embedding them directly in everyday marketer workflows, so non-specialists could produce genuinely on-brand work at scale. This challenges the long-held assumption that speed, volume, and brand quality are competing trade-offs in marketing content. By making brand-governed generative AI a standard part of how an entire marketing org operates, Lumen turned its content supply chain from a bottleneck into a competitive advantage.

Shining Moment

The most meaningful result wasn’t a number — it was the return of creative energy to the team. Freed from assembly-line production, Lumen’s marketers shifted to genuinely collaborative creative work, reacting to trends in real time and describing the work as the most fun they’d had in years. In an era where AI is often framed as a threat to creative roles, Lumen is a counterexample — proof that the right technology, implemented thoughtfully, amplifies human creativity rather than replacing it.