Adobe needed a new way to connect to a broader audience of young people who didn’t see their future careers in creativity. We needed to shift perception of Creative Cloud from a professional-grade tool, made only for art students, to a suite of tools that can take this broader audience's passions to the next level. With more ways to create than ever before, Adobe needed a way to completely reframe the way we inspired this next generation to be creative. So, we invited students to jump into the creative process through one of their biggest passion points – music. To coincide with the launch of her upcoming album, we worked with Billie Eilish and her team to develop work inspired by her art, and ultimately inspired students to jump into the creative process and create.

We collaborated with Billie about her creative process, which coincided with the theme of her album, “When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?”

Utilizing the theme of where Billie gets her inspiration, the campaign launched with a call-to-action for students to submit artwork related to the album theme. It was an opportunity to get our audience to start thinking about where they themselves go in their sleep to inspire them in a new way, and get them to push themselves creatively. The submissions rolled in and we had started the right kind of conversation with our audience, but now we needed a way to get Billie herself to share her perspective on the creative process to inspire others to join. We created two videos to have Billie unpack her creative process and brought it to life with an illustrated style to show that inspiration can come from anywhere.

In order to inspire students to go beyond the free and easy tools available, we needed to give them something to aspire to. Students have a special love for their creative idols in culture, but previous research has shown that highlighting these aspirational celebrities can have the opposite effect by making our audience feel like they could never create what their favorite creators are doing. With a need to give students a higher bar of creativity to aspire to, we needed a fresh way to connect students with their creative heroes. Rather than highlight the output of their work, we uncovered a new story to unite students and their creative heroes - that inspiration can come from anywhere, and that anything is possible when we all create.

The launch of the creative challenge was strategically planned to coincide with Billie’s debut album.

To get people excited, we used paid & organic social media to tease the collaboration. And to kick off the creative challenge, Billie and Adobe announced the program on their social channels.

Throughout the month-long contest period, we leveraged key influencers and Adobe’s owned social channels, pushing out pieces of content as a way to drive participation.

We also extended this campaign into streaming music channels. While these channels aren’t very visual, we know that music serves as an inspiration for our audience to create and it was a natural fit with Billie’s involvement.

Our media plan ensured that we connected this message to one of our audiences biggest sources of inspiration, when they are listening to music. The videos targeted our audience on:

Connected TV

YouTube

Vevo

Facebook

Instagram

Ultimately, the campaign helped inspire more students to invest in their creativity by highlighting how our creative heroes can find inspiration anywhere, how personal the creative process is, and that anything is possible when we all create.

Through the campaign, we had:

4,000,000 site traffic to Adobe.com

37,000,000 social impressions

27,000,000 video views

8,000 submissions