In celebration of Black creativity, Adobe and Complex partnered on an impactful campaign dedicated to elevating diverse voices across various artistic mediums. The Adobe Diverse Voices campaign was inspired by Adobe’s ‘When I See Black’ film, which beautifully highlights the spectrum of the Black experience.
The goal of the campaign was to explore a vision for how Adobe can best give back to under-represented artists, specifically Black creators, who are a vital part of the creative community that Adobe is committed to championing.
Adobe's brand belief is that creativity empowers positive transformation in ourselves, business, culture and worldwide; but that can only happen when creative expression draws from all voices. The unfortunate reality is that everyone does not have the opportunity to be seen or heard—and women, Black and Latinx populations, people with disabilities, the LGBTQ+ community and underserved youth are significantly more marginalized.
The campaign resulted in a one-of-a-kind partnership that provided Adobe a platform to thread the needle from the promise of “creativity for all” to the meaningful work of uplifting the next generation of Black creators. It allowed the world to see, learn and benefit from diverse perspectives and served as a progressive step toward leveling the playing field.
Black creators often work in industries with miscast labels and expectations for their art and what it represents. Complex flipped the issue and encouraged Black creators to define themselves using their art at one of the most innovative events of 2020—ComplexLand, a first-of-its-kind immersive digital experience featuring exclusive merch drops, art, musical performances, food and more.
The Adobe Diverse Voices campaign celebrated five emerging Black creators of varying disciplines from illustration to photography. Each creator displayed their custom pieces inside a virtual gallery within ComplexLand, the Adobe Creativity Space, and the exhibit was a premier destination during the five-day experience.
Complex also provided the creators a platform to tell their own stories through a captivating vignette series, ‘When I See Myself,’ each opening with the artist completing the sentence "When I see myself..." The 60-second videos offered a glimpse into the artists’ lives, their stories, and emphasized the importance of creating and defining your identity for yourself. Complex featured the artists’ videos in a compelling, branded editorial piece and distributed them across the brand’s massive social media platforms.
As a result of Complex’s thoughtfully developed strategy and distribution, Adobe Diverse Voices was a highly successful campaign that uplifted the profiles of Black artists and their art while aligning beautifully with Complex’s commitment to authentic and responsible storytelling.
Complex’s Adobe Diverse Voices editorial piece received over 4M impressions and 130K+ video views.
The brand’s approach to developing 60-second vignettes allowed the full creative to be featured across Complex, Adobe and the respective talent’s social media accounts, resulting in hundreds of thousands of earned impressions, qualified engagements, and video views cross-platform. The five videos received over 3.75M social impressions across Complex’s platforms.
Instagram saw substantial viewership for the ‘When I See Myself’ series. For example, artist Dana Scruggs’ video performed extraordinarily well on her own account and was further amplified and featured on Adobe’s, amassing over 100K views and 200+ comments across the platform.
Additionally, a brand study revealed that the campaign was successful at establishing Adobe as a top-of-mind brand. Males and females both reported increases in unaided brand awareness, where females reported an additional lift in agreement that Adobe “celebrates and uplifts under-represented voices.”
The campaign’s success also informed Complex’s development of brand partnership guidelines, where the team addresses how to empower, educate and guide its partners on the best way to reach and target Black and Brown communities.
Complex is proud to have brought these stories to life in partnership with Adobe, and the brand will continue to use its platform to amplify marginalized communities.
