How AI is transforming Media & Entertainment marketing

Marketers must adapt to AI-driven content discovery to enhance relevance and drive revenue in a rapidly evolving landscape.

In brief

• AI is transforming interaction models across sectors, significantly impacting the Media & Entertainment industry.
• Consumer reliance on personal AI assistants shifts content discovery control from media companies to platform providers.
• Marketers must integrate AI into operations to enhance content relevance and drive revenue growth.

Across sectors, artificial intelligence (AI) is fundamentally changing interaction models. This is especially true for the Media & Entertainment (M&E) sector. Studio-grade content competes for attention with creator-led feeds. Publisher content is being disintermediated by agentic interfaces, reducing organic traffic to their platforms.

Consumers are increasingly relying on personal AI assistants to decide what to watch or buy, shifting control over discovery and engagement away from media companies and toward the platforms that power these agents. So, the question becomes: what does this mean for marketing and marketers?

Adobe’s State of Customer Experience in Media & Entertainment in an AI-Driven World¹ found that 96% of M&E marketers are expected to directly drive revenue. Marketers must fundamentally rethink the capabilities they need to enable this growth. Investments in data foundations, digital supply chains and personalization at scale have laid the groundwork, but this will soon be table stakes. The next generation of growth will come from integrating AI as a native layer across marketing and content operations – to match the most relevant content to the right audience in the right format at the right moment.

Content discovery as a growth lever

Embedding AI directly into creative and decisioning workflows will close that gap, powering faster, more relevant content discovery at scale.

Content relevance

Most media companies have vast content libraries that can now be turned into living, searchable ecosystems rather than static archives. AI can help enrich and structure metadata at scale to surface and reuse new and library content. Intelligent tagging of creative, contextual and performance attributes makes every asset searchable and recommendation-ready. When metadata is consistent and connected to audience data, marketers can instantly identify which assets best match an audience’s interest, region or campaign objectives.

Platform relevance

AI-powered content adaptation and versioning now allows marketers to quickly create different versions of content. This can be leveraged to deliver personalized experiences or quickly test content performance to identify and serve higher-performing assets, which drive better outcomes such as improved conversions or more clicks. This also means less burden on creative teams and reduced agency spend to create the different size variations or aspect ratios needed to meet the requirements of different platforms or channels. Creative teams can pour energy into developing the most compelling creative and concepts, then rely on AI to create the multitude of adaptations, versions, sizes and flavors.

Global relevance

For M&E companies that need to deliver global experiences and marketing content, AI and automation can completely change the localization and translation process. Using tools like Adobe Firefly Services to quickly localize and translate assets dramatically reduces time and cost. The human element is simple, such as reviewing tone or checking for local colloquialisms, before delivering the final asset for activation. For streaming and entertainment companies that need to generate thousands of versions of original assets for different platforms and in various languages, using AI to drive just a 50 percent efficiency gain can mean massive savings in human hours and cost, allowing those hours saved to be deployed to higher value tasks.

Companies using AI for managing content and automating workflows have seen a 34% reduction in content costs and nearly double the amount of output, according to the same Adobe research report. These results are more than just small improvements – this represents a paradigm shift in the marketing function and how it is structured, requiring a blend of creative, tech and data to deliver the benefits.

Building a scalable content discovery platform

While technology is evolving rapidly, only 14% of M&E firms report readiness to handle AI-driven content creation and oversight. AI can help accelerate transformation, but it is not a fix for disjointed processes, fragmented asset management platforms, incomplete metadata or siloed data. The transformation journey often begins with these non-negotiable foundational elements.

We are witnessing the start of a new era in marketing — one where AI is built into the core of marketing operations, giving organizations the tools to meet and surpass, but also shape customer expectations. By investing in solutions that improve efficiency, personalization and speed, M&E companies can drive true relevancy for their content.

For marketers and executives, embracing these new technologies is an obvious imperative. Given the pace of change, speed is of the essence. M&E companies that can adopt and properly integrate these AI tools, paired with a marketing team that understands how to use them, will be able to expand the value of their content and IP, and drive growth in the age of AI.