Adobe Photoshop has long been the gold standard for digital creativity. But after years of over-reliance on product marketing, the brand had begun to lose relevance and buzz with young creators.

To re-build brand belief for this next generation of creators we developed a campaign inspired by their creative orientation: the world is a canvas for them to transform.

The centerpiece of this campaign was the Fantastic Voyage film. In it, a girl uses the power of her creativity and Photoshop to transform her everyday commute into a fantastic voyage to the furthest corners of her imagination.

But before our hero could apply the transformational power of her imagination, art production had to first construct her reality. Each setting was carefully built from scratch on a soundstage to become the convincing fabric of reality, the canvas, onto which our hero’s imagination is projected.

Then VFX brought our hero’s imagination to life. From tiny details like butterflies fluttering over a subway floor transformed into a flowering meadow to macro settings like a futuristic megacity breaching the clouds, every detail of our hero’s imagination was created in VFX in a creatively transformative effort equal to the hero’s in the film.

To give our film its due, we relied on a video-rich media plan. Digital and social video placements put the film in the contexts relevant to our audience of young creators. Additional broadcast brought the film to prime time, serving to cement the stature of the brand.

Within two months of launch the campaign had earned over 214M impressions and ~86k visits to adobe.com. No wonder as the film continues to beat engagement metrics for video completion rate (67% vs. 48% benchmark) and YouTube view-through rate (55.4% vs. 30% benchmark). So far, the Photoshop campaign has garnered +5 pt gains in unaided lift, putting the brand back on the radars of today’s creators as a powerful tool to unleash imagination.