- The fictional marketers who came up with a new jingle for Adobe’s Acrobat software are at it again with a new campaign to promote the product’s new AI-powered tools.
- The team, played by actors Hasan Minhaj and Patty Guggenheim, anchors a new five-episode web series called “The Marketers.” In the series, the pair is charged with devising a follow-up campaign that is even bigger and better than the jingle.
- The series is Adobe Acrobat’s first episodic scripted comedy series. Episodes will drop on the brand’s YouTube channel every Thursday through April 16.
The campaign picks up where the previous effort left off, with the first episode beginning with a recap of Minhaj and Guggenheim auditioning singers for the jingle. Exhilarated by their success, they are quickly brought back to Earth when they find out they have to create the next campaign to show off Acrobat’s new features.
Minhaj and Guggenheim gather a team of marketing archetypes, including “the best data guy south of the North Pole,” a Gen Alpha trendsetter, a grizzled exec who has been in the business for fifty years, and a woman who only got the job through nepotism. Together, the team tosses around ideas for the new campaign, which are all summarized in a handy PDF Space. They then use artificial intelligence to come up a plan that incorporates their many disparate ideas.
The rest of the adventure will be laid out in the following four episodes, which will feature cameos from Iliza Schlesinger, Mario Lopez and others. In addition to running on YouTube, the episodes will be cut into short-form pieces for use on social media.
“We wanted to answer the critical question most marketers face today: how do you show up for an audience in a way that adds to their experience instead of interrupting it?,” said Jared Carneson, global head of social media at Adobe.
“The answer wasn’t about making more engaging ads. It was about marketing-driven entertainment. Something additive,” he continued. “Something that gives more than it takes. Acrobat isn’t the story – the characters are. Acrobat is how they brainstorm, build presentations, shape their campaigns. It doesn’t interrupt the narrative. It moves it forward. That’s the shift we’re making: from content people tolerate to content that earns the attention it asks for. We believe this does.”
