Adobe is Fighting from the Middle Out

Agencies have been using Adobe as a weapon against platform disintermediation. Last week's Adobe MAX 2025 just revealed agencies are also the target.

For two years, I've written about the existential battle between agencies and platforms. Google, Meta, and Amazon building tools that let brands bypass agencies entirely. Agency leaders defending their value with one core argument: "Brands need platform-agnostic strategic guidance. You can't trust Google to tell you when to use Meta."

It was a good defence. Until Adobe figured out they don't have to choose sides in that war. They can attack both.

Last week's Adobe MAX announcements were a declaration of a two-front offensive: Make creative production so accessible that brands don't need agencies. Make orchestration so powerful that brands don't need direct platform relationships either. Adobe wants to be the NEW intermediary that makes both agencies AND platforms less necessary.

And the way they're doing it reveals the most sophisticated platform strategy I've seen: absorb the point solutions that threatened you, then use them to attack everyone else.

Throughout 2024, Adobe looked vulnerable. Not to Salesforce or Microsoft, but to nimble startups that made creative AI accessible to everyone:

Midjourney exploded with millions of creators generating stunning images without Photoshop. Runway democratised video generation. Canva reached 170+ million users (including my kids, who don't know what Adobe is and is part of the cohort challenge Adobe will face). Leonardo AI, Luma, ElevenLabs and dozens of specialist tools capturing market share Adobe thought was theirs.

These tools had copyright ambiguity. They had brand safety concerns. None of that mattered because they were accessible and they worked. Adobe had superior technology and legal protection. But they were watching the market fragment into specialised tools while their integrated platform was just less exciting.

Here's what Adobe actually announced, and why it matters:

Partner Model Integration: Google Gemini, OpenAI, Runway, Luma AI, ElevenLabs, Topaz Labs, every significant creative AI tool is now inside Adobe's platform. Not through APIs. Not through partnerships that maintain separation. Integrated directly into Firefly, Photoshop, Premiere, and GenStudio.

Adobe didn't compete with Midjourney and Runway. They absorbed them as features.

In 2024, when point solutions were capturing market share, Adobe wasn't falling behind, they were negotiating the partnerships that would let them consolidate the entire creative AI landscape into a single orchestration layer.

Midjourney's image quality? Available through Firefly's partner models. Runway's video generation? Integrated via Luma and Google Veo. ElevenLabs' voice synthesis? Built into Firefly's Generate Speech. Every specialist tool that threatened Adobe's creative dominance is now a module Adobe orchestrates.

Firefly Custom Models let brands train AI on their own creative assets by encoding their entire visual identity into automated systems. This was historically the agency's core value: understanding brands deeply enough to produce consistently on-brand creative at scale.

Content Production Agent interprets marketing briefs and automatically produces channel-specific content aligned with campaign goals and brand guidelines. The agency account team's primary function is now automated.

Firefly Design Intelligence codifies complex design and visual identity rules into "StyleIDs" that generate brand-compliant content globally. This was premium agency expertise: understanding how brand systems work across markets and channels.

Conversational AI assistants across the platform mean marketing managers describe what they want and receive professional output. The creative expertise barrier collapsed.

Adobe's message to brands: "Your agency charges hundreds of thousands for creative services. We've automated their capabilities and integrated every specialist tool they would use. You don't need the intermediary anymore."

GenStudio integrations with Amazon Ads, Google Campaign Manager, LinkedIn, and TikTok enable campaign activation directly from creative production. Create in Adobe, activate across platforms all without leaving Adobe's interface and without direct platform account teams.

Agent Orchestrator manages AI agents across platform connections, automatically optimising budget allocation, creative rotation, and audience targeting. This is exactly what Google, Meta, and Amazon wanted to sell directly to brands: algorithmic optimisation. Adobe inserted themselves as the orchestration layer that captures that value instead.

Brand Concierge guides customers from exploration to purchase while maintaining brand control and cross-platform presence. Instead of Amazon owning the customer journey, the relationship stays with the brand, via Adobe.

Adobe's message to brands: "Platforms will lock you into their ecosystems and optimise for their revenue. We give you platform-agnostic orchestration with your brand at the centre, not theirs."

Conventional platform war wisdom says owning the ends wins. Control the consumer relationship (like platforms) or control the enterprise relationship (like agencies), and you capture value. The middle gets squeezed.

But Adobe's bet is different. The middle might be more defensible because:

1. Creative IP creates irreversible dependency. Once brands train Firefly Foundry custom models on proprietary assets, switching costs become enormous. Your brand intelligence exists in Adobe's infrastructure. Recreating it elsewhere means starting over. Platforms can't offer this because they don't control creative production. Agencies can't offer it because they don't own the technology infrastructure.

2. Orchestration complexity collapsed faster than expected. When coordinating across platforms required specialised expertise, agencies defended their position. But Adobe's AI agents automate what agencies do manually while providing what platforms can't do natively: true cross-platform optimisation.

3. "Commercially safe" eliminates enterprise alternatives. Adobe's legal indemnification for AI-generated content creates a moat competitors can't match. Enterprise legal and procurement teams won't approve tools with copyright ambiguity when Adobe offers clear protection. This isn't feature differentiation, it's risk elimination that prevents evaluation of alternatives.

4. Integration depth beats point solution excellence once you control distribution. Adobe's bet is that brands value workflow efficiency over best-of-breed for individual tasks. Even if Midjourney produces marginally better images or Runway produces marginally better video, the friction of coordinating them makes Adobe's integrated alternative more valuable. And once partner models are inside Adobe's platform, those point solutions become features Adobe distributes rather than competitors Adobe fights.

The agency response will be "We provide strategic value beyond tools." True. But increasingly hard to monetise when Adobe's tools automate tactical execution. Strategy without execution capability forces agencies to use Adobe's platform anyway—making Adobe the more valuable partner from the brand's perspective.

The platform response will be "We own the consumer relationship and conversion data." Also true. But if Adobe captures the brand relationship and creative production, platforms become distribution channels rather than strategic partners—reducing their ability to extract premium pricing.

Adobe's two-front attack works because they're not trying to beat agencies at strategy or platforms at consumer data. They're making creative production so efficient and orchestration so automated that neither strategy nor consumer data provides enough differentiation to justify the costs both currently charge.

Adobe's orchestration strategy may succeed because they've solved the only problem that mattered: how to make both agencies and platforms less necessary simultaneously while capturing the value both used to extract.

In the mid-market ($5M-$80M marketing budgets), Adobe becomes the default orchestration layer by 2027. These brands can't afford premium agency retainers or dedicated platform teams, but they need sophisticated creative production and cross-platform coordination. Adobe's automated capabilities, now enhanced with every point solution that matters to capture this segment decisively.

In the enterprise ($80M+ budgets), Adobe becomes indispensable but not exclusive. The workflow evolves: agencies provide strategic creative direction and cultural campaigns, Adobe produces scaled asset execution, platforms handle direct consumer relationships. Adobe doesn't need to beat anyone completely, they just make themselves essential to everyone's workflow.

Adobe's MAX 2025 announcements reveal a strategy most observers missed: they're not trying to be the best creative tool OR the best orchestration platform. They're trying to own the middle position that makes both agencies AND platforms less necessary by being the orchestration layer everyone else must work through.

This is fighting from the middle out. Not defending the middle ground, but using the middle position to attack both sides simultaneously. Absorb the point solutions that threatened you. Automate the creative production agencies charge for. Provide the platform-agnostic orchestration that makes direct platform relationships less valuable.

The window for brands to establish strategic positioning is now. Adobe's integrated capabilities are new enough that early adopters can negotiate favorable terms and develop internal expertise before market defaults harden. Late movers will face consolidated market power with reduced alternatives.

MAX 2025 demonstrated Adobe has assembled the partnerships, built the infrastructure, and automated the workflows to execute it. The question is whether marketing leaders recognise the three-way battle in time and position themselves to extract value from all three vendors without surrendering strategic control to Adobe's orchestration layer.

Brandflow is written by Justin Billingsley, who has spent his career on all three sides of the industry's table: senior client, global agency leader, technology founder. First published 13 November 2025 in the Brandflow newsletter on LinkedIn.