Adobe Creator Live London brought together 550 invited creators and social media influencers at Olympia for the brand’s first creator-first, creator-led event in EMEA.
Delivered by Taylor Bennett in The National Hall, the event combined live performances, creator talks and interactive ‘passion zones’ spanning fashion, music and lifestyle, sport, fitness and wellbeing, and food. The aim was to position Adobe as relevant within the UK creator ecosystem and test a new, community-led approach to engagement.
Starting a new conversation with creators
Creator Live marked a significant departure from Adobe’s established user-conference model. Rather than place product announcements at the centre of the programme, the brand wanted to create experiences and stories that creators would interpret and share with their own audiences.
Russell Bennett, partner and CEO at Taylor Bennett, describes creators as ‘the new media’ – curators of highly engaged communities who communicate in their own language. “This was about starting an Adobe story and opening communications with a new audience,” he says. “We had to create stories that people wanted to tell for us, to their audiences, wrapped up in their own narratives.”
The event was invite-only, with the audience selected to reflect a range of creative disciplines, career stages and communities. Product adoption remained a longer-term objective, but the immediate priorities were relevance, awareness and insight: learning how Adobe could build a scalable creator community in EMEA.
Reinventing the event in eight weeks
The original plan had been very different. Six months out, Olympia had been secured for a more conventional creative user conference. Following a series of internal changes, that format was no longer desired.
Taylor Bennett worked with Adobe’s event team to explore what else could be done with the venue. The concept of a creator ‘fairground’ emerged, and Creator Live was born with roughly eight weeks to turn a completely new idea into reality.
“The time pressure was probably the biggest challenge,” says Bennett. “We had to design experiences that made sense and connected with many different audiences, while also understanding what the venue needed from us to achieve our ambitions within that timeframe.”
At the heart of The National Hall, Taylor Bennett installed a 360-degree main stage, with the passion zones radiating from it. The environments deliberately moved away from the familiar screen-and-lectern format, using designs inspired by a wave, a cloud, a festival and mountain heights to support the stories being told on each stage.
A professional live podcast studio allowed attendees to record content with a full AV team, while other activations included live content creation and personalised summer-hat printing in conjunction with the Alessia Russo Foundation. The stage structures have since been reused at other events.
One of the standout moments featured live improvisational rapper Abandoman. Audience members supplied three words, which he transformed into a song in the moment, while digital artists used Adobe Firefly to generate accompanying artwork live on screens around the audience.
The Spud Bros and Niko collaboration also became a major social moment, generating 118,885 engaged interactions and becoming Adobe’s best-performing UK post of the month.
Every touchpoint needed to be shareable. As Bennett explains: “When you invite an audience of content creators, you effectively have hundreds of reporters in the room. It is a big risk, but the moment the doors opened and the phones went up, we knew we had achieved something.”
Creating impact beyond the room
Olympia provided a distinctive setting for the experience. The National Hall’s glass roof and historic ironwork contrasted with the modern creator community and Adobe’s technology, while the modernised foyer provided the capacity needed to welcome hundreds of attendees and supported quick-scan badge printing from RefTech for a mobile-first audience.
“The new foyer space was large enough to handle around 550 creators, as well as several hundred Adobe guests and stakeholders,” says Bennett. “It gave us the space to get people through registration quickly and into the experience.”
The hall’s natural light could have presented a design challenge, but the team used it to its advantage, creating a bright and colourful environment rather than trying to reproduce an evening-style production during the day.
“Natural daylight can occasionally be a challenge because lighting is usually one of a designer’s best tools,” says Bennett. “Rather than fight it, we used the unique brightness of The National Hall to create a colourful explosion of expression wherever people looked.”
For Bennett, the combination of Olympia’s heritage and redevelopment made it particularly well suited to an event connecting creativity with new technology. “It was a happy marriage,” he says. “The grandeur of the old building mixed with the newness of the redevelopment lent itself beautifully to this audience. There was something special about ultra-modern social media sitting inside a deeply historic London venue.”
Bennett also believes Olympia’s wider redevelopment represents an important opportunity for the events industry and for the return of major events to West London. “Taking events back to West London is important, particularly following the loss of Earls Court,” he says. “The reinvention of Olympia is fantastic for our industry. With the new spaces, hotels, restaurants and branding opportunities, it would be exciting to bring the event back and explore how it could grow across the venue.”
Ultimately, the event exceeded its targets. User-generated content reached 6.1 times its target and total interactions reached 27.1 million. Social-first activations generated 613 pieces of user-generated content, more than 350 posts and over 100 story tags.
Across Creator Live and the accompanying Ambassador Summit, 100 Adobe Firefly and Express ambassadors produced 454 pieces of content and 506,000 interactions.
Adobe also secured 46 pieces of traditional and non-traditional coverage within 30 days, against a target of 30, with 100% positive sentiment. The event achieved a Net Promoter Score of 64, above the benchmark of 59 for a comparable industry event, while 87% of attendees agreed with the statement: ‘Adobe is for someone like me’. Capturing that sense of relevance was particularly important for a first-edition event designed to engage a new community.
Bennett believes the results demonstrate the value of giving audiences the freedom to shape and share a brand experience for themselves.
“Start with the story your audience will want to tell, not simply the message the brand wants to broadcast,” he says. “Creator Live was not just a successful day at Olympia; it was the start of a new Adobe story with a new audience.”