Understanding a new audience for Adobe
Over the past decade, creators have evolved to become some of society’s greatest cultural influencers. With their meteoric rise has come an economy all its own. Today, modern creators are no longer just traditional influencers renting reach to brands; they are Monetizing Social Creators (MSCs) acting as CEOs of multi-platform digital empires.
As a leading creative company, Adobe realized the shift and is facing a critical need to meet and empower this new, parallel creative economy and the creators driving it. Before they could act; however, Adobe needed to more intimately understand this rising generation of creative entrepreneurs.
To deepen our collective read, we conducted a comprehensive two-day ethnographic analysis on the ground at the Adobe MAX conference, speaking directly, and in-depth with 10 MSCs. Additionally, we analyzed hundreds of creator ecosystems, conducted secondary research, and connected with a variety of new and longstanding social-first creators with varying degrees of relation to the brand or its products.
The challenge was to uncover the core psychological drivers of these multi-hyphenate creators to guide Adobe's brand, marketing, and product ecosystems into a parallel creative era.
MSC’s vs. Creative Professionals
Next gen creators or parallel economies?
It would be a mistake to view the Multi-Platform Content Creator (MSC) simply as the “next generation” of traditional creatives. Many established, agency-trained Adobe Creative Pros see the MSC path as a lucrative parallel economy alongside their 9-to-5. Being an ambitious creator in 2026 means applying your talents beyond traditional client work. Ultimately, these two groups have distinct needs driven by platform monetization, not ambition—and many MSCs aspire to run media businesses rather than produce the content themselves.
A breakthrough shift
Through our research, we uncovered a fundamental shift: the modern creator’s core ambition has evolved from fame to freedom.
Fame no longer holds its old currency. In a world of niche algorithm pockets, a creator with 10 million followers can be entirely unknown to an adjacent group, while a micro-creator with 100k followers generates staggering income. True leverage now comes from creative sovereignty—where the advantage shifts from pixel perfection to deep, hyper-individualized audience trust.
In an era where AI commoditizes technical polish, creator freedom relies on balancing artistic control with financial security. To serve this shift, Adobe must evolve beyond being a tool for individual craft to become the foundational engine that helps creators run, expand, and monetize their creative businesses.
For MSCs, visibility is a means to achieve financial and creative independence, not the end goal.
Carolyn Rush
Senior Strategy Director - Koto LA
Designing for an unconventional future
Ultimately, our study clarified both the stated and latent mindset of this critical creative set. In doing so, we provided Adobe with the foundation to successfully shift from a siloed “creativity tool” brand to a vital “business capability” ecosystem fit to further MSC’s entrepreneurial agenda.
Of course, this is but one chapter in the ever-evolving story of creativity. As audiences, brands, and creators continue to navigate the fluid, at times contentious, shift in creative technology that defines this decade, behaviors are sure to evolve. Both among the traditionally trained and the more maverick upstarts among us.
One thing is for sure, MSCs will continue to push into new product categories, demand the infrastructure for their success, and challenge the conventions of our creative past at nearly every turn as they strive toward breakthroughs of their own.
