Marketing campaigns for software often highlight advanced or futuristic features.
But when Adobe sought to acquire and activate more customers for Photoshop, its popular image-editing software, it chose an unlikely route: Looking to the primitive, pre-technological tools of an artist who died more than 70 years ago.
“We needed to find something that would give technology soul,” explained Oskar Hellqvist, creative director of Swedish creative communication agency Abby Priest, at the Data & Marketing Association’s (DMA) &Then Conference in Las Vegas.
Abby Priest’s campaign for Adobe’s Photoshop found its soul in the paintbrushes of Edvard Munch, the Norwegian artist most...