Turning the Table: Marisa Biaggi

Our 2021 Advertising Awards judge Marisa Biaggi, Ph.D., has to be one of the most diversely accomplished judges we’ve had. Marisa holds a Ph.D. in musicology from Princeton University and is the Group Creative Director for Connected Experiences at Edelman. Passionate about connecting society and culture through creativity, she leads creative development and storytelling for a variety of brands across all of Edelman's practices, and is the firm’s creative lead for Adobe. Prior to joining Edelman in 2010, Marisa oversaw creative and production at the Met Opera, for which her team won Emmy and Peabody Awards.

We asked Marisa to share a recent project that she holds as a favourite or that she was particularly proud of and she was kind enough to provide an in-depth look at her and her team’s work for Adobe MAX. Check it out below.

Adobe MAX Out of Office

Adobe is such an exciting brand for our creative team—not only because we are all superfans and users of the products (seriously, where would we all be without Creative Cloud??), but also because we get so many opportunities to partner with them to broker these awesome intersections with culture at large—solving real challenges and telling awesome stories in creative, engaging, and unexpected ways. Adobe MAX Out of Office is one of those great projects.

Last year’s Adobe MAX creativity conference was free, online, and its biggest yet, so we had this incredible opportunity to think about how we could drive excitement and engagement around this year’s MAX (also free and online!) to make it even bigger.

We started with the insight that many of us are still working from home, so the idea of “protected” time to disconnect from work (and let’s be real, life) to attend a conference in the way we used to seems like, well, a thing of the past. This boundary-blurring was proved out in Adobe’s Future of Time study, which in no uncertain terms revealed that, more than ever, people are feeling stressed, stretched, and totally burnt out because of our hybrid home/work environments. And as creatives, we know that nothing is a bigger enemy to inspiration and productivity than burnout and distraction! So, we wanted to find a fun and exciting way to protect people's time so they could fully immerse in this year’s Adobe MAX.

Whether it’s for vacation or to attend a professional event like Adobe MAX, we realized that there’s one tried and true way people try to protect their time away: the classic out of office message. But let’s face it, most OOO notes are pretty generic and frequently ignored. So we thought, what if we gave people an out of office reply that no one could ignore? That’s why we worked with Adobe to team up with Cameo and stars of everyone’s favourite office-based sitcom to surprise and delight creators with custom OOO replies, making Adobe MAX Out of Office the world’s first personalized, celebrity out of office message.

To kick off, we released a video with the amazing Mindy Kaling and immediately garnered coverage in outlets like AdAge and DesignTaxi. Then, with our team of celebs—including Andy Buckley, Melora Hardin, David Koecher and Kate Flannery—we started the fun task of creating over 80 custom messages for potential MAX attendees.

To do this, we used data and intelligence to help us identify creators that Adobe MAX would be of interest to. We researched to find out each person’s likes, interests and hobbies, and then used that intel to help our celebs craft super personalized OOO videos, which we deliver by tagging our creators in tweets from @adobemax. As I type this, we are still ramping up to Adobe MAX on Oct 26-28, and surprising and delighting more people every day! So far, the reactions have been fantastic, so it’s clear we’ve struck a (happy) nerve. We can’t wait to see the rest.

For more information about Adobe MAX visit https://max.adobe.com.

It was a pleasure having Marisa on our jury and we can’t thank her enough for her perspicacious judging and for sharing insight into her process and work.