Best Buy is North America’s leading consumer electronics retailer, reaching more than 200 million customers across its stores, marketplace, online channels and retail media. With such a large customer base, the company needs to create, store and distribute huge volumes of digital assets across different teams and platforms, while maintaining the right approvals, usage rights and brand consistency.

Today, Best Buy’s digital asset management system (DAM) is more than a place to simply store content. It now helps the company produce, manage, and publish content into a single AI-ready content supply chain through Adobe Experience Manager Assets, Adobe Workfront, and Firefly Creative Production. This allows teams to create, govern, and reuse content at a faster pace.

The importance of scaling content and marketing campaigns can’t be ignored, but systems must be in place to support this and ensure success. When leaders prioritise the infrastructure behind the content and not just the content itself, businesses are likely to gain a competitive advantage. 

Scaling an AI-powered content supply chain 

Within its Experience Manager Assets system, Best Buy added almost 350,000 more digital assets over the last year, managing over 1.4 million in total. Altogether, these assets are used across a wide range of teams, including ecommerce, PR, and marketing.

The challenge is not simply managing this vast volume of content; it’s ensuring the correct content reaches the right audiences and channels at the right time. This is where metadata becomes crucial. To create a more connected content ecosystem, Best Buy has reduced its number of asset management systems from 22 to just 5, using metadata, approval statuses, and taxonomy. These allow teams to quickly see where an asset originated, how it can be used, and whether it requires further review. 

Such tools allow marketers to spend less time searching for content or re-creating assets that already exist. For instance, approved brand content can be reused across email, advertising and ecommerce. 

As AI streamlines the creation of more content, organising and distributing that content becomes just as important as the ability to produce it. Inconsistent metadata and taxonomy can make growing content libraries harder to manage, increasing the risk of duplication and unnecessary complexity. The underlying infrastructure is key to ensuring marketing teams can scale content without sacrificing control, consistency, or efficiency. 

AI powering entire content supply chain

Best Buy has already introduced AI into all stages of its content supply chain. Adobe Firefly, “a family of generative artificial intelligence models and web apps” is helping the retailer produce and expand on-brand content via generated and adapted assets. Doing so allows its marketing team to create more alternatives for different channels, while cutting manual work. 

Best Buy also works with two other Adobe tools – Adobe Workfront and Adobe Experience Manager Assets. Workfront helps teams improve production and creative workflows, simultaneously connecting metadata and project information. Adobe Experience Manager Assets implements “AI-powered tagging, search, and governance,” helping teams track authorised content, understand usage permissions, and reuse assets on a multichannel basis. 

Stacy Aase, associate director of product management, marketing technology, at Best Buy commented, “With Adobe Firefly, our creative team can take an asset, use AI to bring elements together, and get it 80% of the way there. Designers then step in to refine the details and deliver the final 20%.” 

AI is being used to aid creative judgment rather than replace it. Gen AI is proving to be a valuable tool that completes repetitive, high-volume production tasks, freeing up teams to share on-brand content across more channels and enabling designers to focus on the most important matters. 

AI can help retailers like Best Buy accelerate content production and distribution, but governance is key to ensuring that increased production doesn’t lead to inconsistent branding, copyright issues, and unapproved content.

This has been demonstrated by Best Buy which established an AI task force across its creative, legal, metadata, and compliance teams, setting out guidelines for AI adoption. The company also incorporated governance directly within its DAM via taxonomy controls, metadata standards, and rights management practices. 

When rolling out AI at scale, leaders must be prepared to empower their workforce with the necessary tools and workflows that make scaling content easier. Therefore, change management is just as much a leadership responsibility as a technical one.

Brands that build an environment that supports their content strategy in an AI-led marketing era will be better equipped to meet growing content demand, as well as staying on brand. As Best Buy has demonstrated, strong foundations can help marketing teams keep content relevant, consistent, and ready to share across diverse channels.

AI’s impact on the marketing landscape and supply chains will be central to discussions at upcoming DMWF events, beginning with the next conference in Amsterdam from 24-25 November 2026. 

See also: Samsung targets Apple’s iPhone Duo launch with reactive social campaign 

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