Scott Belsky: How to bring creatives and marketers to work together

For the longest time, the creative world was fragmented leaving designers, artists and the creative community scattering to find a place to showcase their creations. All changed the day Scott Belsky, one of the creative world’s rock star decided to unleash Behance. Beginning his career at Goldman Sachs, Belsky soon realised it wasn’t where he wanted to be. He then turned his efforts to accumulating capital to quit his job and bootstrap his startup – Behance. Years later, Adobe acquired Behance for a reported over $150 million.

Scott Belsky, EVP,  Adobe & Founder Behance in Conversation with Plunge Daily’s Ashutosh Bhattacharya

Today Belsky is the Chief Product officer, overseeing Creative Cloud and Executive Vice President of Adobe. Commenting on his role, he said, “Now my job is to understand the problems of some of those creative people in the world and help develop products that empower them to bring their ideas to see the light of day – what better job could I possibly have?”

Adobe’s Photoshop and Illustrator are technologies that creative minds around the world have in their arsenal. According to Belsky, software such as these have helped define the creative industry as it stands today and is still the ‘life-blood’ of creatives across sectors.

While these creative tools have been industry favourites, Adobe has been innovating and working on transforming the way it gets delivered to a user. Cloud today has wholly remodelled the way users can access numerous tools from Adobe. From days of buying the box-set of software every year or so, the California-based software giant has pushed their products to be made available as a service on the cloud. Users today can have access to upgrades and new updates as soon as they are released. Coupled with mobility and portability the move has been genuinely disruptive.




Scott added “The role that Creative Cloud plays in delivering experiences, across industries, has multiple parts to it. First, there are the creators themselves that try to help people tell stories and help to merchandise information so that we are receptive to it and that it moves us and compels us to take action – to buy things and to do things.”

Today in the fast-moving world of Social Media and 24X7 experience be it in stores, on phones, while watching television and in mediums that are still being explored – like augmented reality and virtual reality – creativity is all set to play an important role. Scott added “Marketers and creatives need to be able to work together very efficiently and that’s one of the reasons why Adobe has focused on innovation. Both, the creative side and helping creators do their most creative work as well as for marketers and any business that wants to control and deliver a better experience to their customers.”

Any technology-centric conversation is incomplete without  Artificial Intelligence & the widely debated pros and cons of Social Media, when asked, Scott said” AI is all the rage these days but what does it mean? To me, it means making our customers more productive and enabling to do things that they just weren’t ever able to do before. It should suggest to you what you’re trying to achieve or just do it for you. With AI, we’re starting to re-imagine what our tools can do for our customers and indeed how it can only transform the creative process as we know it.”




Adobe Sensei is the artificial intelligence initiative from Adobe that focuses on creative problems customers face. While one of Adobe’s objective is to empower the creative community by automating things that would otherwise be time-consuming. They are also looking to bring stakeholders closer and enhancing efficiency.

Speaking on the influence that social media has, Scott said, “When I think about social media and the promise or perils, I think about other technologies over the generations where we have said ‘Oh my goodness, is this going to be a good thing or a bad thing?’ Today’s social media is no different. People are using it to connect, discover, to create revolutions within their towns or countries and there’s so much of opportunity and responsibility regarding how to manage it. You also think about social media and whether the news is real or fake. I hope that social media evolves to help people determine what is real and what is fake and what can be believed.”  He expressed that people have to learn to utilise it in a way that it enhances their lives.




Scott admitted that he was excited to be in India given Adobe’s most exceptional talents were based here. “I’m in India, to just meet a lot of our teams that are doing some of the most important projects in Creative Cloud, thinking about products and planning out the future of what these products can do for the world.”

With the proliferation of smart-phone devices increasing, there is a growing population that no longer wants to work traditionally. Countries like India that are facing a startup and entrepreneurial boom, Scott added, ” It’s so exciting to have a population that’s so mobile ready and creative and excited about those sorts of things – so entrepreneurial – and so we’re trying to bring more of our products to mobile for that reason.”

Adobe pushing products to mobile can be a gamechanger, and the ability to access Creative Cloud anywhere at anytime is a boon for industries and the creative community.