NHL and Adobe Connect AI Content Creation With Fan Personalization
The NHL’s Adobe partnership connects AI content creation, fan insights and campaign delivery across the league and its 32 clubs.
The partnership gives the league and its 32 clubs access to an enterprise marketing stack, linking creative production with fan insights and campaign delivery.
A league can produce thousands of content variations and still struggle to reach a fan with something relevant. The harder task is connecting what the organization knows about that fan with the creative work and delivery decisions that follow.
The NHL is addressing that challenge through a partnership announced September 28 with Adobe, which becomes an Official Creative, Marketing and AI Partner ahead of the 2026–27 season. The agreement gives the league and its 32 clubs access to Adobe CX Enterprise solutions.
The announced plans connect three functions. Adobe GenStudio will support content creation and adaptation for different markets and languages. Adobe Experience Platform will provide a real-time view of fan preferences, with Adobe Journey Optimizer activating those insights across channels including web, app, email and in-arena experiences.
“The NHL's greatest strength has always been the passion our fans bring to the game.” — David Lehanski, Executive Vice President of Innovation and Growth Strategy, NHL
For sports marketing leaders, the potential lies in the connection between those functions. A content team might prepare several versions of a campaign around a rivalry game. Fan insights could help determine which audience receives a team-focused story, an event invitation or an introduction to a rising player. Campaign results could then inform the next creative decision. That is an illustrative workflow, rather than a deployment described in the announcement.
Today, those steps often sit with different teams, agencies and systems. Creative staff work toward an asset deadline, CRM specialists build audience segments, and channel managers decide when to distribute the campaign. Connecting the work can shorten handoffs and give each team a clearer view of the outcome it is trying to achieve.
The league-wide scope adds another dimension. Shared infrastructure could give clubs reusable approaches to content, audience activation and measurement while preserving their local identities. A club should still sound like its community. The value of a common platform is that successful practices can travel between markets without requiring every team to build the same capability from scratch.
A separate possibility is fan participation. The partners say Adobe Express, using Adobe Firefly and NHL-themed templates, could eventually let supporters create and share their own hockey content. This remains a prospective initiative. Its appeal would depend on giving fans useful creative freedom around the players and moments they care about.
The commercial implications also deserve attention. An official partnership creates visibility for a technology supplier, while a league deployment can provide a concrete example of its products at work. For leagues evaluating similar relationships, rights revenue and operating value should each have clear measures. Sponsorship exposure is one outcome; faster campaign production or stronger fan engagement is another. Financial terms and the agreement’s duration were not disclosed in the announcement.
For the NHL, useful measures could include time from brief to approved campaign, the effort required to adapt content for another market, and incremental engagement or conversion compared with an existing approach. Those measures would show whether the platform helps staff make better decisions and gives fans more reason to return.
The announcement establishes an enterprise marketing direction rather than reporting results. Its significance is the ambition to connect fan understanding, creative work and delivery across a league. If that connection works well, personalization becomes a repeatable part of sports marketing operations, with creative teams spending more time on the stories that make hockey worth following.
NHL Public Relations
