Adobe Summit 2026 · Session OS219 · MARKETO · Watch on Adobe.com
Template compatibility with the legacy v2 editor is live, hundreds of customers have already adopted it, and the feature set has crossed parity. If you've been waiting for a legitimate reason to migrate, this session from Joe Stewart and Deepthi Amirthagadeswaran is the closest thing to a green light Adobe has given.
Legacy Template Migration: What 'Parity' Actually Means in Practice
Joe Stewart was direct about it: the new Email Designer has reached use case parity with the legacy editor, and Template Compatibility — launched at the end of last year — converts your existing v2 templates into fully editable assets in the new designer. That removes the single biggest blocker most teams cited for delaying migration.
In the demo, Deepthi Amirthagadeswaran walked through the conversion flow: navigate to the Marketo Templates tab when creating a new email template, select any approved v2 template, and within seconds you have a compatible, editable version in the new designer. Her caveat is worth noting — she explicitly recommended reviewing every component post-conversion to confirm accurate detection before putting templates into production.
Fragments are the direct analog to modules in the legacy editor. From a converted template, you can select any structure, choose Save as Fragment, and it becomes a reusable component. If your team has built muscle memory around module-based template architecture, the mental model transfers cleanly.
Content Locking: Granular Governance Without Custom HTML
Content Locking is the feature that makes the new Email Designer viable for organizations with strict brand or compliance requirements. Stewart described the capability in terms of levels — you can lock at the template level, at individual structures, or at specific components within a structure. The practical effect is that template builders define the guardrails once, and email authors can't break them.
Deepthi's demo made the granularity concrete. She toggled governance on at the template level, then applied component-specific rules: the hero image was set to content-editable only (swap the image, no style changes), the heading and subtext were set to fully editable (text and styling both open), and the CTA button was locked to content-only editing — authors can change the button label but cannot touch button color, text color, or size. That level of specificity is what keeps brand reviews from becoming a bottleneck on every send.
This matters most in multi-team or multi-brand environments where central brand or legal teams need assurance without being in the approval chain for every email. Combined with the audit trail in the collaboration workflow, there's now a defensible record of who touched what.
Brand Themes: Centralizing Style Rules Outside of HTML
Brand Themes address a workflow problem that's been friction for years: style consistency enforced through custom HTML rather than a centralized definition. Stewart described Themes as reusable styling rules — colors, fonts, button styles, layout spacing — that apply automatically across templates. The important operational benefit is that you can create multiple theme variants, which is directly relevant for teams managing more than one brand or business unit out of a single Marketo instance.
Deepthi demonstrated a workflow that will interest teams migrating legacy templates: from within a converted template, you can navigate to the Themes tab and have Marketo auto-detect and generate a theme based on the styling already defined in that template. It's not a manual rebuild — Marketo reads the existing styles and creates a starting definition. From there, you can edit: she removed borders from primary and secondary buttons directly in the theme definition before saving.
The GenAI layer on top of Brands is worth flagging separately. The AI assistant can reference brand definitions — assets, guidelines, voice — when generating copy or images. That's the mechanism that keeps AI-generated content from drifting off-brand, assuming the brand definition is well-maintained.
AI and Adobe Express: Where the Integration Is Actually Useful
The AI Assistant and Adobe Express integrations are positioned as time-savers on specific, bounded tasks — not as autonomous email generators. Stewart's framing was that the goal is to spark creativity and speed up iteration, not replace marketers. For MOps practitioners who've been skeptical of broad AI claims, that framing is more honest than most.
The practical scope in the demo: Deepthi used the AI assistant to generate a replacement hero image via Adobe Firefly, directly inside the email editor. She then opened the embedded Adobe Express interface to crop and edit that image without leaving Marketo. Adobe Express Quick Actions — crop, background removal, format conversion — is included for all Marketo Engage customers, which means no additional licensing conversation for basic image editing.
Conditional Content is the personalization mechanism that replaces dynamic content from the legacy editor — and Stewart was explicit that it goes further than the legacy implementation. Multiple section variants within a single email, rules based on country, industry, company size, behavior, or account-level data, built through a drag-and-drop condition builder. The operational value is scaling personalization without multiplying email assets.
Collaboration Workflow and Dark Mode: Operational Details Worth Knowing
The built-in collaboration workflow eliminates the export-to-Google-Docs-or-Figma review cycle that most teams have accepted as a given. Stakeholders leave comments directly on the email inside Marketo, can tag teammates, and receive notifications. All activity is tracked in a digital audit trail. Deepthi demonstrated tagging a colleague with a specific task; that colleague receives a direct notification linking to the email asset. It's not a sophisticated project management system, but it removes the external tool dependency for review rounds and keeps version history traceable.
Dark Mode Preview is a narrower but increasingly relevant capability. Stewart noted dark mode is becoming more prevalent across email clients and devices. The implementation is straightforward — a toggle in the editor shows a dark mode rendering, and you can make dark-mode-specific image substitutions without affecting the light mode view. Deepthi demonstrated this directly: swap the hero image for the dark mode view, light mode stays untouched. For teams that have been ignoring dark mode rendering because previewing it required Litmus or manual testing, this removes that excuse.
Litmus Integration and Spam Detection are also listed as available capabilities, though they were not demoed in depth in this session.
Key takeaways
- Template Compatibility is live — approved v2 templates convert to the new designer in seconds, but validate every component before pushing to production.
- Content Locking operates at three levels (template, structure, component) with distinct modes: fully editable, content-only, or locked. Map your governance requirements to these modes before rebuilding templates.
- Brand Themes can be auto-generated from an existing template's styles rather than built from scratch — useful for teams migrating a large template library.
- Adobe Express Quick Actions (crop, background removal, format conversion) is included for all Marketo Engage customers with no additional licensing required.
- The collaboration workflow creates a tracked audit trail inside Marketo — this replaces external review tools and gives compliance teams a defensible record.
Bottom line
The new Email Designer has earned a serious look for production migration — parity is real, Template Compatibility removes the rebuild burden, and the governance controls are mature enough for multi-brand or compliance-sensitive orgs. The teams still sitting on the legacy editor are now holding the short end of the feature gap.
