Static images are less successful in driving customer engagement than videos. Video advertising is a minefield to navigate for brands today. They are increasingly expected to do this at scale while working with the same resources as before.
The challenge in this centers on the current demanding ad landscape we’re in.
Utilizing video is, of course, an effective marketing strategy that can help boost ROI. But an ‘attention recession’ has been born from the fact that the average person sees 4-10,000 ads a day. This requires greater ad personalization to hold the audience’s interest. Companies need a way to create and deliver ads that resonate while keeping their creative production capability lean.
If you’re trying to produce a high volume of creatives but are stalled by slow workflows and personalization challenges, you’re not going through it alone. Around the world, brands just like yours are experiencing many of the same thoughts, concerns, and setbacks.
In this article, we will discuss one such solution for creating at scale and therefore winning the attention of consumers: Creative Automation.
What is Creative Automation?
Creative Automation is the creative production process of leveraging technology to scale your asset production by automatically adapting and changing certain aspects of your banner or video content. For example, the size, format, Calls To Action, and graphic elements. This enables high-volume content creation for high-volume demand.
Creative Automation helps remove bottlenecks in the creative production process by shortening your time-to-market speed, personalizing content at the touch of a button, and making overall the process of creative production and video advertising easier for your organization.
Without the option of creating and adapting visual assets like banners or videos with ease, designers and marketers would need to manually create each asset, one by one, ensuring each has high quality and brand consistency. With Creative Automation, you can automatically create brand-compliant content variations, which gives creative people time back to focus on higher-value tasks like conceptualizing original ideas. They get to save time and resources by relying on the use of dynamic creatives.
Dynamic creatives consist of a base creative (video, banner, or image) in which elements are set to be swappable. These are called “dynamic creatives”. They are typically text, images, sound, video, or even entire scenes. This gives you the ability to instantly create customized videos or banners at scale without sacrificing creative quality.
A dynamic element is something in a piece of creative that can be changed from a data trigger. This can be the aspect ratio of the video, a text element, an image element, a video element, etc.
Why do you need Creative Automation?
With more privacy laws in place, personalization and individualization will be more difficult to achieve in online advertising. However, it won’t be an impossible task.
As we enter a cookieless era, Instead of “profiling” their audiences, large advertisers will have to reconnect with their customers and shift their focus towards strategies such as contextual advertising.
Producing personalized content for your audience is no longer a nice option. It’s now a necessity. If your team wants to increase conversion and exposure, this kind of strategy is the only way to go. From targeted search keywords to crafting relevant ads. Marketers can now create tailored journeys based on what’s most important to their audiences to help connect the dots for future customers.
For example, your brand needs to create an ad campaign that targets consumers from a specific age group, in a certain country, on specific channels.
With Creative Automation, you can easily achieve this! And that is by taking the components of this specific ad – messaging, images, Calls To Action – and creating all the variations you need instantly.
The 8 Reasons
There is a myriad of reasons to adopt new practices in today’s complex digital marketing landscape. Creative Automation is a future-proof solution to the demand for more and more ad creatives as it can be used:
- To scale asset production: Roll out dynamic creatives (videos and banners) at scale to serve your global markets
- To target your audience: Tailor your ads to match your audience’s intent and reach people at the right time, channel, and with the right message
- Cut production costs: Cut cost on the production process without adding headcount
- To personalize ads: Drive your audience through the funnel with personalized video experiences
- To collaborate: Create workflows on a global scale by knowing who is using a creative and in which part of the world
- Prevent ad fatigue: Combat ad fatigue by recycling your existing creatives
- Achieve team focus: Help your team stay focused on creative ideation by automating repetitive tasks
- Adapt at scale: Adapt your ads based on the format you need for omnichannel campaigns
How Creative Automation works
To get started with the actual process, you need to create a template. It should consist of a base creative (video or image), and define which elements are swappable.
In fact, an example step-by-step process can be summarized as easily as this:
- Create a base asset in the Storyteq platform using its Template Builder or After Effects extension
- Plugin which products and prices your clients want to promote (dynamic elements)
- Render the video automatically
- Get the files back in just a few minutes; share them with your customer, add them to your channels, or use them for split testing.
Creative Automation and Social Media
As channels evolved and multiplied, they also started to introduce more formats. Social channels like YouTube, TikTok, or Instagram now handle videos, which offers flexibility to use them across many stages of the marketing funnel.
This has a cascading effect on marketers. They now need to consider what the right way to communicate with their audience is. Using Storyteq’s Creative Automation, creative and marketing teams can tailor any media to all of these different channels in a matter of minutes.
The outcomes and long-term impact of Creative Automation
Through Creative Automation, companies are 4x more likely to see improvements in their asset post-production creative processes. But how exactly? There’s more to it than removing or automating non-essential steps from our daily workflows and creating personalized content.
- Brand consistency:
For many creative teams, branding compliance is just an extra bottleneck in the constant battle to get a marketing campaign launched on time.
Creative Automation allows your teams or clients all across the globe to output the versions they need using your universal guidelines, without the constant need to keep teams accountable for their deliverables. Creatives can be rapidly commented on, reviewed, and reiterated. Thus keeping control of creatives and eliminating the need for sending emails back and forth.
- Optimize your creatives to gain valuable insights:
The only way to find out what works best is by testing. All ad strategies and underlying processes should be focused on agility, flexibility, and the ability to adapt to changing circumstances fast.
A more personalized ad experience brings you closer to your audience. And with improved segmentation comes the ability to deliver a more personalized experience. If you know where your audience is in the funnel then you can serve them with the ad that is best suited to their stage and their preferences.
Wrapping up
Creative Automation is for any marketing manager or digital creative lead with teams who need to produce assets at scale or to keep their branding on point. As we have so far explained, Creative Automation makes this process a lot easier by removing this repetitive work. This allows designers to focus on designing, editing, and animating their craft. But don’t take our word for it. Real-life digital creative leads and marketing managers have shared their experience of why Creative Automation has proven essential to their production process.
Take this recent study with one of the world’s largest sports betting and gaming groups. Despite having an in-house creative team of 150 people, they were experiencing a slow time-to-market and their creativity was being diminished by the time spent on repetitive versioning tasks. With Storyteq, they could centralize operations across departments, lessening the back and forth between teams and streamlining processes with our software in a way that generated a large volume at much greater speeds.
Transform your creative processes with Creative Automation, and focus on the work that matters.
About the author
Jenni works with Storyteq, in the field of Creative Automation. She regularly shares industry expertise on the relatively new and competitive software which is changing the face of creative production. Creativity takes time, but creative production should not. Magic happens when we let technology empower creativity in this way. Storyteq’s Cloud-based Creative Automation platform enables both creative and marketing teams to produce multiple variations of premium videos, HTML5 banners and statics, in minutes.
