Creative Production

Creative automation: Why not ditch the manual effort?

Wasted Assets

Many global brands report that half of their assets never make it to their target audiences, eating up a considerable amount of their budgets. Choosing a platform that brings together media and production allows you to reduce the waste to zero.

Creative automation technology has advanced significantly in recent years. You can now drive multi-market campaigns with a click of a button, with automatic changes to the language, copy, packshot and the format of an ad. Content automation is no longer about creating multiple variants of an asset fast. It’s about bringing intelligence to ad-making.

Existing manual workflows simply cannot cope with the increased demand for content that needs to be delivered ever faster. We are entering an age of the Content Gap. We have data, insight and demand for more content but no way of making it fast or cheap enough with the traditional way of working. Automation and waste reduction strategies are needed to have any chance of filling the content gap.

Getting marketing automation right 

Content automation will become a normal part of the creative process. It’s important to choose a solution that will empower marketers to deliver multi-channel campaigns optimised for the modern data-driven marketing world.

What are the key things to consider when discussing marketing automation?

1. AUTOMATE IT ALL 

Marketing campaigns need to influence the entire customer journey. They also need to be simple to implement. To truly benefit from content automation, potential solutions should ideally create adapts for all channels, without compromising creative quality. Creating TVC, OOH and POS adapts as easily as the video, digital or ecomm ones.

2. CONNECT WITH EASE 

The term ‘connected ecosystem’ is often used, but what does that mean? It’s important to connect all providers in one place so the flow of assets and data is seamless. From media plan, creative master, translations and adapts as well as DAM tools, rights management and delivery platforms. If you want the benefit of Creative Automation you need to design a connected stack.

3. TEMPLATE FOR SUCCESS

Making templates to drive automation can be laborious and complex, removing much of the cost benefit. You need a platform that enables simple template production in tools your partners already use every day. Ideally, the entire process of template creation should be automated, reducing the time to make them from half a day to a few seconds.

4. MANAGE WASTE

With automation providing unlimited variants of content at one’s fingertips, it’s easy to produce more than you need. Many global brands report that half of their assets never make it to their target audiences, eating up a considerable amount of their budgets. 

Choosing a platform that brings together media and production allows you to reduce the waste to zero. With the media plan dictating all placements, you only produce what is required and more importantly, you only pay for what is actually needed.

5. UNDERSTAND THE IMPACT 

We are swimming in data, but rarely is it delivered in a format and time that allows those valuable insights to drive improved ROI during a campaign. You need to connect the Client, Media Agency, Creative Agency and Production Agency together in one data lake. Linking the asset and its performance to the tools to change it in one simple real-time dashboard.

6. HEALTH WARNING

Be mindful when implementing Creative Automation. All that easy to make content needs to be managed carefully and with precision. Without you even knowing it a producer is keeping you safe. Checking the specification, rights management, compliance and trafficking tools. This is all being done in a manual workflow and you likely don’t even see it happening. Automation must mirror these checks and balances or you better be ready with your chequebook to pay out late copy fees and rights infringements.

CreateTOTALLY is a next-generation marketing automation platform, driving the future of brands. 

Our mission is to be the universal platform that realises the real power of automation for all brands and their agency partners. Uniquely combining media planning, workflow automation and content automation with omni-channel campaign delivery, we seamlessly harness and optimize every brand asset, with no compromise on creative quality or brand consistency. 

We reduce asset waste to zero by putting the media plan at the heart of the content creation process, ultimately shifting the mindset from ‘just-in-case’ to ‘just-in-time’ production. Bringing media insights into the production process, we enable brand owners and agency teams to optimise assets throughout the lifecycle of the campaign, all within one platform. Linking back in-channel performance and insights to deliver campaigns that are optimised for the modern data-driven marketing world.