With customers demanding more content, delivered faster than ever and with greater levels of personalisation, our clients need to be able to meet that demand without breaking their budgets – and automated creative production is often the answer.
Automation is one way in which we deliver the halo content that our clients need to drive business growth and reduce marketing costs. We take their hero creative (often working in direct partnership with their creative agencies), and produce a halo of engaging, tech-enabled, agile content around it. This content is channel-specific, high quality, and delivered at pace, particularly when automating production.
Of course, when automating any aspect of your marketing content, hesitation is understandable. But at ITG, our blended approach balances full automation alongside automated studio production and manual production. We have our Creative Production MD Brett Field to explain how this works for our clients.
How has creative production worked traditionally?
Traditionally, creative production has been a largely manual process that creates an intensive workload utilising production methods and processes that can often be inefficient. It’s a workload that can trap creative production teams in a cycle of repetitive manual creation, amends and tweaks that drive efficiency down.
This approach has always had its place for low-volume bespoke artwork, but also its limitations with cost, and efficiency when agile content at scale is required. The explosion of new channels and subsequent increase in demand for more and more content means the traditional method of manual creative production is now unsustainable. The world has changed and with it, the thirst for fast and affordable agile content. But that hasn’t stopped a number of brands from continuing to execute creative production in an outdated way.
How do ITG approach creative production?
So, how is our model different from the traditional method? Instead of a purely manual process, we use a combination of production methods – what we call a ‘blended’ model – that incorporates the use of fully automated ‘self-serve’ templates, studio automated production for fast, efficient, high-volume creation of personalised artwork, as well as manual production methods, as suited to the content type. This gives us the flexibility to employ the best combination for every client we work with, and fully tailor how we deliver their halo content.
Our fully automated solution is self-serve and instant, allowing anyone to create assets without any expertise in creative production, through intuitive use of dynamic templates. These templates allow you to select formats and design styles, then edit different elements like text, language, images, prices, backgrounds, colours, sizes and much more – all while maintaining a consistent brand identity. This is most useful for brands who need to create campaigns at pace, while simplifying the process of localising assets by empowering teams to ‘self-serve’ on demand. Coupled with AI, our solution is enabling agile content to be produced at scale, all whilst saving time and cost.
This approach works in many situations, but not all, which is why we also employ automation within our studios. This creates a high volume of campaign assets with variable content from templates in a fraction of the time compared to manual production, through clever use of data.
Our goal is to move clients who still utilise a largely manual approach, to more automation-enabled methods, driving cost efficiencies and delivering that scalable halo of agile content, faster. We introduce clients to an ‘automation-first’ production approach but with careful consideration, guidance and advice based around the suitable content types. This makes the transition a lot easier, ensures that brands are comfortable with automated creative production, and helps them realise the significant associated benefits.
Most brands will be able to automate a large portion of their creative production but are either unaware of the huge benefits it could bring, or resistant to updating their established traditional model. Instead, they stick with often inefficient, costly and time-consuming models simply out of habit.
What are the key benefits of automated creative production?
We embrace automation in creative production for many reasons, but some of the most tangible are:
Speed
Significantly reduced creative turnaround time.
Self-serve
No requirement for specialist skills.
Efficiency
Increased efficiency with reduced need to brief and manage bespoke assets.
Resource
No resource availability issues.
Brand compliance
100% brand compliance of all assets.
Cost
Opportunity to realise significant cost reduction.
A great example of where automation can deliver benefits is in the local marketing for individual markets, franchisees and stores. Users can edit pre-approved template content to adapt for their specific requirements quickly and easily, making it relevant for their audience. This is far more efficient than delivering ‘one-size-fits-all’ marketing to those local markets or relying on your locations to produce on-brand, consistent content – either themselves or via local agencies.
The benefits of automated creative production are self-evident but there are also considerations before deciding if automation is right for your content.
Things to consider before automating your creative production
As I’ve outlined above, most brands and businesses can benefit from automated creative production to some degree. However, you should still evaluate your content and any constraints you may have, to establish which production method (or combination of methods) is right for you. It is possible to automate almost all production, but you need to make sure you are clear on why you’re automating, and ask a few important questions:
Do you generate enough content?
Automation is perfect for efficient, high-volume asset creation. For low volumes, manual creation may still be best.
Do you constantly change design?
While campaign templates can be themed, if you are likely to frequently update design you may not optimise the benefits of automation.
How often will you use an automation template?
The more you use a template the greater the savings versus manual production, and they will eventually ‘pay for themselves’.
Is there a self-service need?
Even if you don’t generate high volumes, the benefit of empowering self-serve creation may be more important.
Do you have a brand consistency & visibility challenge?
If brand consistency is a challenge, and you want to see the content your local markets are creating, then automation is the perfect solution.
Is there a need for speed?
If speed to market is important to you, whether full automation or studio automation is utilised, content production is significantly faster than manual production.
Suitability of content
If you like to create one-off, bespoke masterpieces, while you can create a template there is no point. Equally, you can create beautiful templates, but you need to consider ‘design rules’ that the template should adhere to.
For most brands and businesses, the benefits of automation significantly outweigh the negatives, but there may still be reluctance because of the inherent concerns that come with the territory. This is why ITG’s blended approach works so well. The transition towards using automation is smoother, since manual and automated studio production methods are utilised where they are best suited. This gradual transition to full automation ensures that over time you are adapting your processes and optimising your efficiencies to deliver the most benefit.
Conclusion
Automated Creative Production is central to how ITG create halo content at the pace that modern marketing demands. In this high-pressure environment, brands who acknowledge and embrace an automation-first approach are most likely to flourish. Brands that are slow to modernise their production processes and realise the benefits will fall behind and find it difficult to compete.
We work the way which will best suit our clients, building lasting, meaningful partnerships that empower them to achieve optimal time and cost savings – and, of course, outstanding halo content.
Want support implementing an automation-first creative production model?
Our teams are here to help you deliver cost efficiencies and create more high-quality content, faster than ever. Fill in the form and we’ll be in touch.