The rise of technology in marketing and online advertising has led to higher expectations on marketers and creative teams than ever before. However, technological innovations cut both ways.
On the one hand, technology has made it easier to capture customer attention on multiple platforms and ad channels, as well as test creative campaigns and deliver personal and relevant experiences to your target audience.
On the other hand, the request for multiple assets is constrained by time, a factor that still remains a challenge in most companies.
We’ve seen that companies often solve this by either adding headcount to the company or settling for creative assets of lower quality, as employees would rather use the time available to focus on creative versioning to meet demand.
It can seem like an impossible ‘quantity versus quality’ balancing act where you have to choose: “Will you create a higher volume of assets and compromise their quality?” or “ Will you opt for creating fewer assets but focus on their originality?”
But having this deeper understanding of your existing processes and workflows will help you identify where you can optimise to make things more efficient for your customers and teams.
Not sure where to start? This is where Creative Automation comes in. By splitting out the responsibilities, you can empower your designers to focus on what they do best, being creative. But you’re still ensuring that you’re continuously improving your business’s processes and workflows.
In this article, we give you a glimpse of this process by sharing how you can create a video, image or banner template within Storyteq’s Template Builder and shed light on the benefits of automating creative production with the help of our platform.
Operating at your full potential with the Template Builder
Storyteq’s Template Builder is a low-entry, in-browser web-based editor that has been developed to make creative work easier.
The wide range of creative features give both creative and marketing teams the versatility they need to create, scale and manage creative assets, regardless of production needs and team size.
In a nutshell, with the platform, you can:
- Scale the creative production of videos, images and banners
- Combat ad fatigue by creating completely new ads based on old ones
- Re-iterate content rapidly
- Output a large amount of asset variations
- Directly adapt creatives to multiple sizes
- Make ad components dynamic in order to automate the production process
Scaling creatives with minimal onboarding time
At Storyteq, we aim to make creative work effortless and strive to make the software as user-friendly as possible. We monitor this not only by having conversations with our clients to collect customer feedback, but we also do this internally by having our team members use the platform with minimal onboarding.
Take our newest team member, Daria Kochetkova, who has joined us as a Video Editor intern. While completing her Bachelor’s studies in Journalism, she did a minor in Media Design, in which she got in touch with various creative tools like Adobe Photoshop, Adobe After Effects and Adobe Illustrator.
Energised by the endless creative opportunities in media design, Daria decided to do several internships working as a digital designer before joining us.
During the application process, Daria was asked to create her first animated template within Storyteq’s Template Builder; only after a 10-minute onboarding session one of our Customer Success Managers. With no experience in using the Template Builder, she managed to create her first professional looking template. Most importantly, she got the job!
On her first day, her team onboarded her for another 30 minutes, after which they asked her to create her first template for a product demo for Navico, currently the world’s largest marine electronics company, and parent company to leading marine electronics brands.
Navico has approximately 1,500 employees globally and distribution in more than 100 countries worldwide. This means that the company’s advertising activities have to be tailored to multiple languages in order to craft a message adapted to each audience.
For the product demo, we simulated the promotion of a marine electronic device in nine countries and in five different ad formats. A quick calculation revealed that they needed 45 different variations of the same ad, altered to different languages and ad formats.
After Navico shared the exact template they use in Adobe Photoshop, the next step was to extract all the single elements from the file like fonts, text fields and images.
As Daria had previous experience in Photoshop, she thought it was relatively easy uploading these elements in the Storyteq Template Builder in order to ‘recreate’ Navico’s original template in different ad formats.
By marking certain elements dynamic (in this case, multiple text fields and pricing), Navico is now able to link any datasheet to these elements and generate all media versions they need in just a couple of minutes.
A common challenge that arises when working with multiple languages is the fact that there can be significant differences in the number of characters you need for your copy.
In the Navico example, we picked two ‘similar’ banners for the UK and Italian markets. As you can see, the English header ‘SAVE UP TO’ only needs 10 characters, while the Italian header ‘RISPARMIA FINO A’ consists of 16 characters.
So how do you generate all these media variations while preventing overlap of text or diverging font sizes due to the fixed text fields?
That’s where dynamic ruling comes in. Any dynamic rule set tells the platform what should change about a specific layer and when.
In the Navico template, the text layers are able to have its source text, scaling and alignment changed.
The end result: pixel-perfect banners in multiple languages.
Wrapping up
The Navico example perfectly illustrates how a creative team can benefit from creating assets within our platform.
Instead of manually crafting assets one-by-one, the platform allows creative teams to easily adapt, translate and repurpose the same asset for all markets, segments and formats. All while remaining on-brand.
The change in approach saves marketing and creative teams a lot of time, time that can be used to focus more on the creative processes instead.
Are you ready to take your creative production to the next level? Whether you want to start using dynamic creatives or need more time understanding the ins and outs of our platform, we’d like to learn how you manage the production process. Let’s talk!
The easy-to-use platform strengthens the boundaries of creativity, resulting in assets of both higher quality and a higher output. This enables marketing teams to easily produce and try out different versions and optimise their campaigns.
