3 Ways to Speed Up Ad Production

Performance marketing and creative teams are great at producing content, but not always the most efficient at working together. Most of that is neither of the teams’ fault. Coming from different perspectives can lend itself to bottlenecks and slowdowns in production. 

We recently sat down with Tricia Lee, Sr. Director of Demand & Integrated Marketing, Brian Boggess, Creative Director, and Jerry Bell, Director of Product Marketing, for a 30 minute session on these bottlenecks and how they’ve overcome them in their roles. You can also watch the session on-demand.

Here are the top 3 production bottlenecks discussed in the session and how to overcome them.

One: Agreeing on Where to Start

A blank page can be an overwhelming place to start [creatively]. While you might think a creative would only want a boundless arena with absolute freedom, building in constraints can be very effective and efficient timing wise. 

Elements like past campaign history, metrics from live creative, or even hard and fast rules like best practices and aspect ratios are helpful in giving creatives context from which to start.

For example, VidMob used creative data to learn that opening with talent and logo drove higher performance for a specific video type. For the next iteration, this info jumpstarted the creative process by providing guidance on which scenes and soundbytes would work best for this type of sequence. The videos opened with the most beautiful shot of the interviewee, followed by a relevant product visual from their story. The second generation of videos which leveraged this information saw a 67% increase in VTR and 43% increase in CTR.

Leveraging data sped up ad production and drove higher overall performance. 

Watch On-Demand

Two: Finding a Common Language

Creative teams are not mind readers; they don’t appreciate vague instructions with no details. They also tackle creative projects from a slightly different vantage point as a performance marketer. 

Thankfully, there’s a tried and true document everyone should have in their backpocket – the creative brief. Leveraging the creative brief as the North Star and weaving in data points will have both teams working towards the same end goal. Within the brief, provide information such as where the ad will be placed, what the campaign goals are, and how success is being tracked to ensure that both teams are aligned. When including creative data – the more, the better. 

Lastly, consider a strong kick off with everyone. Schedule a call or meeting to review the creative brief and make sure everyone understands the priorities, goals, and language used.

Three: Reducing Upfront Work

When a piece of creative isn’t performing as expected, it’s easy to write off the whole concept and say we need to form a new bowl of spaghetti to throw at the wall. That is going to be time consuming and slow things down.

Instead, look at ways to take the same concept/idea and repackage it with new learnings so that it can be retested. As mentioned earlier, starting from a blank page is not only difficult but it’s expensive and time consuming – from time for exploration/ideation to storyboarding to motion design to sound design, the whole creative process can be a beast.

You can be more nimble and potentially preserve a lot of the work by taking the time to see why it failed and learning from it. There are so many options to refresh a creative concept. Try stitching with other bits of UGC content to be more appropriate to TikTok, or take a big idea and break it down for Twitter, perhaps test a text-on-screen version that might be more friendly to YouTube. The possibilities are endless when you have the right data to back decisions.

Making performance data a part of the creative review saves time, energy, and resources. Plus, it improves communication and cuts down on slow turnaround times for both the marketing and performance teams.

You can catch the full conversation here.