What to Know about Creative Automation • Vidmob

What is Creative Automation?

Before we define what Creative Automation is, it’s first important to understand why we need it. The growth of digital advertising and eCommerce is putting more pressure than ever before on marketers to deliver better returns on digital media spend. Thus, keeping up with the growing needs for creative production is getting more difficult. Personalization, multiple channels, and testing are increasing demand for content production that burden design teams with boring, non-creative work. 

So how do we remedy it? Enter Creative Automation. Creative automation unlocks scale and flexibility for brands that need a variety of different assets or the ability to adjust elements within assets. For example, a fashion retailer might have thousands of products that they want to show to different audiences. Having one template that pulls the most up-to-date images and text creates efficiency for the design team and more relevant outputs for its audiences.

All too often we see creative automation deliver a generic ad that feels disjointed from the actual brand guidelines and is overly focused on conversion. But when we use creative automation to the fullest, it becomes a highly personalized extension of a brand’s larger relationship with their audience.

Move Up The Funnel

Creative automation became popular for bottom of the funnel advertising with conversion-oriented campaigns – retargeting audiences who abandoned a shopping cart, searched for a product or clicked on an ad. Today, people are well aware of this tactic and are more likely to ignore advertisements than ever before. Simply putting the right product in front of someone isn’t enough–the entire creative needs to work together as a whole. 

Creative automation also allows for scale – creating a variety of different advertising strategies. When they tailor the content, brands can create much more relevant experiences for their audiences. 

Upgrade Your Approach

To make the most of creative automation, it’s important to embrace the entire process.

1. 1. Get Your Catalog Ready: Advertisers with a high volume of different offerings often have a complete product catalog ready to go. Having structured data to feed the dynamic ad is critical to success and scale, including images and descriptions for every asset.
   2. Consider your Platforms: Not every platform has the same formatting. Using a template that’s designed specifically for each platform will dramatically improve the look and feel (and performance).
   3. Test your Templates: Create different designs and test them. One template might feature a promotional price while another might be more dedicated to an image — see what works where.
   4. Commit to Quality: Ensure your ads meet your brand guidelines and feel cohesive with your other assets live in the market.

Create A Feedback Loop

Creative automation also provides new insights to creative and media teams. Stay in communication with all parties, taking in learning and sharing results so everyone understands which templates and variables work best on each platform. Creative Automation unlocks scale, but the approach needs to be used intelligently to make it work harder. Creative is a major part of campaign performance, and with a bit of effort, creative automation can deliver big results.

Creative Automation Meets Data 

Creative Automation will shine its brightest when paired with data to back it up. Refined insights we learn about creative performance will allow marketing and design teams to operate more efficiently than ever before. 

This enhanced collaboration facilitates a simplified, focused and fast path to Creative that works. We like to think of Creative Automation as the ‘arms’ or ‘many hands’ and Creative Intelligence as ‘the brains.’ Together, they make for an unbeatable duo in the creative process. 

Learn more about Creative Automation.