Today’s advertisers face the challenge of creating highly visual and personalized ads at massive scale.
Businesses with multiple locations need to communicate with different audiences to create engagement with their campaigns. For advertisers that means distributing tons of localized video and image ad variations, which brings the issue of production cost.
Due to recent changes in cookie policies both legislative and technology-based, opportunities for targeting users have been reduced. Creative became critical. In fact, according to Meta, creative quality accounts for 70% of an ad’s success.
Within engaging creative come additional challenges: maintaining the presence on Meta, TikTok, Snapchat, and YouTube, and taking care of the brand governance.
That’s why agencies need to choose a cost-effective solution that will help them stay in the game and keep their sanity.
The key is in automation. Creative automation is the process of automating parts of the production of creative assets.
Learn how creative automation can enhance your creative process, and why every performance agency needs it.
What is creative automation?
To understand creative automation first you need to consider the difference between the ads production and creative assets.
While most creative assets end up being ads, in order for a creative asset to become an ad it has to be assigned to a wider ad unit with other non-graphic elements (i.e. headline, text, landing page URL, etc.) and later assigned to a campaign.
With creative automation, you can automate each part of the production of creative assets, which leads to automating the whole process of ad production for all placements.
To put it quite simply: with dynamic creative - you automate media buying, with creative automation - the process of creating all the assets needed for campaigns is automated.
Creative automation as an essential part of DC
It is no secret that dynamic creative gives you a broad spectrum of opportunities when it comes to setting personalized campaigns. But, an essential part of every campaign is an ad, furthermore, the ad’s creative.
Integrating automation and campaign insights in the creative process will help you deliver more effective engagement.
To create automated ads there are two parts of the system that need to work together. The first part of the system will render all the creative variations. The second part will upload designed assets to the Social Media platform, add additional ad elements, and assign the ads to the campaign.
The first part of the system is creative automation.
This process allows you to combine different elements and data generated from product feeds in order to create a highly-personalized experience through your campaigns.
When you create a catalog and dynamic template you want, let the software render variations for all social media platforms - that’s how a week of work will turn into minutes.
How to solve production challenges with creative automation?
In a world where users want a more personal approach, a campaign’s performance is far less dependent on the strength of a single Social Media platform.
It depends on the creative.
Due to the rapid development of Social, the tempo of creative production is nearly impossible to combat without using automation technology.
Hyperproduction became a #1 challenge for every performance agency. You can’t just set a generic ad and wait for the results because probably there won’t be any - we’ve seen it all before.
But, let’s dig a bit deeper and break it into more granular production challenges, and how to solve them with creative automation.
#1 Overcome the lack of design resources
You need to run a campaign for an e-commerce brand with hundreds of products. They want to go for the advanced campaigns, to use different variations of ads for different creative strategies, and they want highly personalized creative that will engage their customers. Bonus: they want it as soon as possible.
You will need a lot of time to produce different creatives, create product catalogs, and check does every designed item have the correct data from the product feed, and how it looks overall in different formats.
Besides time, you will need a team of designers to create all the variations, which requires more budget.
Solution: With creative automation, you won’t need to expand your team or spend days and nights doing repetitive tasks to create different variations of assets. Creative automaton with its set of tools can do all this work for you. Automation is the fastest path to get your engaging creatives.
#2 Get powerful engaging ads for all placement requirements at once
Multiple placements are available even on a single channel and running an omnichannel campaign highly benefits brand consistency.
Take Facebook as an example: there is a story format, messenger, news feed, etc. That’s why a single creative is usually served in multiple placements.
Each placement has its own dimensions for a reason, and the best results will come from a creative fitting of this placement, without boxing or cropping assets. Even the simplest campaign on Facebook will require multiple different sizes of assets.
Advertisers may want to expand the campaign onto Instagram, Snapchat, or TikTok, which requires a completely different set of safe zones and margins. Therefore, you’ll need dozens of assets per ad, just based on the number of placements.
As you can see, even with a single creative, running an omnichannel campaign will put you at a rough minimum of 60 assets to serve an ad the way it should.
Solution: With creative automation and dynamic templates, you will get all ad variations for all possible placements in no time.
Tools such as the Review tool and Creative export (features in the Hunch platform) are essential for making it all work.
The review tool allows you a detailed review of the product catalog designs and it will help you to catch all the errors in designed assets and ensure the best quality and on-brand creatives for your campaigns.
The creative export allows you quick and easy customization of assets that needs to be compliant for additional networks and placements. This tool plays a big role whenever a campaign is planned across multiple networks, variants for multiple messages, products, and photo assets need to be applied across all dimensions.
This is how with the Hunch platform you can customize your creatives to be TikTok, Snapchat, or Youtube-ready.
#3 Combat the price of ad localization
Running campaigns in multiple locations (countries, regions, cities), comes with a burden of a choice: should a marketer choose a lower-performing generic creative or bear the cost of localization of creative assets.
How to find a balance between the positive impact of localization on ROAS and the effective cost involved in getting there?
Solution: With creative automation, you can reduce the inherent cost without losing a chance for creating impactful localized ads for thousand of locations.
You are running a campaign for a delivery company that is heavily focused on precise location targeting, and this specific company delivers to 100 areas. Looking at just the placement requirements and the location personalization you’re now having thousand of assets required just to get started.
In a traditional process, this isn’t really cost-effective, and campaign results would suffer. However, with creative automation, you can produce creatives on demand in no time.
#4 Ad personalization as an ace up your sleeve
Personalization plays an important role in grabbing the user’s attention and getting an ad to perform better.
Personalization is focused on user interest (i.e. the food industry for users interested in health you could focus on the fact that all the ingredients are freshly sourced). Contextualization is a part of personalization, focusing on context (i.e. if you serve an ad in the morning, that ad will show pastry).
These are ad production requirements that will take a lot of resources.
Solution: Relying on creative automation will make it all work. You will be able to produce different creatives much easier and faster, and you won’t face the problem of updating your ads.
#5 Don’t miss any potential lead with retargeting campaigns
Retargeting campaigns will require you to show your offering as best as possible. Should you decide to show a promo coupon, or offer free shipping and communicate that visually each of these changes will require you to produce all the assets.
Solution: Let creative automation be the fuel for creative testing. You should prepare the strategy and decide what benefits you will communicate through ads, and creative automation will cover producing that.
Why should every performance marketer use creative automation?
Battling with recent privacy updates, today’s marketers need to find efficient ways to scale while staying on the brand on every channel and get their job done. Creative automation meets this need.
Creative automation allows for faster ad production, and more collaborative workflows between the marketing team and design, and eliminates space for errors.
The most important: creative automation takes all the burden of delivering hundreds of variations, which leaves you and your team the capacity for developing impactful strategies.
How to choose a platform for creative automation?
When choosing a platform for massive creative production, you should think about 3 levels of automation:
- Asset production automation
- Creative automation
- Campaign automation
A platform that can provide you with all three levels of automation is the one, just like Hunch.
Why?
Each level of automation is a piece of setting a dynamic campaign. So, if you find a platform that can leverage just one level, you won’t cover it all, and you’ll still have to set the rest of the things manually.
The second thing you need to consider are features of the platform you’re choosing. Check if the platform can enhance your productivity and workflow with the tools it offers.
Furthermore, check on the pricing. Creative automation should be a cost-effective solution for your marketing team. If you spend more budget on a single creative automation platform than you would on hiring a team of designers - reconsider your choice.
Make your next step with creative automation
Creative automation is the engine behind any creative customization at scale.
This technology gives the ability to deliver optimal performance in your campaign, without additional costs.
Using this technology, you will successfully combat the challenges of creating highly personalized ads at a massive scale and keeping on-brand creatives through omnichannel campaigns.
Unlock the great potential of creative automation and enhance your creative process!
Interested in learning how Hunch helps you to do so? Book a demo and see us in action!