Creative automation can be a great way for businesses to work around limited time and resources; expanding available capacity, whilst also simplifying some processes to provide more flexible working conditions, and adapting legacy systems to new workflows.
Creative automation is commonly the combination of scalable design with flexible content definition and automated assembly. Moving over to a strategy of creative automation involves more than simply flipping a switch for brands. By adapting the technologies and processes behind creative automation, they can quickly and effectively close that content gap.
- Timelines & Consistency: Time is the enemy when it comes to closing the content gap. While creative automation technologies may be able to create multiple different iterations of a single campaign, human timescales to build campaigns are still significantly long. However, by using creative automation, marketers can drastically shorten the time it takes to produce a complete campaign. This is especially important when it comes to responding to market conditions, or even significant world events.
- Personalisation/Localisation: The reuse of assets across platforms, formats and campaigns can be critical to the workflow of an agile organisation. Alongside the surge in ecommerce, there has been a distinct uptick in personalised campaigns across all platforms. The need to personalise at scale is now more sophisticated and essential to long-term success, avoiding stagnation and the ‘impersonality’ of wide-scale campaigns that can be damaging to their success.
- Efficiency & Cost-Effectiveness: All too often, companies find their creative processes wasteful and costly. Whether it is the time taken to locate assets, their accidental duplication or the use of images whose rights have expired, companies that are able to centralise their assets so there is a single source of truth are much more likely to generate higher ROI on creativity overall.
Only 23% of executives believe the speed at which they gain accurate insights is ‘very strong’, the Digital Trends 2021 report from Econsultancy and Adobe reveals. This explains why agility has been ranked as the second most important development objective for mainstream organisations moving forward, just below innovation.
Data also suggests there is a strong link between the rating of an organisation’s insight agility and the projected budget increases over the next year. Fifty percent of companies that were reported to have a ‘strong’ speed to customer insight are planning a 2021 marketing budget increase in a continued time of uncertainty, as employees are more able to prove the value of marketing within their individual organisations.
Furthermore, 52% and 44% of ‘strong’ respondents, respectively, said they will be expanding their acquisition and retention budgets this year, compared to just 39% and 30% of those with a comparatively ‘weak’ speed to consumer insight. Meanwhile, thanks to their more in-depth analysis of customer insight, CX leaders are significantly more likely to increase their marketing budgets for 2021 (60%) than CX mainstream organisations (39%).
By looking at creative automation, businesses can work to improve their speed, accuracy of insight, and better utilise their budgets to exploit these capabilities for the benefit of their campaigns.
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