Are you considering creative automation for the first time?

With year-after-year budget cuts, increasing workloads, and tighter deadlines, creatives and marketing professionals are facing some of the steepest challenges yet, however their services are still in high demand. 

Whether your personal experience has been difficult, tiring, or even a total nightmare, you're no doubt looking for a solution. Fortunately, there is one, and it's emerging rapidly: creative automation.

What is creative automation?

Creative automation is the act of leveraging technologies like workflow automation or even AI to efficiently produce creative assets at scale with the purpose of delivering ad creatives faster, cheaper, and in higher volumes than what would be possible with a manual creative process.

While creative automation can refer to any part of the process, the most common form of creative automation has to do with automating the creation process rather than the creation of the assets themselves. Meaning that things like task assignment and hand-off, briefs, reviews etc. are automated.

How modern marketing teams can benefit from creative automation

Creative automation can help marketers and creative professionals solve many of the challenges they are currently facing. Additionally, it's often pretty easy to implement and can greatly reduce the burden on you, your team and even your budget.

Some of the things you can do with creative automation is:

• Create an overview of large data volumes and versions of creative assets intended for different channels and media types
• Automate the production of large quantities of assets or multiple versions of the same asset in different languages or dimensions  
• Integrate your creative process with your workflows to avoid off-process issues and the associated costs.

Essentially, what creative automation can help you do is free up time for your creative teams, which means they will be able to do more of what they were hired to do—create great content and campaigns—rather than resource-draining manual tasks.

How to get started with creative automation

Because creative automation essentially covers everything from automating localization of creative assets, and making your content creation processes more efficient to automating the creative process itself, finding out where to begin can be a little difficult.

So, to help you we’ve got 4 tips to help you get started with creative automation.

1. Identify your pain points

The first thing you need to consider is what you want to achieve with creative automation. What are your pain points? To do this, you can ask yourself the following questions:

• Where are the bottlenecks in your processes? 
• What aspects of your creative process are most prone to errors?
• Which part of your creative process takes the longest?
• Which part of the creative process does the creative teams complain about?

A few examples of issues that could be easily fixed with creative automation are if your teams find themselves sending emails back and forth every time they need to leave feedback on an asset that’s in production, if they’re spending time manually resizing assets for different platforms, or if finish a task requires the creative to manually push the asset to the next stage of the production process by sending emails or direct messages.

Creative automation shines when it comes to scheduling repetitive communications in advance or making them trigger off of other actions, or making accurate, error free adjustments to multiple assets at the same time.

2. Know your stakeholders

Starting with creative automation always often requires investing in a new tool, and like most other investments it will start with an internal business case which will have multiple stakeholders.

Which stakeholders are involved will of course depend on the organization in question. But it could include anything from IT managers, marketing specialists, production leads, marketing heads, executives and of course the creative teams themselves. 

Whoever your stakeholders are, you need to find out how they can benefit from creative automation. If you don’t get the internal stakeholders on board, and if you don’t take their processes and needs into account, you may end up investing in a tool that is actually more disruptive than it is effective.‍

3. Focus on easy implementation and training

Like with most other solutions a creative automation platform can only be as good as its users, so the easier it is to use, and the simpler it is to get creative teams to use, the better it will be.

Because of that, you would probably be well off if you look for a no-code or low-code solution, as this will make the implementation of creative automation as straightforward as possible. This will help minimize future challenges and avoid potential development costs. 

No-code, or even low-code, solutions are generally easier to adapt to the processes your creative teams already use which will greatly help with the implementation.

4. Your creative automation tools should integrate with your existing systems

Some creative automation tools can be integrated with the rest of your workflows and systems while others can’t and this is important to remember.

The creative automation tool you choose shouldn’t make your current processes more difficult, which means it needs to integrate with the rest of your marketing tech stack.

A result of failing to integrate your creative automation tool is actually counterproductive to what you are trying to achieve. This is because managing workflows across multiple systems will add manual tasks (the ones that you are trying to get rid of, remember?)

As seen in the diagram below, when your systems aren’t working together as part of an efficient process, they’re working off-process.

For creative automation to take full effect, it needs to be aligned with your workflows.

An example of the loss of efficiency failing to integrate your creative automation tools could look like this:

A company already has proofing software, and an approval management system. None of them are integrated with each other. And now they want to add a creative automation tool to handle content localization and versioning for social media platforms. This also won’t be integrated.

The result of this decision is that every time they execute a campaign an asset first goes through the creation process, after which it is manually uploaded to their proofing software for review. After all edits have been made based on the comments during the review, it is then manually exported and uploaded to the approval management system. And after the asset has been approved they need to upload it to their creative automation tool where they can handle localization and versioning.

Granted this will probably be faster than handling the last step manually, but each hand-off between systems is a manual process that can add time and increases the risk of errors. And all it would require to fix this issue, would be to make sure that these three systems were integrated with each other.

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