Creative Automation should be a no-brainer for brands (and creatives, too)

Marketing, brand, and creative teams should see Creative Automation as an asset, not a threat, say Kelly McConville (VP of Marketing at Fourthline) and Justin Blyth (ECD at Ambassadors).

Creative Automation offers a fast and efficient way for brands to scale their content production without compromising on creative quality. The technology enables the generation of 1000s of campaign asset versions across formats, languages and touchpoints in a fraction of the time of traditional methods. So with the demand for content at an all time high, why are many brands still reluctant to embrace Creative Automation?

We spoke with Kelly McConville (VP of Marketing at Fourthline — ex N26, Uber and Philips) and Justin Blyth (ECD at Ambassadors, the creative production company behind Cube). Here’s their take on why marketing, brand and creative teams should see Creative Automation as an asset, not a threat, and how it can actually enhance the creative work itself:

Based on your experience, what challenges does Creative Automation solve?

Justin: The purpose of advertising is to connect and communicate with people, to have them see your campaign and actually feel something. So I think what Creative Automation does is make the work more relevant to everyone who’s going to see it — a piece of content that has one idea can now work in every format, in every length, in every language.

Kelly: Being from the client side, I look at it through a really functional lens. Running in-house creative teams and building and scaling them over global companies, it’s allowed me to allow my creatives to be creative and not to sit there versioning for days. And because we’re all human and humans get tired and distracted, it also removes the element of human error.

I come from both regulated and unregulated industries and Creative Automation gives that extra peace of mind that every asset will go out exactly as it should, which is essential for building and maintaining brand value. Central teams can check their logo, positioning, size and everything that’s been approved; using that as the template, regional markets can then create their own, on-brand campaigns instantly without the extra rounds of edits and approvals. Then everyone’s happy: Marketers can create the content they need, Brand Managers can ensure consistency and Creatives know their work won’t be compromised.

Justin: And I think especially now, when everything is tested and measured, it also creates a lot of room to adjust things on the fly. You can respond in real time to give your audience more of what they want to see, and I think automation helps greatly with that.

Some feel that Creative Automation hurts the quality of the creative work, favouring scalability over craft. What’s your take on that?

Justin: I think it's a lack of understanding of how Creative Automation works. A lot of people think automation means AI's making everything but that’s not the case. You actually can and still need to do a very traditional creative process — content creation, copywriting, beautiful animations, do the actual shoot or photoshoot. You can create with the same level of craft, and then feed that into an automation platform where certain behaviour is programmed in. For example, that it resizes type based on the length of the text, or that it changes the layout depending on the language.

Kelly: I agree. For me as a brand person, Creative Automation has also allowed me to create and test different versions really quickly to see what works best — not just A/B tests but go to massive scale, testing from A-Z. We can shoot multiple scenes for a campaign and test them and adapt parts of it without blowing through budgets for reshoots and hours of wasted creative time.

And because we saved all that time and money, we’re actually able to invest more into craft: higher-quality productions and longer formats that allow more room for storytelling.

Justin: That is such a cool insight when you really think about it. In the past you would have had to have everyone agree to one version of a piece of content and the flexibility that comes with Creative Automation means we can try and see what works and see literally what people respond to at that moment in time. You can create versions of campaigns and films that don't just have one singular expression that can be seen in all these different ways and written for different people in different areas, regions, cultures, seasons — it's the opposite of limiting.

Like you said, it allows people who aren’t designers to generate the versions they need. You can kind of back off and have peace of mind knowing that this campaign is going to look good wherever it's seen.

What do you need to look for when choosing a Creative Automation solution?

Kelly: There are many different things to look at. Does the Creative Automation solution speak to all the martech software and media platforms my teams are using? And if it doesn’t, are they open to building the APIs I need? How easy is it for my teams and external partners to come in and work with it? Does it pass the IT and security checks, which is important especially in regulated industries? These things are boring but quite important to think about.

Justin: At Ambassadors, we are in a unique position as a creative production company because we built our own Creative Automation platform. A company that’s doing the creative but not the automation part might not think about what’s needed to produce at scale. While with a company like ours that does the creative, the craft and the automation, everything is considered and it just goes a lot smoother because they’ve already tackled these issues before.

Our platform is built by coders and animators and designers and people who have been making campaigns for years. And what’s beautiful from my perspective is that the platform keeps evolving — if it can’t do a certain thing that I want to do, we can actually build that in most of the time. I'd say there really are no limitations to it.

Why isn’t everyone using Creative Automation? What do you think are the barriers to adoption?

Kelly: There's just so much fear. Every creative team that I’ve worked with has needed a push. They think that their budgets or teams are going to get cut but when you start to explain that this is going to free up their time to do more creative thinking, they start to see the value.

Justin: I agree. It doesn't mean that the content itself is being automated, it’s just a tool to make the repetitive parts of the process more efficient and more accurate.

So when it's used correctly, it simply allows you to make your campaign relevant to many, many, many more people and to evolve over time as the campaign changes.

Kelly: My message to those out there unsure about Creative Automation is to learn more about it to truly understand what it is and how useful it can be to your teams. It's not AI and it's not a magic wand but it will allow your social media manager to spend more time on strategy and your creative teams to spend more time creating. 

Justin: Absolutely, and I think just be open to trying something new. People can be stuck in old ways, maybe traditional creatives see it as the enemy of the beautiful work they want to create but it's just not true. It's just a tool for us to be more collaborative, to have more checks and balances, to make stuff that's more relevant for our audiences. Because if advertising doesn't connect to the person who's seeing it, then really what's the point?

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