Above all else, we believe that at the heart of all digital advertising is the digital creative lead. After all, without the creative brains, there is no ad, and no way to elevate your advertising efforts. This is confirmed by a study by Venngage that states that 49% of marketers rate visual marketing as “very important” to their strategy, 22% consider it “important,” and 19% say that their strategy is “nothing” without visual content. This includes original graphics, copy images, and videos.
Thus, the trend towards a “creative-first” mindset when it comes to advertising narratives seems to be staying, and as people’s attention span for absorbing information is getting shorter, visual creatives will remain essential for a long time. In fact, during a webinar we recently co-hosted with Google App Emea, we learned that in an AI driven world, 50-80% of your Return On Investment comes from creative assets.
To reinforce this trend, John Media in his book Brain Rules shows that when people hear information, they are likely to remember only 10% of that information three days later. However, with the addition of a relevant image, people remember up to 65% of the information three days later.
- Creative production entails the processes that surround the production of marketing and advertising materials of a creative agency.
- Storyteq’s solution aims to streamline these processes with the help of Creative Automation so your agency can satisfy your client’s needs in a sustainable way.
- The stress of the workload puts pressure on processes that are run by humans, which leads to frustration and creative burnout.
- These are often caused by the three major constraints: time, cost, and quality.
What are the challenges around creative production?
Creative production entails the processes that surround the production of marketing and advertising materials of a creative agency. While we have identified that the creative is king, 36.7% of marketers struggle to produce relevant variations of creative assets consistently.
This shows that there might be multiple challenges that you face in your creative production processes. In this section we will outline the four most common ones that we think hold you back from maximising your agency’s success.
Lack of capacity to deliver the quantity of high-quality creative assets for all your clients and staying on budget.
This is the classic fast, good, or cheap conundrum where for a long time you could only choose two. With the pressures of always having to deliver, eliminating this challenge can feel impossible.
Little control over your creative workflows. You’re way too dependent on other departments or outsourced teams / freelancers.
You always feel like you are there to please others and your workflows and production processes are dictated by other departments and not an in-house creative production team.
You’re swamped. There are not enough resources to stay ahead of the curve as deadlines keep passing you by.
You feel like you are always falling short because in order to move fast, you need to sacrifice quality in order to stay on budget.
The considerable amount of repetitive manual work is killing the team’s creative vibe and stalling their ability to catch the latest trends.
Let’s say even if you and your teams managed to solve the issue of time, quality, and budget and your workflows are aligned and run like a well-oiled machine, you now find yourself and your creative teams complaining that the repetitive work you need to do is taking away from the creativity that you value so much.
Creative production processes
At a creative agency processes are usually set up to work for a shorter period of time, focusing on the urgent need to deliver creatives on-time and in-budget. But when the processes surrounding your creative production are interrupted, you can start running into problems: the costs generally go up, and the quality of your deliverables go down.
This can have an impact on the quality of your products, services, and reputation. These are often caused by the three major constraints: time, cost, and quality, as identified by the Production Constraints Triangle.
Escaping these constraints is difficult when your processes are not suited to handling the demands of your clients. But what if you no longer had to choose between producing digital creative assets either quickly, at a high quality, or cheaply?
As you can imagine, while these processes work on the short term, in order to create a sustainable process, you need to be future-thinking and think about adopting Creative Automation into your workflows.
39.2% of marketers wish they could automate the generation of visual content. However, often upper management might push back on integrating a Creative Automation tool into their workflows because of budgetary constraints or because their short-term model seems to be working.
The feedback from our clients shows that there is a 54% reduction of time and a 62% reduction of cost when adopting the use of our Creative Automation platform. A reduction of 2 of the points in our Production Constraints Triangle can only lead to an increase of their quality. This way, your creative production processes can become sustainable and future-proof.
Here are some of the solutions that our platform offers to help your agency thrive:
Creative production Solutions
1. Deliver the high volumes of creative assets you need, on time and on budget
2. Ease down on the pressure of deadlines and deliver excellent work
3. Become an industry leader and exceed your client’s expectations
4. Set your agency up to be sustainable, scalable and future-proof
Some benefits of our platform to get you and your creative teams excited
Template Sharing
As an agency, you work in large groups across multiple departments, for multiple clients who also have multiple departments. Therefore, having easily shareable templates side-steps communication breakdowns and allows you to optimise your cross-departmental creative workflow while increasing output.
Magic Resizing
Creating templates for multiple clients is already enough work. Having to manually create multiple sizes of the same templates just seems outright unnecessary. Doesn’t it? With our platform resizing your templates, whether into a square, banner, skyscraper, custom sizes etc., your workload is reduced to a click of a button.
Workspaces
Having multiple clients, you might want to give access to some of them to serve themselves with media on-demand. However, you don’t want them to get access to all your work, or the work of your other clients. This is why we created the workspace functionality, which allows you to distribute resources like templates, and digital creative assets.
Industry standard tools
Let your creative team use the tools they know best. Our platform has an After Effects extension which is the industry standard tool for visual effects and motion graphics. In addition, Photoshop is widely used for creating banners and static images. Building your master files using these familiar tools, and using the Storyteq platform to transform them into smart templates allows for a smooth transition of workflows.
Key Takeaways
- Every agency needs to have smooth processes in place in order to achieve success.
- When the processes surrounding your creative production are interrupted, you can start running into problems: the costs generally go up, and the quality of your deliverables go down.
- There are multiple solutions that can help guide you to success like using our platform to deliver the high volumes of creative assets you need, on time and on budget.
