It takes courage for creative people in top global companies to trust in the powers of automation to propel their creative output. Like a new parent handing over their child to a nursery teacher on their first day of school, the sudden idea of lacking control can be daunting. As for the marketers we speak to, they struggle to wrap their heads around the fact that content production and creative assets can be scaled so seamlessly, no longer feeling the burden of overloading their creative team while still expediting the time-to-market .
Storyteq has been a pioneering force in the Creative Automation industry and is committed to helping digital creative leaders and global marketing teams to improve their creative workflows while reaching multiple markets and audiences via multiple channels. To date, we have helped over 300 digital creative teams and global marketing teams of 200+ companies in more than 45 countries worldwide, rendering over 10M creative assets worldwide.
But! None of this can happen without a strong, dedicated team behind it.
Our team
Our team has, like multiple companies worldwide, been denied the opportunity of meeting face-to-face for nearly a year, as our last two quarterly meetings had to take place virtually. Working remotely has its perks and advantages, for sure, but we also felt it was time to reconnect, align and get ourselves inspired for a great 2022. And we just really missed each other. Fun and games were definitely a huge component of the day, but we gathered with purpose, too. We were there to strategise and a successful day of this proved there really is power in numbers.
Over 40 of our colleagues arrived at the venue at around lunchtime, buzzing like bees in a particularly productive beehive. Indicative of the growth Storyteq aspires to this year, people and product, new team members were introduced too. We’re currently a tight-knit, vibrant team of 45+ seasoned colleagues with big ambitions. We’re multi-cultural too, and take pride in having more than 14 nationalities and 12 languages on board. We’re engineers, designers, creatives, marketers, mavericks and number crunchers. But above all, we are passionate people with a collective dream. All self-tested negative for COVID, we were pumped and ready to go, hosted at the beautiful venue The Unbound, a hidden gem in the outskirts of Amsterdam. Let the fun commence!
We began by looking back
For the last three years in a row, we’ve simply doubled our numbers in full-time employees, revenue and clients. By now, it is no news that Storyteq is growing fast. During the first half of the team day, we reminded ourselves of some of our most recent milestone achievements:
- Served clients from over 10 major industries from Automotive, through Food and Beverage, all the way to Pharmaceutical and everything in between.
- Worked with +100 companies in +50 countries across 5 continents.
- Onboarded multiple new clients from diverse industries.
- Rendered +10M total number of assets, from our clients.
- Reached the milestone of 20M renders through our platform since our inception.
- Rebranded and launched a new website.
- Released 100+ times product updates.
- Our top 5 new features of the year were: Version history, Banner Size Estimation and Asset Quality Adjustments, Workspaces , More supported file types and After Effects extension 1.3 & 1.4.
- Published 20 articles on our blog and interviewed 7 industry leaders.
- Welcomed 17 new members to our teams and now have 15 nationalities working side by side.
It’s pretty clear by now that 2022 is not going to be any different and we are making sure we scale organically while maintaining our user-centric and customer success principles at our core to support top global brands around the world.
The proof of the pudding is in the tasting
On another note, one of the things I liked the most was to also look at different ways in which our clients benefit from our solution. For me, this simple act connects all the dots of our daily efforts. The Customer Success team walked us through some of the most impressive templates we produced that have benefited multiple campaigns for clients.
Looking forward to how we’ll shape the future of Creative Automation
During the event, we sedimented three clear intentions for this year:
- Reach the milestone of delivering 10.000 templates through our Managed Service team with the aim to build 80% of templates n less than a day, creating a quick turnaround for brands to go-to-market at speed.
- Join forces with top industry leaders around the globe to position Creative Automation as a thriving solution of the future.
- Further strengthen our relationship with key clients to ensure the evolution of our solution to fit their creative engine needs and expand and integrate our solution into their creative workflows and strengthen their MarTech ecosystem.
Having everyone together in our yearly meeting was an opportune moment to explain the company wide Objectives and Key Results, define main KPIS and connect how the team in its entirety will make sure that Product, Marketing, Sales and Customer Success and Managed Service will work closely together to support more brands out there but also to delight and retain our current clients.
So, the task then put in front of teams was for each one to paint a picture of goals intended for 2022 and the new strategies which will be implemented to achieve these. And they could literally do just that if they wanted. Paint a picture! The only rule for these presentations was that slides of any sort, be it Google or PowerPoint, were not allowed. It was fitting that at our Storyteq team day, as a platform which enables more time to be creative, we were asked to get creative ourselves. Sales really stepped outside of the box when they drew up a Pokémon character fuelled by a diet of confident but realistic KPIs and a foolproof method for reaching these. Customer Success entered theatre mode and dramatised the secrets behind retaining a happy customer base. As some of our biggest teams in the company, these presentations (or, performances) proved that “too many cooks“ do not spoil creativity. But as we know here, too much manual repetition does.
After this inspiring session with our peers and coworkers, guest speaker Bo The, CEO from Boomerang and part of Publicis Groupe, provided us with even more insight to digest on the status of Marketing in 2022 and the future trends to expect this year. We saw some inspiring cases on the power of purpose, transparency and of course automation at scale. Following that, we geared up for dinner and we got to learn about each other by playing a quiz which consisted of two truths and one lie from each one of us.
Our solutions moving forward?
Generating multiples of creative assets can be time-consuming and expensive, resulting in less creativity and slow go-to-market speed. Storyteq sits right at the intersection of cutting-edge technology, creativity, content production and media. We are developing technology and a team of industry experts that support both digital creative leads and marketers to improve creative workflows. Check our solutions below:
Want to join us and help shape a challenging industry?
Storyteq is growing fast and we are looking for people like you.
Our leading cloud-based Creative Automation platform is always evolving so that our clients can routinely expect a streamlined and sophisticated experience that anticipates market trends.
If you’re excited to help digital creative leads and marketing teams in top global companies make an impact, check out our open positions on our careers page.