Marketers don’t have time to be creative anymore. The constant need to refresh creatives for new promotions, complex approval processes with many stakeholders, and an overwhelming volume of creative requests. Moreover, scaling creative content to meet varied requirements and maintaining consistent brand messaging across regions are daunting tasks.
And then there’s AI, which can make you feel even less productive because it seems like AI tools can magically fix everything.
That's when you realize you need more than just hard work to meet the creative demand. You need technology to support you. That’s when you discover creative automation.
But what is creative automation? How can you incorporate it into your workflow? In this article, you’ll find out everything you need to know about it.
What is creative automation?
Creative automation makes the creative process faster and easier by automating the production, customization, and updating of ad assets. This eliminates repetitive tasks and boosts efficiency.
To explain, let's look at the usual process:
Creating ad assets is mainly a designer’s job, but advertisers need to help prepare personalized ads for campaigns. It takes time to create these assets, make them look good, and send them to advertisers. Sometimes, assets need changes and go back to the designer. Once finished, advertisers add elements like CTAs, offers, or headlines and then assign the creatives to a campaign.
Without creative automation, this process repeats for thousands of products, leading to repetitive tasks and constant updates with new offers and prices. This often causes advertisers to give up on personalized ads, leading to poor performance.
Creative automation handles all these tasks automatically. It streamlines the production of creative assets and the entire ad production process for all placements.
Best practices of creative automation
Surrounded by thousands of ads a day, users demand a more personal approach to even acknowledge you as a brand, let alone buy something from you. In fact, 80% of consumers are more likely to buy from a brand that provides a tailored experience.
A campaign’s performance is far less dependent on the strength of a single social media platform. It depends on the creative.
That’s why we choose the best practices of creative automation that will help you test the waters with this powerful technology.
Overcome the lack of design resources with dynamic templates
Producing high-performing creatives demands a lot of resources.
Even if you have enough designers in your team, you will lose the time race - there’s never enough time to produce as many variations for different formats and placements manually.
If you're a creative strategist always stuck in the cycle of manually resizing or editing thousands of ads, creative automation is your answer.
With creative automation, you won’t need to expand your team or spend days and nights doing repetitive tasks to create different variations of assets.
Use pre-made image and video dynamic templates, or upload your psd. design, fill the placeholders for dynamic information with data from your product feed, and let the system render thousands of creative variations in no time
The best part: is the next time when you need a tweak in your ad (for example sale or new product image) you won’t need to ask your designer to do the job for you. You can do it by adding the information to the spreadsheet and letting the creative automation do the work.
Make hyper-localized ads in a fraction of the time with creative automation
You are running a campaign for a delivery company that is heavily focused on precise location targeting, and this specific company delivers to 100 areas. Looking at just the placement requirements and the location personalization you now have thousands of assets required just to get started.
In a traditional process, this isn’t really cost-effective, and campaign results would suffer. However, with creative automation, you can produce creatives on demand quickly.
Through feed management, you can add and transform data, to produce thousands of creatives and deliver enriched dynamic ads in multiple locations (countries, regions, cities). Use images of popular buildings in a particular city, or advertise a product from a nearby store.
Use on brand templates to maintain brand consistency
Multiple placements are available even on a single channel and running an omnichannel campaign highly benefits brand consistency.
Take Instagram as an example: there is a story format, Reels ads, news feed, etc. That’s why a single creative is usually served in multiple placements. Even the simplest campaign on Facebook will require multiple different sizes of assets.
You may want to expand the campaign onto Snapchat which requires an entirely different set of safe zones and margins.
As you can see, even with a single creative, running an omnichannel campaign will put you at a rough minimum of 60 assets to serve an ad the way it should.
With creative automation and on-brand templates, you can do this in a hustle-free mode. The pre-design template will show your brand and define dynamic fields that will be filled with data from your feed. Click the button and watch creative automation transforming weeks of work into minutes.
Produce high performing creatives with contextualization
The biggest opportunity to delight your audience is to use the information you have about them, such as previous engagement, location data, weather data, demographics, and interests. Or get better results by mixing this information, and delivering ads with the right message at the right time.
Use creative automation to connect any feed to unlock the full potential of your audience data, and start combining different information to produce beautiful ads that will be contextualized in terms of weather data, language, or location.
Serve your audience ads for umbrellas and waterproof footwear the very minute rain starts, or showcase the ad for a beautiful wedding gown to a user who’s been looking for venues for a wedding.
Use slang of local communities and render tons of creatives that will help you directly communicate with different audiences.
What about AI? What is creative automation in the context of AI solutions?
Discussing creative automation without including AI in today's context would have been a significant oversight. AI plays a crucial role in automation, particularly in creative tasks.
A common concern with AI solutions is the lack of control over the process. That’s why we thought of the good practice of AI.
If your catalogs contain thousands of products, removing the background from each one is quite challenging. Not to mention, you’re sacrificing hours of manual editing instead of focusing on design and strategy.
What AI can give you is operational efficiency where there is already too much manual repetition. Tools that enable creative automation, such as Hunch's AI tools, can help you speed up the creative production process and gain more creative control, yet still deliver standout creatives.
With Hunch’s AI Background Removal, you can ditch plain backgrounds and give each product a unique, hands-on look. Most importantly, you're doing it at scale, without spending hours on manual edits.
See how Beliani achieved faster creative testing using Hunch's AI and creative solutions.
Put a spotlight on your creative performance with an end-to-end creative automation platform
We’re all about the fair play that’s why before pitching Hunch we’ll bring you the article about the top 8 creative automation tools.
Back to the content.
Creative automation is the engine behind any creative production at scale.
To start that engine you will need help from the best in class design tool for ad creative: Hunch Creative Studio, which will help you deliver beautiful ads that perform on Paid Social.
Not only does Hunch automate the process of creative production, but the whole media buying process on Meta and Snapchat, meaning that you won’t have to leave the platform to effortlessly manage all your campaigns on both platforms. Hunch is an end-to-end platform where performance and creative teams work together because all communication and iterations are happening inside the platform. Talking about smooth workflow.
Streamlined workflow doesn’t come without other rewards. And here’s the best example of that.
One of our clients put Hunch to the test in a 4-week Conversion Lift Study conducted by Meta's marketing science team. The client used Hunch’s AI tools to remove backgrounds from 350,000 product images, creating enriched Dynamic Product Ads (DPAs).
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Hunch outperformed both competitor overlay and no-overlay templates, delivering an impressive 2.3x incremental lift in ROAS. This gave a clear picture of the value Hunch brings.
