According to a study by Demand Metric, “consistently presented brands” are 3.5x more likely to have better brand visibility when compared to those with an inconsistent presentation.
To be fair, there’s no question about whether consistency matters. Not only does it help you build brand awareness, but it also helps people feel more in control once they’re familiar with the brand.
The question is how do you achieve it across different markets, products, and channels?
If you’re producing creatives manually, the risk for inconsistent design is far greater. Even with a design system, it is possible for the wrong font size, color, or images to sneak past the approval process.
What you need is a creative automation tool - a platform that generates 1000s of on-brand creatives and makes collaboration between teams simple.
Creative automation tools help you adopt a modular approach
Creative automation helps you revamp your production process. Instead of starting from scratch each time when you run a campaign and then having it go through multiple rounds of approval and quality checks to check for consistency, you bake it into the process right from the start.
Whether you use a standalone creative automation tool or a full-fledged creative management platform, you can adopt a modular approach i.e. you don’t design a creative in one go but rather break it down into parts called modules which can be created, modified and replaced and assembled to create a complete campaign.
This can happen in two ways - you can create templates on the platform and save them for future use or start from the ready-to-use templates and modify them as needed.
And you can do this when creating video campaigns too!
You end up with a few templates that you can adapt to your campaigns with components that can be auto-populated. For instance, you can connect your feed data which contains the CTAs, product images, descriptions, pricing or other fields and produce 1000s of creatives with those details accurately depicted.
This ensures there’s no room for human error and approvals take less time.
Most creative automation tools you encounter will offer these features so you can upload your own font, brand colors, font size and any other design elements that are a part of your brand identity. You can also lock down these elements in design so no one can change them without approval. This is especially useful if you’re working across large teams, divisions and even different markets.
And while one might argue that it stifles creativity because every ad might end up looking a little too similar, it actually frees up time and resources for the design team to work on product images or take strategic decisions based on how the existing designs are faring. These templates can be modified and the changes applied to ads in real-time so there’s no downtime between receiving insights and acting on them.
Some features to look for to ensure creative consistency
While we’ve already discussed a few features, it is by no means a comprehensive list. These are a few other features in creative automation tools that can prevent you from making mistakes on designs that need a quick turnaround:
- Auto-Cropping: Upload images which are cropped to fit templates
- Auto-Layout: Resize creatives to fit different ad types
- Auto-Sizes: Scale creatives for different formats and channels
- Automated Text Treatment: Ensure text is displayed as per your brand guidelines across ads
- Creative export: Quickly customize assets compliant with additional networks and placements
- Review tool: Review and approve designs to ensure only the best ones end up in your campaign
All your creatives deserve the same attention
Not all ads are created equal. A TV spot or a billboard ad is far more high stakes than perhaps an ad on Facebook or TikTok that users scrolls past in seconds.
But all your creatives deserve the same treatment. The problem with Paid Social is everything has started to look the same. A product shot on a white background if it’s an image and some text overlay with some funky sound effects if it’s a video.
The reason for that? Campaigns that require thousands of creatives because they have to be tested on an audience (hello DCO!) and have a very short window for production. For performance marketers, it’s always go time. But the creative suffers because of that.
With creative consistency powered by creative automation, performance marketers can rival ads produced for TV or OOH. Those templates can be re-used and modified to suit paid social campaigns without comprising the quality of the creatives.
If you’re looking to bring creative consistency to your design, we’re here for you! Chat with one of our experts to discuss your creative challenges and we’ll walk you through all the available options—no strings attached.
