What does 2020 hold for creative production? You may have done your research or even conjured an educated guess about the problems brands are facing. Still, the people who know it best are those on the front lines — i.e. our customer success superstars. After all, they’re speaking with clients on a day-to-day basis. Let’s explore what’s been coming through the pipeline with Alex Barrett, our senior customer success manager.
Q1: What might be the biggest production problem that advertisers are facing today?
I think it comes from a strategy that we’re all pretty familiar with today. On one hand, brands are planning campaigns with a global reach in mind, and, on the other hand, they’re focused on making sure the message that reaches the end-user is hyper-targeted towards that individual’s specific profile. This means creative teams need to produce a ton of assets to cover different languages, demographics, and other audience segmentations.
For instance, in one company’s first campaign they had to accommodate creative variations for an audience of moms and in the same campaign set up creatives that would change the CTA based on location. This sounds pretty simple, but in terms of production it would have required 50+ creatives to build one-by-one in the past. Luckily in Celtra, they’re able to accomplish this much more easily using tools like a rule-based feed.
Q2: Which major production problems are on the rise?
If we look back on the same issue of increased production needs for different audiences, and add the fact that these campaigns are being run across multiple channels, you can see how a production teams’ time can run thin. This means many teams end up outsourcing work, expanding their teams internally, or simply sacrificing the quality work to meet deadlines. Not to mention, limiting the time their creative folks are spending being “creative”, and pushing them to just produce ads quickly. Obviously sacrificing the quality of work isn’t sustainable even in the short-term, and increasing the number of people you have working on a project doesn’t serve as a long-term solution. That’s where technology comes into play.
Q3: What does creative production software do to address all of these problems?
If you look at Celtra’s product it’s all about helping to solve this problem of producing content at scale. Whether it’s using feeds to add translations to your creatives, building multi-channel campaigns under one roof, or using our Production Wizard (the Celtra tool where users build and scale creatives across different campaign dimensions) to batch produce creative with ease, it’s all about production efficiency and organization.
Production Wizard is really a game changer in this sense. It allows creative teams to focus on creating interesting designs that can be reused and then allows anyone (non-creative teams included) to update the content and produce new creatives on the fly. What I love about this is it allows creative teams to get back to spending time on what they love – being creative – and allows Growth teams to do what they love – activate new campaigns quickly!
Q4: Based on your conversations with clients, what are their current production priorities?
It’s funny, many of our clients describe solving what we’ve termed The Content Gap. Basically, they’re able to produce the amount of creatives they need without additional investment. This topic was huge in 2019 and I imagine that will continue into 2020.
Another trend in production that’s become a priority is moving in-house. Teams are realizing the benefits of having an in-house production team and are taking on new employees to accommodate. This shift makes sense. Clients have voiced a desire for more control and, in-turn, less reliance on agencies in the past.
Hungry for more customer success insights? Reach out today.