As an enterprise marketer, you need to produce large amounts of engaging campaigns for every audience. Although these larger corporations typically have access to extensive production resources, many are still not creating the amount of content they need. In fact, the majority of shoppers (66%) find brand creative to be repetitive and want more creative variety.
With increasing content demands, manual production can’t keep up. Traditional methods are too slow and cumbersome, ultimately increasing the error and inconsistencies within an enterprise. One solution to this challenge is automation. By automating the production process, teams can gain better speed-to-market and reuse of assets, ensure a smoother global-to-local workflow, and save on costs while producing all the creative variety imaginable.
Introducing a new process to an enterprise can seem intimidating, but it doesn’t have to be. Here are a few best practices on navigating change management when implementing Creative Automation at enterprise brands:
Adopting a modular approach
It’s time to rethink how we work. A modular approach is a digital creative design system that operates based on a template that is subdivided into smaller, component parts that can be independently created, modified, optimized, or replaced. Why take this kind of approach? Modular creative helps drive greater flexibility and relevancy without additional work. For enterprise brands, this means maximizing assets and minimizing costs.
To get started with modular creative, first develop a full list of final assets. Once the list has been finalized and approved by the brand, you need to take a look at your brand content already produced. What kinds of film, TVC, and KV assets do you have? What about key messaging and product claims? This helps to define the different cross-channel messages you may need. After messaging is locked in for every audience, designers can develop the main design template by following the modular approach. The design template helps to structure the content for different data triggers and audiences and will be made of changeable components such as hero image, copy, packshots, etc. Once the design template is approved, the designers will upload it to Creative Automation for production.
Adjusting agency work
Creative production can be tedious, but with automation, you can let software do that hard work for you. When a modular approach is adopted, it shifts how enterprises work with their agencies. This means early alignment from media agencies on asset needs and briefing creative agencies for campaign toolkits.
Although every creative agency is different, you can change the way you brief your external agencies to set them up for success with campaign toolkits. From different briefing templates to an overview session, there are a few different ways to get your external agencies on board. It’s important to talk to your agency partners about any rate card or scope changes that may need to be considered, with work shifting due to automation’s key role in creative production.
Onboarding internal teams
Enterprise corporations are huge (and that’s an understatement). Not only are there global and local teams, but multiply that across different categories and brands and your eyes might start to blur. That’s why it’s crucial to create a plan for activation by division. If you select a key stakeholder from every division or brand to be a Creative Automation champion, you can create an activation plan based on the expected work pipeline. Not only does this provide great insight into upcoming projects, but it creates a support network for every team.
Once onboarded, teams can start thinking about new creative needs. With a modular approach, you can maximize assets thanks to templates. Ahead of a campaign, the creative teams will also need to consider how they shoot products and record content in a modular way to really make the most of their assets for future campaigns.
With Celtra, an international enterprise launched a campaign in 10 markets with 320 variants and saved 48% on time and 55% on costs. If you’re interested in learning how our platform could help your enterprise company, check out this video or send us a note.