How Media Agencies Can Use Creative Automation: Media by Mother x Celtra

Dave Gaines founded the Media by Mother agency on three pillars: simplicity, integrity, and creativity. With a solid 25 years of experience in media, digital, and strategy, he’s on the pulse of how to optimize media and paving the way for more impactful creative. 

Media by Mother has been using Celtra to increase the creative scale and production of their clients’ campaign strategies for years. Since the Celtra and Media by Mother partnership began, they have hit the ground running, winning their very first creative pitch and taking home their first award earlier this year. The quality of their offering and campaign performance has been on a steady incline ever since. 

Filling the gap between creativity and optimization

There is a limit to optimization before it begins to dry out your creativity. “Media gets optimized within an inch of its life, but without a creative idea, you can only get so far.” says Gaines. In fact, he’s met a number of programmatic professionals, who, although they make it their business to get the most out of any ad, rarely ever see an idea. The ads are sent in code to be optimized for a 2-9% incremental improvement. However, creativity accounts for 40% of that, so by establishing stronger concepts and focusing on building out the creative, your results are bound to increase.

The game changer in the success strategy for Media by Mother was to put more thought into how the ads would work once they went out into the world. Developing and populating the middle ground where programmatic and creative teams work together will make the creative idea shine true to its original intent through a combination of creative strategy and optimization.

Using Celtra, both media and creative teams are able to work in the same production environment, where they can tweak and scale at huge volumes, resulting in not only highly optimized creatives but stronger ideas that are served in more intelligent and relevant ways.

Testing and optimizing campaigns

In the past, media companies were set on increasing reach. Today, the aim is to spot and reduce waste. Where are ads falling short, and what can we do to drive results? Media by Mother had seen a rising need from clients to produce higher volumes of creative at double the speed. Not only that, but these assets were also expected to be hyper-relevant and impactful in order to drive positive results. To ensure the creatives are landing, the key is A/B testing- which means a high number of variations need to be produced. Over the years, advertisers have refined ways of testing what works and tweaking the creatives for the highest possible appeal and performance, despite the rising demands in volume.

With Celtra, Media by Mother has built countless assets with thousands of different iterations that are easily sent out into the world to test. To use an example from a Media by Mother client, 2,500 creative assets were built in less time than it had previously taken that same client to build 45.  With creative automation, although the scaling capabilities are infinite, the feedback process is short and efficient. In that same case study, out of the 2,500 options, only 900 were chosen; however, by organizing them within buckets of themes, it was easy for the compliance team and stakeholders to flick through and approve them. “From an efficiency perspective, it has undoubtedly done the job, but from a test and learn perspective, that’s where the real value comes in,” says Gaines. 

Leveraging brand investment

Leveraging all the investment a brand has made into its creative teams means always thinking about how to personalize the content differently and what combinations can elicit better responses. By innovating and improving the creative, you boost engagement and impact at least four-fold without increasing production costs. Gaines reported that one of their clients is hitting 4x better creative engagement targets since bringing in a team of designers to work on the guardrails for their digital advertising campaigns.

An important shift in the approach to production, Gaines suggests, is to reframe the way we think about creatives. “Think of it as an OOH board, only it’s a poster on the internet. A well-designed banner or button brings us a step closer to curing the awful eye bleed exposure you get from digital advertising”. The creative looks better, and on top of that, they’ve “got the ability to play around inside the creative sandbox that Celtra provides us as a production environment, and we get incredibly fast feedback so we can make things happen quickly.”   

Adopting this mentality means exercising more creative freedom to consider and play with how ideas can be seen and how to build upon them. With a little help from Celtra, Media by Mother aims to relinquish its old constraints and be thrown into a richer, more creative-driven media space. Hopefully, as more companies adopt this mindset, we will see a decline in wasteful, badly designed ads that litter our screens and more appealing advertising that injects effective creativity into the media landscape.

Want to learn more? Watch the full webinar below

So, if you’re looking to take your campaigns to the next level, Celtra’s Creative Enablement and Library is a powerful asset you don’t want to miss out on. Book a demo to see how you can transform your advertising game today.