Creative Automation: Made by Robots, Optimised for Humans
Automation has made an impact on countless industries in one way or another. That impact can be as small as the dishwasher doing our chores, saving us time and ensuring the cutlery sparkles. It can also be as big as a robotic arm packaging products in a factory, increasing productivity and capacity for a business.
Learning fast from software developers, marketers will automate just about any task they can. They use software to generate detailed reports that used to take hours, in minutes. They schedule a month’s worth of social media posts in one hour instead of visiting every platform every day. The result is that marketers can focus on the tasks that people do best. This includes coming up with great ideas, telling important stories and creating strategies that cannot exist through software alone.
Challenge
Automation gives us the time we are so desperate for. The creatives in marketing teams are expected to produce more digital content than ever, at a faster pace and tailored for every personality within a target audience. These expectations are unsurprising because people see thousands of messages on the internet everyday. The best way to ensure your message lands is to use language and imagery that appeals to the people you want to engage with.
Design production at scale is essential for digital managers who want to personalise, localise and diversify visual creative to improve performance…but it can be expensive, monotonous and slow. A designer’s time is not well spent when they are adjusting image sizes or changing the background colours of the same piece of creative work all day.
Additionally, if the people within a target audience vary, there is more room for small variations of the same message. But who has time for that?
Solution
Optimization helps marketers ensure that paid media budgets are automatically shifted toward the best performing ad sets they create. This removes the need to check ad performance everyday and manually move budgets to the content that best meets the objectives. We decided to take this sort of optimization a step further, in a way that keeps small reverts off the to-do lists of people who can do more.
While optimization ensures maximum performance for ad sets, the number of assets available still depends on how many a human being can create in a given time. Rollout is a creative automation platform that frees people to be creative at scale. It reduces costs and speeds up production of visual content, with quick exporting of assets like HTML animations and static PNGs in any digital format that you can imagine.
Built using GoLang (Google’s Go programming language), the platform is simple. A designer using RollOut will create a campaign, set various dimensions, upload fonts, colours and images that are aligned with a brand’s CI. The software can then produce multiple iterations of an ad with various layouts and colour combinations according to the assets the designer has added.
If you’ve ever read the AI generated script for a Batman movie (see it here), you’ll know that human creativity is still essential to the process. A copywriter on a roll will also be able to upload various copy sets to RollOut. Campaign taglines, hashtags and other important information can be set to be automatically included in every iteration of an ad too. Not sure whether ‘sign up now’ or ‘register today’ will work best? Include both.
Results
Testing and iterating content from idea to launch and back triggers better performance. With Rollout, you can produce thousands of iterations for testing and refining messaging or imagery without spending weeks in production. The ability for an agency to create personalised communications at scale becomes a more realistic achievement. For clients who want to reach the people they serve in a way that is relevant and impactful, the cost of creating digital assets becomes more affordable.
We at PlusNarrative believe that digital excellence is the overlap of people, platforms and processes. We are builders, with the tools to shape ideas into real behaviour-changing products. If you’re looking to save weeks of time in production, get in touch with the +N team to trial creative automation for your business.
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