The ROI of creative automation: Unlocking team productivity, campaign performance and revenue

Today’s digital era has unleashed an unprecedented scale of content consumption which businesses often struggle to keep up with especially without creative automation. To stand out in the clutter, a brand needs to be present in at least 12 – 18 websites and ecommerce marketplaces, create personalized content for more than 200 user cohorts, and refresh creatives in not less than one week if campaigns are to stay relevant and engaging. 

This requires every brand to become a creative powerhouse to achieve the speed and efficiency needed to create personalized content at scale, without being limited by bandwidth. 

Here’s where agile creative operations (CreativeOps) plays a crucial role in streamlining the different parts of enterprise communication—planning, production, review, and collaboration—making it more efficient and agile. This way, brands can launch campaigns faster and scale production anytime. And a crucial part of creative operations excellence is the use of creative automation tools to remove all repetitive and manual tasks that eat into team efficiency, campaign performance, and ultimately revenue.

Creative automation for fast, flawless and friction-free creative operations

A typical marketing campaign would require teams to work for up to 8 days putting together assets and creating visuals, and then another 10 days to adapt them for different advertising platforms like Meta, Google and ecommerce platforms. On top of this, reviewing creatives for brand and platform compliance would take another full week until they’re ready to go live. 

For this entire process, what if we told you that plugging in a layer of creative automation could save upwards of 40% of bandwidth for teams? That’s right. 

A CreativeOps platform like Rocketium comes with powerful a creative automation tool that make your life so much easier. Let’s take a look:

1. Getting on more advertising platforms and retail media networks is no longer the nightmare it needs to be. Easily adapt your key visuals for different platforms by automating size adapts, making quick edits, and putting more ad placements across different platforms with the click of a button. And not just for images, but for GIFs and videos as well. 

2. Personalization is now a breeze. Don’t waste hours creating message variants to personalize for hundreds of user cohorts. Easily create thousands of variants for your visuals using a simple content feed import, and let the creative automation tool do its magic.

3. Save even more bandwidth with an AI copywriter that thinks like your brand, with your brand context and campaign intelligence built into the LLM. You can make it write project briefs and copy for your ads, translate content for faster vernacular production and more.

All the bandwidth and time you save with creative automation now translates to three very important outcomes that impact your business.

The three-pronged impact of creative automation: team productivity, performance and revenue

1. An important outcome of creative automation is the impact it has on efficiency and team productivity – the same teams can now achieve greater productivity due to more bandwidth and space for creativity. Adopting creative automation empowers design and marketing teams to get back about 30% of their time spent on non-productive tasks, which in turn translates to highly significant cost savings. For example, for a 10 person marketing team (4 designers + 6 marketers), where average salaries are $100K, 30% productivity means $300K of the total $1Mn resource cost. This means a brand can save thousands of dollars by boosting team productivity.

To give a real-world instance, the world’s biggest ecommerce company previously worked on multiple tools with multiple agencies for their creative needs. Even the smallest creative changes took several hours and delayed go-lives, causing them to lose revenue to competitors during peak sale events. But with creative automation software, the company cut down agency costs extensively boosted the efficiency of their own in-house teams, and over-delivered on campaign outcomes, even when ecommerce sales slumped everywhere due to covid.

2. Creative automation also contributes to much better ad performance given that brands can personalize, experiment and refresh ads on time, without worrying about bandwidth. Recently, Rocketium came up with a solution for the world’s biggest fast-food chain which spends $13M+ on campaigns across multiple digital and retail media networks. Working with multiple creative agencies slowed down creative production at this company, and delayed campaign launches severely. Moreover, creative refresh was slow and they ended up burning significant dollars on stale creatives. But after adopting creative automation, the brand launched campaigns faster and refreshed creatives on time, resulting in 20% higher return on ad spends (ROAS) and a significant $200K+ cost savings on creative agencies.

3. The holy grail of creative automation is ultimately the kind of impact it has on revenue. With 10x more visuals to power campaigns, enterprises now have more business opportunities, especially during sale events. In a spectacular demonstration of how automation impacts revenue, the world’s biggest retailer effectively unlocked $3M+ annual GMV simply by adopting creative automation. Previously, the company struggled to penetrate into untapped markets owing to lack of personalized content in vernacular languages. But after automating their creative processes, they gained 30% more bandwidth and personalized creatives for 11+ new vernacular languages, which ultimately helped them expand business into more geographic markets. 

Another important way in which creative automation also impacts revenue is how it gives brands the ability to advertise on more platforms. With many aspects of production and brand compliance now automated, brands have the bandwidth to produce more creatives without worrying about multiple platform rules and guidelines. A major FMCG company recently worked with Rocketium to enable creative automation and pushed up their campaign launch time. This way, they could make more creatives and penetrate deeper into the 15+ retail media networks where they advertised, and boost their current channel contribution of 15%.

Creative automation for your enterprise — how to get started?

Creative automation never functions in isolation; it requires the entire creative operations infrastructure in an enterprise to be equally robust and agile. 

Here’s where it’s crucial to have a platform that brings together creative tools to meet the scale of today’s production demands, and orchestrates processes in a way that eliminates manual and redundant tasks so that teams are more efficient and effective. A CreativeOps platform like Rocketium already does this for the biggest global brands, such as Amazon, McDonald’s, Walmart, and Colgate-Palmolive. The added advantage of having a CreativeOps partner is that you also have platform experts who will actually run creative operations for your brand, without the hassle of getting teams to change the way they work.
 
If you’re ready to get started on your new CreativeOps journey of efficiency and business growth, reach out to us marketing@rocketium.com.