Evolution of the advertising market: ad production automation makes all the difference

Is ad production automation advertising’s new black for agencies and brands?

 Advertising has advanced tremendously, and especially over the past three-to-five years. Brands as well as advertising agencies continuously try to adapt to the new fast-developing ad reality, diverse audiences, and rapidly changing trends. 

In the past decade alone, we have seen major changes in advertising and software automation.

From PPC and social media to AI and machine learning, advertisers, agencies, C-Level executives, and clients are today searching for and applying the best automation technology to their campaigns.

But before we get into evolution, let us begin with the basics.

What does advertising automation mean?

Just as it sounds, it is the process of automating different areas of one’s digital advertising efforts with various software and tools.

First and foremost, it frees up one’s time to focus on other important areas. According to Business.com, software automation can save 30% of advertisers’ time. Moreover, it optimises campaigns for higher CTR and lower CPC.

Automation helps to increase lead generation, customer segmentation, customer lifecycles, analytics processes, etc. This is especially essential if a business begins to grow and scale, and manual operations become unmanageable and ineffective without specific software solutions. When this happens, automation is key. 

Automation software tools are proving their ability to enhance the overall ad experience and future of the digital advertising industry.

Why is ad production automation so necessary? What does it do?

If you produce advertising or are a business that needs advertising to scale up your sales, you know that ad production is key to staying competitive.

With manually intensive processes, there are many potential holdups in ad production that influence the entire ad campaign.

Marketers have never needed more content than right now and are struggling to meet these demands with manual production:

• Performance teams need to refresh the campaign creative frequently to drive performance

• New product launches put pressure on delivering new creative assets

• Media plans require tons of sizes and format variations

• Every day new social media networks appear to be a marketing channel 

Automation has changed the way that media is bought and handled; now it’s time for the creative to experience the same shift. 

Companies and brands need to keep up by producing more and more creatives than ever before to match customer interests and expectations.

It can be really challenging, and time- and money-consuming. From expensive content scaling, slow creative processes, misunderstandings between marketer and designer, and inconsistent designs, marketers can’t just turn to old-fashioned creative production anymore. The answer is automation.

Why haven’t marketers adopted automation yet? A lack of awareness that such software tools exist. Creative automation really is the “new black” and quite different from the traditional brief-idea-production-launch process many marketers have become accustomed to.

How should it be used?

Automating content production at scale is an exciting option, especially its promise of reducing manual involvement. But, it’s important to remember that ad automation doesn’t eliminate human involvement entirely – and shouldn’t.

Following the campaign development process and design stages, which are heavily reliant on people, comes the production stage. This is where ad production automation comes into play. In the production phase, ad automation supports content production and delivery processes. For instance, if the same asset needs to be made available in local languages, you and your colleagues are able to easily and quickly create and edit and then auto-generate all the required versions in a variety of sizes for your social channels, ad networks, etc.

However, not everything in the ad production phase needs to be automated. The approval requires human involvement. It needs to be clear to the entire team where quality checks are needed – a definite distinction between the creator and the approver – to ensure the content output remains on-message and on-brand. Just like its role in creativity, human gut instinct and brilliance are incomparable – something machines will never quite match. 

When multiple people, from internal design, copywriting, and marketing teams to external agencies, work on a great number of tasks, collaboration is paramount. Thanks to brand templates and guidelines, ad production automation welcomes a more collaborative environment as well.