Why ad builders inside ad platforms fall short

In today’s digital marketing landscape, agility and speed are everything. Brands and agencies alike are under constant pressure to deliver high-performing, personalized ad creatives at scale across multiple platforms. Automation has emerged as a powerful ally in this race—particularly in ad production. However, not all automation tools are created equal.

While many ad tech platforms offer “creative builders” within their broader suite of features, the reality is this: production tools embedded within ad platforms often fail to meet the needs of designers and creative teams. They’re often built with media teams in mind, offering light creative capabilities bolted onto a system designed for campaign management, optimization, and analytics.

This brings us to the comparison between two industry players: Viewst and Smartly.io. Both operate in the digital advertising ecosystem, but they serve two very different masters. One is a pure-play creative production tool, while the other is a media-focused automation platform with creative features added in.

Let’s dive into what sets them apart and why the future of automated ad production might belong to the specialized, not the generalized.

The landscape of ad production automation

Before diving into specifics, let’s establish the context.

Creative production at scale is no longer a luxury, it’s a necessity. A single campaign might require hundreds of variations across formats, channels, audiences, and languages. To tackle this, many companies turn to automation tools. But there’s a catch.

• Media-first platforms, like Smartly, often include creative builders as a value-add. Their strength lies in ad placement, targeting, and analytics. Their creative tools, while functional, tend to be rigid and limited.

• Creative-first platforms, like Viewst, focus exclusively on the design and automation of creatives. These tools are built by and for designers, prioritizing flexibility, control, and production speed.

Let’s break down why this distinction matters—and how Viewst’s laser focus on design gives it a critical edge.

Viewst vs. Smartly.io: a feature-by-feature breakdown

1. Text styles: freedom to design with precision

• Viewst: ✅ supports multiple styles within a single text element. Want bold, italic, colored, and underlined text all in the same block? No problem.

• Smartly.io: ❌ no support for mixed text styles within the same text element.

This seemingly small feature is a big deal for creative professionals. Typography is one of the core elements of visual communication. Limiting text styling within elements forces designers to use workarounds, duplicating layers, and creating image-based text, which slows down workflows and creates rigid templates.

2. Audio volume controls: coming soon to Viewst

• Viewst: 🔜 audio volume control shipping in Q3 2025.

• Smartly.io: ❌ no support for audio volume adjustment.

As video ads become more nuanced with voiceovers, music, and sound effects, having granular control over audio levels is critical. Viewst’s roadmap includes this functionality, giving editors the ability to control volume levels directly in the browser. Smartly, again, does not support this, leaving users with basic mute/unmute toggles or the need to edit externally before uploading.

3. Group animation: motion design made scalable

• Viewst: ✅ offers more than 100 fully customizable presets with group animation on the way.

• Smartly.io: ❌ basic animation options, no advanced group animation presets.

Animating elements together text, images, buttons, brings motion and storytelling into a creative. Viewst offers a rich animation engine designed to empower non-motion designers to build pro-quality movement. Smartly lags behind here, with limited animation flexibility.

4. Flipping images: a designer’s basic tool, often overlooked

• Viewst: ✅ supports flipping images horizontally and vertically.

• Smartly.io: ❌ no support for flipping images.

This might sound trivial, but small tools like image flipping make a big difference in layout composition. Designers often flip product images or people to match directional flow. Having to edit externally or skip this altogether slows down production.

5. Removing unnecessary fonts: keep it clean

• Viewst: ✅ allows users to manage font libraries and remove unneeded ones.

• Smartly.io: ❌ no font management system.

When managing large brand accounts or multi-client environments, font clutter becomes a problem. Viewst enables users to streamline their workspace, reduce load times, and stay brand-compliant by eliminating unused fonts. Smartly offers no such control, leading to messy, bloated font pickers.

6. Photo variation composition: versioning without pain

• Viewst: ✅ allows for individual photo variation composition inside templates.

• Smartly.io: ❌ no per-image composition control.

Let’s say you're running an ad for sneakers and need a separate composition for each colorway or size. Viewst allows you to fine-tune layouts for each variation—aligning product images, adjusting sizes, etc. all within a single template. Smartly applies changes uniformly, restricting creative variation across assets.

7. Global account brand setup: control at the top level

• Viewst: ✅ offers global brand settings, assets, fonts, and templates across accounts.

• Smartly.io: ❌ no centralized creative governance.

For enterprise teams, global control is essential. Viewst allows creative leads to lock in brand colors, logos, and typefaces across an organization, ensuring consistency and compliance. In Smartly, each user or project might end up applying their own rules, creating brand chaos.

8. Auto-layouts: coming soon to Viewst

• Viewst: 🔜 auto-layouts shipping in Q2 2025.

• Smartly.io: ❌ no support for responsive or auto layouts.

Designing for 10, 20, or 50 sizes of an ad manually? Painful. Viewst is building auto-layout technology that dynamically adjusts designs for various sizes and formats—a true game-changer for time-strapped teams. Smartly still relies on rigid, size-specific templates.

Why builders inside ad platforms don’t cut it

Now that we’ve compared features, a deeper truth emerges: tools like Smartly’s builder aren’t failing because they’re bad, they’re failing because they’re distracted.

Smartly’s core strength lies in media operations:

• Dynamic product feeds

• Audience targeting

• A/B testing and reporting

• Campaign scaling

Its creative builder is simply a means to an end: get a creative live so it can be tested and optimized. It’s built for speed and scale, not for design depth or nuance.

On the other hand, Viewst is all-in on creative production. It’s not trying to be an ad server or analytics dashboard. It’s building the best damn creative editor possible in the browser, for the modern marketing designer.

Viewst’s philosophy: a true creative production tool

From its roadmap to its current capabilities, everything Viewst builds points in one direction: empowering creative teams with control, flexibility, and speed.

A few defining characteristics:

• Built for collaboration. Designers, brand managers, and clients can collaborate in the same environment.

• No code, no clunky software. Everything happens in the browser, optimized for speed and performance.

• Creative automation, not creative limitation. Smart templating, asset versioning, and responsive designs without sacrificing creative freedom.

In essence, Viewst understands what designers need, not just to build ads, but to build better ads, faster.

Smartly’s niche: great for media teams

This isn’t to say Smartly is without merit. For performance marketers and media buyers, it’s incredibly powerful:

• Rule-based optimization

• Real-time feed integrations

• Platform-wide A/B testing

• Budget allocation tools

Its creative automation works well if your creative is already built and only needs light variation. But if you want high-end, brand-compliant, responsive design you’ll hit a wall quickly.

The future of creative production is specialization

As the industry evolves, the needs of creatives and media teams continue to diverge. Media teams want speed, scale, and testing. Creatives want tools that enable expressive design, brand fidelity, and multi-version production.

Platforms that try to do both often sacrifice one for the other. The phrase "jack of all trades, master of none" applies perfectly here. While Smartly excels at what it was built for (media automation), its creative builder is a lightweight afterthought. Viewst, meanwhile, doubles down on production and the results speak for themselves.

In a world where campaigns live or die on the strength of their visuals, it’s not just about getting ads live. It’s about getting them right.

Conclusion: choose the right tool for the right job

If you're a media team looking to run thousands of variations across Facebook or TikTok with dynamic targeting, Smartly is probably a good fit. But if you're a creative team tasked with producing hundreds of high-quality, on-brand variations, Viewst is the only real option.

Don’t force your designers to work in a tool built for media buyers. Let media tools handle the backend and give creatives a frontend they can thrive in.