As a designer in digital advertising, you’ll often find yourself torn between two forces. On the one hand, you want to deliver qualitative designs, appreciated by your colleagues, clients, and targeted audiences. On the other hand, you have to wisely manage your time, since the increased amount of marketing networks and devices (and therefore corresponding ad formats) require hours of resizing and upscaling.
Maybe you find yourself wondering ‘What if I could spend more time on creating eye-catching ads, and less on these boring, repetitive tasks? What if I didn’t have to balance quantity against quality, but I could opt for both?’
If this is even the slightest bit true, the moment is here to learn more about using a Creative Management Platform (CMP). This cloud-based technical solution supports designers in twofold: they offer more time for creativity and improve the quality of your ads. All while staying in full control of the designs.
Let’s take a closer look at these benefits.
- More time for creativity, less manual handlings
Creating digital ads can be very time-consuming. Designing your first ad first requires creativity, especially when you want an ad that stands out. You’ll spend time adding a dashing background and positioning text boxes, or finalize the template by adding new elements such as copy and images. When you’ve collected feedback from all those involved, the design is ready to be upscaled.
But this isn’t the end – not in the least. From your first ad, you’ll scale up to different formats and sizes for different ad networks and devices (Google Ads alone already supports 20 different ad sizes, so do the math). In some cases, you also have to add translations to make the ad suitable for different regions. The scaling part of digital ad production is probably the part that requires the most manual handlings. And it takes hours, sometimes even days.
When you use a CMP, these manual handlings are automated. When you have finished your first design, you can upscale with just a single click. Translations can be added in a few minutes. Last-minute feedback can be applied to your ad set as a whole. With a CMP, you can easily create hundreds of ads within minutes. Basically, you create one design, the rest is created by itself.
You also have the opportunity to create ad templates. With this, marketers make minor changes to the ads without messing up your design. They no longer have to ask you to perform every little alteration while breathing down your neck.
To put a number on it: a CMP roughly saves 50% of time spent on creating and scaling your ads when you solely work on static ads. This means you have 50% more time to spend on creativity, and you can create more ads while doing so. When you also animate your ads (we’ll talk more on that in the next part of this article), you can even save up to 90% of your time. Think of how amazing your next ads will be with all that time on your hands. It’s design-Walhalla.
- Better-looking, professionally animated ads
While we can’t measure all designers by the same standards, we notice that most of you lack coding skills. That’s completely fine since developers often miss your eye for composition.
So usually, most designs are handed over to developers to add animation. This slows down the production process, but also (no offense, developers) often means that designs are messed up by accident. To make all your ads pixel perfect, it would be great if you could, therefore, animate ads yourself.
Also, we often hear that "using GIFs is a good solution" when there’s either no developer around, or to simply avoid frustration. The issue here is that GIFs tend to decrease the quality of your ads, by allowing you to show only 256 colors (in comparison, HTML5 ads have roughly 16,7 million colors). As a result, your brand colors could be displayed incorrectly. On top of that, GIFs also don’t contain interactive elements such as clickable buttons and moving call-to-actions.
Using a CMP enables you to create all kinds of high-quality ads, without needing coding skills. It often has an easy-to-use WYSIWYG ad builder, that allows you to add all kinds of animations to your ads, including video elements. This way, you can create professional-looking HTML5 ads within minutes, from dynamic (re)targeting ads to in-banner video ads that’ll blow your targeted audience away. Whatever type of ads you create: you don’t hand in on brand consistency or image quality, but also stay in full control when it comes to your design.
What do you think?
The opportunity to create more and better-looking ads, while spending less time on boring, manual handlings. How does that sound? If it sparks joy, let’s throw out the old workflow and let in the new. And with new, we obviously mean a CMP.
Enjoy!