Technology has been reshaping the future of the creative marketing and advertising industries even before the pandemic accelerated the need for new approaches. But now, as organisations plan their futures in a transformed world against the backdrop of economic turmoil, many are choosing to take the next leap forward and explore the opportunities presented by automation.
The pandemic upended the marketer’s playbook, challenging the existing rules about how to develop customer relationships and build a brand. In just a short time, we have seen the enormous potential of automation to drive brand engagement, boost creativity and improve customer engagement. The foundations have been laid to tackle the next challenge we all face: global economic uncertainty.
From its contribution to revenue to the productivity opportunities it can generate, automation can play a transformative role in every business journey. Applied intelligently, automation can realise the ambitions of marketing and creative leaders by delivering greater personalisation, conserving more time for human creativity, and unlocking new opportunities to grow and scale.
Creative automation combines creativity and technology to streamline production and augment the creative process so that the best ideas take shape faster. It enables the delivery of creative assets at scale, dynamic advertising, and conversational marketing, helping brands to supercharge their creative output through technology.
DEPT® has been pioneering creative automation for over ten years. Here, marketing leaders from Just Eat, eBay and Opendoor clients share what creative automation helps them to achieve.
Just Eat: global scale, local relationships
Matt Bushby, UK Marketing Director at Just Eat
“Automation enables companies to use critical information to target key audiences at scale with the right messages. This is particularly valuable for a global business like Just Eat whose relationship with its customers and partners is a local one.
“Working with DEPT®, we have used tools such as YouTube Director Mix to create more localised experiences for our customers. Our partnership has enabled us to deliver to a mass audience but also focus on the areas where we need to drive success. And that’s incredibly exciting because it means we’re able to engage more customers in more relevant ways and tell them about the incredible choice on the app.
“Automation also enables us to produce assets at scale. Whether it is through our CRM workstreams or our external channels, automation helps us to discover new ways to drive efficiency and produce large volumes of advertising assets that increase our reach. From email and push notifications to social media advertising and video platforms, automation has empowered us to create at scale and optimise our creative output to deliver the best results for our customers.
“The introduction of automation has enabled our teams to focus on higher level tasks and the big challenges, such as how we strategically build our business, come up with new creative ideas and identify smarter ways to engage our customers. With automation we can test multiple ads across thousands of creatives – a process that could take people days, weeks or even months to deliver. By using automation, we can not only get quicker results but free up our teams to use their creativity in more productive ways.”
eBay: loyalty & engagement
Eve Williams, Chief Marketing Officer, eBay
“At eBay, we use automation across multiple points of the customer journey. From the ads on our website to the emails we send our customers, automation enables us to not only personalise our messages based on our customers’ browsing histories and purchases but also share other promotions they might be interested in. Ultimately, automation has enabled us to better engage with our customers and justify their loyalty to us by creating marketing assets that they find interesting, engaging and relevant.
“Automation can also have a positive impact on people in the workplace too. Machine learning has the potential to reduce the number of repetitive manual tasks that employees have to do and gives them more freedom to think creatively in their roles. For example, instead of manually uploading hundreds of differently sized versions of a single asset, we can automate the resizing process and designers can produce more assets that are more relevant to our customers.
“Throughout our automation journey, DEPT® has been an important partner for us. Their experience in understanding the full end-to-end customer journey has helped us to automate and personalise a wide range of campaigns, from emails to product pages. Their combination of technical understanding and their ability to create content has been powerful because it has enabled us to automate processes and seamlessly create content at the same time.”
Opendoor: driving the best outcomes
Marty Ellis, Head of Lifecycle Marketing, Opendoor
“This type of automation offers two primary benefits. Its ability to generate lots of assets enables businesses to do rapid testing at a scale that was previously impossible. This improves engagement and, ultimately, conversion rates.
“The second benefit we see is the potential for creative asset automation and artificial intelligence to work together to apply intelligent feedback to the marketing process. AI and automation together can assemble the jigsaw puzzle of a creative asset, deciding on the best copy, imagery and layout based on the variations that drive the best outcomes for a given customer. In this way, companies can create personalised campaigns that are incredibly effective at scale. In the future, the most intelligent software will be able to learn what works and design and deploy campaigns with minimal human input.”
Delivering transformational growth
At DEPT®, we believe in the power of automation and its potential to propel organisations into a faster, better and more productive future. We are committed to creative automation because we have seen what it can achieve for our clients. From delivering personalised content at scale to giving us back more time to develop creative strategies, we know that automation technology can deliver truly transformational growth for both our business and our clients, especially in times of uncertainty.
Drop us a line today to discuss how creative automation can supercharge your business.
