Creative automation: a starter guide

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Creative automation: a starter guide

Learn how creative automation helps support content production by streamlining workflows, automating repetitive tasks, and increasing productivity while maintaining brand integrity.

In a recent survey, 78% of workers said that good content is the most important driver of business success.

It’s no wonder then that the amount of business content being created has grown significantly, with employees spending an average of 15 hours a week on content production.

But as content production grows, it’s important that the production process scales with it. That’s where creative automation comes in. 

Learn more about creative automation and its related use cases in this introductory explainer.

In this article

    What is creative automation?

    Creative automation refers to the process of using technology to streamline and scale creative content production. As content demands continue to grow, creative automation allows professionals to work more efficiently and deliver a higher output with less effort. 

    Tools for creative automation can help designers eliminate repetitive tasks, allowing them to focus more on higher-value, more creative work.

    Creative automation: three use cases

    Global ad campaign

    Any digital marketing campaign is composed of many different content pieces — banners, text ads, emails, etc. — while each asset is itself needed in multiple formats depending on the platform, placement, and language. 

    It’s common for even a moderately-sized ad campaign to require hundreds of different design assets for distribution. 

    When creating such a campaign, the creative work largely comes at the beginning of the process: research and strategy, copywriting, and design. Then comes the long and repetitive phase of duplicating, tweaking, and exporting each version of each asset. 

    Creative automation can take over this phase, making it easier to scale up distribution without overburdening creative teams

    Document production

    Within the broader realm of content management,document management is a speciality area unto itself. 

    While creating documents has been a standard business exercise for decades, creative automation makes it possible to speed up the document generation process, bypassing some steps to allow employees to get to work faster. 

    For example, imagine creating a company PowerPoint presentation from scratch.You’d have to set up the design of the document, manually placing the company logo, sourcing pictures, setting fonts and colors, and inserting the right language and disclaimers. 

    With an automation tool, these aspects can be defined once, managed centrally, and then built again instantly. 

    Brand activation and governance

    One common sticking point in the content creation process is brand approval. 

    After creating an ad campaign or a presentation, the material needs to be checked for quality, eliminating any off-brand material or non-compliant language. 

    Creative automation can help by eliminating problems at the source. When building new assets, centralized management of all creative materials ensures that content production starts on-brand and never veers off course.  

    Altogether this reduces the number of revisions needed and speeds up the editing and approvals process. 

    Learn more about creative automation for brand and communications teams

    Templafy can help you get started with creative automation, giving every employee a simple route to approved brand content from inside Microsoft Office and Google Workspace applications.