Creative content and to meet pandemic holiday demands

This holiday, consumers want new and fresh content while they shop online or via other digital channels during the pandemic. According to a recent survey we conducted of US consumers, 79% want different storytelling approaches from brands – they do not want to see the same ad/creative repeatedly.

We’re spending more time online than ever and have probably seen it all already anyhow.

Simultaneously, this season, retail and brand marketers want to satisfy their consumers and produce tons of holiday campaign assets without sacrificing quality.

However, the ever-growing number of platforms, channels, and accelerated online adoption along with the fact that brands might’ve already over-used existing creative concepts through the past couple of months – poses an execution challenge.

This holiday season brands will more than ever look to fill in the revenue gaps due to less retail traffic, thus they will need clever creative tactics and with that content to do so effectively. When stakes are high you don’t want to put all your eggs in a single basket.

When volume demands become overwhelming, creative variety and quality take a hit. Still, as brands start to run their advertising engines to battle it out for consumers’ wallets, production resources and budgets have not grown to meet the demand, and teams are expected to do more with less.

This dilemma is coined as the Content Gap, and many brand marketers and advertisers are feeling stretched thin. Brands need to consider different, more efficient ways to produce creative.

On the ‘naughty’ list

The Content Gap creates massive pressures within a brand or retail company. As consumer spending regains its strength, brands need to ensure they deploy creative content seamlessly and efficiently this holiday. Let’s discuss these challenges.

• Lack of creative quality: More than half (51%) of consumers find creative assets with relevant offers to be the most memorable. Nevertheless, producing and promoting weekly –if not daily– holiday sales across multiple channels creates strains on promotional content (email, social posts, etc.). Retail marketing and advertising teams often forego quality to push out high volumes of promotional campaigns across platforms.
• Scattered & slow process: Commonly, internal creative teams, marketing leaders, and media agencies review campaigns but often work in silos. This method creates friction as stakeholders have their processes and preferences to complete a campaign – especially when most teams are now working remotely. Brands struggle to quickly and seamlessly collaborate, prompting them to leave money on the table.
• Inefficient regional or local adaptations: The localization of global campaigns presents the opportunity to reach and engage with international markets. However, the traditional production processes brands have in place are duplicating efforts, not to mention inconsistent branding when local markets are left to create from scratch.

Creative automation tops the ‘nice’ list

Creative Automation is the antidote to the Content Gap dilemma and will rescue brands this holiday season. With 61% of consumers expected to conduct their holiday shopping online this year, brands need to bring to market a variety of holiday campaign creative ideas, messaging, and promotions to charm and convert consumers.

In practice, Creative Automation software allows brands to launch campaigns faster, apply changes to existing creative instantly, get more done with the same resources, and bring remote teams together for an agile response during the pandemic holiday.

To infinity and beyond

Now that we understand a bit more about Creative Automation let’s dive into how brands can get ahead with their creative production this holiday and the New Year.

• Don’t compromise on variety, scale production instead: Brands can expand their creative assets across multiple permutations of templates, designs, languages, and sizes. CA brings all teams into one place to help on several levels – functions like multi-user access to preview, review, approve campaigns, speed up workflows while removing constant user management.
• Accelerate speed to market & make room for high-value creative work: Even the largest, most resourceful brand needs the right technology to make their creative production process more effective. With the right technology in place, creative teams can become faster and more agile by eliminating manual, repetitive tasks in the production workflows. Speed is essential, but it’s also crucial to consider time and resources. When you don’t have to choose between quality and quantity, brands can focus on elevating creative ideas.
• Always on brand, always in control: Investing in high-quality creative production helps retain brand consistency across regions, platforms, and messaging, all on a single interface. According to a recent creative variety survey, 60% of consumers are bothered or distrust a brand when ads or content don’t match their website or app or store.

Take a fresh approach to automating creative

Consumer sentiment shows the need for retailers to evaluate how they create and deploy holiday campaigns.

Ahead of the holiday season, investment in creativity is a must. Secondly, retailers, creative strategy has become a critical performance lever to drive sales. However, today, the challenge is that many brands have not organized their creative teams to react to global and local consumers and move at speed.

This holiday season, transformative retailers and brands will advance with the assistance of new technology like Creative Automation to automate and scale their creative messaging, variety, and help their teams focus on strategic work. Those who place a greater focus on creative variance and agility will come out on top this quarter and beyond.