24.10.2024
73% of marketers use some sort of automation when creating ad campaigns - from simple automations such as generating texts with ChatGPT, optimising and generating images, to larger, custom-coded automations.
Our Display Automation is a creative automation tool that can significantly enhance the efficiency of your creative production process - no custom-coding and 100% manageable in-house.
Below, Emma will take you through an A-Z video guide on exactly what it is and how this creative automation works.
Sander Boesen
Content Marketing Manager / Zuuvi
Quick Guide
If this is unchartered territory for you, take a step back with this article that breaks down the basics of display automation.
Otherwise, watch Emma's A-Z video guide right here👇
Video Guide: Display Automation
Below, our Head of Customer Experience, Emma, will thoroughly take you through the opportunities you have with our creative automation tool, Display Automation.
However, since you may have caught on to a few things about Display Automation already (who knows, maybe you've read our previous article), I'll leave you with a few timestamps.
0:00 - Intro to creating your first Display Automation Campaign
1:52 - Scheduling campaigns in advance
2:57 - Creating product-based rules
4:00 - How to be Creative with Display Automation
4:35 - A walkthrough of finishing up and publishing your campaign
Alright! I assume - and hope - that answers most of the questions you may have about this creative automation, and how to create automated ads with Display Automation. Click below if you want a Zuuvineer to demonstrate it for you on a 20-minute call.
If you're still slightly confused about what the term creative automation actually covers (believe me, I was at first), along with automation in ad creation in general, allow me to dive much deeper into what we're actually dealing with here.
What is Creative Automation?
Creative automation is changing the game for marketers and designers who need to produce digital ads fast and at scale. In today’s fast-paced digital world, the ability to create high-quality, dynamic ads quickly is essential, and creative automation makes it all possible. Instead of designing each dynamic ad manually, creative automation tools empower teams to generate hundreds or even thousands of ad variations with just a few clicks. This means you can customise ads for different platforms while keeping everything consistent with your brand’s look and feel.
Repetitive, manual tasks like resizing and reformatting each individual ad are the number one enemies of creativity. A creative automation tool handles these tasks for you, so your creative team can focus on what really matters - making impactful ads. Whether you’re running multi-channel campaigns or tailoring designs for specific audience segments, creative automation saves time, boosts efficiency, and helps you respond to trends faster. It’s not just a buzzword - it’s a must-have for anyone looking to stay competitive in digital marketing.
How Does Creative Automation Work?
Creative automation takes the repetitive work out of ad production. With creative automation, instead of manually adjusting each creative, you set your parameters - like text, images, and dynamic data - and the system generates all the variations for you. This allows brands to adapt their ads to various platforms, while tailoring each individual ad to the data they choose quickly and efficiently. Additionally, creative automation tools offer real-time editing, so you can tweak designs on the fly based on performance data or new design choices, ensuring your ads stay fresh and relevant.
Benefits of Using a Creative Automation Tool
Well, it honestly looks like I've already touched on this above, so I'll keep it simple, answering the following question: Why should marketers embrace creative automation tools? It’s simple:
1. They deliver speed,
2. They increase scalability,
3. They enable consistency.
With creative automation, you can churn out hundreds of ads, each tailored to different channels or audience segments, without overloading your team. These tools also ensure brand consistency—templates lock in your guidelines, letting you focus on strategy and creativity, not execution. Ultimately, a good creative automation solution frees up your time, enabling you to deliver better ads at a faster pace.
Below I'll put an example of outputs from our creative automation tool. (Bear in mind, I'm not a designer...)
Automatic Advertising
Should you use automatic advertising? Well, if you ask me, no ad creation process should ever be fully automated. This would create ad campaigns that are stripped from human creativity, and would likely be full of ads that get lost in the sea of content.
However, Automatic advertising does have its benefits when used correctly.
For example, automatic advertising can remove many manual processes from digital marketing. Thanks to creative automation, designers can forget about versioning endless amounts of ads, while marketers can deliver personalised, data-driven ads to their target audiences. Platforms that enable automatic advertising often use real-time performance data to continuously optimise your ads, ensuring they hit the right people at the right time.
A key component of this process is automated creatives - ads that dynamically adjust based on who’s viewing them. With automatic advertising, these ads change their message or design to suit each viewer, increasing engagement and improving ROI. By automating these adjustments, marketers can save time, reduce errors, and improve performance across all platforms.
Are Automated Ads Worth It?
Absolutely - with reservations. Because again: fully automated ads are not something we would recommend. But automated ads can be a huge win for digital marketers, if the automations are used moderately. By automating parts of the creation, such as ad versioning, and many of the manual deployment tasks, you cut down on manual work, speed up production, and increase flexibility. Automatic advertising tools can be used to ensure that each ad is relevant and personalised to the viewer, even as campaign goals shift or audience preferences change. This agility allows marketers to optimise their ads in real-time, leading to better results.
Also, automated digital marketing is built for scalability. As your business grows or you expand into new markets, automatic advertising handles the increased workload without needing a bigger team. You can produce ads for multiple platforms and audience segments, all while maintaining brand consistency and delivering the personalised experiences that drive conversions. In today’s fast-moving world, automated ads are a must-have tool for any serious digital marketing strategy.
The Future of Automatic Advertising
As digital marketing continues to evolve, automatic advertising is becoming a standard for high-performing campaigns. The power of automated ads lies in their ability to continuously optimise themselves. By testing and tweaking the messaging based on performance data, marketers can ensure their ads reach the right people with the right message at the right time. Looking ahead, we’ll likely see more AI-driven tools being integrated into automatic advertising, making it even more powerful in terms of targeting specific audiences with personalized, automated creatives.
However, the rise of AI in ad creation may also dilute the human creative touch, which I personally see as a challenge to the quality in advertisement going forward. In that regard it's important to separate AI and automations, as these are completely different. Automations can never take over creative tasks as some AI's are designed to do.
Just a little food for thought.
How Automated Creatives Drive Performance
Automated creatives are a game-changer when it comes to delivering personalised content at scale. Automatic advertising creates dynamic ads that adapt to each viewer’s preferences, helping reduce ad fatigue and boost engagement. When paired with automated digital marketing strategies, these creatives can continuously update based on performance metrics, allowing marketers to optimise their campaigns in real-time and drive better ROI.
Choosing the Right Creative Automation Solution
Picking the best creative automation solution is crucial to getting the most out of your ad production. When looking for a creative automation tool, prioritise features like user-friendly templates, real-time editing, and easy integration with your existing marketing tools. The right solution will not only increase your team’s efficiency but also ensure your ads are data-driven and high-performing. By automating the repetitive parts of ad creation, you’ll have more time to focus on creating content that truly resonates with your audience.