The latest generation of AI has been a game changer across marketing teams in the retail world. Yet, some areas of content production have been transformed faster than others. Specifically, how creative teams can further invest in AI tools has been a matter of ongoing discussion. Today, AI-powered solutions have emerged to not only assist those teams with streamlining processes but also help remove the tedium from their work with automated content creation at scale.
The Hidden Dangers of Manual Creative Workflows
While we often think of creative work as a flowing and organic process within a team, it involves tedious manual tasks such as resizing the same design for different placements, creating language variants, checking all output for adherence to brand and content guidelines, and doing the same work repeatedly for different platforms (e.g., tweaking one design and piece of writing for Facebook vs. Instagram).
Ultimately, there is a limit to what any given team is capable of accomplishing while adhering to strict schedules and competitive marketing demands. Marketing teams know well that there is always more work to do.
But when designers and creative marketers are bottlenecked by tedious manual processes and procedures, it’s more than just struggling to meet deadlines. It’s a persistent lack of time to personalize campaigns for each potential audience, test those campaigns, or refresh live creatives that are underperforming.
Even if refreshing a campaign is simply a matter of tweaking some copy, keeping track of all those adjustments—much less the results—is a challenge all its own. And when creative marketers and designers don’t know what’s working and what’s not, it’s often because they lack the data they need to feel which way the wind is blowing. That’s hardly smart marketing.
What it Means to Effectively Automate Creative Work
Most marketing teams are already leveraging AI in some fashion, in some cases unknowingly, and were some of the first teams to do so. New survey data has found that 80% of marketers already leverage AI tools, and 48% considered increasing AI adoption as a ‘top goal’ for 2024.
ChatGPT, for example, is often leveraged to tweak copy, guide research, and brainstorm strategies, while powerful tools like Midjourney create visually appealing content to either be used outright or inspire. These tools have already helped to transform the marketing industry. However, they only intersect at single points within the creative marketing process and lack brand-specific capabilities for detail-critical work, making them ultimately limited and, as a complete solution, sorely lacking.
To effectively automate creative processes within marketing without outputting generic, ineffective content or trampling all over brand identity, AI-powered solutions need to be able to 1) learn teams’ existing processes inside and out, working in tandem to produce outputs faster and cheaper; 2) learn brand identities via rule-based checks that ensure fidelity; and 3) generate data-driven insights that allow teams to understand how effective a given campaign is or isn’t, and for who it’s effective with.
That’s why solutions are emerging that address all these challenges in one place. One key player in this transformation is Rocketium, whose approach goes far beyond traditional automation tools. Rocketium is transforming the way marketing teams work. Its AI-powered creative operations platform integrates workflows seamlessly to cover the entire creative journey—from automated content creation and creative review to providing granular analytics, and much more.
Unlike other tools, Rocketium goes beyond just creating assets; it connects with APIs and data feeds to automate variant generation and create customizable workflows for each team’s specific needs, while also ensuring every piece of content adheres to brand guidelines and delivers valuable insights.
The challenges of manual creative processes—like adapting content across formats or reformatting materials for different platforms—are becoming a thing of the past. Rocketium’s platform allows for instant resizing and personalization of copy and designs, saving valuable time and resources. Performance marketing teams now have data-driven insights at their fingertips, automatically tracked and reported, giving them the ability to refine their strategies with real-time feedback.
This is how Rocketium helps the top retail brand in America produce sales banners 12 times faster, allowing 60 designers to create 140,000 banners in just a week.
Precise Automation Tailored to Your Brand
Of course, automation with AI has always struggled with one challenge above all others: accuracy. When a team has to produce creative marketing materials to brand specs quickly and consistently, an AI solution that doesn’t understand the rules and guidelines of a brand’s messaging is going to be dramatically limited in its effectiveness.
Rocketium’s rule-based checks on AI-generated outputs are addressing this issue, allowing even new designers to quickly align their work with established brand guidelines. The software ensures that AI-generated content is not just automated, but brand-safe, offering peace of mind to marketing teams.
This not only genuinely automates creative marketing workflows but is invaluable when assisting new designers in learning a brand they may be unfamiliar with. In other words, software is evolving to allow for AI-generated outputs to be genuinely ‘brand safe.’
Harnessing AI for Smarter Creative Decisions
Going further, Rocketium’s AI capabilities extend to auto-tagging and organizing assets for easy search, streamlining the often-overlooked tasks within content management and campaign review, enabling teams to source and revisit ideas with ease.
What truly sets Rocketium apart is its ability to support more strategic, data-driven decisions, with analytics capabilities that allow for effective, properly tracked A/B testing, ensuring teams can identify which creative outputs will resonate with specific audiences.
Leveraging AI in this way, creative teams can better decide on their overall strategy and next steps, something 43% of teams say is currently lacking.
Rocketium also ultimately helps to tighten budgets, reduce missed opportunities, and ensure that each marketing dollar spent is that much better leveraged. It certainly did for a leading home-improvement retail brand that saw their launches of on-brand creatives launch 4.6x faster, boosting returns on ad spend by 56%.
“AI can de-layer creatives and answer very interesting questions about what creative choices teams have made knowingly and unknowingly. It can look at new creative ideas and predict the performance without running expensive pilot campaigns. But the team’s culture needs to be data-driven, open to testing, and supportive of small failures.”
Satej Sirur
Co-Founder & CEO of Rocketium
+ Top AI Leader 2024
In conclusion
It’s important to remember that, even at this level of sophistication and beyond, AI-powered software solutions are not a replacement for talented marketers and designers. Rather, these tools are meant to be leveraged as co-pilots, capable of making creative workflows that are much more streamlined and impactful.
In an era where competition for consumer attention is at an all-time high, a strong partnership between human creativity and AI-driven efficiency offers a powerful advantage—one that can make all the difference in standing out to customers and driving business success.
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