Building a creative machine for the digital marketing landscape of today

[Music] I've been I'm quite surprised as this many people still still here actually I thought you'd be all in the pub by this point my name's Nick Gibbons I work for a company called credits we do creative and I've been talking about performance creative like non-stock for the last 48 72 hours so I'm gonna keep this pretty pretty short and sweet and hopefully interesting a lot of what I'm gonna say is fairly self-explanatory but I think it bears repeating because it is the the world that we're currently living in how many people in the room work in user acquisition cool how many people work in

creative production optimization or anything to do with creative okay so pretty a pretty spot-on crowd a lot of the stuff that I have said as I mentioned it's not gonna be new news to you but what we're trying to do is help with a bring a solution so without further ado ad optimization been taken over by machine learning to varying extents on varying platforms but the trend is clear has been clear and this continues the way that we're having less control now about the media the optimization of the media it's moving more black box for for various reasons for various platforms but and performance is is improving in many ways some people like more control some people are okay with less control but this is the trend you have your budget you have your goal and everything else in terms of audience optimization delivery apart from maybe some first party data has been taken away the control has been taken away from you

guys results have been getting better data data is improving ad formats are improving ROI CTR CVR a lot of times on these platforms is being dialed in more and more and so the optimization algorithms are working to a certain extent I haven't got anything to do with CPI or CPA here but this was a stud this is a study from Magna clover which showed that one looked at more upper funnel metrics mushy campaigns being run by machine learning AI were much better on the whole at driving things like awareness engagement purchase intent etc such so we think creative is the only way to improve performance now that's that's quite a big show a lot of people challenge me on that and say well what about data what about IP what about bits and pieces and I agree with all of those but a lot of that is not super

controllable data first party data growth can grow organically if it's the party anybody else can buy it as well as you so creative is the one thing that we see which is controllable and can be used as competitive advantage for you guys day in day out weekly without paying over the odds all of you guys here in user acquisition will know again better than us in terms of what your CPM is your media cost is but we're seeing a trend up into the right across all of the major platforms certainly the good good inventory and we expect that to continue are almost on a weekly monthly quarterly basis is this something that you guys see from your campaigns to in terms of just generally quarter-on-quarter media costs going up I'm guessing so so that brings me to the term creative and I've spoken to a few of you in the room here over the past few days and creative is kind of a catch-all word and

can mean many different things to many different people for some people that can be taking an idea and iterating and optimizing it for some people that can be resizing for some people it can be trying new technologies for some people that can be doing wireframes and scoping out new concepts for some people that can be creating new marketing assets and for us it's any and all of the above we we tend to work from a performance first mindset so look at what's performing and then decide what type of creatives to build and when to build and how much to build of it what do we think is a nice idea that looks good and let's go and test that and have a goal but last year playable player balls became quite a hot topic a lot of people were testing them for the higher conversion rates they are lenses will probably be in q1 or q2 so how you keep up with all of this with an internal team it's kind of or it's almost impossible it doesn't really matter how big you are how much resource you have how much money you have in

order to build a creative team internally that can service all of the format's all of the time all of the apps all of the countries all of the objectives it was very very difficult resource time skills budget most of our clients have a problem with at least one or two of those so what we're trying to do is help them build the creative machine so I mentioned that they have in-house resources that have somebody to build they have somebody to test but they just don't have enough so what we do is we have a platform and a service and an account team that will help augment what's already existing in-house to help take their ideas and versions to help them think of new ideas to help them do resizing to help them try to new technologies to help them build new assets so on and so forth there is always something else to be doing and what we find is if you don't have that people are always making trade-offs internally they're deciding okay

creatively we'd love to try these five different things but we only have two - due to which - do we pick you pick the wrong ones you're losing ROI you pick the right ones you get lucky you can compete and beat the opposition beat the people you're competing with in the auction so what we do is fresh ideas multiple variations in formats produce fast at scale and cost-effectively basically all of the stuff that you would like to have done internally so this is where we are credits we are a global creative network we have the word marketplace here I don't really like the word marketplace because it it kind of sounds like a place where anybody can come and bring their wares and buy and sell and trade but we're more of a curated platform where designers have to pass certain tests do certain skills and technologies certain briefs and we categorize them rank them and then assign them accordingly ideas new assets optimize existing ones for better

performance very quickly and easily without having to scale up an internal team or to hire an agency or any any way or you would normally do it and I guess the point three is just as important it's a scale ability factor so if you decide one week one month one quarter that you want to double your output to test you can just double your output you don't have to sign another contract hire another team get a freelancer in you can use as much as you want whenever you want and drop that down when if you have a less demand so scalable on-demand creative workforce to help match the match your media buying and the competitive nature of competitors are doing and I mentioned earlier what is creative what some people think is creative is not what other people think is creative what some people need creatively it's not what other people need creatively so we do illustration concept art storyboarding 3d modeling cinematics HTML player balls etc etc etc whatever kind of creative talent you

guys need to help push your campaigns or to improve your app store experience or to test a new platform we can bring the resources to bear you're camping on your apps games whatever it is you have so a quick example of a client we just started working with recently and it'll be soft and for the eagle-eyed of you in the in the audience you'll tell me that those are not obese off to creative which they're not but they said we could talk about Ubisoft but we couldn't show the creative because some of it hasn't been released yet but just as an example of how a company a large company would use and engage a service like ours or a platform like ours so a couple of months back we started off doing playable ads for one of their casual titles and they wanted a playable ad that worked across ten different platforms so we built the playable ad tested it tweaked it provided it to them so they could run it across everywhere different file sizes

different file structures etcetera search after that they decided that they didn't want to do playable 's anymore in fact they were going to launch a new strategy game and they wanted a brand new you a trailer for launch globally they didn't have any asset so we made 3d assets of their characters put together a 2025 second trailer which is yet to be released but it's it's pretty cool and we just coming to the end thirdly and finally the last project that they briefed us in they have a new game coming out in soft launch and they wanted us to build some assets for the app store in 2d asset for the app store in two different styles to see which ones would increase their conversion rate once the game actually launched so large company lots of different apps lots of different requirements lots of different skill sets but they engage with us and we manage all of that for them on the backend so they just asked us what they want and we get it delivered for them they don't have to worry about contracting negotiating managing keep seeing etc such an we take care of it for them and we work with

many different size companies in many different parts of the world size doesn't really matter in terms of creative because there's always something extra that needs to be something extra that needs to be done oftentimes the larger a company the more creative problems they have because they're pushing the boundaries they're trying to eke out diminishing returns on their performance so creative becomes even more important but we work from companies of you know one-man bands with no creative support to companies with studios and agencies on retainer but there's always a need for some kind of supplement or creative service or something else that they want to try to try and get the upper hand with their campaigns a couple of quick case studies this one was a company called elix I don't know how many of you would have would be familiar with them there are Chinese Chinese app developer looking to take their games from China export to the West we help them localize for Germany increase the amount of creative

volume reduce their CPI simply because they have brought more options to bear and we also help them with a bit of cultural nuance to help them build something which actually worked for the market cooking - Glu Mobile this this one was a little while back now but once they when they launched we help them with their Instagram strategy came up with four different concepts one was cartoony one was Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares or something Kitchen Nightmares one was different foods with different markets so maybe Singapore would have chilli crab the UK would have fish and chips just ways to kind of make it locally nuanced locally relevant and there was one other one which was capes me now but we reduced this reduces CPI by 50% simply by trying and testing more things than they were able to themselves with their internal team yeah that most of the time we work very closely with the internal teams unless they have us working on a separate project and communication is key in terms of getting

the right creative out the right amount of creative the right type of creative so key takeaways I told you it was going to be short and sharp and sweet campaign management is being more and more dictated by the platforms and their algorithms created is the only way or one of the only ways I would say the most important way most importantly be you can pull to enhance or improve campaign performance and it's not just a one-time thing it's not just a want format thing it's not just a one campaign thing it needs to be an always-on creative production or ideation production optimization process in order to get the best out of it and that's it from me [Music] you