Content Automation Platforms: What Are They?

Introduction

The market for creative software today is largely dominated by Adobe, with tools like Photoshop, InDesign, and After Effects providing everything a designer needs to produce the marketing materials a company requires. However, major companies we’ve spoken to report that only 20% of their creative budget is spent on creativity, while 80% is devoted to adapting and localizing advertising campaigns.

For marketers, the ultimate goal would be to reverse this ratio: dedicating 80% of the content production budget to creativity by automating as much of the adaptation process as possible.

Could Content Automation Platforms Help Achieve This Goal?

If your company produces only a small volume of content annually, automation may provide only marginal benefits. Your creative team can likely handle everything using Adobe’s suite of tools.

However, the digital landscape has completely transformed content production. A brand’s vitality now depends on its ability to communicate frequently and consistently across all platforms. Advertising campaigns, to maintain effectiveness, need constant updates to banner kits, numerous variations, A/B testing, and more—all in an international context where content must often be adapted into multiple languages.

In this context, content automation solutions have emerged over the past few years with the goal of automating content adaptation. These platforms can handle tasks like creating multi-size banners, translating videos (both text and voiceovers), and generating regular content based on the same graphic template (e.g., for social media).

Two Types of Platforms

Content automation platforms generally fall into two categories:

 

1. 1. Platforms specializing in templating:
      These excel in enabling users to create new content easily, either manually or through data imports, using pre-defined templates.

1. 1. Platforms focusing on content localization and adaptation:
      These are designed to handle the localization and adaptation of a “Master” set of content, such as for a product launch where content must conform to the original design provided by agencies using Adobe tools.

Tailored for Marketers or Designers?

In these categories, some platforms prioritize marketers by offering intuitive, user-friendly tools, complete with preformatted template collections and AI-powered features.

Others cater to designers with high demands, offering powerful yet ergonomic graphic editors. These platforms are often the only ones suited to meet the rigorous needs of adapting a Master content set for product launches. The original designs, typically created by agencies, are usually built with Adobe tools.

Some platforms promise compatibility with Adobe Suite by allowing users to inject text and images into templates previously set up online. However, complex creations (especially those in InDesign or After Effects) often face significant limitations in this approach.

The Brandeploy Approach

At Brandeploy, we recognized early on that an excellent editor is a prerequisite, but marketers also need simple, intuitive interfaces to make changes directly. This is particularly true for local marketers, whose needs are often overlooked, and who often have limited budgets to handle content adaptations.

But what does this mean in practice? Here are some concrete scenarios where a content automation platform can save time—and money:

Practical Use Cases

 

1. 1. Large Product Catalogs:
      If you have an extensive product catalog and need to create assets for online product pages across multiple distributors—especially in several countries—a platform can integrate with your DAM (Digital Asset Management) and PIM (Product Information Management) systems to streamline content distribution.

1. 1. Multilingual Campaigns:
      For product launches, you might need to translate a comprehensive kit of assets (images, banners, videos) into multiple languages.

1. 1. Frequent Acquisition Campaigns:
      If your online acquisition campaigns are not refreshed often enough, leading to declining performance, a platform can help produce new creative batches more frequently.

1. 1. Empowering Local Teams:
      Give more autonomy to local points of sale or markets to create content tailored to local customer needs while ensuring brand identity compliance.

1. 1. Complex Content Workflows:
      If your content production process involves extensive validation, back-and-forth exchanges, file transfers, etc., a platform can centralize production in one place. This allows collaborators to work together with appropriate rights management and workflows tailored to your organization.

Content Is King, Now More Than Ever!

Learn more about Brandeploy:
Brandeploy is a SaaS platform that helps brands and agencies create banners, videos, and text content at scale by automating creation and translation within a workflow customized to the brand’s needs.