Advertising in the digital space is a little like playing whack-a-mole. Advertisers can feel that they’ve just got on top of developing campaigns for one format or platform, and another appears demanding their attention. For creatives trying to meet the speed and scale of today’s digital ad market, it can be overwhelming.

But it doesn’t need to be.

There has been a lot of debate about the role of technology in creativity but there is one undeniable fact: Creative teams could not manage the sheer scale of the advertising landscape without it. It’s not if you use technology in your creative, it’s how.

Let’s look at the scale of the challenge first. As of late 2024, advertisers have to coordinate their presence across ten broad categories: social, search, video (online and mobile), display (online and mobile), email, native advertising, streaming audio, OTT-TV/CTV, podcasting and digital out-of-home.

Within each of those categories, of course, is a whole advertising ecosystem that impacts the customer journey at every point, from brand awareness campaigns, to bottom of the funnel performance marketing. Each of these campaigns, across every channel, within every platform, demands an initial creative idea, planning, execution and optimisation.

Optimisation is particularly important. Being able to refresh ad campaigns ‘in-flight’ reduces ad fatigue, where consumers become ‘ad blind’ having seen the same creative over and over again. Similarly, social media platform algorithms prioritise fresh content that has proven engagement.

Updating that creative improves ad visibility and performance. Finally, ads must be optimised based on audience data for personalisation. Ads have to adapt depending on customer journey or audience segment. All of this requires a responsive (some might even say proactive) ad team with creative variants at their fingertips, ready to deploy.

But speed and scale are not the only issues. Brands – particularly legacy brands – often still operate in silos, data teams separate from creative, execution set apart from strategy. For example, recent research showed that more than half (57%) of creative directors cite poor cooperation and communication between people and departments.

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For advertisers to be able to cope with the speed and scale of today’s ad landscape, both technology and teams need to operate around some kind of centralised resource. In practice, this means refining or even reinventing how organisations manage their creative process, both culturally and operationally.

Technology is not a solution, it’s a tool. The solution is to make sure that tool is being used at every opportune moment across the campaign creation and execution process, right from the very beginning.

Tools such as Celtra’s Creative Automation can develop templates that allow designers to develop stand-out campaigns that can be adapted quickly to every platform and format. Added to that is consistency – technology can help ensure each image or video is current and supports the existing brand guidelines.

Once created, campaigns can have a modular element, allowing assets to be swapped in and out to maintain that freshness that banishes ad fatigue and satisfies the algorithm, while automated localisation and personalisation means campaigns can be highly targeted while maintaining the speed and scale of distribution.

Take ride-hailing app Lyft, for example. By using modular templates the company could run 600 unique creative executions for a range of markets with a very lean in-house team. Even creating at volume, there was a 45% decrease in cost per acquisition while there was a 10-fold increase in production efficiency.

Putting technology to use across the business in a creative context is about supporting teams, improving workflows and managing the vast demands put on the advertising organisation. It means it is still possible to put creativity front and centre – a proven competitive advantage in a highly competitive world – while still operating at the speed and scale of today’s market.

To learn more about how you can make creativity the beating heart of your brand, whatever the size of your team or business, dive into Celtra’s latest report, 5 steps that make creativity the beating heart of your brand, published by Marketing Beat and available here.