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Marketers are increasingly up against significant challenges. Our budgets are tight and resources are lean, yet the expectations of our clients and consumers are higher than ever, making it crucial to optimize our creative processes. So it’s become a master balancing act of doing more with less. Pile on the fact that new ad trends are forcing production teams to meet the relentless demand for distinct video creative — one of the most intricate media assets in terms of production.
The morale of the story? Brands have to rethink their approach to creative development to be successful in 2024. Let’s talk through it.
The Creative Process Defined
Let's dive into how creative development actually unfolds in a collaborative setting. Whether you're launching a campaign, designing a product, or building a brand, moving from concept to execution follows a structured rhythm. Understanding the four stages of the creative process — preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification — can really help teams work more effectively together.
It all kicks off with the preparation stage. This is where creative teams gather to align on goals, gather insights, and explore challenges from different angles. It's all about building a shared foundation — collecting research, defining objectives, and mapping out potential directions. This collaborative groundwork is essential for setting creative efforts in motion.
Next up is the incubation stage — and yep, it's just as important as any other. While it might look like a pause, this phase allows ideas to simmer beneath the surface. Teams often step back, explore other tasks, or regroup, giving space for fresh perspectives to emerge. It's a subtle but powerful part of the process that keeps creative momentum alive, even when no one's actively pushing it.
Then, when teams reconnect, they're often met with new clarity or direction — that’s illumination. And finally, the verification stage brings everything full circle. Ideas are tested, refined, and brought to life through collaborative feedback and iteration. It’s where creative thinking meets real-world execution.
When teams embrace the structure of these four stages, they create space for better collaboration, stronger ideas, and more successful outcomes. It’s not just about the spark — it's about how you build around it together.
But today's creative development process is both more challenging and more opportunistic than ever — if you know how to take advantage of the shift. So let's get into the real good stuff.
The Challenge: A Channel You Can't Ignore for Your Target Audience
As the fastest growing trend in marketing across demographics, it’s no surprise that CTV is the must-have ad channel of late. We know video has always dominated the ad game with impressive stats that continue to trump text and images — such as consumers retain 95% of an ad’s message when it’s watched versus just 10% retained when it’s read. And now, CTV is taking that consumption to the next level by creating platforms that initiate conversations and create viral moments that boost conversions and engagement in a way that feels more natural.
This relentless demand for distinct video creative highlights the need for efficient and scalable creative processes.
But being present and effective on this channel is anything but easy. The need to have a plethora of video content that requires yet another set of unique specs and considerations than the short-form video ads you’re likely running across your social channels requires a ton of time, effort, and money. But with teams and resources leaner than ever, this isn’t something most marketers have to give.
For starters, embracing this newer realm of video advertising means lacking the performance metrics to understand how to scale. And even with that knowledge, many marketing teams lack the agility to adjust in what’s essentially real-time to that data, optimize for a variety of audiences, and redistribute in the most effective ways.
So what happens? They’re either limited in their output, getting lost in the competitors that are able to keep the production pipeline full and becoming easily forgettable. Or they continue to show the same ads over and over across multiple platforms, giving viewers an extreme case of ad fatigue — which ultimately leads to less engagement, fewer visits, and dwindling impressions. It’s a choice between ‘out of sight, out of mind,’ or just plain annoying.
Today, every ad is a creative story that has to be unique and purposeful. That’s no secret. But understanding how to optimize those unique assets in volume for multiple target audiences isn’t as obvious.
The Proposal: Reimagine Your Creative Development Approach
Keys to success in CTV advertising: it’s data-driven, A/B tested, optimized, and quickly modified at scale.
Reimagining your creative development approach touches every part of the process — the initial idea and extends through to the final asset. Breaking down the silos between media buying and a high-performing creative process can dramatically boost your campaign power by allowing you to create significantly more assets to launch. And that’s where an ad partner comes in.
With a partnership between performance metrics and media buys, marketers can make subtle, yet meaningful modifications to their ads that can dramatically impact the tone and message to match your objectives and target each unique audience your targeting.
What’s the impact? Advertisers who deploy more than three creative variations of an ad spend 31% less on costs per visit and see 63% higher return on ad spend. In fact, Harvard Business Review has reported that minimizing media spend while investing more in creative production drives more sales in the long run.
The Game Plan: Bundling Your Creative Production & Media Buying
The obvious way to deliver unique content to your diverse audiences constantly and consistently is to have a full creative pipeline at all times. With an on-going supply of ads at your disposal, you can test, analyze, learn, and adjust to drive better performance without harmful lags between deployments. (Again, easier said than done for most marketers.)
So instead of doing what you usually do and going to an agency to develop one creative campaign that gets blasted in fragments across multiple platforms, creating a disconnect between your media buying intel and optimization, let’s try something new. Take the money you were already planning to spend on both a media buy and creative production individually, and bundle them together.
New approaches exist that allow you to do just that. Marketers can now couple the custom, results-driven creative with your media so they can actually work together harmoniously, not only learning from previous performance to better optimize your campaigns, but also enabling the development of a lot more creative in less time to keep your presence fresh and effective.
This approach ensures that every creative asset is optimized and refined before the final stage of the creative process, so that is can have optimal impact once live in the digital world.
Identifying Your Target Audience
Identifying your target audience is a crucial part of the creative development process. It's all about getting to know the folks you're trying to reach with your creative assets. You can dig into this by diving into market research, gathering customer feedback, and checking out analytics.
Once you've pinpointed your target audience, you can start crafting creative assets that really speak to them. This means cooking up a content creation plan that hits on their interests, values, and any pain points they might have. Plus, you'll want to put together a messaging framework that clearly and compellingly communicates your unique value proposition.
By syncing your creative strategy with what your target audience actually needs, you can create more impactful and engaging content that really stands out to the people that matter most.
Measuring the Success of Your Creative Strategy
Measuring the success of your creative assets is super important for figuring out what's working and what needs a little tweak. You can improve what you don't know. And this is all about setting clear goals to see how things are going — like checking out engagement rates, conversion rates, and return on investment (ROI).
To keep an eye on how well you're doing, you can use a bunch of cool tools and tricks, like analytics software, A/B testing, and customer feedback surveys. These give you the lowdown on how your creative stuff is performing and point out where you can make things even better.
By keeping tabs on and digging into the performance of your creative assets, you can fine-tune your strategy and make sure your content hits the right notes with your target audience, ultimately leading to better results. This shouldn't be something you do once your campaigns wrap up. By having media and creative teams working in tandem, you can make tweaks as they run to best maximize your spend and results.
Best Practices for Efficient Creative Development
Efficient creative development is all about making the process smoother so you can churn out top-notch creative assets quickly and effectively. Here are some friendly tips to help you nail it:
Keep learning: Stay in the loop with the latest trends, technologies, and best practices in creative development. (Assemble is always on top of this.) It helps you stay ahead and bring fresh ideas to your projects.
Use technology to your advantage: Embrace tools and software that boost creativity and efficiency. Automation and AI can make the creative process faster and improve the quality of your work. At Assemble, we even make our own tools and templates to ensure the most effective production process possible.
Team up and collaborate: Encourage teamwork and idea sharing across different functions —going beyond your media buy and designers to project management, account executives, copywriters, and more. Collaboration brings diverse perspectives and sparks creativity and innovation.
Stay flexible: Be ready to adapt to changing project needs or market demands. Flexibility allows you to tweak your creative assets to keep them relevant and effective.
Communicate clearly: Make sure everyone on the team is on the same page with clear and consistent messaging. Good communication streamlines the process and avoids any mix-ups. Make sure to rope in any key stakeholders early to avoid any issues later.
The Future of Creative Development
The future of creative development is both exciting and rapidly evolving (obviously). And with artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and other emerging technologies seriously taking off, the creative process is becoming more automated, efficient, and effective — as well as more accessible across departments and skillsets.
In the coming years, we're going to see a big shift towards data-driven creative development. Imagine creative assets that are fine-tuned for maximum impact, all thanks to automated data and analytics making sure they hit the right notes with your target audience without all the research and tedious work. AI and ML are proving to be game-changers in the creative process, from sparking initial ideas to crafting compelling content and visuals for anyone who can figure out the most effective ways to use them.
The Conclusion: How Assemble is Staying Ahead of the Game
While Connected TV advertising, as well as AI-powered technologies and platforms, continue to emerge and evolve, there are a lot of advantages for marketers to capitalize on. The traditional barriers to TV creative aren't as permanent as they used to be, and with the right strategy, launching and measuring your performance-driven campaigns and scaling in capacities you never considered before can be affordable and simple.
What's even better is that you've already found the perfect ad partner for the job (👋). At Assemble, we know that the only way to push the boundaries creatively is to work smarter by optimizing as many aspects of the production process as possible. So that's exactly what we do; we research, we test, we learn, and we build our own tools that aim to make each step simpler, faster, and more automated. So when you're relying on the quick delivery of tens or hundreds of asset variations, we have the best solution for your goals, assets, and placements.
Like our new BannerForge platform, which employs an entire library of reusable templates and analyzes all the best parts of each framework to automate the banner development process. Or our BAM tool, designed with a smart text editor tailored for coding, so developers can instantly generate code for any email component you can think of, without the need for testing.
We're in the constant pursuit of dissolving the challenges today's marketers are facing in the creative production process. If you want to learn more, contact us today.