9 Creative Automation Tools to Boost Your Design Workflows

Answer this: How do you tend to respond to an increasing creative content demand?

Well! According to Dentsu’s annual CMO survey. Creative leaders often respond by expanding their team (84%) or outsourcing work to external agencies (16%).

Though this approach can be cumbersome and costly, delegation is the key to success in the world of business. But since AI has dominated every market sector, thighs have changed.

In this article, we’ll walk you through an alternative solution: Creative Automation, which streamlines creative production workflows by automating repetitive tasks, making the lives of creators and marketers easier.  

What Is Creative Automation?

Creative automation is the use of technology to ramp up design production with the goal of delivering faster and more relevant marketing campaigns. 

The process typically involves using automation and AI to streamline repetitive or time-consuming tasks in the creative landscape. 

It’s an excellent way for small teams to cope with high-volume demand for creatives without hiring additional resources or burning funds.

Be it banner ads or video content, you are offered ready-to-use graphics and templates to match high-volume demands. 

Importance of Creative Automation in Marketing and Design

Shrinks Timelines and Boosts Productivity

With creative automation, you can create hundreds or even thousands of design iterations of a single campaign within seconds. Considering this to be done by humans would be a nightmare. Let alone the errors that humans will make at such a scale.

When the process is done by AI, it saves time that lets designers brainstorm new ideas for success. 

Personalized Branded Content at Scale

Personalization becomes an issue when dealing with larger-than-life audiences. The more formats your audience lives and breathes in, the more branded content you need to create.

Creative automation supports this flexibility and agility in two ways.

Firstly, creative automation involves testing and segmenting – the key to delivering a more one-to-one ad experience.  

Next, it allows the reuse of assets across platforms, formats, and even campaigns, which is essential in agile, modern organizations. 

Enhanced Efficiency and Cost-Effectiveness

Creative automation brings the perfect ROI for your business. That’s right, no hassle of hiring multiple designers or stressing in-house members.

By leveraging AI and automation, you can streamline more than half of your repetitive tasks, making the creative process less daunting and more fruitful.

Moreover, creative automation lets you scale without increasing headcount. Meaning you work with the current bandwidth yet have more power and technology to scale endlessly.

How Creative Automation Tools Help Automate Repetitive Marketing Design Tasks? 

Creative automation tools are designed to help marketing and design teams with repetitive, low-skilled design tasks. They streamline and automate the age-old process involving initiating and approving multiple campaigns, countless stakeholders, and a myriad of media platforms.

Here’re a few features 👇

Global Templates and Localization for Regional Teams

Handling a high volume of creative assets can be overwhelming. Instead, global teams can use creative automation tools to design ‘master templates’ for regional teams. 

They can then resize, reformat, and personalize the master template to suit their market needs. This allows for the best of both worlds – consistent branding and localized messages.

Prevent Blunders

Creative automation tools come with automated pipelines. They require less human interference while designing, distributing, and storing creatives.  

While most tools make it even easier with drag-and-drop functionality, you no longer have to worry about your team making blunders when coping with high-volume demand.

Collaborate Production Workflow

Being on the creative side, you know how collaboration bridges the content gaps between ideation and execution.

Even though it applauds automation, creative automation provides users with collaboration features, like real-time previews, comments, tags, and more. 

Using them, marketing and design teams can efficiently collaborate on omnichannel ad creatives before they are finally set out for launch.

Insights Through Optimization

Creative automation tools offer certain optimizations to make your ad creative more personalized and compelling. You get hands-on image and video optimization, A/B testing, segmentation, and more.

Let’s see how creative automation tools can help you in real life:

Suppose you want to promote a new phone in 3 different models (64GB, 128GB, and 264GB) in 14 sizes, 5 languages, and 4 ad variations. That adds up to a whopping 840 unique ads. Consider the time your designer would spend on this. You get how this type of manual creative adaptation doesn’t efficiently scale.

And let’s not forget the big chunk of time that is spent working with various stakeholders, fielding their requests, and producing collateral and digital content to meet those specifications.

Phew! 😪

Now, what if you got a tool that takes care of the 840 unique designs with respect to the variations in sizes and languages? Your life would become much easier, and it would also be light in your pocket.

Below listed are such tools that can help you utilize creative automation to the fullest.

Creatopy

Creatopy offers a complete ad-making solution for all sizes of businesses and teams. Its creative automation tool helps save time and money when building high-volume ad campaigns by streamlining your design process, making it more efficient and productive.

Features

• Use the Smart Resizer tool to resize multiple designs using 60+ pre-set sizes or add custom size
• Has an extensive library of pre-built templates and over 20 million elements to customize templates or custom designs on the go
• Built-in collaboration feature for collaborative projects – comment, tag colleagues, attach files, and do much more
• Enable role-based management to create teams and workspaces, allocate roles and rights, and set privacy levels for your projects
• Easily run A/B tests by generating ad tags for designs that you can import to your preferred ad network
• Add motion to your visuals by choosing from a wide array of the animation presets that bring your designs to life with a click

Furthermore, you can download your ad designs as high-definition files in various formats, such as JPG, PNG, or GIF for static visuals.

Creatopy is trusted by the likes of AutoDesk, MegaRush, and more. Although it doesn’t offer a free version, you can test its capabilities with a 7-day free trial.

Flaminjoy

Flaminjoy is an all-in-one PXM (Product Experience Management) platform to measure social content performance, work with influencers, and generate engaging creatives at scale.

Its creative automation tool combines AI and creativity to generate personalized social media posts, ads, and static banners at scale, empowering businesses to streamline content creation and enhance brand engagement.

Features

• Easily create hundreds of dynamic ad templates within minutes; customize templates as per needs using the intuitive drag-and-drop editor
• Use pre-built animation within the templates to animate static content easily – try different animation styles, creatives, and variations as per your will
• Quickly format UGC or your custom designs into any size and format for any ad platform; use the in-built content library to source royalty-free content for your campaigns
• Leverage the built-in Digital Ad Creator to automate half your tasks – create banners, transform them into compelling short videos, and download ad creatives in bulk with a click

Flaminjoy is trusted by top brands like L’oreal, Samsung, FILA, Dove, and more for running attractive ad campaigns. Furthermore, the platform is scalable for any business type, be it e-commerce, marketplace, or media company.

Pixelixe

Pixelixe is a graphic design creation and automation tool that allows businesses to auto-generate graphics with a click. Its creative automation feature is what blows the minds of fast-growing teams. 

Features

• Use the Quick Image Automation tool to turn your creatives into templates and generate unlimited image variations from your data on the fly
• Leverage Design Set Builder to create and edit your design and automatically apply the changes simultaneously to each pre-set image size 
• Built-in template editor with access to 2000+ photos, 900+ Fonts, 700+ icons, photo filters, and premade templates to design seamlessly
• For developers, Pixelixe offers APIs for white-label, image automation, photo filter, and more to help you build amazing apps

Pixelixe’s creative automation is used by Honeywell, IKEA, and more renowned brands. You can start a free trial with 50 documents; no credit card is required.

BannerWise

BannerWise is a creative automation platform that empowers advertisers and agencies to build, publish and optimize digital ads at a large scale. The software caters to over 1500+ daily users and has an average of 160% positive ROI on campaign results.

Features

• Scale a single master creative into different sizes and formats without switching tabs
• Create multiple versions of a creative with different fonts, text, and backgrounds in a click; easily manage them from a master ad set
• Supports 90+ languages helping localize your creatives using smart buttons, text elements, and image scaling
• Setup custom templates and enable role-based management for specific elements if needed

Apart from these, BannerWise comes with certain add-ons for additional users, API connections, hosting, and exporting in-banner video ads. 

CHILI Publish

CHILI Publish creative automation software revolutionizes the old-school method for designing creatives. Powered by AI, it simplifies graphic production workflows by automating common or repetitive tasks across platforms.

Features

• Automate and streamline design and marketing processes, saving time and increasing efficiency
• Use Smart Templates to ensure 100% brand consistency of personalized content without worrying about human-errors
• Use no-code tools like Smart Crop and Dynamic Layouts to customize creatives while freeing up designers for important tasks
• Integrate with existing systems and workflows, including DAM, CRM, and CMS platforms, to enhance productivity and streamline the creative process

CHILI publish caters to all industries and business types. Its clientele includes big brands like Philips and Airbus. The good part is you can request a demo of the software.

Rocketium

Rocketium lets your business produce on-brand creatives at scale and in record time. It’s easy-to-use interface and robust capabilities make it a go-to choice for top players like Amazon, Walmart, Airtel, and Nykaa.

Features

• Get tailor-made templates for your brand and creative style; easily adapt templates to thousands of creatives with multiple sizes for various channels
• Use Bulk Editor to customize styles and variables or remove background across 1000s of variants with a click
• Built-in AI copywriter to craft compelling copies with catchy headlines, CTAs, and more
• Has integrations with GDN, FB ads, and Google Drive, making it easy to upload and distribute creatives across platforms

The platform is an excellent choice for SMEs and large organizations dealing in high-volume ad creation.

Bannerflow

Bannerflow is a cloud-based creative automation software that supports you at every stage of the campaign lifecycle, from creative production and campaign management to personalization and performance optimization.

Features

• Apply powerful animations via drag-and-drop and built-in transitions; toggle options to add both automatic and live data feeds to campaign creatives
• Create thousands of ad variations while maintaining quality production with the help of automatic brand asset and image optimization
• Built-in premium design tools to craft premium cross-channel advertising
• Use smart scaling to quickly produce more sizes, versions, and formats to complete campaigns in minutes
• Real-time collaboration with instant approval, previews, and comments
• Enable role-based management for brand assets to control who can access the brand library in the clouds

Over 1700+ brands, including HP, ShutterStock, and more, trust Bannerflow with creative automation. Bannerflow has no pricing mentioned on its official site. However, you can request a quote from its pricing page.

Hunch

Hunch is a New York-based creative automation software that helps you boost ad performance by providing on-demand branded content in volume without compromising quality.

As a Meta Business Partner, Hunch works with top global brand and performance marketing teams to improve operational efficiency, revenue generation, and time-to-market.

Features

• Use Hunch’s creative studio to create brand kits and customize images and video templates from scratch or pre-made designs. 
• Enable Smart Scale to resize templates to fit different social media platforms automatically
• Easily export image and video assets and use them for omnichannel campaigns
• Leverage Automated Ads with the Hunch platform and run automated campaigns on Meta and Snapchat via a unified sheet
• Seamless collaboration between teams to enhance creativity and get the job done quicker

Hunch’s creative studio is all you need to ramp up your ad production without increasing headcounts. Some of the best brains, like Sony, Qatar Airways, and more, leverage Hunch’s creative automation to scale their ad game.

Celtra

Celtra is a leading creative automation software that has helped brands like Adidas, Spotify, and DocuSign stay creative at scale. The platform caters to the needs of around 15k+ active users and boasts some amazing features to streamline your creative process.

Features

• Leverage Celtra’s Scaling Studio to easily iterate concepts, collaboratively produce, and launch thousands of creatives without the extra manual work
• Launch and test your own product ad creatives across Facebook, Instagram, and other channels 
• Empowers your team to generate endless combinations of video with visual overlays, graphic call-outs, and end-cards for the media buying platform of your choice

Celtra has successfully deployed over 2M+ ads and 100k+ campaigns. Want to test the power of Celtra’s creative automation? Book a free demo with them for it.

Wrapping Up

Believe it or not, creative automation is the new normal!

Be it e-commerce, SaaS, or marketing agencies, every business out there is leveraging the power of creative automation to scale its creative processes.

And why shouldn’t they? After all, they get to scale the process cost-effectively without compromising quality. If you’re a business owner looking to ramp up content creation, we believe one of the tools mentioned above would fit rightly into your business puzzle.