Want To Cut The Cost Of Creative Production By A Third...?

...then it's time to consider Creative as a Service.

[Article originally published on Campaign UK]

Advertisers can reduce the cost of their video ad production by up to three-quarters and shorten delivery time by 50% if they ditch their traditional approach and work with a Creative as a Service (CaaS) solution instead. 

That’s the controversial conclusion of a report published by leading CaaS solution, Shuttlerock. The research, conducted by marketing management consultancies TrinityP3 and Group Lark, benchmarks two defining features of a CaaS solution – cost and speed – against more traditional approaches to creative production. 

Using verified industry data, the researchers compared various approaches to creative production – such as ad agencies, production studios and in-house facilities – against that of a CaaS solution, with the goal of determining the most effective and efficient means to scale production and accelerate time-to-market.

The results proved that CaaS solutions deliver significant productivity and cost-saving benefits, coming out on top in all comparative instances (aside from being ‘potentially equivalent’ in speed with in-house facilities). 

Even more complex assets

In response to media fragmentation, the increased number of digital media channels and consumers’ insatiable appetite for content, brands find themselves needing to do more with less - in both a time and budget sense. “In 2005, the average brand would produce around 200 outputs or deliverables a year,” explained Darren Woolley, CEO of TrinityP3. “A decade later, that same brand will be producing more than 2,000 outputs a year.” This has a huge impact on marketing budgets and the speed at which brands can connect with their audiences. 

This trend has gone hand-in-hand with a shift toward higher value, more complex assets. Rich media – videos, HTML banners, AR, 3D and other engaging and interactive content – clocks up higher click-through rates, with consumers 27x more likely to click-through online video ads than standard banners. Research suggests that the average user remembers 95% of a message they watch in a video, compared to just 10% if they read the same message. 

For this reason, digital production has become more expensive, complex and time-consuming to create. Aware of the impact these challenges are having on brands, Shuttlerock sought TrinityP3 and Group Lark to determine if its CaaS solution could be proven to be a more efficient approach to creative production than those currently available to marketers.

CaaS: 4x cheaper, 100% faster

What the research team found was just how burdensome digital marketing has become. Once you factor in overheads, per unit costing and heavy production lift, the average advertising agency charges up to four times more and takes 100% longer to produce the same assets when compared to a CaaS solution.

Owing in part to the speed and efficiency of its CaaS solution is Shuttlerock’s proprietary, technology-powered platform ‘ShuttlerockCloud’. The platform streamlines the creative process – including guided project briefing, collaborative video review tools, and easy asset management – to keep turnaround times fast and costs low. 

At its core, Shuttlerock’s CaaS solution fuses people, process and technology in a unique offering that enables brands to rapidly create and iterate rich-media assets efficiently and cost-effectively. It’s these inherent characteristics that empower brands and marketers to scale their creative at a cost and speed unrivalled by traditional models.

In addition, the common compromises that marketer’s find themselves making when it comes to creative production are eliminated when choosing to work with a CaaS solution. “We talk to so many marketers who frequently face the age-old dilemma: speed, cost, quality or scale. You can have any two but you have to make a concession,” said Scott McBride, chief revenue officer at Shuttlerock. “Our Creative as a Service solution is able to produce quality creative assets at a greater speed, lower cost and larger scale than traditional production processes, meeting the needs of the modern marketer and finally enabling brands to create without compromise.”