How To Scale Digital Ads up to 70% Faster
How Superside Increased Ad Design Productivity 70%
Time is money
When you’re producing tons of social media ads or multi-channel digital campaigns, the faster you get to market, the better.
- Every minute you waste is an opportunity lost.
- Every hour you gain is a resource you can strategically reinvest.
- The more manual tasks you automate, the more space you make for creativity.
In this playbook, you’ll learn how Superside’s Craft & Productivity Team revamped existing ad design processes with a solution to scale digital ads up to 70% faster.
Produce High-Volume Digital Ad Creative Faster
In the whirlwind of today's marketing demands, our customers seek campaigns that make waves across every conceivable channel. Our pursuit of innovative solutions not only accelerates this process, it ensures that every effort is an investment toward powerful, wide-reaching results.
Managing multiple channels, multiple formats, multiple markets and multiple campaigns is the norm for high-growth brands and one of the most common reasons they partner with Superside. Simply put, they need to produce a lot of ad creative.
What’s also all too common: The entire process of resizing and reformatting digital ads at scale can be very time-consuming.
There had to be a better way. This is why Superside’s Craft & Productivity Team wanted to delve deeper into the creative tools and workflows used for producing large-scale ad creative and find ways to work faster, ensure consistency and add value.
Assessing the Existing Digital Ad Creative Processes
Breaking things down to build them back up
First, the Craft & Productivity Team conducted a thorough investigation of how teams were approaching high-volume digital ad production and versioning.
- For simple benchmark statistics, they took the total number of social media and digital ads projects in a month and divided this by the total number of hours used to complete these tasks.
- Then they went further, determining which areas were taking the most time, such as concept development, feedback and rollout.
- Finally, they asked more questions to figure out where time was being lost and why.
Pinpointing problem areas
Like the air flowing out from a leaky bicycle tire, each incremental productivity loss you uncover in a creative workflow acts as a friction point. The more leaks you have in your workflow, the more slowly you creep along.
In the case of scaling digital ad production, the Craft & Productivity Team found:
- Time-consuming, manual processes that were prone to mistakes. Think producing and downloading each ad variation individually—then finding a mistake and starting all over.
- Collaboration was challenging, especially if you couldn’t comment directly on the file and had to add additional collaboration tools to the workflow.
- There was no holistic view for each project to allow for stakeholders to review the entire version history.
Uncovering the common source
Traditional design tools, like Illustrator and Photoshop, weren’t a perfect fit for scaling high volumes of digital ads. Of course, they're valuable for what they're designed to do. But, they lack the features and functionality required to work quickly and seamlessly during layout and versioning tons of ads.
Finding Speed and Efficiency With Figma
Empowering teams with the right tools
Clearly, Superside’s teams and its customers needed design software better suited to producing large quantities of ads. After careful research, the Craft & Productivity Team chose Figma.
The ability to create asset libraries and leverage them with responsive features makes Figma uniquely suited for scaling high-volume digital ads.
Is Figma the only design software Superside uses?
Of course not. Superside uses all major graphic design software so that we can easily act as an extension of your in-house creative team. If you use Figma, we’ll use Figma. If you prefer to use Adobe because that's what your team already uses, we’ll use Adobe.
We've found working in a shared platform—with easily accessible design components and templates, along with full views of version histories—speeds production and ensures consistency.
Speaking of which, after choosing Figma, the Craft & Productivity Team spent three months developing workflows and training design teams to enable adoption, formalize best practices and speed up production. In the end, the initial process rollout went so well that nearly 400 Superside customers, and counting, now use the following workflow to scale digital campaigns.
Delivering speed plus quality
Efficiency gains are one thing. However, quality is a value that Superside steadfastly upholds. Even though our creative workflows leverage automation, professionally trained, human eyes keep a constant vigil on the entire process. There will be no badly cropped images on our watch!
Most automated design tools automatically resize images and text. But, not all tools do so with the same quality. We've had instances with software that would crop images with faces going out of the frame and no way to change it! No thank you.
Combining human expertise with the right tools and workflows makes all the difference. With Figma, we've added speed and flexibility, while fully upholding quality.
A Systematic Approach to Scaling Digital Ads
The process of scaling digital ad production has unlocked a systematic approach that we can apply time and again to gain efficiencies and add value wherever possible.
Scaling each discovery to deliver greater value
As the Craft & Productivity Team implemented Figma to establish hyper-efficient processes, they learned how each productivity gain could be carried forward to further benefit Superside customers.
In addition to using fewer hours to produce ad variations, when planning out a high-volume digital ad campaign, Superside customers can now either allocate the unused time to other areas or translate the time savings into cost savings.
For example, imagine you have a project where you’ve budgeted a total of 50 hours for the whole thing. When versioning now takes 10 hours instead of 20, you have 10 hours you can either save or use elsewhere.
No matter what’s decided, Superside customers keep winning and winning.
How AEI, Antler and PointCard work up to 70% faster
One of the efficiencies Superside and its customers have mined—building and housing brand guidelines and design systems in Figma—has helped AEI get assets 70% quicker and Antler move 40% faster actioning new projects and campaigns.
Similarly, when PointCard wanted to test and optimize its online campaigns, Superside leveraged Figma-based workflows to deliver 441 creative assets and nearly 30 new concepts in only six months. PointCard also saw a 275% increase in conversion rates.
Extending the winning streak
Building on Figma’s versatility, Superside has also developed ultra-efficient creative processes for motion design and generative AI.
With these advances, our design teams are able to deliver high-quality creative in record time, like producing 450+ personalized videos in one week for Superside's Customer Success Team and delivering 3,300+ branded images to Ava Labs on a tight timeline.
Put productivity and expertise on your side
At Superside, we're dedicated to bringing you creative that performs at all levels. Talk to us to scale your digital ad campaigns, all while ensuring quality, consistency and, most importantly, engaged audiences.
Michelle enjoys learning from and empowering ambitious marketers and creatives focused on scaling design and fueling growth.🚀 With more than two decades of experience, she’s worked at both agencies and in-house teams at companies of all sizes in the United States and Canada. She began her career as an advertising copywriter, remastering these skills as a content marketer and becoming a subject matter expert on everything from frozen pies and financial statements to SaaS and now CaaS. Connect with her on LinkedIn.