How to make cost-effective changes to your brand’s creative
It doesn’t need to be an expensive and time-consuming process to make minor changes to the artwork of your marketing materials.
Creating original brand design is always going to be a slow, considered process. However, once that original creative design is produced, artworking further versions shouldn’t be as painful and expensive as it is today for many marketers, according to Tweak, a marketing software leader.
They’ve pioneered new technology which enables print or digital artwork to be edited by anyone in an organisation in a web browser, without learning how to use design software. A brand nightmare, you might think? No, Tweak has created an online application to lock down brand elements and pre-press settings to make sure nothing goes wrong. And for those marketers who don’t want to take any chances, they’ve got an approval dashboard where users can’t create artwork until marketing has clicked OK.
This tech opens up exciting possibilities for remote workers – and brands who need collaborators in different time zones. Having different workflows for original creative design and the reuse of that creative for multiple executions is critical, says Tweak founder and CEO Jerry Kennelly.
“Designers continue to work with sophisticated Adobe applications, while users of Tweak edit the creative in a simplified web interface requiring little training. By giving self-service access to brand assets, businesses become more agile. There’s greater productivity because staff can get access to creative assets in an online platform rather than queueing up tasks for the marketing team,” explains Kennelly, who knows a thing or two about digital workflows. The former photojournalist sold his Stockbyte image library to Getty Images in 2006 for $135m and didn’t hang around for long before launching Tweak in 2011.
Kennelly argues that there’s no joy for creatives in mindlessly versioning campaigns and that this work is a cause of employee churn. “Creativity is critical in the battle for brand mind-share. Releasing designers from repetitive work enables them to use their time more efficiently on real creative work that adds value. Of course, there’s a big impact on the bottom line too. Wasted time across organisations is reduced while the time taken to make edits and produce artwork is reduced to minutes.
Tweak’s technology allows Adobe InDesign packages to be converted to designs which can be edited online and shared with individuals or teams. The administrator has visibility of every version of every template, with the ability to approve or reject changes with the click of a button. A digital asset management library which helps manage all kinds of digital files from video to imagery and logos is also included.
For industries like retail or real estate where the design includes vast amounts of imagery, data and pricing, Tweak’s software comes into its own. It’s integrated with Nielsen Brandbank’s FMCG product imagery and data library, meaning it’s just a matter of searching for the product you need and dragging and dropping the image onto the design. Pricing and product information is always up to date formatted correctly on print or digital design.
“By connecting your imagery and data to your brand design templates, you remove the possibility of errors and empower everything to move a lot faster, with much shorter lead times,” explains Jerry Kennelly. “By reducing design lead times, marketers can capitalise on market changes, competitors’ offers, changing weather or create more localised campaigns at a very low cost,” he added.
Tweak’s customers range widely from major Universities to the New Zealand and Irish Government trade development agencies, who use it to provide self-service design to their offices across the globe. Other users include Height for Hire who use Tweak to empower their remote offices, hardware chain TJ O’Mahonys and Insurance and pensions giant, Irish Life.
One retailer who adopted the system two years ago is Pat Joyce, who runs a chain of supermarkets in Ireland. Joyce’s was the first to use Tweak’s Brandbank connector, which refreshes grocery images every day, allowing the team to create marketing materials and point of sale artwork in minutes.
“When I was introduced to Tweak, I knew immediately it was the solution I had been looking for. That makes perfect sense” explains Joyce. “How hasn’t somebody hadn’t thought of that years ago? I can make changes within a few minutes of deadline, with no risk of errors,” the supermarket owner added.
As well as several pages of newspaper ads every week, Joyce’s produces 30 magazine mailers a year, which it distributes to every home in its catchment area. Since taking production in-house with Tweak, Joyce’s creates these 24-page productions, each with hundreds of products, in a single day.
Hardware chain Expert Hardware is a leading franchise that faced a problem of creating on-brand point-of-sale in its stores. Tweak integrated Expert’s image library and product data with its design templates. Now owners search for the product and drag the image onto their POS template using Tweak. Using Tweak saves the 50 franchisees about 5,000 hours a year, reckons CEO Gerry Fallon.
Tweak’s brand template and digital asset management solution is used by brands throughout the world. For a consultation or demonstration contact Tweak. Freephone 0800 975 9751