Feature Focus – Skai’s Creative Manager

In this week’s Friday Feature Focus, we present Skai’s Creative Manager, which helps marketers simplify and optimize visual asset management.

There are a ton of variables in advertising including research, planning, placement, publisher, price. But at its core, advertising is still a lot about ads and Skai’s Creative Manager helps marketers manage their ads across the biggest advertising platforms in the world.

Skai’s Creative Manager serves as a media library hub where an entire marketing team—including partners and agencies with Skai logins—can upload images and videos to be used in ads. There’s also integration with Dropbox and Box so that teams already using those folder-sharing services can simply sync the tools so that the media assets automatically show up in Skai.

Skai Creative Manager helps marketing teams stay organized and collaborate across teams

Having those images and videos housed within the system means that Skai clients can quickly and easily access the assets they need in one place without having to go through another system. This can not only streamline the time it takes to build campaigns, but it can also reduce mistakes by ensuring the wrong imagery doesn’t get used in ads by accident.

When technology helps to save time and limit time-wasting errors, marketers are able to focus more on the strategy of advertising in order to really drive performance. Skai’s Senior Product Manager, Christian Tabing-Dalit, stresses the importance of ad imagery, “It’s essential to get the visual elements of your ads right. Rich, visual experiences are at the heart of social media. Advertisers and agencies need to maximize the engagement-inducing effectiveness of their creative assets.”

On top of being a media hub for advertisers, Skai’s Creative Manager has some other very powerful capabilities including resizing, overlays, and creative sequencing.

Resizing

When it comes to static images, different ad formats can have different ad size requirements, even for the same publisher. Skai’s Creative Manager can perform bulk resize formatting which can be very helpful in a time crunch and much less expensive than having a creative agency do the work for you.

Even if you have all of the correct sizes you need for a campaign, sometimes it can be useful to try testing different size variations. “It’s critical to align the aspect ratios of your creative assets with Facebook’s best practices—different sizes and shapes perform differently across Facebook’s diverse range of placements,” says Tabing-Dalit. “For example, Stories ads should be designed for mobile-first engagement: portrait, full-screen, and video.”

Overlays

To squeeze the most out of the creative investment, overlays can be used to add new visual and text elements to existing ads. In Skai Creative Manager, overlays can even be added as a bulk operation in order to quickly repurpose a slew of imagery.

Overlays are an easy way to quickly repurpose existing creative for new sales and promotions

“Overlays are especially valuable for retail and ecommerce marketers who often run promotions throughout the year,” says Tabing-Dalit. “Instead of your creative team or agency spending valuable time manually adding sales stickers to hundreds of image assets, you can completely automate that workflow.”

Creative Sequencing

Skai clients can group visual assets into Albums which can then be organized into a message sequence by simply dragging and dropping the assets into the desired order. For marketers, there are two ways to leverage this feature: for performance optimization and for storytelling.

Sequencing for performance optimization. Marketers can set performance goals on visual assets based on numerous metrics enabled by the system. Then, if an ad doesn’t meet those goals, the system will automatically pause it and create a new ad using the next image or video in the sequence. Clients can choose the desired threshold before the system checks the ad’s performance, such as after 100,000 impressions in order to give the ad enough time to prove itself.

Sequencing for storytelling. It doesn’t always make sense to run the same ads over and over to the same audiences. Marketers can activate narratives at scale by setting rules for when the images should be refreshed.

In conjunction with Skai’s Creative Manager, Skai offers a full suite of creative capabilities across search, social, and ecommerce advertising channels including advanced analysis and optimization capabilities to maximize marketing performance.

“Beyond helping our clients collaborate more effectively and activate their creative assets at scale, we enable marketers to derive actionable creative insights,” says Tabing-Dalit. “Within Skai’s Analysis Grid, clients can easily see album- and image/video-level performance, then optimize accordingly.”

For information on Skai’s Creative Manager, clients should reach out to their Skai reps. Non-Skai clients can contact us or Book a Meeting to see how Skai can help to supercharge your marketing.

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