What is a creative management platform(CMP)?

A creative management platform, or CMP, is a software designed to streamline different processes involved in digital advertising such as the creation, management, distribution and performance tracking of ad content across various platforms. A CMP is a cloud-based platform that offers multiple tools to optimize all these aspects of digital advertising in a centralized manner.

A creative management platform helps brands manage complex campaigns easily by automating creative production, personalizing ad content, and allowing marketers and designers to collaborate within the CMP for all campaign operations. This setup reduces repetitive efforts in designing creative variations and enhances campaign performance. It helps marketing teams reduce the time-to-launch campaigns, improve conversion rates and ROI from advertising campaigns, and maintain brand consistency across all campaigns and platforms.

What are the key features of a creative management platform?

Designed to facilitate the creation, management, and optimization of advertising content, a CMP offers the following key features:

A creative studio for Ad design

The core of a creative management platform is its ad creator, which empowers the design team to produce high-quality image and video ads. The master creatives need to be crafted with creativity and precision so that further design variations can be scaled confidently. The ad creator tools, such as templates and creative elements, offered by a CMP ensure quick production of engaging creatives.

Creative automation

Once your master creatives are ready, you need an automation tool to scale the production of variations based on size, dimensions, colors etc. The automations are smartly designed to generate publication-ready creatives, eliminating the need for manual resizing or optimization.

Centralized storage

A creative management platform offers a cloud-based centralized storage, which makes all the creatives accessible in one place. If your teams are located worldwide, they can access the creatives easily irrespective of their location & time zone. It streamlines collaboration and improves productivity.

Unified feedback & version control

Collaboration within a CMP is seamless which means there is no need for different communication & file sharing channels like emails, drive folders, slack etc. With a creative management platform, feedback is contextual and file sharing is simple via in-platform operations. Version control ensures that only up-to-date creatives are being circulated and provides the capability to revert back to older versions when required.

In-built campaign management

You can publish creatives to different ad platforms directly from the CMP using integrations. Campaign management capabilities of a CMP allow you to launch large-scale campaigns faster.

Dynamic creative optimization (DCO)

Have you ever wanted to personalize your display ads for your specific target audience? DCO provides just that. It tailors ad creatives based on the user’s geographic location, suitable offers, and ideal visuals for that specific user. DCO uses first and third-party data sources to power the algorithm that suggests the right variation for a specific viewer. DCO is creative personalization on steroids, using data-driven advertising for improved conversion rates and ROI.

Real-time analytics of creative performance

To optimize creative performance, you must closely monitor metrics like click-through rates (CTR), clicks, impressions, video views, etc. A creative management platform provides live performance metrics to ensure that marketing teams can launch improved variations faster and meet their targets for campaign success. You also get the ability to launch A/B tests within your creative management platform.

User-friendly interface with drag-and-drop operations

For a creative management platform to be successful amongst marketing teams, it must be easy to use. Teams can’t add another complex automation tool to their stack, which is difficult to learn and has poor UI. An ideal CMP offers a drag-and-drop editor, making it super-easy for anyone to produce content and make edits to the creatives. Templates and design elements are often included as a part of the editor, which makes the production of specific content types like display ads, social media ads, video ads, etc., pretty straightforward.

How do companies benefit from a creative management platform?

A CMP improves the productivity of marketing and creative teams and ensures that they can create personalized content to drive improved results. A CMP offers the following benefits:

Faster production, iteration, and launch

Since repetitive tasks such as resizing, formatting, and adapting ads for various platforms are automated in a CMP, marketers can launch new campaigns faster. For example, a fashion e-commerce brand preparing to launch a new summer collection needs multiple ad creatives for the campaign - display banners, social media images & videos, email creatives, etc. Without a CMP, their design teams would spend numerous hours creating each asset manually and then uploading these assets for review, leading to design inconsistencies and feedback gaps. A CMP automates all these variations and brings all feedback and versions in one place.

Save time spent in switching and learning different tools

A CMP consolidates various marketing operations into a single platform, allowing users to manage all aspects of the creative process, like production, digital asset management, publication, and performance tracking, within one tool. Such an approach eliminates the need to jump between multiple software, each having its own learning curve. Teams can focus on campaign optimization rather than compatibility issues with different tools.

Maintain brand consistency

You can store brand assets like logos, fonts, templates etc. in the CMP so that the entire creative production is brand consistent. Centralized collaboration adds to delivering a consistent brand experience by improving asset review and approval workflows.

Insight into Performance Metrics

Marketers and designers can make data driven decisions to tweak creatives for improved performance by monitoring real-time analytics. Such decisions can take weeks when analytics are hidden in platform-specific dashboards like with Google, Meta or Linkedin ads. Improved visibility of key performance indicators (KPIs) in a CMP helps teams deliver better results.

What are some popular creative management platforms?

Listing some of the leading creative management platforms that you can explore based on your business use cases:

1. Adcreative.ai - An ideal tool for small businesses looking to use AI to automate their advertising operations.
2. Bannerflow - Suitable for Mid-market and large businesses seeking to streamline their entire campaign lifecycle.
3. Celtra - A good option for small to medium-sized businesses interested in creative automation for scaling digital advertising.

How is a CMP different from a DAM?

A CMP automates digital advertising and maintains brand consistency across all campaigns and channels. A Digital asset management system, or a DAM, on the other hand, is a solution to manage the complete lifecycle of digital assets (images, videos, documents, slide decks, etc.) for a brand. A DAM offers the following functionalities:

• DAM offers a centralized repository to store and manage digital assets for the entire organization, including brand assets, product images & videos, sales collaterals, large video content for channels like YouTube, and more.

• One of DAM’s core propositions is advanced asset organization with custom metadata so that teams can find what they need from a library of thousands of creatives.

• DAM is ideal for your business if you have a large number of assets that are growing with time, and you don’t want restrictions on the file size, format, and volume while uploading assets in your library.

• DAM offers content hosting and media processing so that you can publish assets directly to your websites or apps with real-time optimization.

Interested to learn more about a DAM? Check out ImageKit.io.