Marketing automation has been all the craze the last decade, regardless of industry, whether it involves newsletters or chat or even algorithm-based ad buying – programmatic. Brand and marketing people still want to take the “hit-or-miss” out of their communications. Even though we are seeing a slight slowdown of marketing automation in some forms due to privacy regulations, especially in the EU, automation is still relevant. As a topic, automation has begun to be applied to new issues in the organization, such as in brand and design management. Tasks like DesignOps and design management, with the importance of streamlining the design process in digital media, are calling for more automated support.
Brand and design professionals are facing increasing challenges with respect to design execution and time-to-market. As teams grow, complexity increases, along with the integration of a wider group of stakeholders. This is nothing new, but the demand for consistency is still a driving factor for brands, in addition to bringing modern brand experiences quickly to the market. As with marketing automation, cutting costs and improving efficiency have also been forced onto the design systems.
To properly decide to implement or develop the right design automation tools, your brand teams need to involve all brand users from the start. It is important to understand the barriers in the creative/design process, regardless of how small these glitches might be. Our years of experience creating design systems has taught us to try to eliminate complexity or boring stuff in designing. Great branding should be a tool for collaboration and creativity, allowing your people to focus on creativity and not the humdrum of guidelines and standards. Design automation should provide teams with the tools to ease the development of a brand experiences.
For years now, MetaDesign has been developing various types of automated tools that streamline our clients’ design process. These tools have been saving our clients millions of euros or dollars. Case in point, a global mobility company needed to streamline their ad creation process, creating more coherent communication with their customer on a global scale. The goal was to allow designers to have the open files in their hand to make more detailed design decisions or to simply produce the ad as a PDF. This tool has been such a success that our client has seen thousands of active users of the software in our brand management tool.
Design automation and the exciting future of computational design are opening up new avenues for strategists, marketeers, product owners and designers. Over the last 40 years, we have supported and enabled numerous brands to bring their brand to market. We are excited to build new tools that will give the power of creativity to the people who use those brands assets. Write to us if you would like to know more about modern brand management in the digital age.
_Steven Cook is Head of Experience at MetaDesign Berlin