Digital Ad Design
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How Streamlining Creative Leads to Better, Faster, & More Effective Digital Ads

Digital advertising can make or break a small business. The internet is a crowded place, and your ad must capture your audience’s attention with writing and design that stops them in their tracks and makes them want to engage with your brand. According to a Nielson study, creative quality is the most important factor for driving sales – 47% of a brand’s sales lift from advertising comes from the creative. TV ads generally have consistently high-quality creative—as opposed to digital ads, which have a wider range of quality, including both much higher and much lower.

Great looking ads make audiences pay attention, but quality design and writing are hard to come by for small businesses. There may be a number of reasons for inconsistency in digital ad quality, but it can typically be attributed to lack of time, budget, and brand assets. Frequence feels strongly that small businesses should – and can – compete in the digital space despite these roadblocks, and we’ve figured out how to make it happen.

Faster, smarter, cheaper creative

The creative process generally has a lot of bottlenecks. Design platforms aren’t compatible with one another, elements can get held up waiting on animation or copy review, and designers have to start from scratch each project. We knew there was a better way, so we developed software technology that streamlines our creative process, and the results speak for themselves.

In 2020, we created 61,200 digital ads. That’s 3x more than the year before. Our standard turn-around time for creative is 2 days, which means our clients can have their digital ad up and running and see performance metrics within two days of our initial meeting.

Our streamlined process, or “design framework”, helps us rapidly create ads by democratizing design – in other words, it’s accessible to the whole team and clients big or small. By connecting our all-in-one workflow platform to Photoshop and other creative software, development never slows down. When we build a special interactive design element, like confetti, we do so in a way that it can be reused as glitter or fireworks in the future. This ensures we never have to design anything twice. A designer can pick up right where an animator left off with no animation experience required. Strategic milestones keep the creative moving – 12 hours after our designers receive an ad, it’s in the hands of our copywriters. 15 hours later, it’s going through quality assurance.

Our design framework allows us to be cost-efficient and cost-effective. We can create campaigns for big budgets and humble ones with little to no difference in effort or approach, allowing us to keep the cost low. That’s exciting for our local advertisers who may be limited on what they can spend on campaigns. Good creative sells, and in turn helps the small advertiser’s dollar go farther.

Frameworking is integral to what we do. We’ve created efficiencies through automation, which means we get to focus on developing high-end creative like color palettes, type treatments, animations, etc. We have more time to work on technology advancements and explore smarter creative that speaks to the individual and helps our client’s brand stand out.

Focus on local advertising

More and more local clients are going digital, and we couldn’t be happier to help them succeed in this space. However, many local advertisers don’t believe they have the brand assets for a banner ad or streaming video. Not so. Our creative team of designers, animators, copywriters, audio engineers, and developers has the depth and breadth of resources to turn little to no brand assets into effective, eye-catching creative that gets results – and we have the data to prove it.  

From banner ads to billboards, we determine ad strength using a method we call BEAM-D. Ads are scored on Branding, Engagement, Attention, Message, and Design, and we use metrics within this method to grade ads. Our reporting dashboard offers us unique insight into how the campaign performs, using algorithms created by our data scientists (yes, we have nerdy data scientists!). We measure more than standard clicks and view-throughs. We look at lift, percentages of improvement in website traffic, and general conversion stats. Beyond the numbers, though, we know we’re successful when our client tells us we understand their brand and represent them accurately.

Our creative team lives in and works consistently with local and regional markets across the U.S. We cover markets urban and rural, east and west, north and south. We understand the local advertiser because we’re local, and the engagement results show it from SEM to social ads,  OTT, preroll, and more. New channels are emerging every quarter, from display publishers, audio, TV and digital out-of-home. Programmatic is so strong it is estimated that 91% of all display media will be bought this way in 2023. Digital advertising isn’t slowing down and neither are we – let’s see what we can build together.

Get in touch to learn more about how our creative gets results. Passionate about creatively solving complex problems? Join our team.

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