Manufacturing automation is empowering brands and designers to combine creativity and performance. One of the brands at the forefront of this movement is Readly. Readly is a digital magazine and newspaper subscription service that features content from more than 800 third-party publishers and provides access to 5,000 different titles, via a browser and mobile app for subscriptions. monthly subscription. Operating in 9 markets around the world, each campaign must work in at least 5 languages, quickly adding up to 100+ individual ads to each created campaign. We spoke with Readly’s Head of Design, Charlotte Gudmundsson, about how she and her team produce global display ads and the role the Bannerflow platform can play in taking them to the next level. follow.
Tell us about a recent display campaign you are proud of…
Charlotte Gudmundsson, Design Director, Readly: The recent work we’ve been very pleased with are our first two quarterly campaigns for 2021 – launched on social media and display. These are pretty simple designs, but like any campaign, it’s all about how many paid subscribers we can get and how we can maximize that performance.
Quarterly campaign example read Another thing we wanted to check was how we could refine our messaging a bit and be more specific. Indeed, we often try to advertise our selection of over 5,000 titles.
This has been reflected in our designs in the past by having graphics show dozens of magazine covers. However, viewers have about three seconds to view the work and it can be a bit overwhelming, so this time we decided to focus on specific titles.
In the past, we also used a single product photo, so we had a device with our user interface, or app, simulated on the screen. This time, we used three devices, each with a magazine cover model in the product, so people will see three titles instead of a dozen. This is what we wanted to.
Which design challenges were the most satisfying to solve?
Charlotte Gudmundsson: The question is simple: how do you close the gap, to show the breadth of our offering (that we have 5,000 magazines on offer), but to communicate in three seconds?
People have no patience and they don’t log a message very quickly, so you need to post that message immediately ahead of time. So we thought a great Time magazine cover would be more recognizable than a graphic with 20 rotating magazines.
Our goal now is to keep the graphics a little simpler. We also concentrate on the text and also make sure that the text is not too long, also because people are not reading it. Furthermore, designing for five different languages and creating typography in five different languages is also a challenge. The German words are very long and the Italian is quite wordy, so it makes sense to have an ad design that solves this particular problem.
In general, how do you tackle the design process of building campaigns?
Charlotte Gudmundsson: We are a small in-house design team of three designers, myself included. One is based in Berlin and the other is also based in Stockholm.
Usually, when we develop larger campaigns, like quarterly campaigns, we work with an outside company to create certain designs, such as a few key banners. or hero video (we’ll also use social media). We then take those designs and adapt them to work across all of our channels, including partnerships with other companies.
When it comes to Bannerflow, our agency can create a handful of banners, three or four, then we take those master designs and scale them to the number needed for a campaign . This process we share internally between the three of us, largely depends on who has the time and willingness. We work in a very cooperative way. And we always work together in Bannerflow.
How many hours does it take to build a display advertising campaign?
Charlotte Gudmundsson: Counting only our last big campaign… ads needed for nine markets, in five languages, to work across a number of different channels, Google Display, Facebook, Amazon, and more. In total, the campaign has a total of 315 individual banners. have different sizes. A large number of individual design assets.
Today one of our designers worked full-time for four days on this campaign; almost a week, 32 hours. And it seemed to take a long time, but before we started using Bannerflow, we only produced using Photoshop or After Effects, and campaigns could take weeks. So going from two weeks of two designers working 70% of their time on a single campaign to a designer working four days and spending all of their time there, is a factor. change the game.
Does the context of where the campaign is to be placed influence your ad designs?
Charlotte Gudmundsson: When it comes to display ads, the biggest problem for us is how we work with a skyscraper ad, which is a very cumbersome format. So we try to keep it very simple in our ads, a bunch of bold colors, less than seven or eight words of text, and then a great product image. Our mission is to communicate immediately that this is our product.
When it comes to social media ads, we have a little more room for creativity. However, due to time constraints, we keep it a bit easier, and that’s due to the speed of our work at Readly. However, we definitely plan to create more advanced animations for our social campaigns.
What is it about the Bannerflow platform that makes designing ads smoother?
Charlotte Gudmundsson: I think one of my favorite things is the preview mode, where you can see your entire creative team and you have a text form on the side. Here you can just write or replace some text and then it will automatically fill all the selected banner layouts. It’s a time saver for us. Being able to update text at all levels on a set of banners has been very helpful to us. It also makes it very easy for us to create all the different versions we need. This allows us to change the ad copy for different languages, in minutes instead of hours. A big change from when we weren’t working in Bannerflow.
What features of the Bannerflow platform have helped you take ad production to the next level? Charlotte Gudmundsson: Oh, so many things. Dynamic content definitely helps us speed up processes. We’re now connecting our 100-image resource library with live product images that feature various magazines, which means we don’t have to constantly update them. Also, what I really like is that you can pre-install. This means you set your own presets, colors and brand logos, so that you have a configurable template, which really helps. And of course, just scalable, automated production. The fact that you can take a square banner, duplicate it into a tall, vertical banner while keeping most of the content and general placement of the design elements – that really helps.
The same goes for the basic animation settings. It takes a second to add a bit of movement to it. It’s not the most advanced animation.
How do you remain agile and reactive in your advertising?
We paintings very intently with our Growth Marketing Team, who’re approximately forty five people. We’re usually speaking with them over Slack, and that’s how they get our designers’ interest for precise tasks. We additionally use Asana too to paintings on larger projects.
Our Acquisition Team focuses all of the time on our banner campaigns, and music results. They reveal how properly they’re working, and we’ve normal weekly catch-ups with them to debrief over how a particular marketing campaign is performing. Based at the results of these conferences we then replace replica or product snap shots in real-time to our stay creatives.
As a designer, how do you continue to find inspiration for your work?
Charlotte Gudmundsson: I truly use Pinterest a lot. I created many alternative boards focussed on emblem style, Fifties advertising, minimalist advertisements. It acts as a form of inspiration library.
in person I’m terribly curious about going back and exploring design over the last century. I’m an enormous fan of Wiener Werkstätte additionally the} early decade in Vienna. All of these guys had their own specific very little watermark logos for themselves. They were substantially about logo designs.
whereas I take inspiration personally very much from old-fashioned designs, I sometimes also compass from TikTok as well. Our team discovered an excellent tool for making product mock-ups through it. It’s a tool referred to as Rotato, that permits you to form advanced 3D associate degreeimations of devices like an iPhone, or an iPad, and helps North American nation once that includes our product.