Whether you’re struggling with blocks in the traditional design process or want to take your creative workflows to the next level, creative automation may be a solution for your business. Yet, introducing new technology is always easier said than done—especially when you don’t know what challenges to expect.
This is why we highlight the six challenges you can expect as you adopt creative automation, as well as the individual solutions for each of these. By taking these on board, you can avoid surprises, anticipating them ahead of time to prepare for possible disruptions.
Without further ado, let’s dive into the risks involved in creative automation, how these can create six distinct creative automation challenges.
Risks and challenges of implementing creative automation
Deloitte outlines three risks that are part of any digital transformation initiative: contextual, implementation, and governance risks. With creative automation in mind, these can be defined as:
- Contextual risk: Selecting a creative automation tool that’s misaligned with your business and creative goals.
- Implementation risk: Integrating a creative automation tool that compromises your business’s technical security or doesn’t fit into your creative team’s workflows.
- Governance risk: Managing your creative automation tools poorly, resulting in improper oversight and coordination of creative projects.
These risks can trickle down into six potential challenges for your business when implementing creative automation.
Contextual risks
Implementation risks
Governance risks
1. Budget concerns
The conditions brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic urged companies to cut costs—and marketing budgets were among the first to suffer. Since then, marketing budgets have trended downward. Gartner’s latest CMO survey revealed that, this year, marketing budgets have decreased to 7.7% of overall company revenue—a 15% drop from last year’s 9.1%.
As a result, the cost of implementing new marketing solutions worries marketing decision-makers—and creative automation tools are no different. Marketing decision-makers need to think long and hard when it comes to adopting new tools. They have to make sure that these align with business and marketing goals and can be justified in terms of ROI.
While these concerns are valid, deliberating for too long can do more harm than good—especially given the pace at which companies are expected to adapt and scale creative assets. Gartner estimates that for an organization of 10’000 employees, fear of AI and automation will cost them $53 million per year in productivity.
Solution: Understand the ROI of creative automation for your business
Companies seeking creative automation tools tend to do so to get closer to goals such as making creative workflows efficient, reducing redundant tasks, or speeding up the time-to-market of their assets.
A closer look at AI and automation, the two drivers of creative automation, can uncover the ROI of creative automation. AI and automation are what enable your business to scale the production of branded creative assets and automate repetitive tasks, reducing the manual workload necessary for each creative. This frees up employees’ time and focus for more strategic tasks. The result? A 70% cut in costs and a 50% increase in turnaround speed—as was the case with the British Council when they implemented Creatopy.
“GenAI offers the opportunity to grow the marketing function’s impact far beyond its budgetary constraints.”
–Ewan McIntyre, Vice President Analyst and Chief of Research at Gartner Marketing Practice
2. Creativity and originality concerns
AI and automation in creative spaces bring about a lot of fear, with employees worrying that these might take over their work. And we’ve seen this fear spread across countries and industries. Australia’s Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance, for example, has called for the urgent regulation of AI as they fear job losses and the undermining of human creativity. The fashion industry is also on edge. Companies using cost-friendly AI-generated glam models in their advertising campaigns face heavy criticism, with naysayers criticizing their lack of authenticity and emotional connection.
Despite these worries, the best solution isn’t to overlook the positive aspects of creative automation due to fear. Instead, it lies in changing your perspective to understand how creative automation complements the creative process rather than overtaking it completely.
Solution: A change of perspective
Advertisers, marketers, and creatives alike should recognize creative automation for what it is: a tool to boost creativity, not monopolize it. It relieves creative workers of the burden of routine, repetitive tasks. As a result—and contrary to popular belief—this gives them the space to immerse themselves in the creation process.
Nadine Young describes how we can think of the symbiotic relationship between automation and creativity. She uses an analogy that separates creativity and automation into two distinct yet complementary systems: system one and system two.
Automation can be represented as system one, which involves “speedy, innate, and instinctive behavior and decisions,” such as breathing. Creativity, on the other hand, resembles system two: “slower, rational, and more considered thinking,” such as solving challenges creatively. Only when the basics of system one are fully covered does system two have the space to flourish.
This analogy helps us see that these systems don’t compete with one another—they work in tandem.
“The only way advertisers can deliver both the space for deep thinking and rich conversations that creativity thrives in is to work and trust in automation.”
–Nadine Young, Chief Executive of Starcom UK
3. Integration difficulties
Thirty-three percent of IT decision-makers reported disjointed systems and technologies as a top challenge in automation. These bring about hesitations when implementing creative automation—especially considering the time and costs typically required for successful integrations. IT teams spend over a third of their time on integration projects, with custom integrations costing large enterprises millions of dollars each year in labor.
Despite such issues, automation prevails as a top business priority, with 47% of businesses reporting it as a critical initiative. So, how can you integrate creative automation into your workflow without spending too much time and money?
Solution: Pick the right tools
You can use integration platforms like Zapier to help you connect your tech stack to creative automation tools using pre-built integrations—no coding or specialized knowledge needed. Moreover, you must be selective when choosing your creative automation tools, as some make the integration process more manageable than others using APIs.
For example, Creatopy’s API helps you embed the platform’s design capabilities into your existing application for better design automation, project and user management, and real-time updates. You can also use Zapier to create custom triggers that activate Creatopy’s API, automating the creation of visual assets and templates for your teams using Creatopy.
4. Knowledge gaps in technology
More and more businesses are placing an emphasis on becoming digital-first, with 89% of large companies in the midst of digital transformation. And yet, the gap between employees’ skills and the technology they’re expected to use is widening: 90% of executives and managers say that their company already faces skill gaps or anticipates gaps to develop within the next few years. What’s more, 40% of the workforce is expected to need reskilling in the next three years due to breakthroughs in AI. Worries of insufficient employee knowledge might make decision-makers apprehensive about adopting creative automation.
Solution: Create a company culture rooted in upskilling
Reskilling is not just useful for creative automation—it’s an essential component of effective digital transformation. However, effective reskilling requires more than just band-aid solutions or one-time effort. You must create a company culture that welcomes innovation and embraces new technologies. This includes educating employees on the benefits of creative automation, making continuous learning a part of your company culture, and providing supporting resources to keep employees on a path of learning. According to Korn Ferry, not only does this equip your workforce with the skills needed to weather the storm of change, but it also makes the retention of high performers 98% more likely.
New Creatopy customers don’t have to worry about the knowledge gap—our customer success and support teams immediately get users up to speed. We offer tailored training and ongoing support for enterprise clients on a bi-weekly basis as they get acquainted with our product. Our onboarding process includes a platform walkthrough, instructions on creating designs within Creatopy, and a deep dive into advanced features such as ad and feed serving that can make your ad campaigns successful.
5. Security concerns
Companies’ growing dependence on new-age AI tools brings about a proportionate increase in security and data concerns, with 53% of organizations acknowledging cybersecurity as a gen AI-related risk. This fear is further substantiated by the 78% annual increase in publicly reported data compromises in 2023, which carried heavy economic and reputation losses. For example, the recent data breach case of UnitedHealth Group, which compromised 100 million individuals’ data, could cost the company $705 million.
Given these dire consequences, it’s normal to be apprehensive about creative automation. However, as the demand for visuals grows, renouncing creative automation as a solution may result in a loss of market share, with competitors taking the lead in capturing customers’ attention.
The trade-off, therefore, shouldn’t be between having or not having creative automation. Instead, question how to make creative automation work for your business without risking your data.
Solutions: Double down on your security measures
Security measures aren’t just important for creative automation. They’re a must-have for protecting what’s arguably your most valuable company asset: your customer and company data.
One way to do this is using the CIA Triad as a guiding model for developing your security systems.
The CIA Triad highlights confidentiality, integrity, and availability to strengthen your security systems, pinpoint vulnerabilities, and pre-emptively ideate solutions for mitigating these.
- Confidentiality: Strong access controls, encryption, and multi-factor authentication measures, as well as role-based access limitations to guard sensitive data.
- Integrity: Version control, error-checking mechanisms, and data monitoring to limit and anticipate potential security issues
- Availability: Redundant systems, regular backups, and disaster recovery plans to regulate data access and system functionality.
Your data security is our utmost priority at Creatopy. Our creative automation platform has attained certifications such as ISO 20000-1, ISO 27001, and ISO 9001, while using Single Sign-On (SSO) authentication to obstruct data breaches and password-related incidents. Additionally, Creatopy uses bycrypt algorithms for secure password storage and hosts its services within a secure virtual private cloud on Amazon Web Services (AWS) in the US. Together, these features keep our Creatopy users’ data compliant with the CIA Triad.
6. Employee resistance to change
Prosaic revealed that 41% of businesses report employee resistance as the primary obstacle to change management. This is typically caused by a collective lack of confidence or certainty in the reasoning behind change management initiatives and comfort with existing processes. These may affect employees’ willingness to uptake new creative automation tools.
Solution: Highlight the value of creative automation
Communicating a clear “why” can support your business’s shift toward creative automation. When employees understand the value of creative automation and how it can help them achieve their goals, they’re more likely to invest more effort in making this initiative successful.
One way to do this is by emphasizing creative automation’s positive impact on collaboration, personalization, scalability, bottlenecks, and cost savings. For example, Creatopy has helped brands reduce design costs by 50%, shorten asset approval time by 80%, and increase ad production speed by 30%.
Linking these benefits back to business, department, or team goals can also gather the approval of more people around the company, showcasing the value of creative automation beyond the individual level.
“Benefits are immense—[Creatopy] radically decreased [the] amount of time, resources, and money dedicated to localization and proved to be an instrumental tool for our creative asset production process.”
–Meltem Gunyuzlu, Head of Marketing Operations
Get started with creative automation today
Now that you know the six potential challenges of implementing creative automation and how to solve them, you can start considering the right creative automation tool to help you achieve your goals. Not sure where to start? Check out the Creatopy features that simplify the adoption of creative automation for your business here.
