Recreating your media assets every time you need a change is time-consuming and costly. Fortunately, you can now create re-usable digital media assets. Account managers, brand managers and designers can easily update these assets in a matter of minutes.

Dynamic media assets make it easy to separate design from execution. Quickly create updated offers, swap in new product images, or freshen up media with new themes or colors. It’s easy to do all this while staying on-brand and on-message.

How To Create Reusable Digital Media Assets

Most design approaches require designers to re-create media for every change. That holds for display ads, hero images, digital circulars and the like. A seemingly simple messaging change, like 2 for $5 instead of 2 for $4 requires a complete redo. Users have to work through a graphics design program to make a simple messaging tweak. Then they have to update every template size. That’s a complex and time-consuming process.

Anytime such changes are made, there’s a risk of going off-brand. Images can end up in the wrong position, fonts may be incorrect or off-brand colors may make it into the final output. The question is how to provide flexibility to make updates to messaging and images without risking changes to the underlying design.

That’s where Dynamic Media Assets come into play. These assets combine widely supported file formats like PSD and AI files with attributes. The attributes define what users can edit. For example, they might specify that certain images can be moved around in a template, but that only a specific, on-brand font can be used for text. Dynamic templates make it easy to configure attributes.

Templates are associated with themes. Themes bring flexibility to a design. At the same time, they ensure that the output adheres to requirements that designers and brand managers set. Dynamic Media Assets can even specify pre-defined messages or call-to-action (CTA) buttons. This way, output always adheres to approved messaging. It also makes it very fast to create updated media. It’s as easy as choosing a message or CTA from a dropdown.

Templates

Templates offer a number of advantages. First, they make it easy to setup the overall design of a banner ad, virtual bundle, nutrition facts image or rich media image asset. Designers can create multiple variations so that execution leads can choose from a variety of pre-defined layouts.

Once a template is setup, designers can quickly update it to reflect new requirements. For example, if a retailer wants brands to adhere to an updated style guide, templates only need to be updated once.

Templates don’t impact messaging or product images. Changing a template design means the same product feeds and images can continue to be used with no changes.

Themes

Themes are a great way to infuse creativity and fresh design elements into a design. They define different color groups, sets of background images, shadow effects and so on. Designers can themes up quickly and easily. Then they can use these pre-configured themes directly or make them available for sales and marketing. Because theme elements are pre-defined, staying on-brand is easy.

What are some example of themes? There are themes for events like Back to School and Thanksgiving. There are themes for different styles. You can create themes for specific brands in a multi-brand portfolio. You can make themes for specific customers, retailers or social media sites. With a quick change of a background image and a few color updates, a theme-driven template can take on a completely different look and feel. What’s more, themes make it easy to refresh creative even when products stay the same. Marketing campaigns and promotions gain added life as a result. You can use existing themes or create your own. They’re easy to setup.

You can preview themes instantaneously. Simply choose a theme. A full set of display advertisements, nutrition facts images, mobile hero images and other media will refresh and display in the new theme right away. Click export and your new media is ready to go.

So with the combination of Dynamic Media Assets, Templates and Themes, scaling your digital media assets is easy. You can start making the most of your existing product images and other media right away. You can refresh campaigns all while staying on-brand. And there’s no need to create your assets from scratch every time.

Get Started With Dynamic Media Assets Today

RapidAds is used by some of the world’s leading brands. We help them scale their E-Commerce businesses by making it easy to produce the creative they want, at the scale and speed they need. Instead of keeping teams silo’d, RapidAds enables your entire organization participate. To learn how you can achieve similar results, please contact us.