Tech MVP 2022: Celtra

Creative Automation for Marketing & Advertising

By Celtra

For Asia-Pacific brand marketers, a key challenge has been to ensure your brand is conveying a consistent message across multiple markets and cultures. The diverse markets require localising cultural nuances while maintaining brand control, and, at the same time, producing quality creatives at high volumes to keep up with the pace of ecommerce. Organizing, planning, and producing creative work in general remains a complex task, often achieved through a mix of digitised and manual workflows. Yet advertisers, publishers and agencies require more scale and speed.

Celtra’s software, Creative Automation for Marketing and Advertising addresses these issues since it’s aimed at helping brands and agencies to more efficiently scale content production for global toolkits, performance creative, and market-specific campaigns. Brand-specific templates can be fully customised and scaled across different campaign ad sizes and formats. By placing all the design and content elements of a project in one place, marketers can create master toolkits for local teams to adapt with already-approved brand assets.

The software was built overseas but has been taken up and adapted widely across APAC, where local markets differ significantly from one market to the next. Since early adopters like Lazada and Mediacorp used the platform for cross-funnel campaign activities, the APAC team has grown its customer base to more than 30 brands and publishers across industries like online marketplaces, super apps, telecommunication services, gaming brands, finance and insurance, and the retail space. South China Morning Post, Daily Mail Australia, adidas, Spotify and Unilever are among its customers.

Those who use the software like its results. Lazada reported it was able to go to market three times faster on campaign launches using the product, churning out 2,500 creatives using 10 templates with 80% less manual work. Such figures, along with the post-pandemic ecommerce boom, have only fueled its popularity. In 2021, Celtra saw about an 80% increase in customer projects to scale their creatives. In 2022, the company forecasts a further 60% jump in platform use.

Recently Celtra launched Creative Automation for Dynamic Product Ads (DPA) to turn product feeds into branded performance ads. This type of automated scaling has given marketers more bandwidth to do creative testing, which in turn is improving APAC brand return on ad spend by an average of sevent times, Celtra contends. This is the approach one of Southeast Asia's supermarket chains is currently taking on a cross-funnel campaign. Looking ahead, Celtra will be rolling a Creative Automation 2.0 refresh with upgrades to the design suite and more ability for multiple users to collaborate.