In conversation with: Celtra's APAC GM Raushida Vasaiwala

Creative automation company Celtra built its products as early as 2006, and to date, has worked with enterprises such as adidas, Unilever, Spotify, CNN, and VICE.

It believes that scaling marketing creativity is transformative for businesses and culture. In November, Celtra inked a definitive agreement to receive a majority investment from Symphony Technology Group, a private equity partner to market-leading companies in data, software, and analytics.

Celtra is expected to generate more than US$50 million in revenue in 2021 and grow by over 25% year-over-year. The investment comes on the back of Celtra winning more than 40 new enterprise customers this year.

In this latest episode of “In Conversation”, Celtra’s GM of APAC, Raushida Vasaiwala (pictured), talks about how brands can power creative transformation; the pressures creative teams face; and what role technology plays in setting a creative team up for success.

Vasaiwala has been with Celtra for four years, first joining in 2017 as director of business development for Southeast Asia and India. She was later promoted to APAC GM in 2018, and currently oversees the company’s overall Asia Pacific business and product adoption through strategic partnerships with brands, publishers, media, and solution providers.

She has also successfully built partnerships with brands, publishers, agencies, and technology aggregators such as Gojek, M1, Lazada, InMobi, P&G, and Maxis.

Listen to the full episode here. This conversation is powered by Celtra.

MARKETING-INTERACTIVE: How would you define creative transformation? And why is creative transformation so important for brands today?

Vasaiwala: Creative transformation is the adoption of creative automation software by brands and marketers into their online marketing activity and the whole production process, with the vision to drive growth in alignment with their teams.

Most brands are working with either marketplaces or they have their own brand.com, channels or website. With so much noise online, marketers struggle to make the brand stand out.

In order to be able to cut through the clutter, they need to create their own unique brand voice. Hence, resorting to the lowest common denominator in the form of doing generic ads or poor quality ads, or even inconsistent ads, might prove to be very expensive to the business. And this can be seen when you’re paying a lot more. For example, the cost of acquisition is very high, or the engagement is very poor, or the click through rate is very low.

Additionally, studies have also shown that 75% of ad campaign credibility comes from the design of the ad. The same applies for ad creatives also. To be able to meet consumer needs, ads need to be very relevant, and they need to be refreshed from time to time, which means production teams need to produce higher volumes of ads.

They need to be of high quality and created at a much faster speed, so the manual ways of producing ads won’t support that strategy. Hence, creative transformation is imperative if you really want to stay ahead of the game.

MARKETING-INTERACTIVE: There are many ads out there – from upper to lower funnel. What advice do you have for marketers who are struggling to create a consistent brand voice in their advertising?

Vasaiwala: Brand awareness campaigns now are very visually appealing, and that creates brand equity. But the moment you see the same brand or campaign, or when the creatives are not on par with the brand awareness campaign, they are very run-of-the-mill, or the ads are generic and the branding is not as strong.

The brands we work with that are using creative automation software are harmonising the whole funnel when it comes to the experiences they are creating, which means ensuring the brand equity stays as strong as it is in the upper funnel activities. Hence, creatives are a lot more enriched in even regular product catalogues that you usually see on Facebook or Google Shopping, for example.

Gone are the days where you can make do with all those drab-looking ads with a plain background, a product shot, a message, and a call to action.

Enriching your creatives in your performance campaign actually helps in reducing the cost per acquisition and increasing the consumer engagement. You also drive a much higher ROI as well. So what brands are doing differently to stay ahead of the game is they are ensuring that creatives are harmonious across the entire funnel.

MARKETING-INTERACTIVE: Given how fast the marketing landscape is evolving, marketers also need to change their ways of producing creative content. We see a lot of issues such as burnout or churning of content. How do products such as yours help with that, especially as teams become leaner?

Vasaiwala: It doesn’t matter how big or how lean the team is, the goal or the problem statement needs to be defined. For example, how much volume is required? At what speed is it required? And what are the different things that you want to achieve? Once you have gotten that, do you want to do more and test? Do you want to create more variety? What are the other kinds of products that need to be included?

These are the things that are important. So how does creative automation software help? First, it helps in the sheer speed of production, and it really eliminates a lot of human error most of the time so scaling is a lot easier.

Plus, you want to create different types of formats and many different sizes. Most of the designers end up spending 70% of their time creating these adaptations so this is where the [creative automation] platform comes into play. It eliminates that whole manual process, plus the production is done with a lot more speed that separates the content from the design. As a result, you’re creating so much more bandwidth for the designers to be able to do more.

There are also other areas that are equally important when it comes to the review and approval. Sometimes everything else is ready, but the creatives are not because they are not approved. That’s also because of the sheer volume of ads, and the brand manager, content manager, project manager and designer are all consolidating everyone’s feedback through different channels.

We’ve spoken to a lot of design teams and they said they get comments via WhatsApp, Slack, calls and even email. Can you imagine [what it is like for the designers]? It’s so crazy to just consolidate everyone’s feedback and reach a general consensus. So, this is where the platform helps in easy collaboration where you can do the review approval and commenting all in one place.

Finally, there’s also a bit of respite for the media team and the distribution. Our platform has integrations with different channels. These API integrations, for example, help in pushing the ads directly into these channels.

Trafficking, which is sometimes a nightmare for designers and media or campaign managers, is eliminated as well. So overall, the entire life cycle is a lot more streamlined.

MARKETING-INTERACTIVE: What role does creative automation play when it comes to setting up a creative team for success?

Vasaiwala: Creative automation helps in getting the designers to think about the larger picture. It brings marketing a lot closer to what is required to be achieved. With the help of our team, we provide all these best practices, and we speak about creating these modular templates that are easily scalable.

Sometimes, when you’re working manually, you can do everything bespoke. But when you’re using a creative automation software, it helps you to start thinking differently and be a little more creative.

So, when you’re building these key visuals, how can you make them scalable to get a lot more bandwidth to do a lot more testing or create more variety? Why stick to one type of creative when you can test more? It helps creative teams to do a lot more, focus more on the design and craft, and do more meaningful stuff.

And this, again, goes back to the issue of burnout. Burnout is not just working hard, but it also comes in the form of doing meaningless jobs.

Designers spend anywhere between 60% to 70% of their time doing adaptation work. So if that is taken away and they are minimising that manual work, the quality of design will be a lot richer, and they are upscaling themselves. It’s a win-win for both the marketer as well as for the design team.

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