The digital age has allowed marketing and creative teams to personalize assets at an unprecedented scale. As a result, tailored marketing and materials are no longer a nice-to-have — consumers demand them.

In fact, data from McKinsey shows that 71% of consumers expect personalization. More than that, 76% get frustrated when they don’t get it.

You can bet your competitors have seen these stats and have incorporated creative automation tools to meet the demand.

Additionally, diverse marketing channels and multiple team members involved in content creation make ensuring brand consistency a significant challenge. As companies compete to max out their market share, it’s essential that your brand has the proper tools to protect its representation. Otherwise, you risk dilution of brand identity and confusion among consumers.

Source: Lytho Tempo – Creative Automation Software

How can you produce a steady flow of personalized assets at scale and on brand to meet all quadrants of your market? Lytho’s creative operations platform is here to help with an exciting new feature.

Learn how Lytho Tempo streamlines high-volume creative asset production with Data Merge. Also, take a closer look at other features that make Tempo indispensable for your creative production process.

How Data Merge Makes Personalization Easier Than Ever

Lytho Tempo’s Data Merge lets anyone in your organization easily customize assets through creative automation. A user simply imports data from a spreadsheet to auto-populate the variable fields in a Tempo Smart Template. With this functionality, users can mass produce custom materials for any situation.

That means no more entering unique text and images into files one at a time and then struggling with formatting. Just select a Smart Template and use the Data Merge feature to create hundreds, even thousands, of asset variations in no time.

Easily Use Multiple Types of Customizable Asset Data

Lytho is software from creatives and marketers for creatives and marketers. Because of that, we make sure you have everything you need to work efficiently and with minimal headaches.

With Tempo’s Data Merge, you can streamline one-to-many production of deliverables that contain variable data such as:

• Distinct text like names, prices, and taglines in different languages
• Images and logos
• Unique brand colors
• Embeddable links
• QR codes, bar codes, and coupon codes

Tempo even lets you adjust between different layouts. If most documents are in landscape but you need a few in portrait, signal that distinction in your spreadsheet to seamlessly output what you need.

Source: An Introduction to Alternate Layouts | Lytho Guide

Ideal Use Cases for Tempo Data Merge

Anyone who needs to create dozens, hundreds, or thousands of unique items for marketing, branding, education, or service will appreciate this creative automation tool.

For example, a university may print thousands of diplomas each semester. Each document lists:

• The issuing institution’s name
• The issuing institution’s seal
• The degree title
• The issuant’s name
• The date of issue
• The signature of an official

Instead of spending hours entering each of these details manually, Data Merge does it in a fraction of the time and eliminates opportunities for human error.

Restaurants need localized menus and window clings that show distinct specials and promotions for the area. Sales teams across industries require sales brochures and catalogs that cater to different personas and different markets.

Hospitals and healthcare teams can produce helpful educational cards, one-pagers, and posters that adjust the language and imagery according to demographics. Even white-label product or service providers can quickly generate personalized marketing materials for their resellers with the appropriate colors, branding, and logos.

In these instances and many others, Tempo’s Data Merge automates the asset creation process. This ensures each document presents a clean, unified appearance while minimizing errors.

Other Outstanding Features of Tempo

Tempo’s Data Merge feature complements and amplifies the existing elements that make the tool so great.

Smart Templates

The foundation of Tempo’s functionality is its Smart Templates. These advanced asset frameworks are what allow you to personalize content across assets.

Instead of repeatedly and extensively modifying files, Smart Templates have variables wherever an element of the asset will change. Then, you can use Data Merge to insert the right element for each document, serving as a huge timesaver.

Source: Tempo – Creative Automation Software

Lytho DAM Integration

When you use Lytho, all features work together to ensure smooth collaboration with your whole team. Case in point, stakeholders need access to individual elements (like logos and other branding) to personalize materials. Those assets should be easy to find and remain protected from loss (like accidental deletion) or damage (like unintentional alterations).

Lytho’s Digital Asset Manager is a convenient way to give everyone access to the assets they need. Instead of combing through folder after folder, smart tags help users find assets quickly. Permission settings keep users out of areas they shouldn’t be in, minimizing mistakes and upholding privacy.

Lytho DAM has the added benefits of ensuring compliance with copyright laws and preventing unauthorized access. Plus, versioning capabilities save your team from losing important past iterations of an item.

Get a Better Look at How Lytho Tempo Helps You Simplify Creative Operations

If you’re ready to streamline the creative process, find out how Lytho’s creative operations platform helps you automate your workflows. Contact us today for a demo of how Tempo and Data Merge can work for you.

When I was in elementary school, we occasionally had special assemblies where troupes of high-energy adults would come through to present “educational entertainment” (if you ever need a good example of an oxymoron, there you have it).

One particular time, a group came bopping onto the stage in all green outfits chanting, “Reduce! Reuse! Recycle! Yeah! Reduce! Reuse! Recycle! Yeah!” Their aggressive arm flapping and ear cupping signaled to the audience to join in.

That’s about all I remember from that event  repeating the planet-saving mantra over and over. Maybe the folks on stage (probably satisfying a community service sentence by teaching third graders about sustainability) knew about the marketing rule of seven. I doubt it, but maybe, because the chant has been living rent-free in my head for decades.

One Touch Isn’t Enough

The marketing rule of seven, developed in the 1930s, helped us to understand that prospects need to be exposed to a message at least seven times before they will be moved to act. Now, fast forward to 2024 and marketers reasonably expect that number to be higher since they’re competing against way more noise in digital channels. More touchpoints mean more content and assets to power them.

“If your institutions are anything like mine, the demand for assets just grows and grows and grows, especially in the digital era,” waxes Florida Tech’s Director of Creative Services and Brand Management Christena Callahan in a recent Lytho case study.

With demand skyrocketing, marketers must work smarter and prioritize optimization of every asset created. Deliverables can’t serve a single purpose. They need to be reusable.

For example, a case study can’t just be posted on a company’s website. It needs to be atomized and boiled down to a handful of succinct summaries for a series of social posts. It should be combed for meaningful stats and trends that can be shared visually as an infographic. An adjacent blog post could be published, and a webinar could be recorded  and that webinar could be broken into snippets for further social posts and emails.

Source: Convince & Convert

To achieve marketing success today, every asset should be created with the intent of being recyclable for reuse.

The Ancient Art of Asset Recycling

Asset recycling isn’t a new concept. Making the social media rounds from time to time are viral videos exposing the same animation sequence used in different Disney movies, showing how their studio animators recycled assets and patterns.

The practice may be interpreted as lazy or unimaginative. On the contrary, for Disney recycling work was about replicating a successful formula to maximize efficiency, consistency, and outcomes.

Source: Top 10s

Don’t be like Disney in every way, but the strategy of reusing excellent work is advisable. Here are a few tips for integrating asset recycling into your content strategies.

Make Recycling Easy

A joint survey by the World Economic Forum, SAP, and Qualtrics found that 94% of Americans support recycling (in the traditional sense: paper, plastic, glass, etc.) but only 34% do it. The no. 1 reason why Americans don’t recycle: Lack of convenient access.

Asset recycling depends on good asset management in a DAM. Teams need an easy-to-navigate repository of assets so the good stuff can be found and reused. If a designer spends more than a few minutes trying to find an asset, waste is already bloating what should have been a time-saving strategy.

DAM features like tags, custom metadata fields, copyright/usage rights, and filters enable users to quickly find exactly what they need (or quickly discover that it doesn’t exist) and ensure they’re using it appropriately.

Further, being able to store versions and variants of native work make what’s available obvious to keep popular, success work in circulation.

Recycling Is a Collective Action, Part I

Successfully recycling assets also relies on collaboration between the marketing and creative teams. When marketing identifies existing work that can be refreshed to serve a new purpose, it’s time to involve the creative team to tackle the updating.

The request intake system should provide on-asset collaboration, like Lytho’s Request File Markup. Through on-asset collaboration, requesters can clearly and accurately communicate their needs to the creative team by marking up files instead of abstractly describing changes in text fields or needing to schedule a meeting.

On-asset collaboration in Lytho’s Request File Markup

On-asset collaboration reduces overall production time and the number of versions necessary to produce the final deliverable, both of which are efficiency metrics. And recycling assets is all about efficiency.

Recycling Is a Collective Action, Part II

Efficiency gets a steroid-like boost when a self-service creative automation tool is an integral piece of the content recycling strategy. Including a templating tool in the tech stack allows marketers to anticipate and prepare for future use cases of assets during campaign development. So instead of requesting updates to existing assets after a campaign’s initial launch, marketers are collaborating with the creative team during asset production to create a template that can produce new versions of the original.

Templating tools, like Lytho’s Tempo, help creative teams serve up easy-to-use, always-on-brand templates that empower marketers to create the assets they need the moment they need them. Enabling non-designers to take an active role in asset creation maximizes speed to market.

Lytho’s creative automation templating tool Tempo

For example, the need for personalized messaging is just as important as frequency of messaging to today’s consumer. According to Segment.io, 69% of polled customers want a personalized and consistent experience across multiple channels. Personalization multiplies demand exponentially because it requires multiple versions of an initial concept.

Templates address the personalization challenge head on, all while encouraging the recycling of existing work. Not only do they provide consistent, recognizable assets, the same template can be reused countless times to deliver unique messages to target audiences.

Don’t Recreate the Wheel — Recycle It

Wolfgang Reitherman, a core Disney animator in the 1950s, worked on classic movies like Sleeping Beauty, The Jungle Book, The Sword in the Stone, Winnie the Pooh, 101 Dalmatians, and more. Through his experience, Reitherman knew what imagery delighted audiences, so he adopted the practice of recycling work that proved to please. Hence, the borrowed animation patterns referenced earlier.

Marketers need to identify their most successful assets and lean into that work to quickly reinforce the positive results initially generated, like the marketing rule of seven says.

Asset tracking technology is gaining traction as a must-have DAM feature because it helps marketing teams understand which digital asset are (and aren’t) effective once deployed online. Once a successful sequence is established, milk it again by recycling the campaign.

Asset recycling – much like recycling paper, metal, glass, etc.  is easier said than done. It needs to be a mindset, and it needs to have a strategy. But the benefits will make teams smarter and stronger.

Conga CMO Andrew Bennett wrote in May 2023, “Despite [economic] uncertainty, marketing teams’ workloads show no signs of slowing down. Keeping up with this demand while being able to quickly adapt to change is no easy feat – but the teams that can do so will ultimately come out stronger.”

On this Earth Day 2024, consider how your company and team can invest in asset recycling to save time, energy, and resources by finding new uses for existing assets.

Imagine this. It’s 10 p.m. You’re cozy in your pajamas, and suddenly, a pang of dread hits. You remember: Lisa’s talent release form expired yesterday — you no longer have permission to use assets containing her image in your social marketing.

Your mind is racing… Did anyone take down the Instagram posts featuring her headshot? Or was that campaign launched on Facebook? It’s hard to remember. Your partners also had access to that digital asset collection for cross-promotion. Have they been keeping track of where they’ve posted assets?

You begin to experience a different kind of night sweats. Sleep must wait. You need to act now. Where on the world wide web do those now-unauthorized assets live???

A Historic PSA

In the 1960s, large cities in the United States enacted curfews for minors, and city leaders solicited local evening news broadcasters to remind parents to check on their children with the infamous line, “It’s 10 o’clock. Do you know where your children are?”

Homer’s ignorance is funny. Digital asset ignorance is costly.

Celebrities like Andy Warhol, Sammy Davis Jr., and Cyndi Lauper lent their voices to the cause and performed the line. The PSA made Time magazine’s “Top 10 Public Service Announcements” list and was parodied in The Simpsons episode “Bart After Dark.”

Fast forward to 2024. Parents now have help from digital babysitters to keep an eye on their children’s whereabouts. Location services are enabled on smart phones, and AirTags go inside backpacks and wallets. No matter what time it is, they know where their kids are.

Like parents, marketing teams need to keep an eye on their offspring — their creative assets. They need a digital babysitter to monitor where those assets live online because — like curfews for kids — sometimes assets need to “return home” by a certain time. Release forms expire; products and services retire; content grows uninspired.

M is for Management

“Management” is often the forgotten part of a digital asset management platform (DAM). Digital assets are saved there, but those files have a whole other life once they’re shared and released into the wild.

The first step in managing assets is developing a taxonomy of metadata, which should be easy to add, customize and search. Marketers need to index details that are specifically important to their business and processes.

For example, storing an asset’s availability dates, associated campaign name, distribution intentions, derivative files, and talent rights in its DAM records allows marketers to understand that asset’s intent as the foundation to reflect on its effectiveness.

This single source of truth also allows team members to work quickly and confidently when it’s time to deploy assets online, and speed to market is still a KPI king for marketers. Instead of consolidating fragmented data across multiple systems, marketers have the information they need attached to the asset, eliminating risk of misuse.

Management Has to Include Monitoring

The second step of managing assets is monitoring how and where assets are being consumed on external platforms to understand what is and isn’t working. These insights inform decisions about where your marketing efforts go next and what content is valuable enough to recycle.

Too many marketing teams waste budget by over-licensing — purchasing more permissions for assets like images, music, fonts, etc. than the company actually needs or will use —  because their DAM technology doesn’t contribute to understanding assets’ availability or effectiveness. Their DAM doesn’t show them what’s working, what’s worth reusing, and what’s delivering a return on the creative investment.

Monitoring assets post distribution also serves as a safety measure for marketers. If teams don’t know where their assets are published online when availability dates or talent release forms expire, they can’t take them down, and they’re opening themselves up to considerable risk.

Marketing teams can’t sleep on pulling expired assets offline because ignorance is costly — financially and reputationally. You don’t want to be the team that is responsible for one of these:

• Legal battles with contracted talent over unauthorized use of protected assets result in fees and tarnished relationships.
• Old promos that point to no-longer-live landing pages deliver frustrating user experiences.
• Over-circulated content fails to catch the intended audience’s attention which results in watered-down brand awareness.

Lytho Tracks: Digital Asset Monitoring

Digital marketing’s trinity is content, distribution, and data, and your DAM needs to support all three contributors, which is why Lytho launched the latest advancement within its DAM platform — Tracks.

Using AI-based fingerprinting technology that traces assets’ journeys online, Tracks keeps a watchful eye on digital images, so you always know where your assets are, who’s using them, and how they’re being used.

Pair Tracks with Lytho DAM’s custom metadata fields, expiration warning system, and digital rights management (DRM) tools, and teams can control, automate, and optimize their marketing efforts.

Oh, the Places Your Assets Will Go

So, whatever time it is right now, do you know where your assets are? How are you babysitting your assets once they leave the DAM nest? Do you have PSA-like notifications to alert you when asset expiration dates are approaching? Can you customize and capture pertinent metadata to keep your team moving quickly and confidently? Are you tracing images’ online journeys and maintaining records of their destinations for safekeeping?

Lytho’s DAM, DRM, and asset tracking tools help marketing teams trust their content so they can rest easy.

To see Lytho Tracks in action, schedule a quick demo today.