Limitless creativity in automated production process
Last year I shared this blog post on how Paintgun sets order in creative production “chaos” explaining how our weekly sprints work. And since then we have been receiving a lot more questions about our production, mainly asking about how we stay creative in such a structured and always repeating process. The hack that we use is simple but requires a very well-planned action plan. And here is how we do it:
The Ads Incubator is a Paintgun developed high-tempo testing method, through which we create new creatives every week and test those over the course of the following week. The third week is when we analyze the results of those ads, scale the best performing creatives, derive learnings from the worse performers and invest the gained knowledge into the new cycle of creative production. When onboarding a new client, we assign the account a team of creative strategists, designers and copywriters that come together every week, ideate, plan and produce a weekly set of new ads. The graphs below shows how our Ads Incubator (1) and weekly creative production cycles (2) work in synch:
As you see in Graph 1 above, a key role in the weekly production cycle plays the ideation session lead by the strategist. This is when everyone in the creative team assigned to the client comes together to build the new plans. You’d think that in the long run, these people would run out of new ideas so this strategy would soon be absolute. I’d agree with you if it wasn’t for the secret ingredient we add to this sauce — the “guest speakers”.
Much like the universities that have their main faculty and adjunct professor, we like giving our clients the opportunity to work with one agency but get the best of a wide variety of specialists from all around the world. These “guest speakers” are usually freelance creatives — designers, illustrations, animators, etc. — that join us on our weekly ideation sessions. Every week, depending on the project or needs, these talents come in for a day or two and supply the fresh ideas as well as help execute the weekly production, while our own core team adds up the historic learnings we generate and record internally. Together these two combine into what with time turns into even better-performing assets.
One of the products of such combines creativity is this illustration made by working with guest freelancer Jasmine Hortop. If you too want to utilize your talent in fulfilling projects, do not hesitate to reach me at alisa@paintgun.io.
