The technology to drive creativity in your marketing

It was great to see so many members of our network at our event on innovations in marketing this week. Thanks for joining us!

The purpose of the evening was simple: to look at technology in marketing. There’s an ever-expanding set of digital tools out there designed to make the creative process easier. But clients need guidance on which are the good ones – and on what might be coming round the corner.

While isn’t possible to list or summarise all the content marketing technology we’re using within a single blog, we’ve included some highlights below.

Tools that allow you to scale cost effectively

There are a lot out there, but we particularly like the way Adobe’s Premiere Pro and After Effects now incorporate AI technology which, among other things, can identify the focal point in a film and reformat videos accordingly. This is super useful if you are looking for a cost-effective way to create multiple social gifs from the same video.

No-coding tools

While coding will always be part of our offer (take a look at the employer brand site we’ve just built with Informa – it’s a beaut) there are times when clients need content to look wonderful or feel interactive without having to pay for a development team. That’s why we are increasingly using platforms such as ReadyMag and Flourish as go-to solutions. While they’re based on templates, you can make them bespoke to brands, and they’re great at adding life to content.

Friendly AI

A client wrote to me only this morning to say how much she loathes ChatGPT (I get it!). But there is a lot of AI out there that is incredibly helpful (the Adobe tools mentioned earlier being examples).

With that said, we also like AI because it takes the pressure off clients. For instance, with Adobe you can now clean videos and audio to give them more of a studio feel – when the original quality was that of an iPhone. AI voiceovers, on the other hand, allow us to perfect a script with the client and get all those last-minute changes from senior stakeholders out of the way before paying the real voiceover artist to read it. Both of which are key to friction-free client-agency relations.

While we talked about far more on the eve, the most conversation stemmed from the presentation titled ‘Stuff to blow your mind’. As just one example, go to Wonder Dynamics and see how you can now (in Beta) create CGI animations from real-world videos. While it’s not something we are doing at the moment, it’s an indication of what lies around the corner – and proof that we have a long way to go with the AI revolution in the creative world.

And where will that revolution leave us? Team Wardour was fascinated with where the discussion took us after the main presentation. It inevitably circled back to the all-pervasive world of AI, but was really focused on the ethics behind it all and what people and brands will tolerate moving forward. For instance, how ethical would it be, or potentially damaging to your brand, to have your CEO lip-synced to look as though s/he can speak in multiple languages (thanks to Google Universal Translator) when in reality s/he can’t? Food for thought.

To learn more about how Wardour can help with your next campaign, pop us an email at hello@wardour.co.uk – we’d love to have a chat with you.