A guide to understanding creative tags and why they matter.
As marketers and creatives, we can spend hours and hours pouring over a growing library of digital assets, although we don’t always find what we’re looking for.
Remember that hero shot from 2010 that your ex-colleague saved in a folder somewhere? Or how about the product shots you can’t find from the last winter campaign?
The truth is that looking for assets—and more importantly garnering insights from your highest performing campaigns—is a challenge as old as digital time, and one that marketers and creatives need not to worry about.
A brief explainer on creative tagging
If we look at the principle of creative tags, it’s really quite simple: this means breaking a video or static asset down to its most granular components and identifying absolutely everything in it.
So, imagine grabbing a pen and a couple of post-its and then annotating the hell out of just one of your creative assets: the entire colourwheel, the people in it, their emotions, the products, the brand, the scenery, the calls-to-action, the text, language, sizing, etc.
If you convert all those creative tags into a rich repository of metadata for every campaign that you’ve ever launched, across every single market, that’s what we’re talking about: A set of untapped metadata that’s almost unfathomable.
Extracting, managing, and understanding this data would have been a near-impossible task to wrangle with before the latest technologies rocked up in a mass folie of AI explosions in 2023. But this process has now been largely democratised thanks to creative effectiveness platforms—such as SmartAssets—making automated data tagging easy.
Bossing asset management with natural language search
In a snap of the fingers, creative tagging can provide dramatic uplift in asset management.
The metadata from creative tags makes them easily searchable. This means if your assets contain a rainbow-coloured piñata (or something else that really stood out), you could use intelligent asset search functions and natural language to help find it using keywords such as “piñata”, “multicoloured”, “birthday surprise”, “rainbow”, or any relevant information you remembered about the campaign.
What’s more is that you can also locate and categorise assets using other referenced parameters, such as file type, production date, campaign name, and even performance history if you plug this in to your social accounts and there is a noticeable stat. For example, you could easily run a search for the ‘top-performing winter campaign,” or “most clicked product shot.”
This helps keep all your assets in check and organised, as well as allowing you to access some crucial insights to develop future campaigns.
Honing in on the productivity gains
This next part almost goes hand in hand with the last point on effective asset management.
It’s strange, but true that a staggering two-thirds of marketers and creatives experience their productivity being hampered by tedious asset searches which can take anywhere up to 9.3 hours per week.
Just imagine what you could do with that extra day if you didn’t have to spend your time constantly hunting down long-lost assets and other pieces of data.
By putting an end to the constant perusal of niche folders—that always end up in the deepest recesses of your computer, server, DAM, Dropbox, or other—SmartAssets’ latest asset-tagging technology means that marketers can finally put an end to creative doom scrolling.
On top of it all, you’ll never have to lose an asset again and your creative team can focus on the fun, productive, and more important tasks at hand.
Creating a new data set with historical performance data
Marketers should usually have access to the performance data of their campaigns, whether it’s Meta, DV360, LinkedIn, or any other platform. A quick glance at performance graphs and advertising metrics should be enough to gauge which ads had the best performance, highest ROAS (return on ad spend), etc.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that they can answer as to why it performed better. And this is where creative tagging makes all the difference.
SmartAssets taps into creative data to produce much more nuanced insight than manual counterparts. Using this granular creative data, and coupling it with performance data, the platform makes accurate conclusions and predictions as to why some assets performed perform better than others.
Accessing creative data without switching up systems
When looking at creative tagging software, one of the main concerns is whether or not you will have to import all your assets into a new DAM. Luckily for creatives, this doesn’t have to be an issue with the SmartAssets platform.
Using an API to seamlessly integrate with a brands’ existing DAM (Digital Asset Management) tool, the platform is software-agnostic, meaning that it can integrate and provide instant insights from a breadth of content repositories.
This allows brands a fast and effective way to benefit from the same level of consistent creative tagging and search functionalities, regardless of the platform you use.
Putting all your eggs in one basket can be beneficial for creative teams
Hosting creative content and advertising data in one centralised location just makes sense, besides the fact that it’s more manageable.
Data from creative tags can be analysed and tested preflight by brand-side marketers, creative agencies collaborating with brands, or media agencies who are looking after the activation. Bringing creative and media teams together, creating unique workflows and quality-assurance processes, results in efficiency gains and increased productivity.
If you’d like to see a first-hand preview of how creative tagging works, we’d love to show you.