from 5 days to 3 hours: rebuilding ad-variant production without new headcount.
A full-service agency was spending five days turning one design into fifty placements — by hand. The fix wasn’t new software. It was seeing that the leverage lived in tools they already owned.
5 days → 3 hrs
Time to produce 50 placements
−97%
Production time cut
0
New headcount
A full-service experiential and creative agency with an in-house team of production designers specialising in 2D advertising assets. The creative was strong and the team was skilled. The problem lived one level down — in the mechanical work of taking an approved design and stamping it across every placement a campaign demanded.
- Industry
- Experiential & creative
- Revenue
- ~$30M
- Team
- In-house production design
- Environment
- Adobe Photoshop
“We need more designers, or a faster agency.”
“The designers were fine. Five days of mechanical resizing was hiding inside every campaign — and the tools to remove it were already paid for.”
Adapting one ad creative across dozens of placements — bus shelters, billboards, transit posters, digital out-of-home — was entirely manual. Every format meant opening the source file, resizing, repositioning, adjusting type, exporting, then repeating fifty times. A full set from one design took five days on average — too slow for campaign timelines, and far too costly at the pre-approval stage, where the work hadn’t even been signed off.
- High designer hours spent on repetitive, low-creativity resizing.
- Inconsistencies introduced across variants during manual work.
- Pre-approval assets costing the same effort as final production files.
- No scalable system for managing source files and their derivatives.
The goal was never to replace designers — it was to eliminate the mechanical work and free them for the decisions that matter. We evaluated DAM platforms, Adobe CC libraries, workflow-automation tools, Adobe scripting and creative-automation platforms before committing. The answer was a two-part stack. I mapped the bottleneck and the approach; their team built it.
- 01
Engine: creative automation
A creative-automation platform, connected to a master template, generated every format variant from defined placement specs — dimensions, safe zones, copy rules — in a fraction of the time.
- 02
Bridge: a custom prep step
A set of scripts in the design environment handled the hand-off — organising layers, applying naming conventions, prepping assets — so source files flowed straight into the automation layer.
- 03
Design once, run the prep step, generate fifty placements
No new headcount, no replacement of existing tools, no disruption to the designers’ Photoshop workflow.
| Metric | Before | After | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Time to produce 50 placements | 5 days | 3 hours | −97% |
| Formats covered | Manual, inconsistent | 50 placements, digital + print | On spec |
| Designer effort per variant | High, manual | Minimal, automated | |
| Pre-approval turnaround | Bottleneck | Same day |
Consistent, on-spec assets across every placement with no manual resizing errors, same-day pre-approval turnaround, and production designers freed to focus on craft instead of repetition.
“We went from a five-day production cycle to three hours for a full set of digital and print assets — all from a single master design.”
Anonymised at the client’s request. The before-and-after timing is the team’s own measurement on live campaign work.
The team didn’t just speed up a process — they changed how production design scales. For any team running high-volume, multi-placement work, the lesson holds: the biggest gains rarely come from replacing your tools. They come from connecting the ones you already own. Every business has a five-day process hiding in it.
What five-day process is hiding in your business?
A Two-Day Teardown finds where the money is actually stuck — starting with whether your numbers are even real — and names the one to three moves that unstick it. You keep the map either way.