From five days to three hours, without new headcount.
One of the leading experiential agencies in its market was spending five days a campaign turning one design into fifty placements by hand. It looked like a staffing problem, but the way out was already sitting in tools they owned.
5 days → 3 hrs
Time to produce 50 placements
−97%
Production time cut
0
New headcount
One of the leading experiential and creative agencies in its market. It has an in-house team of production designers who specialize in 2D advertising assets, and the creative work was strong. The headroom was one level down from the creative, in the mechanical job of taking an approved design and fitting it to every placement a campaign called for.
- Standing
- A leader in its market
- Industry
- Experiential & creative
- Revenue
- ~$30M
- Team
- In-house production design
- Environment
- Adobe Photoshop
“We need more designers, or a faster agency.”
“The designers were excellent. Every campaign carried five days of mechanical resizing inside it, and the tools to take it out were already paid for.”
A campaign runs across dozens of placements: bus shelters, billboards, transit posters, digital out-of-home. Each one has its own dimensions, so a designer opened the source file, resized it, moved things around, fixed the type, exported it, and then did the same thing again for the next format. A full set of fifty took five days on average. That’s too slow for most campaign timelines, and it hurt most at pre-approval, because a design the client might turn down cost exactly as much to produce as one that ran. So a massive amount of skilled time was going into geometry.
The obvious read was that production needed more designers. I don’t think more hands would have changed much. The work was mechanical, and adding people to a mechanical process just gets you the same process on steroids, with more variants to keep consistent.
- Designer hours going to repetitive resizing.
- Small inconsistencies creeping in between variants done by hand.
- Pre-approval assets costing the same effort as final production files.
- No system tracking which source file each variant came from.
The goal was to take the mechanical steps away from the designers. Before committing to anything we looked at DAM platforms, Adobe CC libraries, workflow-automation tools, Adobe scripting and creative-automation platforms. What worked was two pieces joined together. I mapped the bottleneck and the approach, and their team built it.
- 01
A creative-automation platform
Connected to a master template, it generated every format variant from defined placement specs (dimensions, safe zones, copy rules) in a fraction of the time.
- 02
A prep step in the design environment
A set of scripts organized layers, applied naming conventions and prepped assets, so source files went straight into the automation platform.
- 03
Design once, run the prep, generate fifty placements
Nobody new was hired, the existing tools stayed, and the designers kept working in Photoshop.
The prep step is the part people tend to skip. An automation platform expects files organized and named its way, and that tidying was exactly what designers had been doing by hand between every resize. Without the scripts the platform’s dead weight, because somebody still has to feed it.
It only works where a placement follows rules. Anything that needs a designer’s eye, a different crop or a rewritten headline, belongs with a designer.
| 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 |
Every placement came out consistent and on spec, with no manual resizing errors, and pre-approval turned around the same day. The designers got those hours back for the part of the job that actually needs them.
“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.
Five days down to three hours, with nobody new hired. From outside that looks like magic, but under the hood it’s a master template, a set of placement specs and a few scripts sitting where files change hands. The five days lived in the hand-off between tools, one small export at a time. If I were looking for the same thing in another business, I’d start with whatever gets exported, renamed and re-uploaded by hand every week.
What five-day process is hiding in your business?
The Next Version finds where the money is actually stuck (starting with whether your numbers are even real) and names each move, what it’s worth, and who runs it. You keep the roadmap either way.