How to make creatives easier and cheaper

From the editorial team. Whom to consult about creative development if not with the owner of the design team? The hero of one of our interviews — Innokentiy from AdsFrames, has prepared an original piece for ZorbasMedia and shared his experience that will help reduce costs for creating or refining creatives.

Running traffic in the current reality has become significantly more challenging, that's a fact. The issues lie not only in the tightening moderation on major advertising platforms but also in many associated steps of running campaigns, such as payment solutions.

In such a situation, an ordinary arbitrage specialist (and not only, to be honest) thinks about how to achieve previous financial performance while simultaneously reducing the expenses for launching advertising campaigns.

The first path is to cut down the budget for consumables, but is it worth it?

Because that's equivalent to pouring low-quality (but cheap) automobile fuel. Yes, in the moment, you might end up in the plus, but in the long run, it will lead to problems costing tens of times more than the initial 'savings.'

One of the most significant sections of expenses in arbitrage is creatives. It's easier to pay a designer a modest 500-1000 rubles (conditional currency), and get quality work done by someone with experience in this niche, than to try and cram a ton of educational materials about various video editing programs, visual effects, and photo editing into your head.

So, considering the current landscape, turning to professionals like Innokentiy could be a viable approach to maintaining quality while managing costs.

Perhaps until recently, many thought just that. However, now it's worth taking the 'artist's brush' into your own hands, at least to reduce expenses for testing a new hypothesis.

After a media buyer has decided to create creatives on their own, they encounter a very significant challenge – sourcing the raw materials for creating these creatives.

In this article, I will delve into a crucial aspect of creative development, namely, the search for source materials and other related assets that will help you assemble your dream creative. It's worth noting that this article should be perceived not as a collection of all existing services and methods to facilitate creative development, but as a guide that can steer you towards exploring unconventional ways to make your campaigns simpler and faster.

Spice services, spice services, spice services. So much has been said about them that delving into the question of sourcing creatives in a hypothetical Adheart hardly makes sense.

However, a situation like the following arises quite often: you've found a creative that's great in its content, but it has been downloaded and uploaded back into FB* so many times through the splicing process that it has started to resemble something like this:

At first glance, it might seem like all is lost, with the quality having deteriorated to such an extent that there's nothing left to be done. It might appear that it's time to write off this creative and embark on a lengthy journey to find something new. However, there are a few solutions that many might not have heard of or simply haven't tried yet.

This marvel is called 'Upscale.' In simple terms, it's a method of transforming videos from their original resolution to a higher resolution, and the services we'll be using further also include reducing noise and grain in our video/photo files.

From words to action—there are plenty of services available on the market, but I'll delve into just a few that, in my opinion, are worth paying attention to.

The behemoth among all upscale services, I recommend using this one specifically.

Advantages:

• Quality. The flexibility of settings allows adjusting noise reduction parameters, changing video resolution, selecting the codec for the processed video, thus achieving a very high quality of the final material.
• Speed. If you have powerful hardware, achieving a worthy result can be done in a relatively short time, without sacrificing quality compared to competitors with cloud solutions.
• Streamlined Process. In the internal file manager, you can select multiple video files that will be processed one after the other. This enables you to send your favorite creatives for upscaling while simultaneously tending to other tasks.

The estimated processing time for a single frame is 0.7 seconds.

Conducting a similar test on an RTX 3070 card, we achieved a result of 2 minutes and 14 seconds, significantly faster. Hardware plays a crucial role in this method.

For a more in-depth analysis of upscaling as a tool, I suggest reading the article, despite it being written a whole 3 years ago, it has not lost its relevance.

P.S. The first 10 individuals who contact the author will each receive a free video upscale. Grab the opportunity.

Food for thought: any torrent tracker completely negates one of the drawbacks

Usually, when searching for source materials, few venture beyond the realm of image search on Google and video search on YouTube. However, at times, it's worth exploring other resources, which will be discussed below.

Many overlook a rather cool service for image curation and creating collections of photos based on specific themes.

For the currently popular 'rejuvenation' vertical, within Pinterest, you can find numerous intriguing results; you just need to play around with search queries.

A popular service among designers, its main differentiator from competitors is the lower degree of video compression, and consequently, higher quality.

There aren't as many materials, but since the service isn't highly popular, the chance of finding a cool 'unused' source is significantly higher.

Specialized resources for designers of all levels, an endless source of inspiration for every taste.

At times, you can find examples of ready-made creatives there (yes, they have those too) as well as simply 'borrow' someone else's idea or even use a beautiful image as a background.

For instance, here are banners found on Behance for betting on Georgia

As someone among the greats once said, 'The right question already contains half the answer.'

This applies to search as well; a correctly formulated search query can significantly reduce the time spent searching for the necessary source materials, sparing you from scrolling through search results for hours.

Utilize services for generating synonyms to create various variations of the same query, employ search queries in different languages such as English, Spanish, and German, or if you're interested in materials featuring people of Eastern appearance, use Arabic.

For those who love details, here's an article about advanced Google search techniques – it's worth adding to your arsenal.

When there's no longer the energy to come up with yet another text like 'lose extra weight in X days,' you can resort to:

1. Synonymizers - as I mentioned earlier, they often come in handy when you want to test a large number of similar texts. Recommending a specific service is difficult; many of them are comparable in terms of the quality of generation results.
2. Buttons, badges, decorative elements.
3. Many overlook services for generating similar images online, yet often, the problem of creating a 'beautiful green button png' can be solved in just a few mouse clicks.

Below is a small list of services for various purposes:

• mdigi.tools — gradient background generator.
• magicpattern.design — abstract shape generator.
• clickminded.com — button generator.
• haikei.app — background generator with extensive customization options.
• eyedropper.org — Google Chrome extension that enables using the 'Eyedropper' tool to determine color on any website/image in the browser.

At this juncture, it's worth summarizing what has been discussed above. It's important to note that over the past few years, the number of services capable of assisting media buyers (and not only them) in creating creatives or other photo/video materials has significantly increased. Not all of them are equally useful and employed consistently. As mentioned earlier, this material serves both practical purposes and serves as food for thought on how to streamline and expedite routine, often repetitive work.

In conclusion, I'll say this — Never stop exploring: continue to learn and explore the new. By discovering tools you haven't used before, you can greatly expand your skillset, ultimately leading to positive financial outcomes!