CREATE ‘23 US – Hello New Creatives!

With the CREATE Community, CHILI publish sets the stage for the New Creative: professionals who bring the worlds of creativity and technology together in order to produce more and better work. Change and innovation never go unchallenged, as Jay Pattisall of Forrester reminded the crowd in Austin: new technology always meets resistance and distrust before changing the world. It happened to electricity, radio, internet – and long before that, Socrates warned that writing would harm our ability to remember.

Watch the session recordings in our CREATE website.

Leaders bank on Tech & Talent

CREATE brought together a quality audience of CMO’s, CTO’s, heads of agencies, creative directors and service providers to share and learn about the next stage of innovation in creative production, delivery and execution. The agenda offered a wide variety of topics, which is testament to the immense level of change our category is going through.

The fast rise of AI is a prominent driver of change, of course – but tough market conditions also force organizations to look for efficiencies and economies of scale. Lastly, today’s consumers demand omnichannel, personalized communications and offerings, and the new creative is putting together the infrastructure across data, design, automation and distribution, to meet them right where they are. But meeting that expectation of instant, connected, and engaged experiences presents creative leaders with a complex challenge.

Savings and gains of automation

Increasing creative productivity leads to gains and savings. Zach Escabedo of our platinum sponsor Sitecore shared a quick calculation, based on Cella research findings: if the average blended rate for in-house creative teams is $81-$100 per hour, and they spend an average of 40% of their time on design adaptation and versioning of assets, a team of 5 will save $374,500 on an annualized basis by adopting creative automation technology and work process.

But one thing is for certain: for the new creative, doing more with less is not just about saving money and picking up speed in getting assets to market; it’s all about creating new opportunities, launching new strategies, entering new markets.

Create at scale in real life

So what does it take to be able to create at scale? First of all, technology, creativity and business need to be in lockstep. The example of Sodexo Retail, represented by Dr. Joseph Hoffman and Marianne Edgington can illustrate this point. For the restaurants within Sodexo’s global Retail business (catering services for universities, businesses, hospitals), being able to publish an up-to-date menu is business critical – that sounds like a no-brainer, right?

Jens Leven and Patrick Tosolini of RELATIAL_ shared a sales campaign for 150 Mercedes-Benz dealerships, who ended up producing 425,000 personalized sales brochures from a single smart template. The personalized assets where the result of promotional offers selected from the integrated Mercedes-Benz DAM system, combined with client data from the CRM system, and dealer-specific data. The smart template based process allowed them to save €100,000 in print costs, in addition to incremental revenues from the promotional campaign.

CHILI GraFx innovation

At CREATE ‘23 US, CHILI publish shared a wide range of recent innovations to the CHILI GraFx platform, widely recognized as the most advanced creative automation engine available today.

On the experimental level, CHILI publish Chief Architect Pieter van Parys’ session on triggers, events and actions gave a peak into the next level of smart template design. There, template designers will interact with templates in a new, more dynamic way, which allows them to design exactly the right experience for designers and non-designers engaging the template to produce new assets. Van Parys proved once more that not all templates are created equal; the CHILI GraFx smart templates are the future of template-based creative automation.

No wonder our Training and Certification tracks were high in demand, preparing a new generation of creative automation experts and smart template designers.

What's next for the CREATE Community?

CREATE ‘23 US brought together a new breed of creatives. They do more and better work by embracing technology and innovation. They automate workflows, scale creative operations, and free up time to innovate their business, connect with clients, and keep growing.

Join us for our next CREATE Community Conference on 8-9 November in Brussels, Belgium.

Thank you to our speakers, sponsors, and training staff!