Getting Promotions To Market Faster with Smart Templates

Tackling the Retail Time Crunch

Let's set the scene. Your team just received the visuals for the next promotional campaign, and the clock is already ticking. The deadline is uncomfortably close. To produce all the graphic variants required, your team faces the daunting prospect of long hours slogging away in Adobe® InDesign®, and possibly even surrendering their weekend to meet the impending due date. It's a story told all too often in retail marketing – but does it have to be this way?

Tim Daisy, Account Executive at CHILI publish, works hours that are as long as your design teams'. His passion: introducing retail, agencies, and brands to the breakthrough technology of Creative Automation.

The Struggle to be Consistent

Aside from the human cost, there's another major hurdle to overcome: brand consistency. In the retail space, your messaging and graphics need to be aligned and consistent, whether it’s a window cling, ceiling signage, shelf tag, or a digital asset. However, adhering to brand guidelines over 1000s of variants of differing sizes and formats can be massively challenging.

Each new variant requires time, effort, and sometimes a pinch of creativity to make things fit. And when you multiply these variations across hundreds or even thousands of stores and graphics – each with its own language and product range – it's easy to see why Marketing & Design teams frequently experience huge pressure and almost impossible deadlines.

Smart Templates: Your Key to Creative Efficiency

Enter CHILI GraFx's Smart Templates. These dynamic layout files, editable and accessible in the cloud, overcome all the hurdles of quickly and efficiently producing graphical variants. They offer a real lifeline to Creative teams and Marketing departments.

If you're familiar with regular templates, you're aware of their value. Creative operations often have extensive template libraries to handle size variations. But where Smart Templates shine is in their ability to adapt to the need for graphical variants while staying on-brand.

Smart Templates can be created by your design team then populated by a data source (files, API connection, etc.) or made available in the cloud for manual content entry by end users.

But with Smart Templates, the data doesn’t only drive content; the data also drives layout and design parameters, offering fast resizing, automated layout adjustments, style modifications, etc. all while respecting brand and design guidelines.

Smart Templates can therefore generate output at a very high volume of sizes and styles with personalized and localized content in seconds. That’s not something you’ll want to try doing manually in Adobe® InDesign® for every promotion—especially before the weekend!

From Print to Pixels: Mastering Multichannel Output

Consistency doesn't end with physical signage and choosing the right SPOT or CMYK color values on the press. In today's digital age, your retail promotions need to work just as well on a screen as they do physically in-store. And with CHILI GraFx, you can master multichannel output with ease.

Whether you're creating print material for POS displays, designing static digital ads, or animating digital store displays, CHILI GraFx has you covered. Need to switch from CMYK for print to RGB for digital? No problem. CHILI GraFx seamlessly handles the conversion, ensuring your promotions look their best, regardless of the medium.

Watch CHILIpulse Episode 8

Ready to learn more from Tim Daisy on how to speed up your time-to-market, ensure brand consistency, and deliver retail promotions that wow your customers? Good news!

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