CREATE ‘23 EU: The Future Is PRECISE and ALWAYS ON

Highlights of our CREATE ‘23 EU Community Conference. Last week, over 200 professionals from all over the world met for CREATE ‘23 EU in Event Lounge Brussels. Themed “Brand. Impact. Produced.”, our program aimed to catch the key developments in creative automation, a space that is moving at lightspeed. The combined stories of visionaries and practitioners showed a glimpse of where the New Creative is heading.

CREATE is the Community for the New Creative, by CHILI publish. Its mission is to bring together creative professionals who embrace technology to do more and better work, faster than ever before. Together, we review what’s new, capture what’s valuable, and document and build on our tribal knowledge as we learn and grow. This thing we call creative automation is moving fast and changing everything for brand and creative production teams. We need to stay in the know.

You can watch the session recordings in our CREATE Content Hub to relive the inspiring sessions delivered at CREATE '23 EU.

PRECISE and Always ON

In my opening keynote, The Evolution of the New Creative, I offered a new paradigm that’s been ushered in by the rise of AI and automation in graphics production. Its core visual representation is an infinite loop with briefing on the left and output on the right, where the traditional bottleneck of labor-intensive graphics production, localization, and delivery of assets is removed by always-on creative automation technology.

As a result, brands can be both PRECISE (personalized, tailored to the individual receiver in local markets, receiving local offerings, at the right time, through all the right channels of communications and engagement) and ALWAYS ON (untethered from the old limitations of human-bound mundane, manual tasks).

In this new paradigm, all brands will be able to execute brand asset creation like McDonald’s: global and local, driving multiple campaigns across all channels, 24 hours per day, responsive to changing conditions and requirements in local markets. At CREATE, this vision of being PRECISE and ALWAYS-ON was breathtaking for some, and already today’s reality for others.

One strong voice and guide for traditional creative designers who want to build their personal brand and business, and learn to keep up with the market’s pace, is Chris Do, founder of The Futur, with 2.3 million subscribers on Youtube and almost 1 million followers on Chris’ personal Instagram account. Chris joined with his videographer Dave Katague to talk about the impact of AI on creative design.

How Colruyt Group changed to meet demand

Kathleen Bauwens, Business Application Manager at Belgian retail giant Colruyt Group (774 stores, 33000 employees, €9.25B revenue in 2022) showed how creative automation allowed her team to unify brand guidelines and graphics production across the 30+ brand portfolio. At this scale of creative operations, automation has a significant impact on both the costs and the ability to execute. Colruyt Group’s 280-head Marketing Communications organization drive 1500 campaigns per year into international markets.

Based on data analyses, the group changed the creative service model by organizing around three service categories, each with its own mode of operation: Self-service, Co-creation and Other (bespoke projects owned by the MarComs team). By optimizing each mode of operation, and automating common requests across Print, Social and Digital channels, the team freed up significant resources for their co-created and bespoke projects.

Local, personalized QR codes drive store traffic

Gary Howard, Chief Digital Officer at UK-based agency Precision, shared a number of compelling examples of clients being PRECISE and ALWAYS ON. In the process, they save money by producing fewer assets, whilst driving higher conversions and commercial results.

The example of retail chain giant Subway brings many elements of impactful creative automation into view. Gary showed how out-of-home advertising, with thousands of unique QR codes linked to nearby stores, enabled customers to earn a personalized discount on their favorite sandwich. The integrated power of localized, personal, multichannel communications (print, digital, mobile to store) unlocked the customer value Subway was after.

Intelligent Automation for Peak Performance

All stories delivered at CREATE – whether shared by brand owners, agencies, or industry experts – had one thread in common: Only intelligent automation will allow us to cope with the growing demand for multichannel graphics. We need to teach our teams to embrace the New Creative Paradigm and reimagine the role of both designers – the ones who get the ball rolling with unique concepts, compelling messaging and offers – and technicians who give the ball speed, direction and reach in the market by adding AI and automation to every stage of the process. Tomorrow’s winners harness this entire complex of talent, technology, client behaviors and offers to hit peak performance at scale.

New CHILI GraFx applications into production

For the New Creative – tomorrow’s winners – we have created the CHILI GraFx creative automation platform. In the weeks leading up to this CREATE Community Conference, CHILI publish released three new CHILI GraFx applications and a series of new technology features into production: GraFx Studio, GraFx Media, GraFx Fonts, and GraFx Genie which is our in-platform AI assistant. GraFx Genie helps Smart Template Designers to reduce template creation time by up to 80%.

With these new additions to the CHILI GraFx platform, we are extending our capabilities across Print, Digital and Animated graphics production at Scale. We recorded sessions by CHILI publish team members Ward De Langhe, Pieterjan Blondeel & Jeroen Cosyn, Sean Crowe and Brian Roels for anyone who wants to take a closer look at CHILI GraFx in its current, vastly expanded state.

Committed to the New Creative paradigm

Long gone are the days when marketing was a simple process of turning a big idea into a creative advertising message. Today, turning audiences into customers takes an army of talented experts working across creative, digital, interactive, data science, AI, marketing technology, IT development, and automation domains. We saw this simple fact reflected in the CREATE audience when we reviewed the job titles of the people in the room. We are committed to this CREATE Community, the promise of intelligent automation, and the bright future ahead for those who embrace the New Creative Paradigm.

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