I come from a software world, full of odd types that have their heads stuck in code and exchange conversation with other oddballs about online games and internet bandwidth. OK, I’ve fallen into the trap of stereotyping my peers and for that throw myself on the mercy of the court.

However… there is a semblance of truth in what I’m saying, which makes my immersion into the realms of the advertising industry interesting, to say the least.

Immersion
How did I start rubbing shoulders with agency types? I joined Sesimi, a magical fusion of software developers and quasi ad agency people that have created the world’s best Brand Automation platform. We take the creative concepts that are dreamt up by our client’s creative and marketing teams and plug those ideas into our system which then turns them into automated pieces that can be modified and despatched at a fraction of the costs of traditional production teams.

Hold that thought if you can. I’ll come back to it.

So here are my observations of being in creative land:

Eccentric Creatives
I’ve seen eccentric Creative Directors, Art Directors and Copywriters arguing over pithy headlines and odd layouts of imagery that, without context, sound quite absurd. The subjective nature of these discussions and ‘creative’ standpoints based on ‘feel’ are such a departure from the factual world I was part of. Totally respect it… but strange, nonetheless.

Media Hackers
Then there’s the Strategy teams - the media types coming up with weird and wonderful ways to game social media or search engine algorithms - once again, based on? 

Mac Operators
So that kind of accounts for at least a third of headcount… where’s the other two thirds, I hear you say? It’s over there in the rather large part of the expensive floorspace called the studio. In there you’ll find a whole lot of bleary eyed  “Mac Operators”. These are the poor girls and guys who have spent four long years at uni to learn the finer points of colour, layout, space and typography all so they could become the creative equivalent of a forklift driver. Don’t get me wrong, they know stuff - they’re basically experts in the Adobe range of products. Need an image retouched? Mac Op. Need that print ad resized? Mac Op. But it’s not just one image, or one resize. It’s hundreds of these mind-numbing jobs every day, day after day.

Welcome to the world of Creative Ops. If you’re a large brand, this is where most of your money goes - funding the team of Mac Ops mind-numbingly executing your media schedule. To make sure they don’t slow down on their digital media making treadmill, they bend to the will of the Traffic Manager (think the guy with the whip, standing above the manacled rowers on the Viking ships). I may be sounding a bit cynical, but this really is what creative ops looks and feels like. Because while brands champion their creative people, the last thing they’re thinking about is how they could be working smarter to drive more value to their marketing budget.

That neatly gets my little rant here back to Sesimi, which is where that value piece comes in. Remember that thought I asked you to hold above? About how we plug a brand creatives' ideas into our system which then turns those ideas into automated pieces that can be modified and despatched at a fraction of the costs of traditional creative ops production teams?

That’s precisely the magic of Sesimi - and it’s how we save our clients a fortune. Like… six and seven figure sums of money annually on digital media production - or the poor Mac Op teams that are smashing out ads infinitum.

So… is Sesimi the thin edge of the wedge for traditional creative ops? Is it the beginning of the end for Advertising as we know it?

The answer is … sort of, but not really. We are definitely upsetting the apple cart (that’s a cute way of calling us ‘disrupters’ - but that’s marketing jargon and I’m a software guy that prefers the apple cart metaphor).

Simply, the savings from using Sesimi can be used to reinvest in more great creative or redistributed to more diverse media options. So it’s about working smarter and working a lot faster (Sesimi makes ads in a fraction of the time of the army of Mac Ops and it works around the clock, every day of the year!)

The moral to my little story? The sandpit is changing and changing fast.