What Is A Creative Management Platform? (+ Amazing Examples For Media Brands)
Working with a digital business, especially a newer one, can be daunting due to the number of elements you must handle. From ads to publishing to marketing tactics and more, you can quickly add up the number of platforms you might use. But a creative management platform (CMP) can help with this.
Creative management platforms are some of the most useful software for your company. A CMP ensures that all of the work you do in the digital advertising space is modernized and streamlined in a way that your workflows become a whole lot more manageable through cloud-based automation.
Without a proper CMP, you can be juggling dozens of platforms for tasks like creating personalized ads, starting campaigns, managing stats, and so on. Here’s what you need to know about this platform and which ones I like to recommend to growing online businesses that wish to thrive.
Creative Management Platform Explained: What Is CMP?
A creative management platform, or CMP, is software digital businesses can use to simplify and unify a large portion of their dynamic creative procedures. The best CMPs can handle digital advertisements, various ad campaigns and marketing campaigns, landing pages, publishing, templates, and more.
Better yet, a CMP can automate some of the processes you use for these programs and formats. It can generate stats and optimize your ads quickly, speeding up the creative process and saving production time, money, and frustration.
CMPs are the do-it-all platform for agencies, brands, and companies looking to dive deeper into ads management. It takes care of everything you need from the initial designing phase to the end, with the distribution of the content and even post-publishing performance functionality.
Why You Need A Dedicated Creative Management Platform
If you want a digital business that can keep up with the most popular and successful ones online, you need to consider a CMP. It can reduce the frustration and time used to create ad campaigns and content since you can do it all on the same platform.
Everything you need is already within the software, allowing you to focus on a single place to create everything. It is all stored within the cloud, too, letting all of your team members access and contribute to the content as you go together.
It reduces the need for tons of marketing teams meetings, emails, Slack messages, and the like to share information, files, and data that can be inputted anytime by anyone through the CMP itself.
More importantly, the best dedicated creative platforms free your team up to focus on what matters: the creativity and heart of your business.
It certainly won’t replace anyone’s job, but it will alleviate some of the more monotonous tasks that can be automated so you can focus on the creative marketing strategies crucial for success.
How Does A CMP Work?
It all starts with ad and content creation optimization itself, which a CMP can help you with from the start. With the brilliant marketing and ad design minds at your company, you can use the dedicated creative studio to come up with influential and eye-popping ads.
Your creativity flows into making the initial design, and the software can then take that and automate and scale it to fit a variety of scenarios. Need a smaller, tighter ad for an Instagram post? It’s got that. Want something longer-form and higher-resolution for something like a YouTube video ad? It can help with that as well.
From there, you can take what you created and, within the CMP itself, connect and share your creations across various platforms. Google Ads, Google Marketing Platform, salesforce, Facebook Ads Manager, Sizmek/Amazon, and more are usually available through a CMP for you to quickly submit to.
Within a short time, you can get a high-quality ad up and running across various websites. From there, the CMP doesn’t stop, as it has detailed and helpful real-time data about your published ad campaigns.
You can test out various ad production scenarios, see how they might compare with certain A and B factors, see how metrics like CTR and ROI are impacted, and even optimize further, if necessary.
Benefits of creative management platforms
A creative management platform is helpful for enhancing your digital ad creatives' content and making a more cohesive product. Here are some of my favorite benefits for why I think you should use a CMP:
- Efficiency. There is less unnecessary trial-and-error, as so much is optimized and automated for your team.
- It frees up your team’s time to focus on the passionate, creative marketing parts of your company that matter the most.
- It creates consistency across your platforms, sites, and social media channels.
- Everyone can contribute seamlessly and easily over the cloud.
- Instant data returns to understand what went right and where you can improve.
- It can handle some of the overwhelming nature of juggling multiple ad platforms, such as TikTok, Twitter, Twitch, Snapchat, websites, and more.
- Brand consistency for your creative production across all aspects of your in-house digital asset management.
CMP limitations
Of course, a CMP isn’t the one-size-fits-all solution. There are some limitations to most of these platforms and a couple of flaws you should keep in mind if you want to excel with using one of these:
- You still need advertisement and marketing experts on your digital marketing team. While these ad formats are often user-friendly enough for most people, you won’t get the most out of it without a human mind who can parse through the detailed data to make sense of it all.
- With most CMPs, you have to choose between a simplified user interface that anyone can understand but doesn’t have all of the helpful features and deeper, more customizable software that takes quite a bit of training and practice to master.
- The more ad campaigns you have, the more challenging it will naturally be to manage everything, even with a CMP. It will take time and trial and error to benefit properly.
Examples Of Best Creative Management Platforms
Here are a few of the best digital ad, data-driven creative management platforms I recommend to companies.
I went a little broad here to give you some options that might work for a variety of digital companies for your creative automation needs.
If you want to see more beyond these few, check out the overall best CMPs out there.
1. Adobe Advertising Cloud
Adobe has a suite of fantastic programs for businesses, and its Advertising Cloud CMP is no different. If you want a platform that is the definition of professional and highly customizable, this is the one to check out.
There is so much freedom to make this platform fit your needs. Its data collection and integrations are unmatched, but this comes at a price. This is one of the most expensive and daunting programs, so I suggest it as an upgrade once you’ve familiarized yourself with some of the easier ad creation platforms.
2. Celtra
Like other CMPs, Celtra focuses on streaming the ad process and helping you to do it in the simplest way possible through its dynamic creative optimization. It has a fantastic UI with solid drag-and-drop features that make it easier for anyone to use it well and know how your display ads will look ahead of time.
If you want a platform that will get the job done and even assist non-designers with creating and implementing high-quality ads, this is the one. Its intuitive mechanics ensure that you can make some of the best-looking ads from a CMP.
3. Bannerflow
Bannerflow is another example of a user-friendly platform. It is one of the easiest for anyone of any design skill level. Though this comes with a need for more depth in other features, it makes up for that in how well it integrates with various social media platforms.
I’d recommend this to beginners and as a solid starting point for digital businesses that want to measure ad performance and display advertising across multiple online locations.
Take The Creative Management Process To The Next Level
Breaking into a creative management platform and fully benefiting from it will take some considerable time and effort to accomplish. Unfortunately, doing so won’t solve all your issues or turn your company into a massive campaign performance success overnight.
There is so much more you’ll want to do if you wish to create a cohesive and worthwhile digital business. While ads and cloud-based software like these are important, so is the actual content management of your company. How you handle social media, blog posts, videos, and more is essential.
If you want to create impactful content and creative assets that catch a sliver of the internet’s attention, you’ll also need the best content management software (CMS). This can help you take your content to the next level and improve your ads presence in the long run.
For more marketing strategy, content creation, ad tech, and everything else for your growing business, subscribe to our newsletter for the latest tips.
