“Retailers can make decisions incredibly quickly. They know what they’re selling, who they’re selling it to and what they want to promote,” says Neosframe CEO and co-founder Haley McDonald.
“But there can still be a significant gap between making that decision and having all of the creative assets ready to support it. That gap is where we’re seeing a huge opportunity for automation.”
Retailers have become increasingly sophisticated at responding to what customers want to buy. The challenge is producing an advertising campaign that can move at the same speed.
A new promotion, product launch, price change or local opportunity can require creative across websites, social media, digital advertising, email, in-store screens and other channels. And as retailers head into the critical Christmas trading period, the pressure only increases. Seasonal campaigns need to be developed, adapted and approved across multiple channels, often with little room for delay.
Brisbane-based Neosframe is a self-service production platform built to sit inside marketing teams, using artificial intelligence to change the equation, not just by automating production, but by keeping the information that can’t be touched by AI – pricing, disclaimers and brand rules protected and out of its reach through built-in guardrails. Plans start at $2700 a month for smaller teams, scaling to enterprise plans supporting thousands of videos a month, putting the same production model within reach of retailers at any scale.
Neosframe co-founder and COO Katarina Diquez said retailers need to be able to move quickly while maintaining control over what is produced, particularly when campaigns operate across multiple markets, products, brands or regulatory environments.
“Automation isn’t useful if it creates more risk,” Diquez said. “The technology has to help organisations move faster while still giving them the controls and visibility they need.”
Neosframe brings production, variations, compliance requirements and approvals into a single automated workflow, rather than the multiple agencies, designers, production teams and review stages a campaign traditionally passes through.
For a retailer managing frequent promotions across multiple channels, even relatively simple changes can create additional work and delay a campaign going live. Christmas provides a particularly clear example. Retailers may have weeks or months of planning behind their major Christmas strategy, but as products, prices, offers and inventory change, marketing teams can be required to make rapid adjustments across multiple formats and channels.
A national campaign, for example, may need to be adapted for different locations, products, promotions or customer groups. Traditionally, each variation triggers another round of manual production and approval. Automation creates the potential to make those changes without effectively starting the production process again.
“The production, the variations, the approvals and the operational work required to get retail campaigns live has traditionally taken time,” McDonald said. “By automating those processes, retailers can recover enormous amounts of time while also reducing production costs.”
Neosframe gives marketing teams more time to focus on the work that requires human judgement: understanding customers, developing commercial strategy, creating ideas and deciding where marketing investment should be directed.
“We are giving marketing teams back hours or days that were previously spent on repetitive production,” McDonald said. “They can put that time into understanding customers and creating better campaigns.”
As retailers prepare for increasingly competitive trading periods such as Christmas, the ability to turn a commercial decision into customer-facing marketing quickly, without losing control over what goes to market, could become an increasingly important advantage.
