Storyteq
The Catalyst To Creative Production At Scale

Every brand presents a story; one that depicts solutions to the many critical problems faced by the enterprise realm, one showcasing ‘a better mouse trap,’ or even one that could completely reimagine the functioning of our society.

Such stories play a critical role in developing hyper personalized, localized content, engaging users with a brand across social media platforms and multiple marketing channels. At the same time, marketers, creators and brand managers are required to diligently manage budget and resources, which have more or less stayed the same over the last decade, despite the proliferation of varied content generation and consumption modalities.
Figuratively, presenting an engaging story becomes a balancing game for businesses, necessitating the resourceful utilisation of enterprise assets and the budget allocated. “Financial restrictions and the need to create hyper personalized content creates a marketing execution gap,” explains Badr Eddial, CTO of Storyteq. “Such a predicament relates to marketers being unable to execute on what they want, despite facing a high demand for such content. This is where our solution comes in, helping marketing and creative teams to streamline processes, scale their creative production, and generally operate more efficiently.” ‘The Scalable Way of Thinking’ Storyteq’s ‘template-thinking’ philosophy promotes the scalability of marketing content with template development beginning in the conceptualization stages of a campaign. This enables creators to plan and visualize their workflow in advance and local marketers to localise the content and go to market faster. This philosophy is infused into its Creative Automation platform, which allows users to turn their master files into dynamic, customizable templates for content creation purposes. The integration of Adobe After Effects and Storyteq’s Template Builder gives the comprehensive platform exceptional self-service ability and unmatched automation speed. It can quickly generate multiple formats of premium videos (MP4s), HTML5 banners, and statics, including JPGs and PNGs) . Through the power of template-thinking, the company addresses a multitude of requirements for content creators, empowering them along numerous production avenues with tools, and automated workflows. Creators can now select a template for multiple videos, as opposed to spending excessive time working on videos and content sets individually.

They can effortlessly experiment with text and image layers, language structures, backgrounds and colors, while scaling the content to suit different aspect ratios across numerous marketing channels such as YouTube and Instagram, for example. From a creator’s standpoint, the importance of such functions cannot be overstated. Facebook, for instance, supports square-fit videos, while Instagram features tall, vertically oriented videos. Similarly, YouTube stands apart from its more conventional wide-format videos. All these formats are natively supported through Storyteq’s Creative Automation platform, promoting creators to explore this renewed way of thinking. Storyteq, by virtue of its content automation platform, brings a sense of dynamism to templatizing the creative production workflow. It streamlines the concept-to-delivery pipeline, beginning with the creation of a powerful and dynamic template involving the conventional tools employed by creators. Clients working on Adobe After Effects for high production value video projects can use Storyteq’s After Effects extension to add templating logic on top of the content creation workflow. Templatization of this nature allows creators to interlink data parameters such as text layer, styling, color and more. Upon the creation of a content template, marketers can create unlimited variations of the content as desired by global, regional or local marketers. Storyteq integrates with multiple marketing channels, while also allowing creators to easily connect multiple accounts through its user interface, and export/ upload creative assets to an external library. Storyteq also ensures the elimination of duplicate work when creating templates, particularly across workflows such as video creation, where one format can be used to generate others with different aspect ratios through smart algorithms. “You could go from concept to template to many creative assets in simple steps and finally export those creative assets to a multitude of marketing channels,” adds Eddial. Conversely, users can create variations of an asset that can be integrated into existing digital asset management (DAM) solutions. Such versatility allows marketers with multiple, worldwide offices to templatize their content creation workflow by using variations of assets to suit their needs. The platform also ensures that users don’t have to leave their content creation environments while collaborating across multiple ecosystems.

‘Solving Real World Problems’

A noteworthy aspect of Storyteq’s marketing technological stack is that it solves both technological and people problems within marketing operations.

On the technological front, the company pays close attention to crafting solutions that precisely fit into marketing and creative teams’ workflows. Scalability and interoperability are two of the most prominent problems faced by content creators using software suites such as Adobe After Effects. To support such creators Storyteq runs the full version of Adobe After Effects on the rendering back end, circumventing the problem of supporting specific functions desired by a creator. “You can have an amazing product, but if it only works in isolation, there would not be any real value to it. It needs to work well within content creation workflows”, explains Eddial. “Therefore, we focus all our efforts on adding meaningful features to build templates that empower clients to create multiple assets in short spans of time.” Hosting a wealth of such resourceful functions for its clients, Storyteq also built its own creative editor tool, which enables clients to build templates for banners, images and more, simplifying the content creation workflow. The tool is designed to build templates, as opposed to creating individual assets. On the people front, Storyteq aims at bringing the highest value in the shortest time. Along with a fully self-serve mode of delivery, Storyteq’s team of Managed Service experts provide assistance to clients as they scale higher in their production workflows. In a recent collaboration with Heineken, the team built a comprehensive and reusable system on top of its templating technology for the creation of new content on a global scale. As the creative team funnels in master files for a new video, Storyteq sprinkles the pixie dust of templating magic to create captivating content, all the while taking into consideration regulatory compliance requirements for beer commercials. Such diligence to detail greatly helps clients like Heineken, who advertise across international markets. Local marketers could use these creative templates to render assets on their own. Storyteq also offers customer integrations to upload generated assets onto designated DAM systems or marketing tools. In another instance, the company provisioned its full self-service suite to scale the production output of the content creation team for a gambling company.

Fueling many such success stories, Storyteq’s Managed service team is available to go the extra mile to enhance the productivity of creators. Storyteq stands tall as a catalyst to scale the future of creative production, energizing its client’s collaboration pipelines through valuable solution sets that supplement their marketing tools and ecosystems.