Expensive and scarce employees tend to spend the lion’s share of their time on dull work that could be done by others. Here is an example of a platform that, due to the division of labor, made it possible to increase the efficiency of a designer’s work by 10 times. But this is a universal principle! This means you can create a similar platform – but for use in other areas.
The essence of the project
Abyssale is to offer companies and advertising agencies the ability to increase the speed of creating advertising banners by 10 times without hiring additional designers.
Ironically, the designer doesn’t spend so much time creating actual creatives. They actually spend the majority of their time on other things, such as creating numerous versions of the same banners for different advertising formats and making frequent small changes to already designed banners—for example, changing the background color, font style, replacing a word in the text, updating the price of the advertised product, or creating a version of the banner in another language.
That’s why the core of the Abyssale platform is a specialized editor that allows designers to create one creative design for multiple banner formats. In the editor, the designer assembles a general creative using separate blocks like images, texts, buttons, etc. The editor automatically adjusts the size of the images, rearranges the blocks, and performs other actions for each format, ensuring everything fits into the required banner size while looking presentable. If necessary, the designer can manually adjust the element placement for each specific format.
The editor already includes templates for all banner formats recognized by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), but you can also add your own custom formats.
In a similar way, the editor allows you to create not only static banners but also animated banners in video or HTML5 format.
The designer can send a link to the finalized banner prototype to the relevant people for feedback and approval. Their comments will be visible to the designer on the platform, attached to the discussed banner, so the designer doesn’t have to dig through separate conversations to understand what needs to be fixed.
Once all the approvals are obtained, the designer simply needs to click a button, and the platform will generate the banners in all the necessary formats directly from the prototype. If the designer needs to make edits either now or later, they only need to make changes to the prototype, saving time by not having to make the same changes in all the formats individually. After that, they can once again click a button, and the platform will automatically generate all the formats.
But the most significant advantage of the platform is that once the designer has created and approved the banner prototype, they don’t have to deal with it anymore!
Because all further changes within the fundamental layout can be done by marketers or client managers – “playing with fonts,” changing colors, replacing words, and so on. They are granted the rights to modify individual elements on the platform, but not the fundamental layout, so they cannot spoil anything. After making changes, they can simply click a button and generate all the necessary formats for the corrected banner.
In fact, the client manager can even send a link to the banner editing to the client – so that they can play with fonts and words on the banner themselves 😉
Sometimes more extensive changes are required – for example, when entering a new market and needing to generate a bunch of new banners with translated product names, new prices in a different currency, and maybe even localized images. In this case, all you need to do is create a table with corresponding columns (name, price, product image), even with thousands of rows – and upload it to the platform, specifying the required fundamental layout. The platform will automatically replace the content of the selected objects and create the desired number of banners in all necessary formats. Again, marketers or regional managers can handle this themselves. They don’t need to involve a designer and wait for them to do it. And the designer doesn’t have to deal with the mindless work that would consume a lot of their time.
One of the startup’s clients says that when launching a new advertising campaign, they were able to save 66 hours of a designer’s work using the platform. Otherwise, the designer would have had to manually create 405 different formats of 4 banners. In terms of Parisian salaries (the startup is from France), this amounted to a saving of 1,330 euros.
With such savings, the cost of using the platform appears to be a very advantageous deal. A monthly subscription at standard rates will cost between $49 and $299 per month. However, each tariff includes a certain number of automatically performed operations, so if you have a large number of banners to create and formats to use, you may have to pay more.
The startup talks about “thousands of satisfied customers” from around the world using the platform. Abyssale has now raised 1.5 million euros, in addition to the 600,000 euros they attracted in the seed stage in 2021, along with some pre-seed investments.
What’s interesting
Is that Abyssale manages to save a lot of time for companies without any AI involved. Of course, the platform has a certain level of intelligence to adapt the fundamental layout for different banner formats, but this is achieved using simpler and less resource-intensive algorithms.
The essence of the startup’s approach lies in the division of labor, and this happens on two levels. The first level is the separation of intellectual and mechanical work. Creating the fundamental layout is intellectual work, while generating different formats and making minor changes is mechanical work that surprisingly takes more time than the intellectual aspect. This mechanical work can and should be done by machines instead of humans.
The second level is the division of labor among different categories of employees. The designer’s task is to create the design. The marketer’s task is to use this design for advertising various products, adapting it to the client’s requirements, different markets, or channels. There is no need to force these individuals to work together every time, such as involving a designer in solving a marketer’s task.
The principle of division of labor is applicable in different fields. For example, the startup Blended Sense, which I wrote about in August, used this principle in their platform for creating advertising video content for local businesses. The startup receives orders for creating videos from local establishments and sends people living nearby who know how to shoot videos. These individuals carry out the shooting and receive payment immediately after uploading the footage to the service. Then, completely different people who are skilled in editing create the final videos for the clients. They can live anywhere on Earth, as long as they can create impressive videos of the desired length and format using the raw materials provided.
Such a division of labor allows for significant acceleration and cost reduction in the process of creating high-quality content for local businesses. And Blended Sense has raised $3.1 million in investments for this purpose. It is also worth noting how today’s Abyssale has built a chain of reasoning for potential users of their platform. They don’t overly praise the features of their platform, but rather sell the problem. And if they can sell the client on the problem, it will be easy for them to sell their solution.
Is your agency unable to handle work in a timely and quality manner? Designers are overloaded. Marketers and client managers are constantly waiting for a free designer. And clients don’t understand why everything takes so long and are ready to leave you.
The main bottleneck is designers who are overwhelmed with work because the platforms and tools they use are not designed to handle multiple banner formats. But clients need advertisements everywhere 😉
Hiring more designers is not the solution because it would require spending more money and dealing with more management headaches. Outsourcing part of the design work will lead to unpredictable and potentially worse quality results. And constantly delaying deadlines will eventually ruin your reputation with clients.
In reality, you don’t need more designers. You need a tool that allows designers to focus on the creative essence of their work, while other team members focus on delivering the final result to clients. Besides reaching out to the leadership of advertising agencies, the startup is also trying to sell the problem to designers themselves 😉
Creating different formats of the same banner that was once created by you turns you into robots. It’s time to bring creativity back to your work – try it and see how it can be done.
In this way, the startup aims to penetrate advertising agencies and companies “from below” – through designers who are tired of mundane work. And that’s why they can convince their leadership to pay for a platform that will relieve them from this work.
The text you provided is in Russian. Here’s the English translation:
Where to run
An entirely general but promising direction is the creation of platforms that address the bottleneck of expensive and scarce categories of employees by dividing some of their work among other employees. How do expensive and scarce employees spend their time? What part of this work could be delegated to others? What changes need to be made to the business process for this? How can such division of labor be automated?
A more specific direction is the division of labor in creating selling content. Today’s Abyssale is precisely from this series, as advertising banners are one of the categories of such content. However, considering that modern marketing is increasingly turning into content marketing, this can also apply to any other types of content that companies or even influencers are forced to use for their own promotion.
What are these other types of content? Where can we draw the line between the creative and more mechanical aspects of creating and using it across different sales channels? How can these components be divided within a single platform? What can be automated from all of this?
About company
Abyssale:
Website: abyssale.com
Latest round: €1.5M on October 25, 2023
Total investments: €2.1M+, rounds: 3