Performance creative production for consumer electronics brands
Context
Incentive Agency managed performance marketing campaigns for official Apple resellers across 10 regions. Our services covered creative production, campaign setup, and ongoing advertising support.
When I joined, our production team was small and worked with just three regions. One outsourced specialist managed all the animated campaign creatives and revisions. As we expanded to more markets, this approach became less reliable.
Challenge
The creative assets looked simple, but they needed to be adaptable and animated. Each market also had its own unique offerings, regional details, and requirements.
As we relied more on a single contractor, it became risky for the agency to handle multiple campaign launches simultaneously.
Putting too much work on one person led to mistakes, which could impact campaign launches and our relationships with clients.
Our goal was to create a workflow that could handle busy periods without destabilizing operations or increasing production costs.
Role
My role was to set up a production process that remained reliable even as we launched campaigns across several markets simultaneously.
This included:
Sourcing and onboarding additional team members.
Organizing scalable design processes using clear workflows, systems, and templates.
Reducing the workload for client relationship managers by removing quality assurance tasks from their responsibilities.
Redesigning the production workflow
The first step was to identify which parts of the creative process we could standardize.
Although each region was a bit different, most campaign assets shared the same structures, animation styles, and formats. By reviewing past campaigns, I found elements we could turn into reusable templates and systems. This reduced manual work for each launch and made onboarding new team members much easier.
I turned the previous chaotic process into a clear, step-by-step sequence:
Next, I distributed responsibilities across the internal team, reducing dependency on managers and external contractors during production.
Building an internal production team
To reduce our reliance on outsourcing, I hired and onboarded two junior graphic designers and a skilled motion designer. The cost of this internal team was about the same as outsourcing, while significantly increasing production flexibility and launch capacity.
Each campaign was carefully tracked on a task management board, with corresponding statuses that designers monitored to pick up a new asset package.
Onboarding includes an introduction to the design system and a walkthrough of the task management system. If needed, we can quickly increase capacity before busy periods, since it only takes a day to train a new designer.
Improving review and quality control
We standardized the revision process to save time on reviews and prevent mistakes.
Motion designers used a simple checklist to check graphic designers' work, and graphic designers had their own checklist to review motion designers' work. Client managers could either skip quality assurance or double-check it using a special preview in each package archive.
This reduced unnecessary revision cycles and made deliveries more predictable during busy launch periods.
Delivery
The new workflow gave us a more scalable, organized production system across all our markets.
The project delivered:
a reusable design system aligned with regional requirements.
a distributed production workflow with clearly assigned responsibilities.
onboarding systems and production guidelines for internal specialists.
The new structure also eliminated extra work for client relationship managers.
Outcome
Compared to the original outsourcing-dependent structure:
Production capacity scaled across all ten regional markets.
Operational risks tied to single-contractor dependency were reduced.
Campaign launches became significantly easier to coordinate and maintain.
The redesigned workflow replaced a fragile outsourcing-dependent process with a scalable system capable of supporting synchronized multi-market launches.
