This Tool Is Saving Unilever & Paramount Pictures 80% of Their Content Versioning Budget
It feels like an age-old question: How can brands possibly keep making more content for an increasing number of channels when budgets are not going up? Solutions have been debated far and wide. Perhaps brands need smarter investment in creativity and strategy, or to get on board with more technology and AI to enable efficient collaboration across functions. The widely agreed-upon answer is that it has to be a mix of all of those things, and it needs to be simple. So, what’s the answer?
We’re told there’s a new piece of software on the market, and it’s already saving the likes of Unilever and Paramount Pictures over 80% of their content versioning budgets and accelerating content production by up to 200%. It’s called ReMake, and according to the company’s founder, it needs next to no training time and brands are clamouring to embed it into their workflow. And contrary to most new software items on a budget list, procurement teams ‘love it’.
Balancing speed, quality and cost has often felt like an impossible dream, and one that required compromise somewhere. But perhaps not anymore. Are we beginning to see technology, costs, and creative problem solving, converge on a game-changing sweet spot?
With new industry software solutions appearing at a dizzying rate, LBB went straight to the source to speak to ReMake’s founder, Daniel Robey, about how this software really works, why it’s making brand protection easier, and how it gives creatives the chance to reinvest time and money back into creative work.
“I’ve always seen a need for ReMake”
ReMake is a platform-agnostic tech solution that fits neatly within any tech stack to provide near-instant content versioning through what the company describes as a ‘brutally simple’ interface.
It can be used by any one - agency or client - to take approved content and produce unlimited versions for multiple markets, charged on a simple cost-effective credits system from within the software. This means only paying for what you use, rather than the assets you cast aside.
The escalation of digital and social content twinned with a pandemic that has driven workers out of office might have just created the perfect opening for a solution like ReMake. While versioning has traditionally been one of the more time-intensive areas of production, Daniel tells LBB that ReMake can increase productivity by 200%, and he’s speaking from experience.
Daniel started building an early iteration of the platform at his first company, Think Jam, the global marketing agency he’s headed up for the last 17 years. He says: “Slow and expensive versioning has always been problematic, but the technology didn’t exist to remedy the problem in 2004.” And the problem has only continued to grow in step with market demands and consumers’ insatiable need for personalised content ever since.
With thousands of assets needing to be versioned, the traditional process was no longer fit for purpose. Daniel says it’d become too slow, too costly, and a scourge on creativity.
Daniel tells us he could see how quickly the entertainment industry was bleeding into and altering social behaviour and content consumption around the world. “I have always seen the need for a tool as efficient as ReMake,” he explains. And he acknowledges the circumstance too: “Just as the likes of Zoom and Slack weren’t built for the pandemic, but boomed during it, ReMake has become the right tool for the right moment.”
So, he thought: What if versioning didn’t have to be so complicated? What if it could be faster, cheaper, and overall more efficient? And so he played with the idea and set his in-house team the task of finding the best solution for the problem they’d all been encountering. In the last 18 months, it’s picked up some of the world’s biggest brands as clients, purely by word of mouth.
Why the likes of Unilever and Paramount Pictures are moving to ReMake’s brand of brutal simplicity
Step-by-step, ReMake’s easy-to-navigate interface is drawing brands in, and the simple software means in each session, they don’t have to stay for too long. Daniel explains the process: “I can go into the system and make a change to an ad, copy, render, publish on social media, all within a couple of minutes. If I brief an agency to do it, it might take four to five hours, and then 24 once they’ve sent it back and we’ve had the conversation.”
“Something both agencies and brands going in-house can agree on is that budgets are tighter, time is of the essence, and training up staff to navigate new tech is not always time or cost-efficient.” But no one needs to be trained to use ReMake.
Onboarding is costly and time-consuming; ReMake eliminates the problem. From the intern to the CEO, anyone can navigate its simple interface and work from anywhere with no training. And the platform guarantees brand protection, with Daniel adding: “Platform admins retain absolute control and select which elements can, and can’t, be changed. The result, even if you're working with another team on the other side of the planet, your creative output will always look as intended."
And this sentiment is echoed in Unilever’s response to the platform: “My team is telling me that ReMake is user friendly and enables us to localize content quickly and efficiently,” says Deniz Yamanel, marketing director of Unilever Professional - just one of the brands finding ReMake is giving them much needed accuracy at a staggering speed.
It’s a simple aim of uncomplicated design. Daniel and ReMake’s ethos is clear: “You can now have speed, simplicity, and scale without compromising on your creativity.”
Brands like King are also using ReMake to adapt hundreds of assets for any given campaign, and use their ‘ReMakes’ to speak directly to consumers. Whereas Paramount Pictures have leveraged the platform to push their billion-dollar franchise, PAW Patrol, in their big-screen debut to reach audiences with regional precision.
Picture perfect, every time
The fact brands need to protect their image is never going to change. But as the methods of working around them evolve and grow, brands must be able to trust the software they’re putting their precious assets into doesn't trade cost for compromise or over-complication.
It also goes without saying that some tech has so many tools that it’s overwhelming to use, which isn’t helpful when you have a limited opening to get the work done. That’s why ReMake is so ‘feature poor,’ says Daniel: “We made sure ReMake isn’t burdened by features, specifically when it comes to creative tools, since we're not a design tool. This means ads at any scale are a pixel-perfect execution of the original approved vision.”
With an ear to the ground when it comes to how agencies have been working and adapting, Daniel saw a huge need for everyone in the supply chain to do things faster, and more effectively without compromising on creative. “They want to improve their margins on creative output, which of course ReMake does. It allows more ads, quicker, and cheaper,” he tells LBB, and adds that it doesn’t rely on constantly finding new, margin-hitting hires, that are also difficult to find.
Creatives can restore capacity and budget allowing them to reinvest in what they do best: creating.
Marketers win when it comes to efficiency and ROI. And for creatives, ReMake’s offering is game-changing: tighter control over global output, less time spent on versioning means more time to reinvest in the creative process, and more budget to go big on what really matters.
And there are no budget concerns when it comes to experimenting with ReMake. Iterations on an edit are limitless, it’s only when a client clicks approve that they’re charged. As Daniel points out: “You’re not limited by rounds of iterations, where the money’s constantly moving out of the account and you’ve got to be extra careful with the changes you make.” With ReMake, alongside a straightforward interface, you get the power to play with the content, at a stage in the production process that is more often than not fraught with account concerns. “You can create as many ReMakes as you like until you’re happy,” is Daniel’s lasting point.
