Case studyIndian consumer-finance brand
Nine masters, eighty adaptations, two hours.
A weekly campaign cadence of roughly thirty ad creatives across nine aspect ratios, produced by resizing each approved master by hand. We rebuilt one batch as a layered adaptation set: nine masters became eighty placements across six delivery formats, delivered editable in a single sitting.
- Sector
- Consumer finance, India
- Scope
- 9 masters · 89 boards · 6 formats
- Turnaround
- 2 hours
- Previously
- Days per round, via their creative agency
- 89
- boards, from 9 approved masters
- 6
- delivery formats, 320×50 to 1080×1920
- 0
- flattened files — every board shipped editable
Figures are the delivered batch, counted from the export manifest. The client is not named under a confidentiality agreement, and every brand mark and regulatory identifier has been removed from the work shown.
The brief
Thirty creatives a week, and none of them one job.
The brand runs a weekly campaign calendar. Each cycle produces around thirty ad creatives, and every one of them has to exist at nine aspect ratios — a 1080×1920 story, a 1200×628 in-feed unit, a 300×250 medium rectangle, a 320×50 banner, and the rest of a media plan that has not got shorter in ten years.
In a regulated category, none of those is a resize. A disclaimer that re-wraps from one line to two changes the height of the block it sits in, which moves everything above it. A call to action that has to stay a minimum size stops being a proportion of the board and starts being a constraint on the layout. So each placement is a small layout problem with a compliance condition attached, and thirty creatives at nine ratios is two hundred and seventy of them a week.
- The constraint that mattered
- Not volume, and not speed on its own. The set had to stay editable after delivery — a batch that arrives as flat files is a batch that cannot absorb the one comment that always comes back.
The old route
Days per round, through an agency queue.
The work sat with their creative agency. A master would be approved, the adaptations would be produced by hand, and the set would come back days later — at which point the marketing team would read it, find the two or three placements where the recomposition had gone wrong, and send it round again.
The cost was not really the production hours. It was that a campaign could not be committed to until the last placement cleared, so the launch date moved with the slowest board in the set. Delays landed on the marketing team as pressure, and the pressure landed on the calendar as fewer campaigns.
The approach
Approve the master once. Bind everything else to it.
We took the approved masters as the unit of work rather than the individual placement. Each one was rebuilt as a layered document — art, plinth, product render, headline, sub-line, call to action, disclaimer — with rules describing how each layer behaves when the frame changes shape, instead of a position that only makes sense at one size.
That is what makes the set produce rather than reproduce. Given a 9:16 frame, the art re-anchors and grows into the space; the type does not, because a headline that scales with the board stops being legible at 320×50 and stops being readable at 1080×1920. The disclaimer re-flows to whatever width it has and takes the height it needs, and everything above it moves. Nothing is cropped and nothing is stretched.
- Why layered delivery is the deliverable
- The set was handed over as editable documents, not exports. A comment left on a board is answered by moving the layer it is about — in the same session, on the same board, without regenerating the batch.
The same campaign, rebuilt four times.
Pick a campaign. Every board beside its master is that same approved composition, and none of them is a crop of it. The layout is re-solved for each frame — the art re-anchors and changes size, the type changes by a different amount or not at all, the legal band tracks the frame, and the disclaimer re-flows and takes whatever height it needs. No two of those are the same number, which is the whole difference between a re-layout and a resize.
The frame loses a tenth of its width and gains 60% of its height. The art re-anchors and grows into it, the type grows about a quarter, and the legal band tracks the frame exactly — five to eight different factors on one board.
Two smaller placements are not shown. At 320×100 and 320×50 the headline collapses to one line, the legal band takes a third of the board, and on most of the campaigns the art is dropped altogether — a real part of the delivery, and two illegible slivers next to four compositions. Brand marks have been removed from the documents before these boards were rendered and the fine print is blurred; both are ours, not the client's.
Twelve objects, not one picture.
The equities-positioning master, with the lid off. Every sheet is one layer of the document that went over — the handset, the orbit, each icon, each line of type, the button, the legal band — lifted out of the stack it was in. Nothing here was cut out of a flat file: the sheets are what the board is made of, which is why a comment is answered by moving one of them rather than by re-running the batch.
Width of each layer's own box in the 1080×1920, over its width in the 1200×1200. Measured from the two delivered documents.
Read the index across. The frame lost 10% of its width between the two formats and the legal band went with it, exactly; the art grew by a third; the type by a quarter; the icons by a fifth. A crop applies ONE factor to everything on the board, and a scale applies one factor too — five different factors is what it looks like when a layout has been solved again rather than resized. The disclaimer is the sixth case and the one no factor describes: it got narrower, re-wrapped from one line to two, and everything above it moved up. Brand marks were removed from the document before these plates were rendered, and the fine print is blurred; both are ours, not the client's.
The batch
Five of the nine approved masters from the delivered batch. Each one carries its own set of placements, produced the same way.
What shipped
Nine approved masters, eighty adaptations, eighty-nine boards in total, across six delivery formats, in two hours. Every board went over as a layered document. The revisions that came back were answered on the board itself rather than by re-running the batch, which is the part that changed the calendar: the set stopped being a thing that had to be finished before the campaign could be committed to.
- Client not named under a confidentiality agreement. The sector and the media plan are described because they are what the work was; nothing here narrows the description further.
- Every board shown has had brand marks and regulatory identifiers removed by us before publication. The brand lockup layer was deleted rather than obscured. Blurred regions are our redaction, not the client's design.
- Counts are the delivered batch, taken from the export manifest: 9 masters, 80 adaptations, 89 boards, 6 delivery formats. The weekly cadence of roughly 30 creatives across 9 aspect ratios is the client's own brief, and is larger than the batch described here.
Resizing the same campaign nine times a week?
Send us one week of approved masters. We will send back the full adaptation set — every placement, layered and still editable — and you can time it against the round you are running now.