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Digitas Germany, a leading digital agency, built a campaign portal to streamline marketing content creation across multiple automotive brands. The goal: empower hundreds of car dealers to generate brand-compliant assets, social, print, and video without relying on external agencies.
By integrating IMG.LY’s CE.SDK, Digitas delivered a customizable, multilingual, and automation-ready design experience. Within months of launch, the platform became the central hub for campaign creation, with over 140 campaigns running and with overwhelmingly positive feedback from users at every level from users.
The Story of Digitas Germany
Digitas Germany serves major international brands with data-driven creative and marketing solutions. When one of their automotive clients sought to modernize campaign execution for its dealer network, Digitas saw an opportunity to automate a notoriously manual, expensive process.
Previously, each campaign asset such as social posts, print flyers or banners was produced by external agencies. The client wanted to reduce this dependency, unify workflows across 9–10 brands, and allow 600+ dealers to generate and personalize assets independently in German, French, and Italian.
Digitas needed a technology foundation that could enable all this while remaining intuitive, flexible, and future-proof.
The Challenge: Manual Processes and Rising Costs
Before building out the customer platform with CE.SDK, Digitas’ clients’ marketing workflow was fragmented and agency-dependent. Each campaign required:
- Design iterations for multiple brands and languages
- Separate approval and localization cycles
- Significant agency cost for every new asset or variation
The client’s objective was to harmonize these processes and to create assets “within a few clicks” while maintaining brand consistency and localization quality.
As Senior Project Manager Martin Röhr recalls:
“The wish by the customer was that they can do the whole assets themselves, with a minimum of manual work, to automate and harmonize processes for all brands.”
This required not just an editing interface, but a deeply integrated, template-driven creative engine capable of variable substitution, localization, and automated asset generation.
Why They Chose CE.SDK
During early workshops, Digitas explored building an in-house editor. But when the scope grew from text edits to full template control, multi-language support, and video, the team quickly realized they needed an existing SDK with the flexibility to scale.
After evaluating several options, Röhr discovered IMG.LY’s CE.SDK:
“I saw you have an editor that you can configure for different media types, it was not a hard decision. We did the checklist, what we need, what you can do, and everything matched.”
CE.SDK’s template engine, variable system, and server-side rendering capabilities aligned perfectly with Digitas’ requirements:
- Template Engine: enabled fully branded, modular templates across multiple formats.
- Variable System: allowed text, image, and dealer-specific data to be dynamically inserted.
- Server-Side Rendering: made it possible to generate entire campaign batches and localized versions at scale.
The team also valued CE.SDK’s future-readiness, with built-in support for video templating and AI-driven workflows.
How They Implemented CE.SDK
Digitas began implementation in mid-2024, aiming for a full production launch within a year. What started as a simple proof of concept soon evolved into a full-fledged creative automation platform.
“There was no real plan in the beginning,” Röhr admits. “We found CE.SDK, which could solve every problem we had, videos, social media, templates, and then we figured out how to integrate it into every workflow.”
Over the course of the project:
- Developers and designers collaborated closely to extend CE.SDK’s functionality for multilingual support.
- They built a Node.js server-side pipeline that generated thousands of dealer-specific assets in the background.
- They harmonized content creation across all media types—social, print, and video—while allowing personalized placeholders and approvals within the portal.
Despite the extended timeline, the outcome far exceeded expectations:
“We shipped a much better product than initially planned,” says Röhr. “Building something like this ourselves would have taken years or ten times the budget.”
Throughout the integration, Digitas repeatedly praised IMG.LY’s customer success and support teams:
“You offered us your support, and our developers always got quick responses—sometimes even hints that helped us rethink how we do things. Nothing bad to say about the whole experience.”
The Results
By early 2025, the campaign portal was live and fully adopted by the client’s marketing managers and dealer network. Within weeks:
- 140 campaigns were active across all brands.
- Thousands of assets were generated automatically in three languages.
- Zero negative feedback was reported from car dealers or marketing managers.
“In all meetings, we had no negative feedback—absolutely nothing. Dealers are downloading, managers are happy, and we’re already planning the next automation features.”
The business impact was immediate: agencies were reduced or removed from the process altogether, while dealers gained full creative autonomy to produce and personalize their own assets. Campaigns that once took days to adapt across brands and languages could now be duplicated and localized within seconds, transforming both the speed and scalability of the client’s marketing operations.
One marketing manager reportedly said:
“I built a better-looking asset in the portal than the agency ever did.”
Overall Impact
The CE.SDK-powered campaign portal transformed both how Digitas delivered creative services and what their client could achieve.
A process once dependent on external agencies became an internalized, scalable creative engine—driven by templates, variables, and automation.
For Digitas, this meant tighter client relationships, greater technical ownership, and new opportunities to apply the same model across other accounts:
“I showed the project internally to hundreds of colleagues,” Röhr said. “Everyone wants to use it for other clients. It’s a no-brainer once you see what’s possible.”
The collaboration also demonstrated CE.SDK’s strength as an enabler of digital transformation—not just for editors, but for entire creative ecosystems.
Key Takeaways
- Scope Expansion Through Capability: CE.SDK’s flexibility allowed Digitas to dramatically grow the project scope—from basic text edits to full campaign automation.
- Faster Campaign Production: Dealers now create and localize assets in seconds instead of days.
- Cross-Media and Multilingual Support: Unified workflows across print, social, and video in German, French, and Italian.
- Future-Ready Infrastructure: Server-side rendering and video templating open paths to AI-driven creative automation.
- Trusted Partnership: Strong collaboration and responsive support from IMG.LY enabled Digitas to execute confidently at scale.
Ready to fast track your creative workflow? Start your trial with CE.SDK or get in touch with our team to explore how you can bring brand-consistent, automated design workflows to your organization.